#Gracklstugh revised

[lumendelmari]

Chapter Thirty-Five

Preparing for War

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1485 DR / Day 38

Ghohlbrorn’s Lair, Gracklstugh

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“Here we are,

Different paths led us here,

Now we stand,

Happily drunk, united as one, ready to fall.

You will rise,

Warriors of rock, sweet children of mine.

Allfather's best,

Protected by faith, we're an army ready to fall.

Together we stand, together we fall,

When we do die, we meet in the hall,

The eternal feast goes on,

Warriors unite, we will stand up and fight,

See the flagons fly in Valhalla!

If we all die, we will feast on a high.

For the mead is flowing in Valhalla!”

Those were the lyrics exuberantly sung in Ghohlbrorn’s Lair that afternoon. One drink had turned into two, quickly becoming three and then four. Lizva kept them coming. The four companions soon lost count of how much they’d consumed and how much time had passed. Then when Fargas offhandedly asked Zelyra if she knew any tavern ditties, the half-elf shared the ‘mead-song’ taught to her and Arlathan by the half-giant, Krom. The barbarian had periodically chanted those verses and many others throughout their various battles against the cultists of the Gol’Goroth. The song quickly became a favorite of Arlathan’s—it mentioned mead, after all. [1]

The adventure in Goldleaf felt like an entire lifetime ago. Zelyra had been trapped in the Underdark for nearly four tendays now. And yet, the druid could admit that time spent was not all bad…

Fargas learned the lyrics in no time. The halfling currently stood on a table, tankard raised in the air, as he and a red-faced Zelyra led the entire common room in a rousing sing-along. Kazimir and Derendil pounded on the table for background accompaniment. Various non-duergar patrons who had come in to drown their sorrows or were looking to relax after a long day added a chorus. Even the stern-faced barkeep, Lizva, tapped a toe in time with the beat. This was the liveliest the Lair had been in some time, and as she was making a killing from the ale sales, the duergar was not about to stop the chaos.

“What’s Valhalla?!” a random svirfneblin called out.

But in their revelry, Zelyra and Fargas did not hear the question.

“Show no fear (warriors)

We must fight 'til the end (brave and free)

Glorious in battle (warriors)

Challenging death (brave and free).”

It was an extremely confusing scene for the other half of the party to walk into. Specifically, the half that had just spent several hours in the temple of Laduguer with Grinta and Thangus Ironhead after interfering in an assassination attempt against the latter. Fraeya had been fatally wounded in the crossfire. But the rogue still drew breath thanks to Thangus Ironhead’s gratitude and mercy.

The cleric of Laduguer had managed to heal much of the damage wrought by the assassin’s blade but warned that it could be a day or two before Fraeya regained full use of her voice. Due to the stitches that now lined her throat, the drow could only speak in a whisper, and it was painful to do so. So, for the time being, Sarith was Fraeya’s voice. The rogue would telepathically communicate anything she wished to say via sending stone for the warrior to repeat aloud. Sarith was not thrilled about it but recognized it was the best solution given the circumstances. [2]

Fraeya put on a strong front during their walk through the Blade Bazaar. But as soon as the group descended from the public eye and into the Lair, the façade dropped. The rogue lethargically draped an arm around Sarith’s shoulder for support. The warrior was stunned by the action—after all, how often did a female drow show weakness in front of a lesser male—but did his duty to help her along. Balasar, Eldeth, and Nine were also fighting their own bouts of exhaustion and irritation. And now, after their horrible ordeal, to walk into the Lair and find the others reveling…and drinking! They were none too pleased.

“What’s going on here?” Eldeth cried out.

. . .

Read more here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/35100307/chapters/118576672

or

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13962836/35/The-Grey-Warriors

[pixelgrotto]

Underdark slogging

Last month myself and a group of other folks finished the Dungeons & Dragons campaign Out of the Abyss after about 18 months of playing nearly every week. Jinkies. This wasn’t the lengthiest campaign I’d ever participated in or run, but it was the one where we met most frequently, since all of my other long-running tabletop RPG games are either monthly or bi-weekly. 

On that note, I’d love to be able to say that it was nearly two years of weekly thrills, but I can’t quite do that. There was actually a lot of slog in this experience, and I had an internal debate a few times on whether or not I’d stick it out. (More on that later.) At the end of the day, I stuck around, and now I can look back and say that the overall experience was worth it. But I’ve also taken some time to ponder about what I didn’t necessarily like, and I think there were a couple of issues at work - the first being that I found Out of the Abyss, as an adventure module, to be grueling. 

