Icons
The Tomb of Icons (Icons solo)
Contents
- Commentary
- Overture
- Outside the Tomb
- Entrance to the Dungeon
- Characters
- Icons Conversions
- Character Conversions
- Traps
Commentary
I originally started writing this as a kind of “up yours” to the idea of the killer dungeon. That’s not my play style and it’s not what I like, so I figured that, kinda like dropping Superman into Hamlet, I’d mix it up. It was pointed out to me, quite correctly, that this doesn’t actually prove anything: the setting is based on such different assumptions for the player characters that there’s really no congruence.
On the other hand, I had already started, and maybe some of the conversions are useful.
This is an actual play, not a story. It has no point; one of the characters changes dramatically because dice rolls and I didn’t go back and fix it to make sure there weren’t contradictions and were clues and foreshadowing. It just is.
A couple of changes happened as I was doing it. First, I got a lot more comfortable with Icons’ maneuver-advantage-stunt system, so the descriptions of that get shorter. Second, I adopted a house rule that characters with Super-Speed are allowed to use it instead of Coordination while determining Initiative. This means that in any combat, Quickstep often goes first. That seemed comic accurate to me, so I went with it, but if your Coordination is higher than or equal to your Super-Speed, I’d do the standard Icons thing and say, hey, treat your Coordination as 1 higher (Coordination 3, Super-Speed 2 gets treated as Coordination 4 for the purposes of Initiative).
How I converted D&D characters also changed; there are more details in Icons Conversions.
Overture
“You are the guardian for this area?” It was a tall, powerfully-built man, but an odd-looking one, with a mix of glossy black and creamy white, more pronounced than vitiligo, like a killer whale. He wore Capri pants, low flat shoes, a vest and a messenger bag, and held a...trident? No, seven tines. Septdent?
“I guess,” said Quickstep.
Fork. She’d call it a fork.
The man knelt and then stood again. “I require your aid.”
Do tell, she thought. “Not here. Let’s get the children out of the way.” She zipped to Pfc. Belinda Carrefax and said, “Can you take the kids? I have to do this.”
“They’ll be disappointed that you had to go.”
“If you want to be guardian of the area...”
“I’ll take care of the children,” she said. “You can take care of hero stuff.”
“I presume. It could be co-signing a loan.”
Carrefax laughed and said, “As if.”
In a moment she was beside the black-and--white man. “Call me Quickstep.”
“Above water, I am called Orcan.”
This close, she could see gill slits in his neck. She looked out at the desert. “You are far from your home.”
“Once, this land was a marshland beside a sea.”
“Not in living memory.”
“Not in the memory of humans, no. But my people, before they moved to the sea, lived nearby. Someone who sought solitude—the...witch? Wizard, I think—called Acererak stayed here.”
“Lived there.”
“Not really,” he said. “He was an undead thing, kept moving through magics foul and dark.”
“And he’s back?”
“No, but his cultists are planning to call him back.”
“So we should stop that.”
“Yes, and we need something from his tomb.”
“Which is where the cultists are?”
“Not yet.”
“So give me their names and I’ll round them up.”
“No; there will always be cultists. Some people find his kind of power attractive. Instead we need to disable the mechanism by which he is brought back.”
“Long term. Excellent.”
“Time is short, but if you need to say good-bye to the children—“
“I hugged each child and left a note and a piece of fruit. It’s okay.”
“Over the millennia, our sages have pieced together the location of the tomb. I had them transpose the position onto one of your maps.”
She looked at the map, then took out her smartphone and photographed it. “Excellent. Can you get there or do you need me to carry you?”
“That seems...undignified. I can get there. I was given a flier to use.”
“Nice. How fast is the flier?” He said a number. She said, “I’ll ride with you, then.”
“There is no room.”
“Fine, I’ll meet you there.”
Outside the Tomb
He got out of the flier and carefully lifted out the messenger bag, then took his septdent. She was on the ridge of the hill.
“There are three entrances,” she said.
“Yes. Two are false. Acererak was known for traps and puzzles.”
“We want the middle entrance.” She held up a hand. “Wait for it.” There was a rumbling scraping sound audible across the valley. “I may have set off a trap,” she added.
“But you are unharmed?”
“Sure. Just have a new appreciation for this Acererak guy. Or his very clever contractor.”
“Or she, actually. No one knows what gender Acererak was. We assume because of the attitudes of the time Acererak was male.”
“Hmm. One looks promising but there are no doors and the ceiling is loose, so it’s clearly meant to come down. Another has two doorways at the end. Open either one and it triggers a sliding stone door that traps you inside. A very slow sliding stone door.”
“Is there anything else you need to tell me?”
“I haven’t gone into the third one yet because after I set off the traps I figured I should come back for you.”
“Thank you. This means that the members of the Cult know which entrance to use.”
