Left or Right?

Fully healed with their looting little hearts satisfied they proceeded down another short broad staircase and faced a decision, as a T-intersection lay at the base. To the right...torches led down a long corridor, and to the left only darkness. The half-elf, with her night-seeing eyes, was able to tell them that the corridor was the same as to the left. The group was strung along the stairs, Peredu and Avyx at the base, Norge, still lagging behind at the top of the stairs, guarding the rear.

There was considerable discussion at this point. A perception check revealed that the kobold who got away had gone down the corridor to the right, leaving behind a faint blood trail. Yeah, it's an old and tired gag following the trail of blood. But on the other hand, a bloodied creature running down a stone corridor will leave evidence of its passing.

The left hand corridor was dusty...ill traveled...and apparently ridiculously enticing. Into the darkness the party plunged, leaving behind the kobold, for the moment. As soon as Norge left the stairway he froze...his body stuck in some sort of stasis. At the same time he began to faintly fade out, becoming gradually more illusory. At the same time a shadow began to grow in the space within him, slowly solidifying. After a few moments only the faintest trace of Norge was visible, a sort of shadow occupying the place he had been standing a moment before. In his place John bon Jonne...the wizard sent to explore reports of piracy down river from Portage. John was not wholly formed, and retained a slight translucency about him, as if the shadow of Norge still present was the part of him missing (i.e. together they added up to 100% of a person, but John only 90% and Norge 10%). Norge, was still frozen in stasis, and John looked very confused, and more than a little frightened. He indicated that he couldn't hear when the party began to interrogate him...Peredu considered chopping John up into pieces since this was a sign of evil...until Ember reminded him that he was one of the people hired back in town. John's avatar, was unable to speak as well as hear, as though being projected from elsewhere.

What? Huh? Okay. Truth time: Norge was still on campus meeting with his advisor, and I needed a way to write him out of the story for a little while. Feeling the need to keep the encounters balanced I decided I could drop John into the story until Norge returned. A little bit of plot, a mystery to be solved, and suddenly the missing dwarf was part of the story. What was going on? This is suddenly more than a raid into a bandit nest (sans bandits, what's up with that?)

Well, the hulabaloo died down, and they set off down the unlit corridor to the left. Peredu took the lead, Avyx close behind, the rest of the party strung along behind. The corridor was only 5 feet wide or so, not enough to go two abreast. A ways down the corridor Peredu felt his foot sink into the ground...a pressure plate trod underfoot. Immediately spears came shooting out of the wall, driving their points into the side of the unsuspecting Tiefling. What followed next can best be described as pandemonium. Fingers were pointed: who had the bright idea to come down the unlit corridor away from the bad guys? What to do next? Shouting. Peredu frozen in place afraid to lift his foot off the pressure plate. More shouting.

Eventually everyone retreated to a safe distance and Peredu lifted his foot. Nothing. They then shoved Mairwen up front to look for more traps. Nothing. Peredu retook the lead, Avyx again right behind, the rest trailing along. *Click* *Thud* *More Shouting* Avyx again started yelling at Peredu for insisting they chose this corridor, all while plucking chainmail from deep in her side where a second set of spears had pierced her flesh, embedding the bits of metal. Oh the joys of failed perception checks.

There were a couple things wrong with this scenario: first- why did Avyx resume her position behind Peredu? How come no one noticed that the trigger caused a trap to spring behind him? Or rather, how come no one thought this fact was significant?

Anyhow, there were no more traps present in the hall, and the group found themselves in a small room. A door was on the opposite side. That was not noteworthy. What was noteworthy was the presence of barrels, boxes, crates, and piles of junk piled against the door. Spears and planks of wood were wedged at 45 degrees against the door holding it in place. Pieces of old armor had been hammered into sheets and nailed to the door, reinforcing it in a crude iron shell. At this point they couldn't miss the importance of the traps springing behind them as they walked. Something (dungeoneering check: kobolds) was trying to keep whatever was behind that door in.

To go in, or not?

The debate, became a side issue relatively quickly. Peredu started flinging boxes out of the way to open the door. Cooler heads prevailed, after heated discussion...halfway through which Peredu got bored with the debate and started moving boxes again...but eventually Mairwen opened a small loophole in the door (apparently where spears had been used in the past to prod whatever was on the other side of the door away) and peered through.

The walking dead shambled aimlessly in the room.

Mairwen immediately slammed the port shut, went to the other side of the room and flatly refused to go in. Peredu on the other hand took this as a sign that he had to go in. John couldn't speak. Avyx reluctantly agreed to the argument "we'll have to do this anyways eventually" despite weakly responding, "No, we don't have to..." I can't remember Ember's position in this debate. I'm sure she wasn't enthusiastic...but she also didn't put her little foot down. Now that I rethink though...with Avyx and Mairwen so opposed, Ember would almost have to have wanted to go in, right?

Anyhow, in they went.

I have to say one word here...they were in fact doing this dungeon in the "wrong order." I figured that they would go to the right, following the kobold and the lights. The darkened pathway was supposed to be ominous, and not terribly appealing (hence the traps). This wasn't a terribly inconvenient problem, and should just have required a little bit of a tweak here and there...but it did sort of unravel some of the story I had cobbled together to force the group onto their first mission. It shouldn't surprise you that there are more kobolds down to the right. After dealing with that portion of the storyline, and still banditless the group would be encouraged to explore the places that they didn't feel like going. Oh well, here they were. Where were they again? Oh yeah...zombies.

Peredu charged in, as paladins are wont to do, fanning to the left. John and Ember following, Avyx reluctantly trailing and heading right, and Mairwen sitting in the doorway, ready to get the heck out of dodge. Things went...actually extremely well for the group. Ember discovered she had a radiant spell in her repertoire, and she began scorching zombies left and right. The rest weren't terribly effective...Peredu ended up at deaths door, hiding in the corner trying to heal while Avyx had her hands full on the other side of the room.

As Avyx began to show signs of the abuse at the hands of the mindless zombies John began to waver, like an image lost in ripples of a pond. Over the course of a turn Norge reappeared. As he entered the table, I handed him a piece of paper, containing information only he would be privy too. As he left the last room of kobolds he felt his vision fade...then he was trapped in a surrealist dream...and then suddenly he was awake in a room that stank of decay with a swarm of zombies attacking his friends.

With the divine might of the (somewhat dazed) cleric, and the well aimed blasts of eldritch power from Ember the remaining zombies were quickly eliminated (except for one that wasn't killed with their radiant power. For fun, I had him keep getting back up and attacking until they put him down with a radiant spell). Peredu emerged from the corner he had hidden in, Mairwen decided the room was safe enough to enter properly, and Avyx growled at the Paladin who got her punched by zombies. Avyx growls a lot.

This room was an ossuary, empty in the middle apart from 4 pits where fires had burned in the ancient past. The walls had deep ledges carved into them, bones stacked and moldering in the recesses. Ember began to climb the bone shelves, because halflings tend to get bored after a while. The rest of the party was concerned by a slight glow emanating from the opposite corridor, a reddish pulsing glow accompanied by an occasional low roaring whoosh. Ah well, it's probably nothing...dark forgotten catacombs do that all the time, right?

For reasons of his own, Norge declined to share what he had experienced while "faded" out, and sadly, no one really wondered what had happened to John. Those jerks...I may be the DM, but I'm also John bon Jonne...and I have feelings too dammit. *sniffle* I'm just too worked up about this...I don't think I can see through the tears to type straight.