I haven’t done one of these in a while. Time to get back into the habit.

Today in my Swords and Wizardry game. The Kompanions of Kalador continued their exploration of the under-city of Nightside.  A brief aside to get you caught up…

Last session they took a little vacation from the travails of ruling a burgeoning new trade city by traveling to Nightside.  Nightside is a city sitting on one side of a cube of black rock, floating in the middle of the plane of Limbo. The party gets to Nightside via a pocket dimension known as The Hallway of Infinite Doors, which is kind of what it sounds like except there are a finite number of doors but there are just a lot of them and it sounds cooler if you call it “infinite.”

Legend says at the center of this great cube of stone is a massive chamber full of treasure. Adventurers from the Prime Material as well as the Outer and Astral planes travel to Nightside to have a crack at finding the treasure. The corridors shift and change, terrible monsters lurk in the dark bowels…you get the point.

Anyhoo… We meet up with our adventurers in a massive chamber wherein a small skirmish was concluding. The winners were known locally as “The Corrupted.” The Corrupted are a strange subterranean human culture who are hard core into body modification of an extreme variety. The Corrupted were standing around deciding how they were going to assault a goblin lair when the Kompanions of Kalador show up. Our heros bravely blast the pierced and tattooed savages with a fireball from a safe distance and that was the end of the session.

Here are the highlights today’s session.

-The party decide to skip fighting the goblins for now, since the little buggers have blocked off a room and have clearly used alchemy fire and missile fire to discourage intruders.

-The party comes across goblin grafitti depicting goblins trading gold for prisoners near a big stone door. The stone door has little window and a convenient gong sits just outside the door.

-The Kompanions decide they will use the corpse of a recently deceased goblin as a hand puppet and pretend like one of their number is a prisoner.

-They bang the gong, the little hatch opens and… a hand puppet of a wizard ( you can tell by the pointy hat) answers.  (I wrote this adventure six years ago for a convention game and yes, the wizard hand puppet was part of the original version.)  Much mirth ensues.

-The party tricks “the wizard” into opening the door. The hand puppet is on the rather grubby hand of a fat, greasy looking fellow, with drool and food matted into his unkept beard and he’s wielding a wand.

-The party has a bit of a nasty fight. Rexor, (six foot tall, four armed man with giant beetle wings and wearing armor that is literally a living demon) gets hit with a wand of cold for a good bit of damage. They defeat “the wizard” and his team of security ogres though many of his magic items are destroyed including the hand puppet.

-The party finds one of the Corrupted in the entry area and use telepathy to communicate. Turns out “the wizard” was a minion of a mind flayer and this is the “service entrance” but there’s a secret back door directly to the mind flayer’s crib through the goblin lair. The Corrupted were planning on an assault when the Kompanions showed up and spoiled the party.

-The Kompanions decide the easy way to kill a mindflayer is first to murder about a hundred goblins on your way to the mind flayer’s back door. They don’t get to the back door and find another passage way back into the service area of the mind flayer’s lair.

-The party comes across a strange room with odd and deadly art objects along with a giant metal door that is chained, locked and magically warded. They figure out that is trying to keep something very nasty “in” and not other people “out.”

-After some reasoning and puzzling, they figure out they’ve found the mind flayer’s front door and it was time to wrap up the session.