The adventurers were not eager to spend two days hiking back to the nearest town, but they had treasure to sell and items they needed to purchase to improve their odds of survival. They descended the mountain along the old cart path, overgrown with trees and bushes.
An Orc came up the road, clad in garish armor, wearing rose colored glasses and carrying a muzzleloading rifle. He didn't make any special effort to stay hidden, nor did any of the mercenaries following him.
By me
The adventurers observed from stealth as Cortez the Orc placed an iron flask on the ground, waited about a minute expectantly, then gave it a kick. A cloud of smoke emitted from the vessel, resolving into a genie. The spirit theatrically fell on his hands in mid-air and vomited up a whole tent and market stall. Ishizaka's market was open for business.
The concept was simple. Ishizaka the Genie knew there was treasure in the dungeon, and he was the only person within a week's travel who had the capital to buy it all with currency. He'd take whatever the players brought up from the Mad Marquis' mansion, and they could use the coin they earned to buy supplies to bring up more treasure. And if they died, there would be more adventurers to take their place. All he had to do was wait, and sell useful items at market rates.
Two adventurers took him up on the deal.
- Laguna Tempest, Level 1 Warcaster
- Zigar Kneecapper, Level 1 Thug
They picked up rope, spikes, a hammer and a wax writing tablet for Gowonry the Mutoid, so that he could communicate more complex ideas than just "yes" and "no".
Then they went back to the ruined keep, for another crack at the Mountain of the Mad Marquis.
The early morning mist had yet to burn off. The adventurers heard singing from the ruins of the great hall, a chorus of drunken voices almost two dozen in number. They avoided the crowd and went down the stairs that Laguna excavated the day before.
The cleared stairwell led to a checkpoint with a smashed desk and scattered tokens. This was where the Holy Mountain had received corpses from pilgrims, and given them small receipts for the deposit of their dead. Most of the tokens were wood, but the desk held a handful made of silver, which the duo pocketed. There was a nasty smell in the air, same as the draconic smog from the Library. They recalled that they left all the doors open when they left, to stop the berserkers from chasing them. They braved the smoke to investigate a chamber with an inscription above a fountain: YOU STAND ABOVE THE HOLY MOUNTAIN. OFFER WATER AND DESCEND. Clearly an invitation to go deeper into the dungeon, but with no obvious way down. The smog was too thick to continue North toward the secret door into the Vivisectionist lair, so the adventurers went through another hole in the wall, where someone had smashed a secret door open with numerous blows from a weapon.
The hole lead to a lounge, which the berserkers had trashed and looted. Most of the bottles were empty or broken, but the pair found a metal bottle under the couch. Laguna translated the Dwarven writing on the side as IRONWEED, a defunct Dwarven whiskey label. The seal was broken and the stuff inside smelled like vinegar filled with iron shavings, but the decorative onyx stopper was at least worth money. The next room had a dead kobold nailed to the wall with a short sword, wearing an oversized dragon mask. The mask was missing the gems that belonged in its eyesockets, but Laguna was more interested in the command word written in draconic on the inside. When spoken out loud, the mask lit up, sending light out the eyeholes and allowing it to be used as a helmet lamp.
The next chamber was an octagonal chapel, with a domed ceiling painted with faded images of dragons. There was a huge fireplace with a mouth like a dragon maw, filled with old ashes and bone fragments. The chimney went up 50 feet, and through it the adventurers could hear the same drunken singing from earlier. The chamber was further decorated with more deceased kobolds.
The dragon chapel exited into a proper dungeon, a row of prison cells long empty. The duo heard the fleshy sound of someone mangling a corpse, coming from the cell at the end of the row. They stole up to the door, and found Levenbrech the Red Cap stomping the corpse of a Mutoid into jelly with his iron shoes.
By Brian Foud and Allan Lee
The adventurers stepped into the door of the jail cell to block his escape. Zigar threw rock dust on the fairy, so when he turned invisible he could still be tracked. The dusty silhouette tried to climb over his assailants, and Laguna skewered him with his hematite sword, snatching the Red Cap's hat off and squeezing the blood out.
Levenbrech had nothing valuable on him but a signet ring, with an image of the dragon on the face. The adventurers found a dead Vivisectionist in a nearby guardroom, a Duergar clad in a torn trashbag suit, wielding a sponge mace coated in homunculus venom. There was a staircase at the end of the cell block, and the sound of drunken berserkers echoed 50 feet down from the level above, fast approaching. The duo went back the way they came, hurrying up the stairs and looking for another way into the dungeon.
They hadn't explored the cave Jack discovered on the previous delve, and it seemed a likely route to riches. They slid down the talus pile of broken masonry and crept into the cave entrance. The roof of the chamber was stained by years of smoke from cookfires lit in the mouth. A dead Orc lay skewered with a javelin, which the adventurers retrieved in case they needed a throwing weapon later. They swept through the ashes in the fire pit and found a banded hematite ring, which Laguna pocketed for its lovely crystalline structure.
