You row upriver and then begin to camp on the north shore. Soon enough, another dragonewt on a “demi-bird” rides in. It appears unthreatening, and rather unusual compared with the previous group. Its scaled hide is scarred, horns notched from many duels and skirmishes, and its gear is high quality but heavily used. It wears an iron scale hauberk with a horned iron helm, and carries an iron broadsword and shortsword of excellent make, and wears a beautiful, flowing silken red cape. It cuts a striking figure; competent and confident in poise.
Boamund greets it and it blows a little smoke out of one nostril. It enters your camp with its demi-bird, dismounts, unloads some materials from bird, and builds an octagonal bone table as you watch, and Bog discerns its intent. Fraud approaches as it offers 2 skin pouches (bladders): one has rune-carved gems in it; another has 5 small lead figurines. It squats down on its haunches and methodically unrolls onto the table a greenish hide etched with a grid and drawings of some scene. It puffs out smoke-rings first as two Dragon runes, then a Mastery runes. You all come forward as it waits, and look at these strange figures spread out onto the table. You infer that you are each to choose one, and there is one spare that needs takin too. Bog takes what looks like an Iron Mostali; Boamund some sort of Horali; Fraud a weird Zzaburi; and Shrett the last two: an ugly Mostali-like being, and an armoured mace-wielding priestess or warrioress.
The scene shifts… into a strange liminal world, abstract and unfamiliar, but also immediately logical, like a waking dream – but not a heroquest in the land of myth. Somewhere entirely different. You are aware of your real selves, but also that you control some other being or representation of one; matching the figures. Indeed, you ARE the figures, in this bizarre place. And the rules of this place operate differently from Glorantha as you know them.
You stand outside a crumbling wall of a building set into the side of a hill, on a vast featureless plain. There is a stout old door in that wall. Horali boldly strides in, followed by the others, into a square chamber with doors to left and right. The stone room has nothing else. A mouth opens in each door and intones in Tradetalk, “One of us opens to safety and the other leads to danger. Ask one question and hear one truth and one lie.” Shrett asks the left door if the other would tell them that it leads to safety, and both it and the other door respond “no.” As you debate the decision, Iron Mostali steps up and opens the door, behind which a hideous swaying bone-snake lurks! It dances and sways and hisses cruelly; and its hypnotic dance distracts half of you. You rush to fight it. Weird Zzaburi fires a barrage of three Disrupt-like spells into it. With a couple more blows, it crumbles into dust, and the passage beyond is open to you.
You file in and go down to a corner, peering around and seeing a long passage with two openings on your right side. Horali and Ugly Mostali move to the first opening and a large toothy lizard ridden by a humanoid “lizardnewt” with a spear trots up to attack, with another approaching from the second doorway! You engage in a deadly battle. Iron Mostali and Horali take grievous wounds, and the Priestess heals them as much as she can, but they still are suffering. Weird Zzaburi hits a lizard with an acid-arrow spell, causing progressive wounds. Yet eventually you wear them down and they are all dead. There are two chambers where they each lurked, then the passage continues to a ruined half-chamber where an old stone bridge precariously crosses an underground pool where two hungry, huge crocodiles lurk.
Warily, you run across one by one, and make it safely to the other side where there is another empty chamber. Ugly Mostali tries creeping up to inspect what lies down some stairs into another chamber, and sees that this room is larger and quite busy. And its occupants see him.
There is a dragon skeleton across the floor. A lizardnewt priest is at the far end, chanting with hissing sounds. 6 lizardnewt warriors defend it, moving up and facing Iron Mostali and Horali, backed up by the others. Zzaburi casts a Palsy-like spell that paralyzes two warriors before they can act, but the priest resists the magic. It moves forward as the fight continues, and the two main warriors are accumulating bad wounds; it attacks with claws and bites, having also resisted the Priestess’s magic trying to envelop it in silence. Even Weird Zzaburi soon joins the melee. Ugly Mostali’s sling comes in very handy as does Zzaburi’s staff, yet Iron Mostali has some difficulty with his axe, and it isn’t until late in the fight that Priestess can connect well with her mace.
