The Very Bottom of the Bottom: Campaign Diary

With 12-Bar and Ragados watching on, M’narr probed the huge tome with his pallid fingers, teasing out its secrets. The book – the Demonomicon – was easily the most powerful and terrible object they’d ever seen. Probably too powerful. But that wasn’t going to stop them from nicking it, so M’narr put it in the bag of holding. Only slightly worried by their success, their attention turned back to finding the missing prisoner.

The throne room was the first port of call. The great black diamond in the throne held no answers, though it nearly held doom for M’narr as he removed and identified it. The Gith dropped the gem just in time to see it crackle and vanish into nothingness, returning to its anonymous creator. The scrying pool still showed a drow and a visage, but was similarly useless. After exploring and exhausting all other rooms, only one chamber remained: the “front door” of Tcian Sumere; the fortress’s gateway to the Endless Void. At the end of this corridor, the shimmering force field still flickered between safety and presumable death. Despite its apparent inconsistency, the force field was impassable. A literal and figurative dead end. Truetemper was without a solution. So M’narr decided phone a friend, and led the party back to Ranais.

On Ranais, no longer disconnected from the Astral Plane, M’narr cast a circle and called to Vlaakith, Lich-Queen and demigod, for answers. Savouring his praise, Vlaakith told him that his belief was serving him well, but perhaps it was time to “try the opposite”. The line was hardly dead before M’narr hit redial. Where was he to try “trying the opposite”? At the front door. Or inside it. Or on the other side of it. It didn’t matter. Returning to Tcian Sumere’s dead end, Vlaakith’s cryptic advice was eventually cracked by 12-Bar, who suggested the party disbelieve what they saw. With the planewalkers setting their minds to disbelieving their senses, the forcefield dissolved into the form of an iron door. Either side of it, Ragados and M’narr noticed secret doors. Bloody visages.

Swarms of ghosts burst through the walls to attack the players, led by a Bone Golem. Then the visages reversed the gravity in the entrance corridor, pinning the adventurers to the ceiling. They ruptured the walls and filled the narrow passageways with the pure necrosis of the Negative Energy Plane. None of this was real, naturally. The party fought to retain their senses, slowly fighting through the secret doors. A second Bone Golem (real this time) joined the fight. Both sides started to lose steam. In the end, Truetemper’s Solution had the superior firepower. Breaking through into the prison proper, the party found their drow quarry and his visage guard. The last lone visage used all its cunning, but was dead within a minute. The drow, meanwhile, used the confusion to break free and immediately commit suicide, turning himself to gas and condensing and impaling himself on one of M’narr’s staves. Whoever this guy was, he was no ordinary drow. And before he died, he had one hell of a last request...

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