== Oathday, Erastus 31, 4708; Runeforge; morning ==

While deciding where to go in the rubble strewn halls of envy, a bright flash of light sprang forth from the glittering metal rod set in the floor, and it emitted a pulse of magic so powerful I could practically feel it wash over me.

Some of our ever-burning torches winked out and someone yelled, “What the hell was that?!”

I noticed that the Status spells I had cast earlier were no longer working, which led me to cast Detect Magic and scan various magical items I was wearing. My enchanted mail shirt, ring of protection, and newly acquired cloak no longer gleamed with their usual magical luster.

Crap!

The metal rod from which this effect had emanated was now only softly glittering, but as we watched the electrical sparks that arced across it began to intensify.

I grumbled, “Fuck this,” and created a dome of stone three feet thick over the accursed object.

We were still nervous about being around it, and quickly explored the adjacent chambers.

To the right a hallway branched east and west, with the east end choked by rubble, and the west ending in an empty room.

To the left a short hall led to a large square room lit by lanterns. A floor tiled with mosaics stepped down to a pool of quick-silver infused with abjuration. I dipped a piece of paper into the pool, but it emerged unchanged, and so I put some of the mercury into a vial. After prodding about the entrances to two other caved-in passages, we returned to the relative safety of the central chamber of Runeforge.

We have taken inventory of what we lost from the (anti?) magical blast, and replaced what items we could from our inventory. Next on our list is Krune, rune lord of sloth and specialist in conjuration.

== Oathday, Erastus 31, 4708; Runeforge; mid-day ==

We all took about the same amount of time to travel down the hall toward sloth. Perhaps that was because the stench from the area reached us long before we reached it, and we were reluctant to push forward.

We stepped into a large irregular shaped chamber, and it was as if we were physically assaulted by the gut-wrenching smell of the place.

It was difficult to make out details as the acrid vapors from fetid pools stung our eyes, making them weep and thus blurring our vision. The air was so foul that we were sickened from breathing it, and nothing we did seemed to lessen the effect.

Nolin, Kane, Sabin and I bravely pushed forward into the fetid murk, past the slimed walls and cesspools oozing with the foul refuse from centuries of habitation, which over the millennia of neglect had spawned its own hideous forms of life. Reeking pulsating pustules and amorphous blobs of quivering gunk peeped up from the pools and slumped down the walls.

We moved northward, and then to the right (leaving a left passage for later), but we found nothing of use, and the air became more toxic the further in we went. Eventually we could take no more, and Sabin used Dimension Door to transport us all back to the others waiting at the entrance.

It seemed obvious that the devotees of sloth were true to their calling, and had done nothing toward the upkeep of their wing. They no doubt succumbed to the results of their idleness long ago.

We quickly returned to the Runeforge pool, where we gratefully breathed in the delightfully fresh air, which earlier this morning had seemed so stale.

We have decided to only return to sloth if we find we need something from the area for the Runeforge ritual.

I have no map for this area. It was not practical to pause and sketch our surroundings while gasping for air, and the acrid fumes would have probably turned my paper to pulp.

Karzoug’s hall of greed is next.

== Oathday, Erastus 31, 4708; Runeforge; evening ==

Rigel skipped down the passageway toward greed, arriving well ahead of the rest of us. When we caught up she stood looking at an iron door to the right, encrusted with a dazzling variety of gems. But Rigel looked unhappy, and the reasons for her discontent were twofold: first, the gemstones were all fake, and second, the door looked like a trap.

There was a keyhole in the center of the door, at which Rigel worked for a few minutes before stepping back and announcing that while the trap was disabled, the door really wasn’t a door: it was just part of the trap, and would smash anyone standing before the door into the opposite wall.

The passage dead ended, but knowing the obvious door was a fake led us to focus on searching for a secret door in the dead end wall, which Rigel quickly found.

The hallway beyond was beautifully panelled with polished hardwoods set with silver and gold Thassilonian runes, which extolled the greatness of Karzoug and all of his accomplishments.

The hall stretched on for a hundred feet, and the runes ran the full length of it, and so Sabin and I paused to read in detail what they had to say.