Out of the Abyss is described by D&D writer Chris Perkins in the intro as heavily inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, where the player characters are constantly bouncing from one strange encounter in the Underdark to the next. That sounds interesting on paper, but in reality the adventure begins with the players captured by drow and stuck in a prison camp, and once you escape you’re constantly on the run without much of a chance to catch your breath. You hop from one dungeon crawl to the next, only occasionally stopping in Underdark cities like Gracklstugh or Sloobludop, and there’s not really any downtime. And then the demon lords break free, Demogorgon shows up and starts inflicting madness on everyone, and off you go running from the big bads once more. Eventually your party eludes the drow and demons chasing them and returns to the surface world, where it seems like the campaign should come to a natural end, but after a few months, Bruenor Battlehammer tasks everyone to return to the horrors of the Underdark to take care of the demonic invasion. 

In other words, Out of the Abyss is one of those D&D campaigns that railroads the players while pretending not to. You’ve gotta run through the Underdark at the speed of light without much time to smell the subterranean mushrooms, and later you gotta go back in. The second half of the campaign is, in fact, a series of fetch quests that the players are once again forced into to arrange a spell that gets the demon lords to fight against each other until there’s only one standing, and the final one will always inevitably be Demogorgon, at least if you’re running this adventure as written. 

There’s nothing technically wrong with all of this, since half of D&D 5e’s official modules are railroads that try very hard to convince you otherwise. But Out of the Abyss is specifically a railroad that leans very hard on the travel rules of the game, and frankly...it’s no secret that the travel mechanics in 5e aren’t great. Almost every game that I’ve been in (including the ones that I’ve run) either ignored or hacked 5e’s methods of tracking water/food, making survival checks and looking up setbacks on random encounter tables because generally speaking, that stuff’s the least fun bit of D&D. (If you want a good travel hack for 5e, look up Adventures in Middle-Earth.) Out of the Abyss, unfortunately, really wants you to use these rules for much of the campaign to emphasize the fact that characters are on the run in a bizarre underworld realm. 

You’d think that a ranger in the party, especially a ranger specialized in traversing the Underdark, might fix these issues. And this leads me to the other qualm I had with my Out of the Abyss game...I played just such a character, a Gloom Stalker (later re-rolled him into a Deep Stalker via the revised ranger rules) whose favorite enemy was fiends, no less, and despite all of his abilities designed for hiding in the dark, finding more food when foraging and hunting down demons...none of this really made things better. Two years ago, I didn’t buy into all those claims floating around the internet that rangers in fifth edition are a poorly designed class, but whoo boy, I do now. They depend just so heavily on very specialized tracking abilities that a DM has to emphasize over the course of a game in order to make you feel as if your character is special and contributing, and once our DM became aware of my skillset, he would generally just be like, “thanks to your ranger friend, you safely make it to the next area quickly.” Which sounds empowering in theory (and did remove a lot of the boring bookkeeping) but in reality, I couldn’t help but feel like my character was sort of a patch to fix a segment of the game that was naturally dull. And that’s not even getting into the fact that rangers in combat aren’t as great as fighters, nor as versatile as any other spellcasting class. 

So why’d I stick with the campaign for nearly two years, then? Well, I think it took a while for these feelings to solidify in my head, and once they were there, we were already pretty deep into the Underdark and I wanted to see how events played out. Also, though I haven’t touched upon them much in this post, there were some real highs during our adventure, like the time we befriended a gelatinous cube, stuck rope ladders in him and used him as a floatation device to escape a flooding torture chamber. Then there were all the quirky NPC friends that ended up dying over the course of our Underdark romp to the point where it became a running joke. (”What NPCs shall we murder today?!”) The only issue was that the slog began outweighing those highs for me, especially once the campaign moved online due to COVID and we lost some of the dynamism and magic that comes from playing D&D in-person.

