Coldeven 4: Many Obstacles (Day 2)

This place is huge. Exploring it is proving to be logistically difficult. Aside from the constant need to keep our voices low, lest some hostile person hear us, there's the problem with the doors.

Clearly, there's no one here (at least that we've found yet) who wants to be here, and so nobody is treating it like home. As near as I can tell, whenever someone exits a room, they're leaving the door open behind them. As a result, most of the doors are open. On the one hand, this is good, because it means that B.B. has to worry about traps less. In fact, today, she found only one, and luckily she disarmed it before any of us could fall victim. It looked nasty though, a scything blade that she said could easily have killed one of us. I have a hunch that she may be playing up her accomplishment there, but still, what little I could see of it looked bad.

But the bad part is that this means that we're A) getting lost, and B) constantly having to watch our backs against open doors we haven't been able to check yet. Everything down here seems scared to death, and is quietly keeping an ear to the floor. Food is also scarce, and I have no doubt that if we show any weakness, the scavengers will be on us quickly. For instance, today we had to kill some Stirges. Not much of a threat to us when we're all at our best, but likely to be very dangerous if we're already weakened.

As we were travelling, we actually found a simple pit latrine. It makes sense I guess (because no one likes do their business in a corner of a room that they may have to pass through again) but a lot of us were really happy to find it. Which just goes to show that little things like that matter more than most people think. Anyway, we're walking down a corridor and we start to hear the sound of running water, and Asilky says "Good thing I already went." Which I thought was pretty funny.

More importantly, we've actually learned a little bit about what we're facing today, albiet not nearly as much as I'd like. We found a mysterious room with columns in the corners which had channels down which water was flowing. After about half of us had moved into the room, an Ogre leapt from behind one of the columns and smashed Eaora to the ground leaving her senseless. Before we could really react, it delivered a huge blow with its club to Lo-Kag as he was trying to close with it, sending him flying back limply, which is quite a feat, considering. But K went into one of those fearsome rages of his, and delivered a crushing blow in return, and when I smashed its forearm with my chain, it apparently had had enough, because it dropped its club and surrendered. Since it was speaking undercommon, I immediately put Spike's Rule of Questioning into effect.

Spike's Rule of Questioning: The merciful man gets better answers.

When you've got someone at your mercy, and you want information from them, you've got to play it straight. Some people like to say they'll let their captive go if they talk, but really plan to kill them anyway. In my experience, this doesn't work so well. I think most captives pick up on this, and give bad answers. If a foe is so powerful that you simply can't afford to let him go, don't even bother questioning him, just kill him and have done.

We learned a few interesting things. Firstly, this ogre, Bragdor by name, came in with a bunch of orcs and a wizard dressed in red (their employer). This was apparently the same clan that the three pitiful orcs in the entry room were from. Anyway, like them, this guy had been told to guard the room, and he was genuinely terrified of the orc clan leader, an orc named Orghar. We also learned that the Ogre was living off of stray kobolds, which served to remind me that we have a limited supply of food. We left him there, I don't think he's going to want to tangle with us again. B.B. was in favor of killing him, of course, but the general consensus was that he'd given us some useful information, and that he wasn't that big a threat to us.

Now we're camped. Lo-Kag and Eaora needed the time to recover. We actually found a bit of treasure today, a golden ring with opal inlay. B.B. thinks it's probably worth about 300gp, which is a pretty decent days work, so my mood is slightly improved. Near it, we found a deck of playing cards. The suits are odd (Sword, Fireball, Whip and Spider), but it's a complete deck, and since we didn't do a full day's exploring, it's proved really useful in passing the time. I'm up two silver on Lo-Kag.