Karzoug raised vast armies of stone giants, and with them he sacked and plundered cities of neighboring realms, gaining more and more wealth. But this wealth only fueled his greed, and he forever strove to gain more, enviously coveting anything that was not in his possession.

He attacked other Runelord realms, but none more ferociously or repeatedly as Alasnist’s realm of Bakrakan. A ridge, called the Rasp, acted as a natural barrier between her and Karzoug’s realms, and on top of this he erected huge statues which spied upon her realm. In response she created the hellfire plumes, great defensive towers to keep the giants at bay.

One subtle fact was clear from these detailed accounts of Karzoug’s deeds: he lacked skill at enchantment and illusion, just as Vraxeris had surmised in his journal.

The rest of my companions were gathered before a wall of green mist, which glowed with a putrid light, and had an aura of transmutation (as expected for Karzoug).

Kane put a coin in the mist, but nothing changed, and so Trask pulled out a staff and blew the mist away with a Gust of Wind. We quickly ran through into a large room as the mist began to re-gather in the hall.

The floor, walls and ceiling here were paved with ivory tiles inset with the rune of greed (a claw clutching a coin). In the center of the room was a pool, with an icy sculpture of a whale. Water squirted out of the whale’s blow hole and splashed noisily into the pool.

In the pool itself swam a group of small humanoid creatures with leather wings and toothy grins, staring at us. Water mephits!

In common they quipped, “These don’t look as strong as the last group we saw. The mean silver man will kill them.”

We asked about the mean silver man, and they said he was very strong, made of metal, and very mean. “He uses powerful magic, and sometimes freezes our water. Because he is mean. And strong. And made of metal. He is mean, too.”

We also found out that there were six pools where the (mean) silver man goes, and that one of the six is extremely magical. There was another pool elsewhere that was even more magical, but he did not go there (I assumed this was the main Runeforge pool). The Mephits could travel from pool to pool, even though the pools were not physically connected to one another.

They then all chirped in agreement that “the mean silver man was a big problem for them.”

Nolin replied that he had not yet met a problem he could not behead, which seemed to amuse them, and they huddled together and quietly spoke amongst themselves.

Of course they were speaking aquan, and so I interrupted their conversation and said, in their own tongue, that if they helped us we could kill the silver man.

For a moment they were more impressed by my ability to speak their language than our proposal, and it definitely made them think more highly of us. Aquan can be a difficult language: it is not at all fluid or smooth like water. Rather it is made up of various clicks and screeching sounds that carry well in liquids.

They told us that the silver man was deeper in, and that the magic pool was also deeper in. We saw doorways to the left and right, and asked which would take us to the silver man, to which they replied that it really didn’t matter.

We went left and found another large room with a pool in the center, and a statue serving as a fountain. This pool had goldfish swimming in it (a favorite food of the mephits in the other pool), and the statue was of a wizard holding a staff in one hand, and the other held up out from which the water sprang.

To the right was a wide exit to a long corridor, with silver doors on either side: three on the left and one on the right. Each door opened onto an identical room: large and rectangular and mostly empty. The rooms had an aura of transmutation and held an odd assortment of… parts. Blocks of iron, wood or stone, ivory tusks, bits of fur or glass.

Kane suddenly entered one of the rooms, and while we expected the worse, nothing happened. The same held for the rest of the rooms. Huh.

We followed the corridor around a bend to another pool room, with the same wizard fountain as the last, and a locked silver door to the right. Rigel unlocked the door and Sabin opened it.

This room was obviously a study, with bookshelves lining the walls and work tables scattered bout. And there was a silver metal man standing at a table who looked up at us and vanished.

On the tables were an odd assortment of dead animals, with living animals in cages (cats, rats, rabbits, etc.), and crates filled with mundane lab equipment.

The dead animals had been killed as part of some bizarre experiment, where parts of them had been transmuted to metal. What kind of sick bastard tortures animals?

Once in the room Sedjewick and Sabin scanned the library shelves, finding various tomes on magical theory, history, and a collection of spell books.