There was a noise from the next cave. Voices in a mixture of common and Green Man, the language of the Orcs in the area. Laguna was able to translate. A group of Orcs was arguing over whether they had time to recover the bodies of their dead. The adventurers decided to make friends, since the Orcs were clearly not friendly with the berserkers running around the dungeon. Zigar stepped into the cave and waited for the Orcs to notice the light from the dragon mask, which Gowonry was holding on him like a lantern. The Orcs didn't react, their darkvision didn't show them fine enough gradations of light for the light spell to get their attention. Zigar spoke up to get their attention.
The Orcs almost ran him through with their spears, but held off when he explained that he wasn't with those asshole barbarians who had wiped out the tribe. The Orcs were not happy that the berserkers had mutilated their dead. Did the Bone Chain tribe kill and eat people? Absolutely. Did it kidnap them and sell them to the Vivisectionists? Sure. But they always deposited the bones in the Holy Mountain ossuary. The prisoners they sold to the magical researchers would die in the embrace of the Mountain. They hadn't done anything to deserve this.
The adventurers offered to help the Orcs dispose of their dead properly. The green men agreed. With the duo's help, they schlepped several corpses (including a dead berserker) from the caves up to the surface. The Orcs tossed the corpses over the side of the cliff, thirty feet down onto the footpath Jack noticed yesterday. The players followed suit, and climbed down after the Orcs when they descended. The path led to a copse of trees, and in the middle of the that copse was a sinkhole leading a hundred feet down into the earth.
The Orcs loaded the corpses into an enormous pipe sized barrel, secured to one of the trees with a thick coil of rope. They carefully lowered the barrel of bodies into the hole. At the bottom, a Dwarf in a shimmering robe stepped into the light and turned out the barrel, spreading the bodies across the floor of the cemetery. She looked up at the group at the edge of the pit, a hundred feet up. Zigar held up the bottle of IRONWEED. The woman squinted at the barely visible liquor bottle, then pointed emphatically down into the hole. The players decided to descend into the pit. They helped the Orcs haul the barrel on a rope back up, climbed inside, and the Orcs lowered them into the Necropolis. Zigar hastily spent a soul die to purify the undrinkable spirits in the bottle, restoring them to a drinkable (and delicious) state.
The Dwarf lady wore a shimmering robe covered in blinking eyes, over a thick layer of tattoos and ritual scars. She introduced herself as Thelema, gravewarden and bustuaria of the Holy Mountain Necropolis. She offered the adventurers whatever they wanted for the bottle - money, a happy ending, anything. The monotony of her diet (onions, mushrooms, crow jerky, termite meat and the occasional wild game tossed down by the Orcs) made a bottle of vintage dwarf whiskey worth killing for.
Thelema took out a bronze key and unlocked the only crypt in the sinkhole that hadn't been looted. The interior was full of cushions, futons, and small tables made from masonry blocks. Thelema shouted for a troop of ghouls, who dutifully trundled off with buckets to begin filling a brass bathtub. As the pair of adventurers and their Mutoid henchman relaxed, Thelema explained the score in between sips of rust tinted spirits. As the gravewarden, she was prevented from leaving the Necropolis by the wards scribed on her body, but the same wards prevented the undead from attacking her. It had been that way ever since she and her sister Endura were given to the Marquis as a "gift" in the time of the old colony. Endura was conscripted as the Marquis' personal torturer, enacting the repulsive fantasies he thought would bring him closer to the Ancient Red Dragon he saw in his dreams.
By me
The Marquis was long dead, but Thelema knew that Endura was still doing grotesque magical experiments on the floor above her. Or at least, she had been, until some adventurers smashed her operation to pieces. She didn't know what happened to her sister, but offered to make it worth the adventurers' while if they found her and brought her back alive. Endura wasn't exactly a saint, but she became what she was because Thelema wasn't there to protect her when it mattered.
Speaking of making things worth the adventurer's while, one of the ghouls showed up with 600 silver pieces as payment for the bottle. Thelema poured a strange heating oil that burned without smoke into a pan beneath the large tub. She slipped off her Robe of Eyes and invited the adventurers to join her in the bath.
When all was said and done, Thelema idly mentioned that she had seen another visitor a couple days ago. A balding fighter-type who threatened her for information about how to get to floor 4 of the dungeon. The ghouls chased him off, and she hadn't seen him since. He might be dead, or he might have found another way down. He hadn't used the only route she knew about. You needed the Marquis' signet ring for that, and he was still in his crypt.
The players recognized the description as Gorrister the Great, the man they were tracking for the price on his head. They had a signet ring, but weren't sure if it was the right one. Thelema gave them directions to the crypt if they wanted to double check, and to the sealed door that the signet ring would open. She warned them about the Dragon Cult and the Lizardmen, two groups they should steer clear of if they didn't want to end up eaten or sacrificed to the Ancient Red Dragon sealed in a stone egg beneath the dungeon. As she pulled on her robe, she warned the players not to remove any corpses. They could kill as many undead as they liked (and would probably have to, in self defense), and could take whatever treasure they found, but the bones must stay in the Necropolis.
