Play Report #4

A play report!

So the game was just Fatima and Nyrad the Dwarf. They started out camping in the increasingly chilly (it's November in fantasy world) hills near the Barrowmaze. After some discussion about the wisdom/fun of investigating the cult-infested town of Wandesford and causing trouble, they decided to delve back into the Barrowmaze instead and try to find some treasure and maybe slay some undead monsters. After climbing down the rope in the spooky barrow, they took the first left and found themselves facing a door. They noticed that the door had writing on it, and that there was an incongruously dark flagstone in front of it. Here's what was written on the door:

QSFTTVSF USBQ BOE TLFMFUPOT EBSL TUPOF SFTFUT

Wanna try cracking the code? It's not arbitrary, it's systematic...

I found a few codes in a DnD book a couple weeks ago and I thought it'd be fun to find some puzzles. Fatima and Nyrad set to work trying to solve it, but Nyrad's impatience got the better of him and he just opened the door and walked into the next room. As soon as he passed the threshold of the door, a stone wall slammed down from the ceiling behind him, separating him from Fatima. At the same time, a door at the other side of the room opened and three skeletons ran through it! Luckily, Nyrad is fearless and handy with an axe. And I rolled really badly. While this fight was going on, Fatima was desperately trying to solve the code. Eventually, and very grudgingly, she used a "Read Languages" (Comprehend Languages? something like that) scroll that she had found way back in the Tower of the Stargazer to understand the code, which explained that there's a trap and how to reset it. The stone wall slid back into the ceiling and she joined the fight, which the team quickly won. After their victory, they were really furious, I think partly because they had to use magic to decode the message, and they took it out on the skeletons. They broke all the bones, spit on them, and generally disrespected their foes.

I think other than that...they opened one door to a room which had a whole bunch of giant rats in it- like, three feet tall, Rodents of Unusual Size- and quickly shut it again. They found a few tombs which had been emptied or looted...they found a place in the hallway where someone or something had broken through a room into the hallway. They passed a door-sized spot in the hallway which had been bricked over (looked like a sledgehammer would break through...) but elected to not mess with it.

As it started getting toward the time when we were going to call the game, they decided to walk back to the entrance and get back to camp. As they began to walk, they heard the shuffling, slobbering noises of hungry zombies behind them! They ran the rest of the way and the zombies were unable to climb the rope to follow them.

I think that's more or less everything that happened. They may have each found some amount of treasure, but nothing world-shaking.