There was a silver door directly opposite the one we entered, and another to our left, which is where Rigel picked the lock and Avia opened the door. The hall beyond had jade walls and a ceiling of polished white stone. Three decorated lamps flooded the room with a warm light, illuminating ten life sized gold statues, each posed for combat.

Our first thought was that we had encountered ten golden golems, but a closer inspection revealed that while posed for combat, the figures did not really look like fighters. It was as if someone had made statues of random people asked to pose for the artist. But the faces all held the same expressions of surprise, shock and horror.

Thinking back on the dead, half transformed animals in the lab we realized that these were all victims of the silver man’s experimentation with making metal beings like himself. We guessed he had asked his unsuspecting assistants to pose as he transformed them all to gold.

A corridor led out opposite from where we entered, then bent to the right and ended in another locked silver locked door. Once again Rigel unlocked the door and Avia opened it.

A vast, cathedral-like room waited beyond. The walls were paneled richly with highly polished dark hardwoods, and silver beams supported the ceiling. Gold and platinum symbols were inlaid in the wood paneling. A large pool occupied the near side of the room.

There was no fountain in this pool, but gouts of fire, arcs of electricity and strange sounds emanated from its surface.

At the far end of the chamber was the silver man, who calmly lifted a hand a pointed at me. A sickly green ray struck me full in the chest, and I felt a moment of shocking cold and weakness, but the feeling quickly passed. Trask and Sabin had let out a gasp as the ray struck me, by which I knew I had survived a Disintegrate ray.

The silver man became blurred, the result of a Mirror Image spell, but the next moment Sabin had taken Avia and Nolin with him via his usual Dimension Door trick, and the fighters began to hack away at the man and his images.

I swiftly made my way to the back of the room so I could provide healing support for our front line fighters, and noticed an odd and unpleasant sense of disorientation as I passed the pool,

Trask ignited a strategically placed fireball engulfing the man as Sabin, Nolin and Avia continued to remove his mirrored images and bash the hell out of him.

“You lesser creatures will never understand what it means to have metal skin!”

I used a Dimensional Anchor to keep the silver man in place, as the damage the fighters inflicted began to take their toll. The man used another Disintegrate spell on Nolin, and then set off a fireball centered on himself, causing Nolin to fall.

But it was too little too late, and he fell back against the wall and gasped, “You cannot win this!” before collapsing.

Sabin quickly removed the silver man’s head as Kane and I healed Nolin.

We then turned our attention to the body and found the following items:

[1180] +2 quarter-staff. Silver with a shimmering sphere at each end, and a snake entwined around the end with the larger sphere. This staff gives a +2 enhancement to intelligence, and with 40 charges offered the following set of spells:

Bull’s Strength (1 charge)
Enlarge Person (1)
Telekenisis (3)
Flesh to Stone (4)

[1181] +1 cloak of resistance
[1182] rod of metal and mineral detection
[1183] +2 belt of mighty constitution

500 gp of diamond dust

As others passed by the pool they too noticed the disorientation effect, and Sedjewick staggered back and left the room. He felt as if all of his abilities had been lessened.

The rest of us quickly ran past the pool and back to the entry room, where we showed the mephits the head of the silver man, which made them quite happy. We also described the large, magical pool, and they said they had seen the silver man dip a weapon into it.

We made our way back to the magic pool and (from a safe distance) Sabin carefully observed the pool using Detect Magic, and discovered that the pool could be used to recharge magical items.

I took a discharged staff and cautiously approached the pool and briefly dipped it in. The staff now glowed and had 5 charges! I put the staff in for longer and the the staff glowed even brighter and had 50 charges.

Using an unseen servant Sabin tried to restore the enchantment on a pair of bracers, but other than making them glow the pool did not affect them.

The glow on the items dipped in the pool faded over time, and we intend to use it to recharge all of our wands and staves.

We returned to the study, and while my companions searched the books, I took inventory of the caged animals still living:

house cat
snake
5 rats
monkey

The animals were not well cared for, and so I fed and watered them, and intend to take them out of the Runeforge when we leave.

Meanwhile my friends had found a number of useful history and lab books, which if studied would increase one’s skills with transmutation and constructs (+5).

The historical books also provided an account on how Karzoug survived the fall of the empire. He had created a huge rune-well, and stored his body halfway between this world and a dimension referred to as “Leng.”