Thelema left to go prepare the corpses the Orcs deposited. The players gathered their things and set out on the path she had suggested. They passed through a series of mortuary rooms where corpses were prepared for disposal in the ossuary. In one, Thelema hacked through the tendons of the dead Orcs with a cleaver, and warned the players to get out before she called the ghouls to feed. In the next room, a carrion crawler snuffled around the inside of a big corpse-boiling vat, slurping all the meat flavor out of the wood. In the last room, a group of ghouls ignored the players in favor of slurping the last bits of meat off an unlucky adventurer's skeleton.
The next room was a series of walkways over a bone pit, filled twenty feet deep with skeletons. The bones began to rattle and move as the headlamp illuminated them, promising danger for anyone who fell in the hole. Which was a problem, because the walkway leading to the Marquis' tomb was broken. They chose the other path out, and ended up in a large carven room with a bunch of empty, looted mausoleums. There was a big staircase leading 50 feet up to the ceiling, and a wall of melted black basalt in a shape that suggested a door. There was an indentation in the stone for a signet ring, but it was shaped like a duck rather than the dragon ring the players already had. They searched the chamber for treasure, but instead found two additional exits:
- The stairs had a mechanism that would open a hatch in the ceiling, up to the next floor. The group heard footsteps up above and decided not to risk it.
- One of the crypts had a tunnel leading out the back.
The players investigated the tunnel, and almost stepped on a necrophidius. The skeleton-snake hypnotized Zigar and bit him on the leg, forcing him to spend a soul die to avoid paralysis. Zigar and Laguna stomped the snake to death before it could do any more damage, narrowly avoiding being stunlocked to death. They followed the passage and found the entrance to the dragon cult's lair, decorated with a carven image of an Ancient Red Dragon. They realized they were going the wrong way, and neither of them wanted to risk leaping over the bone pit to get to the other side of the collapsed walkway, so they went back to check one of the passages they hadn't tried.
The tunnel led to a chamber with four skeletons and a four foot deep pit, dusted with a layer of sand and stained with blood. The skeletons stood inert, clad in gilded plate armor and carrying polearms. There were two empty plinths next to the skeletons. The adventuring duo stood on the plinths and nothing happened. One of the skeletons helpfully pointed down into the pit, before returning to lifelessness. Taking the hint, Laguna hopped into the pit. One of the skeletons leaped down into the hole to challenge him. It deflected his blow with the haft of its polearm, and dealt him a vicious blow to the torso. He raised a hand in surrender, prompting the death knight to chuckle and leap out of the pit, returning to stand idle on the plinth.
By me
With Laguna injured and no clear path to the next level, the gang decided to head back to the surface. They passed Thelema on the way back to the sinkhole, dumping bones out of a wheelbarrow into the bone pit. There wasn't an obvious route to the surface from the sinkhole, the Orcs had pulled the barrel backup to the surface. The group decided to sleep at Thelema's makeshift inn while they thought over the problem.
Next morning, with Zigar's soul dice recovered and Laguna's torso feeling a little better, they decided to try another way out: a hole in the rock face visible fifty feet up the sinkhole, halfway to the top. Zigar barely managed to scale the rockface, and used the pitons and hammer he purchased earlier to secure the rope so Laguna and Gowonry could climb up. Zigar tried to climb the next fifty feet to the surface, but only managed to injure himself. The tunnel led down into the rock, and the adventurers could see the enormous Lantern of Clarity at the bottom, familiar from their adventures in the Library of the Vivisectionists.
They went down the tunnel and were confronted with a chasm, separating them from the Vivisectionists' enclosed porch and a way back to the surface. They tied a rope to the javelin they found earlier and threw it across the gap. It took them a couple tries, but they got the throwing spear caught in the bars of the porch, securing the rope so Gowonry could zipline across with his scorpion claws. The other adventurers followed suit as he held the line secure in his nippers. Laguna was the last to cross, and was suspended over the chasm when a swarm of giant bats came down the tunnel, descending into the earth and buffeting him as he held on for dear life. One of the bats knocked the rope loose from the piton Zigar hammered in, and Laguna swung down into empty space, dangling from the porch by the rope. Gowonry and Zigar hauled him up.
The adventurers went out through the emergency exit in the back of the Vivisectionists' bathroom. The berserkers had smashed all the doors open and the smoke made breathing uncomfortable at head level. The emergency exit led out through an oubliette, which led into the Orc cave system from earlier. The gang emerged onto the surface where a flock of giant crows roosted. The crows eyed the players and thought about mobbing them for shiny objects to steal, but they had recently feasted on the bodies left by the berserkers and didn't feel a need to pick on humans.
Back at the camp, Gowonry resumed teaching the centipede-headed woman how to read using his new wax tablet, in hopes that she could be of more use as a scout if she could actually communicate with the players. Laguna thought about picking up some two by fours to get across the broken bridge in the bone pit.
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