“Sorry.”
“I am glad you were not hurt. Now, to figure out how to resurrect him and stop it.”
She looked at him and adjusted her goggles. “We have to figure out how to resurrect him so that we can stop it?”
“Yes.” He regarded her. “Is that a problem?”
“Nah. Day in the life.”
Entrance to the Dungeon[1]
“Wow,” said Quickstep. They both looked around. The corridor was brightly coloured and lit with the plates of lights. She reached up for one—
“Don’t touch it. Please. Acererak was known for booby-trapping everything.”
“I have to move at your pace? Oh, this is going to be hell.”
“It will be hell,” he said without irony. “There’s something odd about the floor.”
“There’s lots odd about the floor. Like, how is it so clean after thousands of years?”
“Magic,” he said absently.
“I would like that magic to come to my apartment. Should we be looking for snares? Arrow-firing holes in the walls? Pit traps with pongee sticks? Sliding spiked grates? Boulders? I’ve seen all of the Indiana Jones movies.”
He held up a finger. “I’m reading. The darker red tiles in the path form runes. Acererak congratulates you on... ”
“You may have just won...” she muttered.
“These are old-style runes. I am not the best at reading them.”
“But you know them?”
“All who might have come here had to learn them.”
“Yay,” she whispered. Standing still for this long made her nervous. The walls of the corridor were decorated with frescoes, and up ahead there was a box sticking out of a wall, as if the painted figures were holding it up. Beyond that...
Orcan got on one knee and peered at the floor. “The mosaic stones are laid out in symmetrical patterns, so you get giant tiles.”
“Is that significant?”
“I don’t know. He loved his traps.”
“Did he re-use any?”
“Yes. He meant to kill intruders.”
“Even his cultists?”
“He didn’t have cultists at the time. They came later. Someone who got in could get the Key or could destroy his body.”
“His body?”
“It is a tomb. His body is still here.”
“After millennia?”
“Magic. If we do the wrong thing, his spirit returns to his body.”
She looked at him.
“He’s not dead...well, finished. He’s...off learning.”
“Shouldn’t we destroy his body?”
“If we can. No one knows how, though. Finding an important part and taking it back to be destroyed should be sufficient.”
“The assumption is that people will be walking through this?” Orcan nodded. She moved to one wall, took out her Swiss Army knife and checked the wall. “Plaster of some kind. Okay. Let me try this.” [2]
“Okay. Ran along the walls and back. Longish corridor with a Y-junction at the end. I didn’t try to go into either of the rooms. The red path runs the length of the room. Frescoes include fields with animals, a copse with wolves, a torture chamber, a wizard’s workshop, a library, a pig-man working as a slave, I think—slaves and torture are a theme. Some animals, like spiders. If it’s creepy and lethal, he liked it.”
“I am inclined to dismiss the two possible exits and look for a hidden door.”
“Maybe that’s just what he wants you to think.”
She meant it as a joke, but he considered it seriously.
As he went he prodded the floor ahead of him with the haft of the trident. Every step was accompanied by a small grunt of effort. Just before the image of the barred door of the torture chamber, the floor tilted and fell to expose a pit. Quickstep grabbed him by the waistband and hauled him back.
The floor fell back in place and rocked there. Whatever they were using for grease millennia ago, it held up.
“Thank you,” said Orcan.
“De nada.” A thought occurred to her. “If this Acererak was the kind of dork you paint, then if there is a secret door, it’s guarded by a pit or something like it.”
“Perhaps. Or it’s in a pit. If I hold the pit cover up, can you check inside it?”
“Can you lift it?”
In answer he stomped on one end of the cover so it rocked, then grabbed it and heaved up.
“Not very heavy,” he said.
She took her flashlight and checked the pit. “Spikes and a skeleton.”
“Do not approach it.”
“Not on my to-do list.”
The path avoided the next two disguised pits but trod the next two, and then curved to the arch whose doorway was misty, preventing view..
“Let me guess,” she said. “Don’t go in there.”
“Not yet, anyway.”
“I wish we’d brought a drone.” She brightened. “I could go get one.”
“Not yet. I know you are fast, but we have limited time.”
“Sure, deny me my niche.”
The other half of the Y was a huge face of a laughing demon or devil with a mouth wide enough for a fat man to dive into.
She pulled out the knife and pried a bit of plaster out of the wall. “Let’s see what happens when something goes through that.” She tossed it into the doorway and it vanished—
She heard nothing but she couldn’t be sure.
“Maybe I heard something. Maybe not,” she said. She pried two new, bigger pieces off, and did it again. “Nothing. Maybe it disintegrated them, maybe it teleported them.” There was a blur. “Same inconclusive results for the devil’s mouth, and I’m not reaching in.”
Orcan stepped in front of the doorway and some stones lit up. Yellow at the base on the left, orange at the base on the right, and the keystone above glowed blue.