Sabin discovered a pair interesting spells from the silver man’s spell books:

Bloodmoney: level 2 (transmutation)
Rune of Contingency: level 3 (transmutation)

We then turned our attention to the gold “statues” and found that they were not solid gold — the transmutation must have only been skin deep. They were hollow, and one of them rattled. Nolin carved a hole in that one’s heel and a large diamond rolled out.

diamond (3000 gp)

All told the statues are composed of about 1,500 pounds of gold, which we will pound flat and take with us.

The silver man himself was made of mithral and weighed 300 pounds — we will melt down his corpse and take it with us too.

We have decided to use the study as our base of operation. It is relatively secure, comfortable, and close to the large bulky items we plan to take with us when we leave.

Sabin, Trask and I went back to the halls of lust to retrieve the feeble man we had rescued from the succubi and left there. I case Heal upon him, and the powerful spell removed all of his mental afflictions.

He looked around, and then at us, and said (in Thassilonian), “For 10,000 years I have been trapped here!”

His name was Nevelektu, and he was assigned to the Cathedral of Lust, where he served Sorshen as a soldier. He fell out of favor with Sorshen’s acolyte and had spent all of the time since then imprisoned in the cage where we found him.

He told us that the daemon and her succubi arrived later, and killed the actual acolyte, using the survivors as their play things.

We told him that Karzoug was trying to return, which alarmed him greatly, but above all, he wanted to get the hell out of this place. We told him where we had set up camp, and he agreed to accompany us.

Unfortunately none of us thought what effect might have kept a mortal man alive for 10,000 years. As soon as we left the cathedral, Nevelektu dropped to the floor and turned to dust.

We returned to the study in a sombre mood.

While we were gone Sedjewick and Trask had studied the journals left by the silver man, where he described how he had transformed himself to metal. Over time he appears to have lost all memory of the time before he was metal, and his thought process became as rigid as the metals he had fixated upon. Once becoming metal he fell into a fixed pattern of repeating the same experiments over and over again. He would make occasional visits to Sloth to collect vermin, which he than transformed to other animals.

The nearby magic pool was another failed experiment, where he had tried to replicate the main Runeforge pool. It takes intellectual abilities from the “less worthy” and uses them for recharging items, but it is unpredictable.

He also confirmed our guess that Sloth was the first group to fall (thousands of years ago), and the area was now used as a dumping ground by the remaining inhabitants.

The evening was still young, and I decided spend some time researching the highly enchanted peacock quill we had taken from the Scribbler. Who would know about such an artifact? Pharasma would, of course, and so I decided to prepare for a Divination. I used the pen to form the question I would ask Pharasma, and as soon as I wrote the question, then pen came to life and wrote:

Sometimes we answer our own questions in the process of asking them.

The others heard my startled exclamation and looked to see what had happened, and while we suspected who had replied, I wanted to be sure. I continued with the Divination, and Pharasma granted me the following knowledge.

Many people in the past have asked for help from the Peacock Spirit.
Use your wisdom to interpret it.

Should you probe the quill deeper, take care with your questions.

“The Peacock Spirit? I read about him while in Magnimar trying to locate you.”

It was Sedjewick, and he had read that the Peacock Spirit was a powerful deity in the early part of the Thassilonian Empire. His emblem was on the thrones of the empire, and he was said to have focused on rune magic.

It was known he had major temples at Xin Shalast and at the Black Tower, where the monastic monks who built and maintained the library were indeed devoted to him.

It is fascinating to discover that the Peacock Spirit was still alive and active after all of these years, and I have many questions for him. But heading Pharasma’s advice I will resist contacting him except in dire need.

I suspect he could offer interesting facts about Karzoug, but more pertinent, I bet he could describe the procedure for enchanting weapons in the Runeforge! If we find no other clues, and are at a loss, I will ask the Peacock Spirit for help.

 

== Fireday, Arodus 1, 4708; Runeforge; morning ==

This morning we will make our way to the halls of Zutha, the Runelord of Gluttony. Zutha specialized in necromancy, and so we have prepared for encountering undead.