Honestly, I also resisted these feelings for a while, because I figured that lots of folks struggle to find a long-running D&D game to participate in. Part of me felt like I needed to enjoy this one and make the most of my experience. But for a variety of reasons, it ended up being a 3 out of 5 campaign; or perhaps 3.5 at times. And you know, we should normalize talking about this, because if you look at tabletop RPG message boards and Discords, you’ll see a lot of people chatting about amazing campaigns or god-awful campaigns. What folks don’t talk too much about is a phenomena that is probably more common than the two opposing ends of that spectrum - and I’m referring to the decent campaign. The one where the story has some alright twists and turns, but not everything is to your liking, or maybe the group and DM doesn’t gel with you 100% of the time. The one where you kinda don’t realize this until you’re a few weeks in, and then choose to endure hoping that you’ll hit another high point, or because you feel attached to your character. The one where you complete, feel glad that you had the experience, but then look back on with fairly critical eyes, as I’m doing now.

After finishing Out of the Abyss, I’ve had to gently bow out from the group that I played with, partially due to the fact that my schedule has become way too packed in recent months and also because I didn’t feel like continuing into higher level content. (We ended at level 15, which is more than enough, since high level 5e is generally too bonkers for me.) I certainly appreciate the journey my ranger went through, but now I’m also ready for him to retire in peace. Not every D&D campaign goes on forever, and sometimes you realize after a period of lengthy playing that maybe you’re just having an okay time...and that it’s also okay to feel that way. 

[lumendelmari]

Chapter Thirty-Three

The Pieces of a Puzzle

1485 DR / Day 37

Cairngorm Caverns, Gracklstugh

At Kazimir’s request, Rihuud led the party to a chamber deep within Cairngorm Caverns. Like the main hall, this room was open and airy, with many tall pillars that reached up to meet a domed ceiling filled with clusters of crystals. But unlike the receiving chamber, this space lacked rich carvings and reliefs and was not suffused with darkness. Instead, the crystals created an illusory trick that bathed the cavern in pale light and illuminated narrow niches carved into every inch of the walls. Each slit was neatly fitted with a single stone tablet. There were hundreds of them, possibly thousands! It was hard to tell as the tablets fit into the niches seamlessly.

Rihuud entered the bright room with ease, thus confirming that it was not all light that bothered the stone giants, just flame. But as Kazimir followed in behind the apprentice, he stopped short in the doorway, for the sight before him triggered a memory. His reoccurring dream of the subterranean library had looked much like this—just on a far grander scale.

Zelyra took notice of the wizard’s thousand-yard stare and asked, “What is it?”

“It’s like my dream,” Kazimir whispered in deep reverence.

“Wait? This is the library?!” the druid replied excitedly.

The tiefling shook his head. “No, not quite. But I think it might be a lead….”

Once the adventurers, Stool, and Rumpadump had filed inside, Rihuud addressed them. “These tablets are a collection of our clan’s history and Gracklstugh’s relations with other civilizations in the Underdark throughout the ages. Most of what you will find will be written in Giant, so I can translate if needed,” the apprentice offered. “You may explore at your leisure. Unless there something specific you are searching for? I have spent many years studying here and know nearly every tablet's location by now.”

“I think we’re here for him,” Fargas said as he jabbed a thumb in Kazimir’s direction.

“Hgraam’s warning…” the wizard muttered. “A cave with two faces. Rock devoured, and the land overgrown. The pebble believes itself flesh. The earth rejects its wards, and the tunnels shake with fury. It’s the cave with two faces part that got me. I think he was speaking of Demogorgon. But what about the rest?”

. . .

Read more at https://archiveofourown.org/works/35100307/chapters/115399363

or

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13962836/33/The-Grey-Warriors

[lumendelmari]

Chapter Thirty

The Smell of Brimstone

1485 DR / Day 35

Cairngorm Caverns, Gracklstugh

Fraeya and Zelyra immediately rose from their bedrolls and hurried over to join Nine, Fargas, and Kazimir, where the trio sat around a pile of letters, jotted notes, and dried fish skins. Derendil was slower to follow. When the others were gathered around, Kazimir pointed to a cut of fish skin nearly twelve inches in length. Scribbled words were inked upon it, but Fraeya and Zelyra could not read them.

“It’s in Dwarvish,” the prince said, his self-loathing now replaced by curiosity.

“Nine and Fargas translated it. And I cast a language comprehension spell on myself to confirm. Not that I didn’t believe them! I just needed to read it for myself,” the tiefling said grimly.

“Well, read it for us then!” Fraeya urged.

