Another month, another game of D&D 4th edition — in a fairly loose (but now gelling up) campaign set in the world of Titan, the setting of the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks. I used to read these books all the time in the late ’80s when I was in junior high, and Kazushi Hagiwara liked them too. Hagiwara has never admitted to actually playing tabletop RPGs, despite all the D&D art references in Bastard!!, but in an interview translated in an early issue of the Viz Bastard!! pamphlet comics, he said that he liked playing the Japanese editions of the FF gamebooks. (In fact, a few monsters from the Out of the Pit monster supplement show up in the background around volumes 6-10 of the manga.) Anyway, Titan is kind of a standard mishmash European fantasy world, with a lot of questionable Warhammer influence that’s probably just caused by everyone in Britain reading Michael Moorcock. But it has a grimy, rough, low-fantasy, anything-goes feel, and I like it for that.

When last we left our heroes, they were facing a horrible fate — Turjan, the evil necromancer imprisoned in Bone Hill for the past two hundred years, had created himself a new body by assembling pieces from several dead wizards into a nine-foot-tall, three-headed monstrosity. As the vaguely Egyptian-looking crowned colossus advanced, the party –

* Sklragagul the Dragonborn Cleric of Kilanirax, the Dragon God
* Grimlock the Dragonborn Warlock
* Shantak the Dragonborn Warlord
* Rima the Halfling Rogue
* Sariel the Eladrin Rogue
* and Klondor the Human Fighter (really more of a barbarian)

– prepared to fight their last stand. However, their fiercest blows merely bounced off Turjan’s layers of magical protective shields and iron-hard mummified flesh. Turjan’s presence started to awaken the dead bodies stuffed like bee larvae in the walls of the underground chamber, and the entire room began to come to life, one corpse at a time. Too late, the party started to flee, following strange visions from the silver chalice of holy water which Rima had earlier looted from a nearby shrine. Sklragagul and Klondor stayed behind to allow the rest of the party to escape, and in the end Sklragagul was cut down, mauled by living corpses and brained with the iron scepter of the Skull Lord.

Retreating upstairs to the ground level of the ruined castle, minus their companion, the party found themselves still trapped by the poison “death rain” which killed and reanimated whatever it touches. But Shantak had an idea: return the chalice to the shrine and perhaps the god of the shrine would give them a way out of their predicament. To reach the underground shrine, they had to sprint across several yards of deadly rain to the trapdoor entrance, but they made it. Unfortunately, as they were climbing down the trapdoor the rotten ladder broke, sending half of the group in a sprained, splintered heap on the floor 40 feet below. Bandaging their wounds, they made their way to the underground shrine, which (once assessed by non-thief eyes) turned out to be a shrine of Erathis-Hamaskis, the composite god of learning and civilization. Clearly, the shrine had once belonged to Mazirian, the wizard scholar who built Bone Hill.

The party prayed to the shrine of Erathis-Hamaskis, and the idol answered, being imbued with a fraction of the god’s divine presence. The idol forgave them for taking the chalice, and told them that its chief worshipper, Mazirian, still “lived” — or rather, dwelt in a state of unholy half-life — somewhere in the underground chambers of the castle. Mazirian had been betrayed and killed by his evil brother Turjan, his living corpse locked away — but in death they shared the same heart, and whatever killed Mazirian would kill Turjan as well. The party vowed to free Mazirian from his suffering and, in the process, kill the giant evil three-headed wizard who was rapidly reassembling his undead army.

The heroes descended deeper into the dungeons which only Rima and Klondor had glimpsed before. Entering an abandoned wine cellar full of barrels of vinegar and sediment, they were attacked by a seething blob of brownish-orange ooze, an ochre jelly which fed on flesh. After killing it, they proceeded to the next room, a finely decorated wizard’s workshop guarded by five mechanical soldiers. The party managed to convince the soldiers that they came in Mazirian’s name, and passed unopposed. Within the chamber was another shrine — a statue to Ioun-Sindhla, the goddess of magic, luck and fate. Like Erathis-Hamaskis, Ioun-Sindhla was a syncretic fusion of gods from the two chief continents, the Old World and Allansia. The idol of Ioun-Sindhla accepted the characters’ incense and sacrificial offerings and came to life. It explained that both Turjan and Mazirian had been its faithful worshippers. However, it agreed to help hide them from the wizard, who was even now approaching the chamber. The heroes ducked behind the shadow of the again-immobile statue, and hid there while Turjan, and his court of zombie followers, asked the goddess where the intruders had gone. The idol weaseled out of the question with technicalities (”They are somewhere that even my eyes cannot reach”) and protected the characters. Turjan left, saying that he was about to imprison his brother Mazirian in a more permanent fashion, and that (now that he had his new body) he would gather his army and leave Bone Hill, to pursue his evil plans in the world outside.

