Following that excitement, the next couple of days are pretty lame as we put as much stuff on the raft as possible until it starts sinking, and then take some off and start poling up river. They pretty soon realise that with me poling, they aren’t going anywhere, so I’m on lookout duty most of the time. Faustus does the heavy lifting on this obvs. Or rather the high flying.
After this the days all seem to merge into one, and it feels like weeks until something happens. When it does though, it’s a bloody great hydra coming stomping out of the river straight for us. The two muscle-men show how heroic they are by jumping off the raft and onto the darn thing, cutting off heads left and right. Obviously that means that it pretty soon has twice as many heads as it started with. Saner minds prevail, and flame-girl and me pound it with some spells, including some tasty fire based damage. Turns out that barbecued hydra doesn’t taste so nice though.
Our next stop after that is the swamp. It starts getting pretty fetid and soon we find a small hut on stilts in a pond in the middle of the swamp. The water is foul and all the fish look diseased. We try to pole off but we are stuck – every time we pole out of the pond, we find ourselves poling back in again. We try everything we can think of – burning the hut, all the spells we have in my grimoire, but nothing can get us out of here. Finally, when we are almost on the verge of losing our minds completely (and I think the hippie-chick does go a bit nuts – she’s certainly pretty catatonic), we see a mysterious figure in the reeds at the edge of the pond. By the time we pole over, she has vanished, but we find a scroll tube with a powerful dispel magic spell in it. We cast it, and the curse vanishes; the water is clear and the fish are healthy. We scarper pronto at that point.
After a while we reach our destination – just in time I think because the raft is starting to look a bit ropey. We proceed into the desert proper, and pretty rapidly make contact with a caravan that is going in the right direction, and it seems could use a few more hired hands to protect itself. We spend a couple of days getting used to how they do things – travelling twice a day at dawn and dusk to avoid the worst of the heat. After a couple of days, we get put on point duty, so we are the first people to see the horde of bandits that suddenly appear from behind a dune and start charging towards the caravan. We send the bargeman back to warn the caravan at top speed, and by the time we get back, they are laagered up and pretty much surrounded. We join the north rampart and prepare to do battle. Their initial charge is pretty devastating, and several of them break right through our line of guards and into the merchants and camels beyond before we have a chance to use the heavy artillery spells (and we had some real dozies lined up, flame-girl and me). The barbarian goes rampaging off, and the dwarf sticks to just defending the hippie chick, who summons a bunch of wolves again, so I decide to mess things up a bit. I have a wand I boosted from a place a little while ago that can change people, and decide to use it on the nob guy, just to give him a bit of a shock. I’m nice though, I turn him into a silver dragon rather than a worm or a beetle or something gross. He seems happy as larry though, tromping on bandits, freezing them with his cold breath and when they turn and run to takes to the sky to chase them down as well. I don’t think any of them got away. Unfortunately he’s back before his hour is up, otherwise he would have turned back into a non-flying person at five hundred feet altitude. Uncontrolled flight into terrain 🙂
We may have knocked out all the bandits, but they have ripped a second one in the caravan as well – quite a few dead and wounded. We do what we can for the wounded, and bury the dead, which takes a day. Then onwards through the endless desert. In a couple of days we find the hidden oasis though, which I guess just makes it the oasis. We replenish our water, and the hippie chick starts on some spell to make it produce more food. We are woken up in the night by a foul stench, which apparently often preceeds attacks from the evil ones, but nothing happens.
The next day we are sent out, minus hippie chick, on a deep desert patrol. We are right at the end of our patrol range, when we discover a strange half buried temple in the sand. Normal people would ignore it or run screaming, but we ain’t normal we ain’t. We proceed down the avenue of half-buried columns, ignoring the two human skeletons chained to the last pair. Beyond is a courtyard with a sand-filled pool, and a dark doorway beyond.