The Personal Journal of Nothur Ironbeard
By Diego Gestri
On the trek across the mountains on our way back from the Krendiri Forest and headed to my sweet home, the Gerulekh lands, we stumbled upon an ancient Dwarf monastery of which I had no prior knowledge. It turns out it used to be inhabited by monks that practiced an ancient Dwarven martial art, but it now lays abandoned and, as we soon found out, was overridden with monsters.
The party agreed to explore it, and soon after venturing through a shrine and a hallway flanked by rooms on both sides, we were attacked by vicious war dogs and what looked like undead versions of the monks that once occupied this place. They carried dangerous staffs into battle that spewed snakes and poison. We found ourselves backed into a corner room, supposedly once an armory, with the war dogs charging in from the south and monks from the west. Vallen raised a force barrier across the south entrance to keep the dogs at bay while we dealt with the zombie monks.
Once the monks were dispatched, we arranged ourselves around the barrier in the south and readied ourselves to face what would come once the barrier dropped, melee fighters at the fore, ranged fighters at the rear. We placed Astrid the automaton in charge of guarding poor Marie who was still in her unnatural slumber.
All of us thus focused on the barrier, and, immediately as it dropped, the dogs charged in and fighting erupted anew. We all engaged the enemy slashing, shooting, and casting spells. All except Marcus that is, who decided it would be a good time to ditch us and go exploring the western hallway.
Along with the charging dogs, those of us in the front (Adoril, Elre, Tavin, and myself) were also immediately hit by a great stench which we realized was coming by two creatures hanging from the hallway ceiling on top of the dogs themselves. The stench of these ceiling crawlers was so strong that some of us ended up nauseated. Kai loosed off a stun arrow in the tunnel stunning all the dogs in the rear ranks of the pack, but the ceiling crawlers seemed to be unaffected. They seemed to be ethereal in nature.
The two crawlers suddenly leapt from the entrance to the back wall of the chamber, one of them toward Marie putting her in grave danger as that is where she was lying unconscious. The other leapt at Kai who had just taken a shot at it with her bow. Seeing this, Yugao ran up to Marie to help defend her, and Marcus, returning from his little sightseeing tour, jumped in to aid Kai with her crawler. Finding itself outnumbered, the crawler retreated leaping an impressive 12 feet in the air and onto the ceiling again. It subsequently jumped and fled off down the western hallway away from the fighting. As it did Kai and Vallen started shooting at it (Vallen with his pistols) to take it down but were unfortunately unable to stop it.
Unfortunately, Yugao was not as successful in her defense of Marie. The second crawler was unfortunately able to reach Marie and grab her thanks to Yugao’s inability to intervene as her frail constitution caused her to succumb to the effects of the beast’s foul stench. Seeing this, Marcus rushed to her aid after the first crawler fled to safety. As if things weren’t bad enough for poor Marie, after regaining her composure (somewhat), Yugao made things even worse by hitting Marie instead of the beast while trying to dislodge it from her with Marcus. Seeing the situation deteriorating, Astrid also rushed in to defend Marie and thankfully did a better job than Yugao and hit the beast squarely with her kukri, causing it to leap out of the way and back to the ceiling, thus finally releasing Marie. After a concerted effort, Marcus, Yugao, and Astrid managed to finish off the crawler, and, becoming thusly disengaged, Marcus and Yugao, both rushed into the hallway to pursue the second crawler that had by then fled down the eastern hallway. Yugao actually managed to catch up and tried to engage the crawler, but it again jumped out of the way, fleeing out of reach through the door at the end of the hallway.
In the meantime, us front liners focused on taking out the rabid rottweiler dogs. We gravely injured the two in the front even though during one of his strikes, Tavin clumsily mis-swung his axe and ended up dropping it on the floor. Before we finished them off though, the stunned ones in the hallway all started coming to. The two dogs in the front eventually collapsed, and the two behind charged in and slammed into Tavin and Adoril respectively. Elre and I kept pounding on them from the sides while Tavin and Elre grappled. Tavin however was still unarmed, having previously lost his axe, and I did my best to defend him.
Then two things happened simultaneously. The dog that was grappling Adoril overextended itself and lost its grip, now finding itself between Adoril and Elre and being attacked by both. At the same time, Tavin starts hearing loud bangs and feels the bullets whizzing just past his head and hitting the second dog he was grappling with. It was Vallen who, after the crawler he was shooting at jumped farther down the western hallway and out of reach, turned around and started shooting at the dog on top of Tavin. Given our troop’s tragicomical record of friendly fire, Tavin rightly became quite worried.
My stoic defense of Tavin paid off, and the hound that was trying to maul him fled given the severe wounds I dealt to it. Meanwhile, one of the two dogs that Elre and Adoril were fighting finally collapsed, soon followed by the last two remaining dogs. The fighting, at least for the moment, seemed to be over.
We then started examining all the rooms to see what we could find. Kai found a silver icon in the storage room. I found a weapon similar to that of Elre in design, as well as a pair of red enameled gauntlets in the armory. Vallen examined the library where he found materials including scrolls with combat techniques and other things similar to the library in the previous section of the monastery. He also found a tome on philosophy of the local monks.
Marcus again chose to wander off by himself, this time beyond the end of the new hallway we were examining and into a room that turned out to be another shrine like the one we first came through. Apparently unaware that the very definition of insanity is to try the same thing and expect a different result, same as he did before, he tried to approach the statue at the back of the shrine and again, to no one’s surprise, the statue animated itself and attacked. Marcus blinked out of the way and tried to open the doors on the far end to escape into the next hallway. The statue prepared to leap at Marcus, but Yugao very uncharacteristically leapt between them first. I am not sure what she was expecting to accomplish, but I am sure it was not to sacrifice herself to save Marcus. The result was that she failed even at that. The statue leapt and slammed into Yugao with a devastating blow. The force of the impact was such that Yugao was flung backwards and slammed into Marcus while still on fire from her pendant. Marcus, now also on fire, was in turn slammed into the door he was trying to open. Score 2 – nil for the statue.
As Kai saw this happening from the hallway, she yelled for the rest of us to come for support. We all rushed to the scene in, save Tavin who resolutely refused to yet again help Marcus get out of trouble he got himself into in the first place, as he had done so many times already. From what I heard of the wanderings of the party during my absence, Tavin would seem to be well justified in his reaction.
Nonetheless a member of the troop is a member of the troop, so to the rescue we went. As the first members of the party reached the scene, Yugao managed to pull back to recover with the help of Vallen, leaving Marcus to fend off the rampaging monk statue. Kai tried to slow the statue down with an explosive arrow, causing some damage, and Elre entered the fray and started attacking as well.
As the fighting wore on, those involved suddenly heard a lot of barking. Great! More dogs on the way! I arrived in the shrine just in time to see Elre charging in for one last blow and taking the statue down just as it had now turned to attack Kai. The dogs were now pounding on the door at the opposite end of the shrine while Lloyd was standing behind it, bracing it. I joined him in the effort with Tavin, Adoril, and Elre to keep the dogs out until we were again ready to fight.
However, we then decided that, as it had been a long day of fighting already, it was due time to get some rest before resuming hostilities. We therefore barricaded the doors with a weapon from the armory and set up my Ramrigar’s Rook Tower in the courtyard in order to rest in the safety of its walls. By this time evening had come, and we agreed to spend the night resting in the tower. Little did we know that the night would bring even more monsters of different types for us to face.