Delve 7, and Lencio’s fifth expedition. And one that will leave an indelible mark.

Lencio hired a man-at-arms, Donald, and bought him a spear and armor. Hubbub hired someone too: Gal the Torchbearer. With them were Arche the Magic User and once more Antonius the cleric.

With Lucky dead, they took an NPCed Thief with them, Mandrake.

They came armed with the knowledge that the rival party, the Ratters, had killed a whole group of orcs. With the orcs and their damnable gong gone, the path would be clear to find the way downstairs to level two – or so they hoped.

Grave Robbers

On the way to the Dungeon they checked out the grave of Lucky the Thief, but found it disturbed and the body gone. They followed the tracks and found a cave with a great number of Morlocks, and now they found out why these creatures looked so mutated: They were made of dead!
Apparently they had taken the dead body of Lucky to swell their own numbers.

As they hesitated at the entrance, not daring the sunlight, Antonius whirled his sling an struck one of them down, shattering its ugly head. The rest of them scattered and fled left and right.

Lencio stepped in, set Donald to guard to the east, while Hubbub guarded the west. Then Mandrake checked the door in front and found it unlocked, then retreated. Lencio opened up the door and found no less than five huge uber-Morlocks; Grimlocks. They were watching a number of cocoons, probably one of them housing a ripening Lucky, soon to become a fresh Morlock.

The Grimlocks attacked at once. Lencio tried to smash the door in their faces, but one was too fast. He came through the door and kicked Lencio in the nuts with such a force that he reduced the warrior to 1 single HP.

The party retreated, pulling a staggering Lencio with them, while Hubbub threw a whole bag full of weapon oil at the enemies. It spilled out in the fore of the cave, and they threw a torch into it, lighting it up, which managed to kill one of the Grimlocks. The others retreated and barred their door.

Once Lencio had his senses back half-way, the others in the party asked Antonius to heal the Fighter, and he did, raising Lencio up to 3 hit points. Alas, as it turned out after a Saving Throw, the force of the kick had rendered the Fighter impotent.

Should we stay or should we go now?

The party debated the next step at length: They felt that they were horrible at combat but might have a chance to win against the Grimlocks with more weapon oil. Alas, fetching more would mean travelling all the way back to the city, and that would conclude the mission, with the next foray only possible a week from this day, for meta reasons.

Orc Life

So they decided to stay, leave Lucky and Lencio’s revenge for another day, and check out the Dungeon. Lencio remembered the way well and led the party to the orc area in a roundabout way, where they found no-one in attendance.

Gal stole the gong and shouldered it like a shield on the back.

Then they dared deeper and found the whole orc area abandoned. Lencio was sure there must be some secret area, and egged Mandrake the Thief on to find it.

Alas, the Ratters had been thorough and had taken all sorts of things with them. There only remained a huge cauldron that they had left behind, a monster of a thing that took four people to carry. And it was apparently used by the orcs to create more orcs, and goblins.

Lencio immediately decided that we must take this with us or destroy it. As long as it remained here, more orc would come. So it simply could not remain. He pestered the others about it until we removed it form the room at least and went on.

Magic Touch

Going around various corridors we found a glyph on a wall, which Arche could read: A teleport. But to where? And would there be a way back?
Lencio figured that after that horrible kick he had nothing more to lose, so he just went and teleported. Arche followed on the foot, anxious to miss out.

The two of them discovered a magical lab with a spell book: Fantastic equipment for a magic user, so Lencio simply told Arche to take it. It was a lot, though. So we remembered that the others were waiting outside, unsure of what had become of us. We decided to get them.

But at that point Hubbub stepped a bit closer and accidentally triggered a magical trap that burned her down to 1 Hit Point!

She rejected drinking a healing potion, though, because we were sure to have a pretty short way back out, and it was time to go anyway.

Trying to solve the transport problem AND stick to his desire to take the cauldron out of here, Lencio brought up the idea to transport all we had found IN the cauldron.

The others agreed and we went back to fetch it. Rats showed up, but throwing them two rations calmed them down.

Filling the cauldron with sacks full of magic stuff, we went that short way, through the room where we had met the kobolds working on a statue last time. And we found the stairs down to level 2 there.

The irony. We had been right there, just around the corner. We could have…

Well. Spilt milk and all.

One last Kick

On the way out, Lencio looked at this spinning wheel again. A risk… but once more: What did he have to lose? He gave it a spin.

Boom!

The wheel gave him ANOTHER nasty kick between the legs, again almost killing him, bringing him down to 1 HP again, and destroying what little was left of his manhood.

The plus side is that any more kicks between the legs will only ever do a maximum of 1 hp damage, because there isn’t much left to hurt with blunt trauma.

Enough: Time to go.
We left and returned home to heal up, and prepare for revenge another time.

Arche had all she needed to learn more spells and research more.

The others brought that cauldron to their old friend the Alchemist to check it out.

The good man was overjoyed!
And he paid us a handsome sum: 9000 coins.

If the Ratters would hear about this, they would bite themselves in the ass for leaving the thing behind.

Massive success: A shower of XP rained down on the party and catapulted everyone a level higher, even the hirelings Donald and Gal. And all it cost was Lencio’s manhood.

Stonehell with simpler rules:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5 (this here)
• Lost in the Depth