Chapter 3 / Episode #102a — "The Rescue of Dog"
Date: Planting 18, 576 CY — same day, hours later Region: The Ruins Beneath the Drachensgrab Hills — The Cave System, Wild Coast Weather: Underground. Dark. The torchlight is everything.
Players Present Slash the Bard Tiger Wong, Monk of the Eastern Lands Two Dwarves (freed captives — names unknown)
Dog the Ranger — recovered. TerryOr, Kern, Silversun, Talon — beyond the portal, fate unknown
Planting 18 — "What the Bard Carries Up"
Slash comes through the crypt alone.
He left four of them on the other side of that portal. He stood at the threshold and watched them go through one by one and did not follow, because the bard has always understood that some doors are not meant to be walked through on instinct. Now he is back in the 70-foot chamber with the dark water and the magical sconces and the weight of what just happened sitting on his chest like a stone.
He goes up.
Tiger is where Tiger always is — exactly where he said he would be, watching Tharney, watching the road, watching everything at once with the monk's particular quality of attention that makes other people feel like they are being measured.
Slash tells him what happened.
Tiger absorbs it the way he absorbs most things. Then: Dog is still out there. The tracks went south. Into the cave. Someone has to go.
Two dwarves step forward. They were in the slave cart a day ago. They have had time to remember who they are. One takes a spear. The other takes a spear, a dagger, a mace — whatever can be gathered quickly from what the freed captives are carrying. They do not ask for thanks or explanation.
The three of them go back down.
Planting 18 — "The Cave South"
The cave entrance off the main chamber opens into something larger.
Slash brings his lantern out front and the dwarves fall in on either side — natural formation, no discussion required. The cave is large enough that the lantern light does not reach the far walls. A pool fills the center, black and still, the surface unbroken. Two passages open to the right and left, leading deeper into worked stone and older dark.
Slash looks at the floor.
The tracks go right. Dog's boots — he recognizes the tread now, the slight drag on the left heel that Dog has always had and never bothered to fix. They are not old tracks. He moves quickly.
There is light ahead. Not lantern light — something lower, warmer. Firelight.
He slows.
Planting 18 — "Color Spray"
The tunnel opens into a chamber and Slash sees it all in a single moment.
A fire pit. Ten, perhaps fifteen creatures gathered around it — subterranean things he has no name for, pale-skinned and large-eyed, built for a world where sunlight is a rumor. They have the look of creatures that have never needed to worry about what might come down their tunnel.
On a spit above the fire is Dog.
Or what remains of Dog. Unconscious, bound, turning slowly. Alive — barely, by the look of it, but alive.
Slash does not deliberate.
Color spray erupts from his hands in a cascade of light that has no business being this far underground. Half the creatures drop where they stand — blinded, stunned, knocked senseless by the sudden violent brightness in a world that has never known brightness. The others take one look at what just happened to their companions and run. They disappear into the far tunnels without looking back.
The dwarves are already moving before the light fades.
They cut Dog loose. They pull him off the spit with the careful haste of people who know that careful and fast are not opposites when someone's life is the margin. He is not conscious. He does not respond to his name. He is breathing in the shallow way of someone whose body is handling everything it can handle and has nothing left over for awareness.
The paralyzed creatures on the floor do not get the chance to recover thanks to the anger of Slash.
Dog would have done the same.
Planting 18 — "Out"
They run.
The bard carries Dog. The dwarves carry the light and the rear. Through the chamber, back into the tunnel, back toward the pool and the main cave. The water is still and black and exactly as unwelcoming as it was on the way in.
The crayfish comes out of it without warning.
One claw snaps at the nearest dwarf. He gets his spear across in time — not a strike, just a deflection, the claw scraping off the shaft — and they keep moving. There is no time for a fight with something that lives in underground pools. The entrance to the main chamber is right there.
They go through it.
They go up.
Planting 18 — "Surface"
Tiger is at the rope before they call for him.
He hauls Dog up hand over hand with the monk's quiet strength, the ranger's body limp and smoke-darkened, the burns and the binding marks already visible in the daylight. Slash comes up next. The dwarves last.
Tiger kneels beside Dog and looks at him for a long moment.
He is alive.
Burned. Starved. Whatever those creatures had planned for him was already well underway. But alive. The monk checks the breathing, checks the pulse, checks the things a man checks when he needs to know exactly how much time there is and how much there is not.
There is time.
Not much. But some.
Dog the Ranger, who has carried the Rod of Six Parts since Episode 65, who has walked into every dark place this campaign has walked into, is alive on the grass above the ruins with the Drachensgrab Hills around him and no idea where he is or what happened to the rest of his companions.
Somewhere below, in a pocket the world has forgotten, TerryOr stands alone before a throne.
The king is still waiting.
XP Award — Episode 102a
| Encounter | XP |
|---|---|
| Subterranean humanoids (color spray, dispatched) | 200 |
| Giant Crayfish (evaded) | 50 |
| Dog recovered (alive) | 250 |
| Session Total | 500 XP |
The bard went into the dark with two dwarves and a lantern and brought back what mattered. Dog lives. The Rod of Six Parts is back above ground. What happens next is a harder question.
Watch the campaign unfold at @thedmandfriends
Dog feels less and less like himself as the days pass by.
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