Although the characters knew they had little time to act, they also knew they were bloody and beaten to within an inch of their lives. They slept a few hours in the alcove behind the statue, resting and regenerating their magical powers. They were awaken by the sound of tremendous explosions somewhere nearby, explosions that shook the walls of the cave. They hurriedly headed down an unexplored passage which they believed might lead in the direction of Mazirian. They survived a trapped gateway which slammed them into a wall covered with spikes; barely escaped a giant gelatinous cube that guarded the next chamber; and found Mazirian’s old workshop where his familiars, the Eyes of Ioun, still guarded Mazirian’s spellbook and his dried-up, severed tongue. The Eyes of Ioun had been tricked into serving Turjan, and were distraught to find that their master Mazirian was really dead, and not merely out of the office for a few centuries.

After another close call with the gelatinous cube, the heroes’ path took them through a long and low-ceilinged passage barely supported by crumbling rafters. They emerged near Turjan’s chambers, having gone full circle through the dungeon and emerged from the other end. But as they approached the room where Mazirian was imprisoned, they saw to their horror that the door to Mazirian’s room had been intentionally blocked off by a 20-foot-thick cave-in. As they surveyed the damage, skeletons and zombies started to gather from all parts of the underground complex, shuffling towards them, clacking their dry hungry jaws.

The characters had one hope: Sariel’s eladrin power to teleport through solid objects. But first she had to find an opening, even a crack, through which she could see her destination. Shantak cleared rocks with his massive strength while the others fought off the undead. But soon the thunder of the Skull Lord’s steel boots announced its arrival. Wights and zombies rushed in from the seemingly infinite chambers full of the undead. Just in time, Sariel cleared away a tiny crawlspace in the rocks, and teleported through to the next room, carrying Rima. The others were left behind in the cave as the Skull Lord arrived, blasting Grimlock and Klondor with its horned skull of fire and its howling skull of fear.

Sariel and Rima rushed into the secret chamber, which turned out to be a well-appointed old-fashioned bedroom, flush with an aura of warmth, and a fresh breeze, totally different from the death-reeking rooms outside. Shackled to the wall was a crumbling skeleton with living human eyes sunken in its skull. The skeleton turned to Sariel and Rima with a pleading look, and when they returned its tongue to its mouth, it begged to be released from its undeath. “All that I have is yours, even the Jewel of Wind” it said. “Just let me drink from the Chalice of Erathis-Hamaskis.” The two rogues rushed to find some water, finally producing some with the magic pitcher in Mazirian’s desk.

Meanwhile, outside, everyone but Shantak had been taken down by the undead mob. Charred by the Skull Lord’s flames, Grimlock fell to the ground and his life ended. Klondor lay bleeding out on the ground. Just when everything looked hopeless, Rima and Sariel gave the holy chalice to the undead wizard Mazirian. As the holy water poured into his throat, his eyes rolled back and the life went out of him. A second later, the wizard Turjan screamed, and the three heads of the skull lord split apart as the massive body toppled to the floor. The other undead, without the evil force that sustained them, staggered and collapsed, dead as well.

The evil of Bone Hill had been exorcised, but several adventurers had died in the process. Emerging into the dawn, the heroes found that the skies were clear, the puddles were simply water puddles, and the “death rain” had fallen for the last time. The sun rose over the green hills of the Isle of Lendore to the east while the survivors settled down to count the vast wealth they had found within the castle.

(To be continued sometime after the script for King of RPGs volume 2 is finally finished… in the meantime, Stephen Douglas (aka Sklragagul) took a bunch of awesome photos.)