Bay 12 Games Forum

In general?  Two main places.  There is a long gallery near where the darkness was, and this other chamber with demons.  Both of them you'll really need to move camp for, as they're quite a lot of crawling/climbing/etc away from where you sleep.

There aren't any passages down from the Black Pit.  It's just hard, flat basement rock.  Nothing further down.

Further down the slab chimney, however..

It's a long way down.  You use up most all of your remaining pitons (more will be dropped tomorrow), to climb well down, onto a cracked gray stone floor, at the edge of a large medium chamber.

It's also warm and there's a scent of sulfur.

"That's Demon Smell", says Sessha.

As a reminder, Willis is currently out of mana.

As you get further up, the passage narrows further.  It's narrows slowly, so it's still passable, but you must be careful.  Particularly when the rock starts getting somewhat harder.  The three of you must put in your pitons carefully, lest one accidently slips.

There are also side passages.  Very narrow, but still made of the same dark stone.  These give you the occasional ledge or hand or foothold.  At one of them, Sessha examines a bit of particularly hard stone that broke off.

"These are onyx, Trence.  Not amazingly valuable, but certainly worth something.  We could gather some today.. I don't think the passage goes much further up."

It's pretty much gather-and-stop.  You'll be breaking away the stone you need to hammer into, and creating a large unstable area, very unsafe to press further.  Onyx is moderately valuable.  Do you want to gather some and block off this passage?

The Black Pit is back up the slab chimney, all the way at the top, and safely far away from the ooze.  Upon turning back down, after scrabbling through the garnet-rich passage, you proceed to climb up the black pit.

The reason why it's so black isn't that it's huge.  It's big, certainly, perhaps fifty or so feet across and more-or less vertical, but it's black more because the wall of the chamber is composed of very dark material, which reflects back little of the glowstone light.  As you go higher, it narrows.  Not quickly, but you can tell it gets narrower as you get up.

Long before this becomes a problem, a vague uneasiness washes over Trence.  This doesn't feel like the best place for him.

Is it possible for a monster to possess or control some kind of mundane(ish) substance? Like, if you had a ghost that was possessing a spooky doll, would the doll remain once you had slain the ghost?

(The problem is that having a creature with a body that doesn't disappear is far enough out of the norm that you're essentially throwing darts at a wall;  You can't assume anything is correct, and it's easy to fall into argument for argument's sake.  Need more hard info at this point.)

((I wasn't aware the game stopped being dead.))

Wait, I guess.  I forget what I was thinking, and I don't really understand what's happening.

Wave cheerfully at the sawbot.

The elevator reaches the bottom, where a passage with metal walls comes into view, ending in a T-junction not too far from the elevator itself.  You can hear the hum of machinery here, and the walls are marked by long coloured lines.  Leading to/away from the elevator are red, gray, and yellow lines, standing out on the painted white metal walls.  The wall of the T-junction ahead has yellow, red, and orange lines.

In addition to the horizontal lines, there is a vertical band running all the way around the tunnel.  This one is blue, and it wraps around the entire wall, although the portion of it on the floor is somewhat scuffed out.

The damaged missilebot, still carrying Xin and Noodles, begins lurching down the hallway, slowly.  The buzzsaw bot brings out it's buzzsaws, but before it can put them to use..

Terinas jumps on a buzzbot

Terinas engages.

(7+4  = 11)(11 vs 11+4) (2+3)

Unlike the incredibly passive missile bot, the sawbot fights back.  Terinas jumps and gives it a good smash with the speartip, rocking it back and making it sway, off-balance for a moment.  One of the buzzsaws comes out from the left and prevents any follow-up, as Terinas manages to hold up, staying out of reach.

Clearly this robot is both more dangerous, but also much more lightly built than the metal brick that is the missile bot.  It's lighter, less armoured, and with thinner skin and joints.  It remains a robot, however.

Outside the elevator, up on the ground..

Gnwbimbar attempts to sabotage the legs of one of the buzzsaw bots.

(1+2)
(10)(11)

(8 vs 7+4)

Currently without reserve pants, the gnome looks around quickly for something to sabotage the buzzsaw bot further with, quickly finding a stick on the ground.  Leverage!  However that saying goes, surely a stick in the right place can gum up the works.

Unfortunately, wooden sticks are ineffective against robots designed to murder trees with speed and precision.  Gnwbimbar takes a serious cut as the stick breaks, the above-ground sawbot ignoring the distraction and going for the small creature.  One short, but painful and ragged cut later, Gnwbimbar escapes melee.  Fortunately, the sawbot is not a grappler.

(11)(9)

Ahrian closes the gap, bounding over the open field and making good time.  She can help Gnwbimbar or engage the aboveground sawbot this turn.

---

"I don't know.  Sample?  All monsters disappear."

And nuke it he does.  Willis rounds the corner, stares at THE THING, and your shouts eventually trigger him into blasting the unseen creature with icy magic, the backblast strong enough to feel the chill wind from the unseen corner.

Willis doesn't quite stop gawping, but he backs up a step and starts looking down.

"It's dead!  Why isn't it vanishing?"

Willis continues stepping backwards, a great flow of ooze coming along the ground.  It's still very wrong, and moving in ways that don't quite make sense, but as the party retreats back to the shaft room, they see that the ooze is acting like some kind of impossible fluid rather than some impossible living creature.  It still looks horrific and wrong, and it still smells both beautiful and terrible, but it is clearly dead.

"Dead things are supposed to vanish!"

They are.. but.. fuck.  You don't quite know what's going on here.