As the foes die, their blood flows down to the central skeleton. Zzaburi hurries to try to smash off the head but soon you find that the bones are too strong to shatter. The fight sways in your favour and all but the two paralysed ‘newts are gone. Ugly Mostali hurls a slingstone at one, then is scolded and you all gang up on the other and kill it; then do the same with the last; each dies fighting furiously. But their blood still flows down to the skeleton. It seeps into it, and the skeleton flaps its wings and rises! Ugly Mostali has to roll aside to avoid its sweeping tail. It flies away crashing through the ceiling, and the tomb starts collapsing, with masonry cascading around you as a new threat.
You run for the exit, dodging falling rocks, and most getting sorely hurt. Iron Mostali barely makes it out alive! And you all do, and the tomb collapses with a crash and a great cloud of choking dust. The skeleton flies off into the distance.
You awaken on your bedrolls; and feel as if you have eaten already and time has passed with things happening at camp but you do not remember it. Just this “dream”. And you have grown stronger, faster, smarter as a result! Mighty indeed is this dragonewt’s odd ritual that it led you through as “Dragonmaster”. While you readjust to the Middle World, it takes back the pouches lying by its table; scoops things up into them; gracefully rolls up the scroll; and returns them and the table to its gear, taking its time. You watch. It remounts its mount, then guides it to slowly pace in circles around the campsite. Bog thinks maybe you’ve done Right Action, and maybe the dragonewt is respecting or guarding you. It does so until dawn, as you rest, then it departs.
As Yelm ascends that morning, you see a shadow cross Him. Its scale is hard to determine, but it is a winged form. A dragon, a wyvern, or a pterodactyl perhaps, it seems? Watching it, you slowly figure out that it is far off, its visibility limited by the weak sun and morning haze, but it is a serpentine, winged wyrm. It circles southwards, well away from your planned heading, and soon is gone. You wonder what it was doing. It reminds you a little of that dragon skeleton.
You leave and continue westwards upriver. That day, Fatbutt pulls up along the southern shore, twitching his whiskers anxiously as he looks around, sniffing and panting. You follow in your coracles and ask what bothers him. He points around with a clawed paw and you notice some areas where reeds have been subtly woven into shapes, mud plastered onto rocks, and little bones piled up with apparent care. “Warning”, Fatbutt says in a quiet, low, serious tone. He points to one symbol in particular, and just as he says it, you recognise it. “Chaos.” It’s a rune, scratched on a little piece of driftwood and stuck into the mud on the shore. There’s a narrow channel past it, where the reeds grow thick and twist together into an uneven, dark tunnel. Fatbutt is visibly frightened and begins creeping further upriver, gesturing with his snout for you to follow him. “Could be monsters. Could be pool of acid poison disease death.”
You prepare to confront this Chaos. It’s what you do. Fatbutt tries to convince you against it. You could just go away; there has always been Chaos here in the New Fens and always will be. But no, Chaos must be destroyed, you all agree. Even if the cost is dire.
You continue on foot, with Fatbutt cringing by the coracles. The reed-tunnel meanders up the increasingly muddy, slimy stream. The water is becoming more shallow. You carry on. Now the water is too shallow to paddle; there’s just thick, stinking mud, and dense banks of reeds and roots on slightly drier ground at the edges.
Now the muddy path widens, and darkens. Shrett uses See at Night to aid him. You can see a low rise; about 10m diameter and 2m high; surrounded by reeds. Several little streams come from behind the rise to disappear into the mud. The rise has two low openings that look like burrows. Near the right one which you approach, Shrett spots signs of something wide sliding or being dragged along a couple of paths. The stench is strong, stinging your eyes and nostrils. All of the reeds here are dead, or misshapen, or both. Boamund throws a Skin of Life spell on you all, and you prepare other magics. Boamund’s Sense Chaos spell warns you that there is indeed plenty of Chaos around.
The entrances both lead down tunnels uneven 1.5m diameter, slimy and stinking, with obvious trails and tracks. This right-side one is and blurred by thick swamp vapours. Bog leads the way with Shrett behind, sneaking, and comes to a steep, slippery slope descending into a chamber- but now you realise that the thickening vapour is eating away at your gear, and you rush out. It’s acid! Cursing, you retreat and inspect the second tunnel. Shrett sees clawed footprints of moderate size, which are somewhat beastlike. As you file in, content that this tunnel lacks that horrible acid-gas, Shrett also notes claw-marks on the walls now and then.