Kazimir dramatically cleared his throat and then began to recite with vibrato…

“Faster this time. Faster, I say! I want to hear heads rolling by the time the ink dries on the tip of my quill!! Veins bursting with black poison, lungs filling with water, or faces melting in forges… I don’t care how you do it! Just do it faster!!!

THANGUS IRONHEAD—how dare he try to encroach on my family business???? BOIL HIM! Boil him in oil and feed him to the roaches!”

“Must you shout?” Fraeya interrupted.

Kazimir halted midsentence and snipped, “There’s a lot of exclamation points and capital letting. I’m merely reading with the tone as written.” He continued, “WERZ SALTBARON—the sniveling, squealing, writhing little rat! BIND HIS FEET AND THROW HIM OFF HIS PRECIOUS DOCK!

CAPTAIN ERRDE BLACKSKULL—I’ve smelt treason on her since she was but a lass. She’s always had an eye on my throne, but she’ll never get it. PUT A KNIFE THROUGH HER EYE! SHE’LL GET WHAT’S COMING TO HER. Yes, that’s what she’ll get!

HIS ARROGANCE, HIS ROTUNDITY, THE PAMPERED, PORTLY, SCHEMING RED—how many names must we give him? FREEZE THE WYRMSMITH until his heart turns crystalline, then smash it to bits!

LINGRICK XARDELVAR—my most gaseous ally!!!!!!”

Kazimir paused for dramatic effect before concluding, “It ends there, but I have no doubt there is probably more to this.”

. . . 

You can read more here:

https://archiveofourown.org/chapters/112113748?show_comments=true&view_full_work=false#comment_615139354

or

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13962836/30/The-Grey-Warriors

[lumendelmari]

Because I know a dungeon crawl can be a little confusing…here is an updated version of the Whorlstone Tunnels map detailing the path the adventurers have taken thus far (up to chapter 27).

1)    Entrance

   1b) Buppido’s Lair

2)   Diseased Pool

3)   Chamber of myconids (called Parade of Fools in the module)

4)   Fungi Thicket

5)   Raucous Mesa

    5b) Assassin’s tunnel

6)   Assassin’s den

    6d) Northwest barracks

    6e) Mindwitness chamber

7)   Assassin’s headquarters

    7c) Pathway up to the Grey Ghost territory

9)  Fountain of Evil (as told to the adventurers by Elgrim; now home to a hydra instead of the Water Weird from OOTA 77)

14) Obelisk room (where the party is currently)

     14b) Unknown room

     14c) Thief barracks

You can read the story here: 

https://archiveofourown.org/works/35100307/chapters/87436915

or

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13962836/1/The-Grey-Warriors

[lumendelmari]

Chapter Thirty-Six

The Hold of the Deepking  

1485 DR / Day 41 

The Blade Bazaar, Gracklstugh

A cloud of unease and doubt hung over the companions’ heads as they slipped through the streets of Gracklstugh in the late afternoon. After their separate shopping excursions that morning, they spent the rest of their time gathered in Fraeya and Sarith’s chambers, essentially twiddling their thumbs while awaiting a call to arms—but no longer. The time had come. Captain Blackskull’s summons came via sending stone not ten minutes prior. The party was to immediately make their way to Clan Ironhead’s stronghold on the far western side of the Darklake District, due south of The Shattered Spire. And so, the companions had donned their gear, double-checked their supplies, and spent a few final moments with their myconid companions. Rumpadump and Stool would remain behind in their lodgings at Ghohlbrorn’s Lair. As the establishment was tucked away in caverns beneath the surface level of the city, it was the safest place for them. Because no matter how fiercely Stool argued for it, war was no place for a sprout.

“Do not leave this room unless one of us, Vanum or Lizva, calls for you. Do you understand?” Kazimir had told the sprouts.

Rumpadump nodded in agreement, but Stool had turned away like a stubborn child. That action still bothered Kazimir, though he knew Rumpadump and Stool were far safer being left behind. The party had no idea what they would be walking into…

. . .

Read more: https://archiveofourown.org/works/35100307/chapters/120975274

or

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13962836/36/The-Grey-Warriors

[lumendelmari]

Revised version of the Gracklstugh map for the Out of the Abyss campaign.

This is the map that we utilized for our play through of OOTA, which you can read in novel format here:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/35100307/chapters/87436915

or

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13962836/1/The-Grey-Warriors