Riverboat Gambler: Shrine of the Dragon

 

 

I swim in the water. I swim and eat the things that fall off the island. The island floats in the water. I gnaw the underside. The island tilts. The things on the island fall over the side. The rays burn me. The things fall in the water where the rays do not reach them. I eat them. I eat the island. The rays cannot harm me. I swim deep in the water. So deep the rays cannot reach me. I forget which way is up. I swim in a straight line. I breach the surface of the water and leap toward the burning eye. My jaws snap shut.

I am in the tomb. I am on the floor in the sand. There is a sound from the hall of reeds. A scraping sound from the floor painted like the water. Something howls.

I roll over and skate silently toward the sound. I imagine I am swimming.

Riverboat Gambler: The Dent in the Shield

Stomp your foot
Flick your sword

Across the body

Of the fat

Thing from the

Jar and toss

With the same 

Motion your shining

Sword to the 

Man waiting to

Catch it so

The blade is

Not lost as

The pincers close

Around your head

You are not

The dancer you

Are the dance 

So if you

Miss one step

The part that

Matters will 

survive

 

Riverboat Gambler: Three More Tombs

David Roberts

 

The enormous statue had once stood over the river but the river had meandered in the ages since it was erected. The sages at first believed the features had been scraped away. A supernatural confirmation kill in one of the dynastic struggles on the ancient Plain. But it had simply been sculpted like that. Faceless except the open mouth. Without eyes and ears and nose the expression was unreadable despite the carefully sculpted teeth and tongue. It communicated fear or laughter or pain or hunger as the viewer wished. 

 

The engineers clustered around the statue at the neck and prepared to blow it up. The Bronze Head was going to open a new restaurant in Hylem-Xylem, which everyone just called Sugar City now that the rhyming slang of the chaotic argot was out of favor again. They couldn't find another bronze head, or they just didn't believe in doing the same thing over and over again.

  

Gorgojo had never been to Last Autumn. He had the architectural drawings. The sketches of the streetscape and planned exterior facade and interior decor. He knew how much space he had to work with and the maximum weight the structure would support. But he had no real sense of the place to which he would take his prize. He was from the pampa, the sea of grass where a single tree was a sight to behold. A city rising out of an ocean of trees shaded red and purple and yellow and orange sounded like something out of a dream.  

 

The charges would break the head free and the sorcerers would catch it with floating discs. They would bear it to the barge, and from there down the river where it joined with the river Hog. From there to the sea, and then back to the world. Once aboard the ship it was the responsibility of the captain. Gorgojo would, nonetheless, accompany it to its new home. He wanted to look up at it while he drank annix and ate purple worm in mole negro. Then look up further still at the trees.

 

The engineers verified, for a third time, that the charges had been set correctly. The mages promised, again, that they had triple checked the carvings at the base of the statue. Lorem ipsum. The same word repeated again and again without meaning. They had to move soon. The potions would wear off and they'd have to dip into the reserve during the trip back.

 

The heat haze made the tongue dance in the statue's mouth. Gorgojo thanked Logic and The Draftsman for checking his work and lit the fuse.

Riverboat Gambler: Three Tombs

Clearing a tomb of undead was routine. You approached by half light or by day and you used a weapon that burned everything inside. The average grave was no more than a few rooms deep. Enough flasks of alchemist fire generated convection sufficient to cook unliving flesh until it fell off the bone. Skeletons charred into heaps of cremains, wights came gibbering out the entrance to dissolve in the sunlight. Mummies made sounds like a man suffocating in a bag. The loss of scrolls and cloth and delicate artwork was regrettable. So was being chewed for an hour as the potion of troll blood surging through your veins kept you alive just long enough to feed the ghouls.

 

For living things it was the same. Set an ambush at the entrance, smoke them out and slaughter them. 

Tabor fondled his amulets and mouthed a prayer to the Hungry Dungeon before tossing the flask. Eda and Salvador had thrown theirs unlit, a "wet shot" to splash fuel into the corners before igniting. With the God propitiated, he threw.

 

A word came from the cave. He didn't understand it.

 

The burning oil went out. With it, the sun.

 

Eda kindled a Light spell but it would not spark. Without even the moons to light them the dunes looked like waves in some primal watery abyss, awaiting the creation of the world.

 

The sound came again. Tabor realized it was his name, spoken from the mouth of the tomb. 

Monster Mash Test Drive - The Tunnel Under the Tundra

 

A Dwarven exploratory mining expedition disappears beneath the permafrost layer of the ancient tundra.

Creature Cache Test Drive: Honey Trap of the Planeswalking Soulmaster

The Hanged King cynically founded numerous enclosed orders of nuns, drawn from the widows and orphans created by his endless wars, whose sole purpose in life was to be sacrificed to him and increase his magic power. The Elixir of Life religion was created as a ploy by the Tower of Pain, one of the newly founded Commonwealth’s largest religious corporations, as a ploy to absorb these directionless death cultists who no longer had anything to die for after the King was killed. It was impossible to talk that many religious fanatics into moving on with their lives, the best the Tower could do was offer them a more prosocial cause to die for.

C Series Masterpost

Introducing the C Series, a trilogy of linked dungeons. A monster infestation beneath a sanitarium leads adventurers on a quest across the planet, and beyond.