Room - Empty Cavern, Abandoned Mine, Kennel, Ancient Monstrosity
Doddot reaches the third level of the hold by zipline. The air here is cool and refreshing after the sweltering sugar and smoke of the second floor.
She flips a coin and sets off accordingly. Runs of twisted metal sourced the handymen's chains and further from the nest they reconstruct into rails. Doddot follows them to an ore shaft. A dumbwaiter blinks like the eye of a broken doll, barely holding power. Inside the shaft, an ore elevator chunks slowly but steadily along a chain.
An abandoned mine, then. Dime a dozen. A glimmer in the ore shaft catches Doddot's eye. She chances a bite from the broken dumbwaiter to grab it. Her reward is a sardonyx the size of a thumb nested in a quartz cluster the size of a head.
She goes on a spending spree after selling it at a crystal girlies auction. She recruits mages, builds kennels, and gets a hot stone massage.
In a good mood, she tosses a fistful of coins onto the patient tongue as she passes. As before, the tongue swallows the offering. Not as before, great grinding is felt underfoot before the tongue comes back. As before again, the tongue unfurls.
Relieved but somewhat disappointed, Doddot chalks the loss up to charity.
After a pause for irony, a void opens on the tongue, stretching into the meaty appendage. The room fills with ozone, the scent of burning flowers, and a tortured shrieking.
From the hole in the tongue, bone grows over bone, cobbling into an unfamiliar shape. Buttery yellow flames lap the bones from below, draping them with muscles of tattered fire. The resurrection is incomplete. It does not stop screaming.
With a shuddering step that sends cinders scattering underfoot, it regards Doddot with a skeletal horse's face.
Doddot hears without hearing.
Warmaster Donir.
In an instant, she sees devastation untold, the future of the world if this half-thing was to reach the surface. Stricken by the psychic onslaught, she faints. She learns what happened from a couple plastered mages days later.
As the monstrosity took forms, the Mages felt a black hole pull at the arcane strata. By the time Warmaster Donir reached the main floor, they'd rallied. In terrifying unison, they rend his flame-licked muscles from bone with a single wave of magic. Warmaster Donir raveled.
Retelling complete, the mages bump chests hard enough to rattle nearby plates. Donir's segmented body and manifold arms are scorched into the hold floor where he died.
Side-eying the remaining mural as she descends to the depths again, Doddot can't help but feel like this Warmaster Donir would look an awful lot like one the stomach-curdling shapes graven on the wall.
Well, he would have with skin, anyways.
Summary
- 9♥️ - +12 Resources
- 5♠️ - Abandoned Mine
- Constructed Kennel
- Pawtral Roll - No Sabertooth
- Wishing Well Roll - Bad Magic! Underwellming. Monstrous Form (Summon an Ancient Monstrosity, 25 STR + one trait).
Combat Summary - Warmaster Donir
- Warmaster Donir - 25 STR, Burning Armour (Incinerate non-shielded, non-ranged attackers before damage).
- The Dimorc Disputantes - 4 Soldiers at 5 STR, 5 Mages at 6 STR.
- No hostiles in range for Monsters or Soldiers for two turns.
- Mages for 30 Ranged, Warmaster Donir defeated.
- Last Blood - Mages for 30 Ranged, Warmaster Donir defeated.
The Hold
Buildings
- Library - 5/5 Mage Occupancy, Good Magic: Nurse's Sigil (when Units move through this square, they recover all of their STR).
- Kennel - 0/5 Hounds or 0/1 Creature, can tame creatures.
- Kitchen - +50% STR to units housed in adjacent squares (current: Kennel, Library).
- Forge - 0/1 Cannon Occupancy, can build traps.
Formations
- Natural Magic - Good Magic: Pawtral (May pay 5 Trade Goods to roll 1d4. Rolling a 4 gains a friendly Sabretooth, 20 STR + 2 movement, spawns from Kennel during combat. Also, lovable cats.)
- Volcanic Shaft - Dormant. For now. Intersects river of magma. Rule of cool: erupts on both floors.
- River of Magma - Liquid. Doesn't do anything. Intersects volcanic shaft. Rule of cool: erupts on both floors.
Remnants
- Wishing Well - May play 10 Trade Goods to roll 1d2. 50-50 Good v. Bad Magic on result.
- Abandoned Mine - Dormant. Forever?
Resources
- Resources - 9/50 - ( +13 from 9♥️, -5 from Kennel )
- Trade Goods - 22/50 - ( +26 from Abandoned Mine ( 20 + 2 * 3 Depth, -21 for 3 Mages, -5 Pawtral roll, -10 well roll ).
- Soldiers - 4/X - 5 STR
- Mages - 5/5 - 4 (+2) STR
- Cannons - 0/1 - 30 STR, 1/fight
World Notes
Dramatis Personae
- Doddot Dimorc - The ostensible protagonist mining the caves beneath her family hold. A bit dim herself.
- Hamgard - The chef! He's never been a chef before, but he's figuring it out quickly.
- Sandwich - Doddot's gross white cat, hatchling of the Pawtral magical room. He accompanies Doddot on her adventures.
Historical Events
- The Cat Fight - Doddot's first significant military victory, a skirmish that took place in the Pawtral magic room. Mages and Soldiers bravely fended off an onslaught of handyman, using the ladder as a chokepoint. The Felling of Warmaster Donir - The first ancient monstrosity slain by the dwarves of Dimorc hold, Warmaster Donir was slain by an unbroken line of mages. It serves as reminder of the terrifying potential of magic to this day.
Takeaways
- Well that was a particularly unpleasant surprise. I got lucky in jacking up my Mages before doing the well roll and then lucky again with the trait that Donir got. There are some nasty ones in that table that surely would have ended the game. By way of example, there was one that casually adds 100 STR to the Ancient Monstrosity. That would have ended my game.