At the steep slope down into this left-side chamber, Bog stops and feels an energy creeping over him, trying to freeze up his joints and muscles. Shrett does, too. Boamund’s Sense Chaos pinpoints two entities below, and Bog’s Find Enemy points that way as well, so something knows you are there. Bog charges, as do the rest of you. He splashes through a flooded chamber, up to his armpits in foetid water, and sees two creatures: each is a parody of a large bear that stands on two legs, but has a corrupt vegetable-like round head carved into a parody of a face, with infernally blazing eye-holes!
You rush them. Bog soon smashes the first one’s head in. Boamund confronts the other, while it has paralysed Shrett, and Fraud casts a Curse Chaos on that one, rendering it ineffectual. So Boamund and Fraud then kill it. Shrett is freed from his Harmonising; shrugging off the ill feeling of that monster being inside his head. You ensure they are very, very dead. But something else is happening: the dim light through the entry tunnel goes entirely dark. You move to encircle what comes.
It is not what you expected—the tunnel fills with a slurry of mud that cascades down into the chamber, piling into a heap that blocks the entrance. But that heap then rises up into the form of a two-headed Dragonsnail, its eye-stalks blunt and blind! With one head it seizes Boamund’s head and knocks him out; with the other it delivers a bad wound to his chest. You charge it and hew at it. Bog eventually climbs onto its shell from behind. Shrett’s Tear of St Tutrys proves its worth, cleaving a head and preventing its very rapid regeneration. Fraud’s sword deals death to the other; and the snail is dead before it can do more harm.
But another one comes! You let it enter, pushing away its brethren’s body, and effortlessly resisting a Disrupt from Boamund; then Fraud’s Curse Chaos. This one has very thick hide that resists your blades, too, but you surround it and those two heads die rapidly; yet Shrett has taken a bad leg wound. Bog uses False Healing to bring him back into the fray.
And the danger does not end! To your great horror, that acid-gas begins flowing down the tunnel. You immerse yourselves deeper into the water and cover yourselves in mud, hoping that it will stop the acid. It seems to, for now, but it might not last. Something comes, though; you can hear it huffing and guffing the gas down the tunnel, and the light is still blocked.
Then it comes. It is a bulky, snaky form with an ugly bulbous slug-like body, covered in thick armoured scales, and its serpentine neck ending in a terrible draconic head with slobbering jaws. A Stoorwyrm; a Chaotic wyrm; you will learn! Fraud hits it with Curse Chaos and that works well for you. You pounce and deliver deadly slashes to its head, and it dies from Shrett and Bog’s powerful hits; its head crushed into pulp. Yet its vengeance is brutal! It explodes with a deafening kaboom, covering the chamber and tunnel in its scaly flesh and gooey innards! Fraud’s arm is nearly blown off; and all but Bog fare poorly; Boamund nearly dies [party luck pts = 2]. You haul yourselves out of the chamber as fast as you can, but some of you only can hear ringing in your ears (I forgot that this lasted 24 hrs so you couldn’t converse for a long time; but anyway, you figured things out enough to heal people and depart). Bog goes back in, naked, braving the stinging acid to take the Stoorwyrm’s warped tongue as a trophy/snack.
With some magic and Fraud’s Healing skill, you limp back to the coracles. Bog regales Fattbutt with heroic tales. Fatbutt rejoices, dancing and urinating, saying that he had been working on a tragic tale of your demise in the jaws of Chaos, but now he can make it a victory song!
You consider staying at a camp for long enough to heal back up, but as Fatbutt says it should take you just the remainder of today and tomorrow to get out of the New Fens and meet your Trader Prince guide “Yorge”, you opt to go on. The New Fens has proven enough dangers to tarry longer.
With much tense debate, you agree that Boamund; barely conscious; will help row the coracles with Bog; since Fraud’s arm won’t allow it nor will Shrett’s wounds. And so you struggle forth. What does Caratan hold for you; will there you be able to find welcome rest?
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