Play the Game!!

Inside the cairn, as the poison fog cleared, the ogre fled, happy to have got away with his life and Talum, frustrated at losing Donyer, rejoined the group.  Not knowing whether there were still enemies inside the cairn, some of the group kept watch while other members searched the dormitories.  This didn't reveal a great deal of loot and one of the few traps, concealed beneath a false floor in a foot locker, failed to do anything more than scratch Na’zel’s metal arm. 

The room occupied by the ogres, next to the filthy and unhygienic kitchen, held only flea-ridden bedding and a few handfuls of copper coins; the ogres rather pathetic 'treasure'.  The escaped wizards rooms though proved more difficult to navigate.  Na’zel managed to dispel the alarm spells protecting the doorways and the prize of Donyer’s spell-books, in the form of scrolls were bundled on the shelves of his study.  The rather  more prosaic treasure of the bandits was held in four chests in Donyer’s bedroom.

Opening the bandits treasure chests proved to be more difficult than the team anticipated and they failed to detect the traps on two of the chests.  The acid clouds released by traps ate severely into Moreta’s armour and singed her hair so severely that it will take a good stylist to restore her good looks.  Amongst the quite significant treasure that they are able to loot are a large number of Westcarlham gold trade bars, a fine Elven flute and a strange gold whistle.

Following the map provided to them by their earlier captive bandit, the gang proceeded to investigate the rest of the cairn, finding an alchemists lab and a forge and, at the bottom of the stairs, a second floating rune pair, marked with an L and a pair of wavy lines.  The forge has some kind of red jewel set in its roof that Na’zel thinks has  a connection to the Elemental Plane of Fire, but Tay Vorn persuades him to wait until the cairn is fully investigated.  The doors on this level respond to the whistle, opening and closing with each single note.

Across from the forge, the group stumble on a sitting room and then a dark room with three different sets of disguises and a magical circle, that the group suspects is for teleporting but the arcanists in the party can't be completely sure of its capabilities and again, the party decide to leave it alone.  It looks like Raxen both has multiple identities and methods of traveling long distances by magic.  One of the disguises, and the presence of so many trade bars amongst the loot, causes the team to suspect that the merchant Selra in Westcarlham, that sent the party to the Miyori family initially, would look similar to Raxen in disguise.

The party then rescue the two missing Miyori scions from their prison, originally some kind of animal pens, and warn the young men not to touch any swords that they see lying around.  This leaves only remaining two routes to check, the stairs down and a corridor to the north-west.  This corridor is protected by a spell similar to the alarm spell upstairs but both much more powerful and combined with the permanency spell.  The spellcasters are unable to dispel the barrier, which does not react to a rock thrown through it and so they decide to investigate the stairs down first.

The stairs come out in a small room antechamber which leads into a room with a checkerboard drawn on the floor and, concealed behind two weapon-racks, many small nozzles.  Suspecting a trap, the party are about to leave when Na’zel puts his foot onto the checkerboard and four ghostly, shapeless figures appear on the far side of the board.  Tay Vorn recognises the board and pieces from a Taldorian game, one used to teach strategy to children as luck plays no part in the game; Na’zel now has to solve the challenge or risk triggering some kind of trap.  Though before stepping on the board it was possible to move around the room, now the entire room has become sensitive to the trap.  With Tay Vorn’s help, Na’zel is able to navigate successfully across the board almost to the end, but making a wrong choice leaves him with the only option of a last mad dash across the rest of the board.  Though this triggers the necro-corrosive gas, Na’zel is close enough to the end of the task that he survives, having activated the sprays only once rather than the four times that it could possibly have gone off, had he just run across. Marks on the floor had already revealed that one of Raxen’s bandits must have already tried this tactic once.  Unsuccessfully. Having passed over the entire the board, this action reveals and unlocks the hidden vaults at the far end of the room but leaves the chessboard room trap still primed until Na’zel crosses back across the board. Na'zel must choose to proceed on alone or return back to the group, re-locking the vaults and resetting the magical trap.