Cool. Simon.
“We should try to clear it to make sure that the runes are complete.”
Orcan stepped away again. They dimmed and lit up again when he stepped away.
“Either Simon or a combination keypad,” said Quickstep. “In the simplest case, one, two, or three in the activation sequence where each is hit once, there are, uh, fifteen possibilities but once you introduce possible duplicates, there are 39, I think, and longer sequences mean more possibilities.”
“Would you like to do it?”
“Under fifty. You can brute force it yourself.”
The first thing he tried — touching them clockwise (yellow, blue, orange) made the mists vanish and they looked into the room.
It looked like...a room. In fact, after the ornate decorations of the hallway it looked bland and empty. There was no obvious door out.
“‘Go back to the tormented or through the arch’ say the runes. Both apparently lead to the same room.”
Quickstep threw another chunk of plaster. “It landed at the mouth of the corridor.”
“You went and checked?”
“Yeah. I went and checked.” She put her hand on Orcan’s shoulder. “I think the arch is a trick. You go through it and it puts you back at the entrance.”
“But the runes—“
“Look, according to the runes, both the arch and the tormentor lead to the same place, right? Near the front of the entranceway. So let’s follow my grandmother’s sage advice, ‘No archways’ and try the tortured image.”
“The tormentor is the torturer?”
“That’s the only one I can find. There’s a pit right in front of it, but the pointy end of your fork should let us poke it from a range.”
“It is the Tritonis Spear.”
“It’s a fork.”
The fork could also shoot...some kind of fire...that wore away the plaster image. Behind that was loth that came apart almost as fast. Behind that was a door. Orcan pushed it open with the fork.
That led to a short hallway and another door.
“Trapped?”
Orcan shrugged and reached into his bag and pulled out an ivory sphere the size of a golf ball. He carefully traced the outline of the door. The ball stayed the same colour. “It is not trapped and has none of Acererak’s magic. It appears to be...a door.”
The Gargoyle’s Lair (8)
“Shall I go first?”
“I could not stop you.”
She opened the door and before her was a four-armed winged...thing of stone. It looked like a gargoyle you’d find on a gothic cathedral. Around its neck was a gem-studded collar. There was an urn in the corner.
The statue slowly started to move, as though it had been frozen, waiting for her.
“Hi,” she said. It probably doesn’t speak English.
The thing, the gargoyle, hissed at her and leapt, wings flapping. She stepped aside easily and hit it. It was rough-skinned and tough; she wasn’t sure if he noticed her at all. [3]
Without closing, Orcan shot a bolt of mystic energy out of the trident at the gargoyle; the energy knocked the gargoyle against the far wall and seemed to make it angrier. [4]
Quickstep managed to hit the gargoyle with three quick jabs where one wing joined the body. Then Orcan stepped forward and delivered a strong uppercut. The gargoyle screeched and raked the claws of one hand across Orcan’s arm, nicking a blood vessel, so a gout of blood painted the wall.
“Ohmygod,” murmured Quickstep, horrified.
She swept a leg under the gargoyle to try and knock it over. It could fly, but this would keep it busy for a moment. [5]
Orcan used the fact that the gargoyle was off balance, and hit it, hard: [6]
The gargoyle smelled the blood and attacked Orcan again but missed, blinded by bloodlust. [7]
Quickstep realized that its eyes weren’t armoured. She jammed her fists into the thing’s eye sockets, felt them squish under her hands and then the gargoyle fell to the ground, its head still stuck on her hands.saw the gargoyle fall to the ground. [8]
“Ewww.” She shook her hands but the slime stayed on them.
“Well done,” said Orcan.
“But you — you have that cut— we need to do something about it.” She reached for him, then realized her hands were covered with gargoyle eyeball goo and pulled back. “I know a little first aid.”
He waved her off. “I will be all right,” he said. “This will heal.”
“I appreciate your stoicism, but that’s an open wound and this is not a sterile—”
The wound closed before her eyes. Orcan tugged at his bandolier. “I was worried that I would lose the bag. The magic items in it have been loaned to me, not given.”
Quickstep said nothing. She said, “Does everything here have a purpose?”
“To keep people out.”
“I mean, is there some kind of fair play at work here? Like this gem-studded collar. Is it just the gargoyle’s decoration, or if we take it off do we free it from servitude, or is it a clue to something somewhere else in the dungeon?”
“This is a tomb.”
“This is a freaking dungeon, and I expect a fighter, wizard, cleric, and rogue to show up.”
“There will be fighters.”
She held her hand up. “You’re not getting the reference and we don’t have time. Answer the question.”
“Some things are important later and some are not. I do not know which.”
“Great.” She bent down and unbuckled the collar, examined it closely. [9]
“The gems are not particularly well-fastened. Oh, what’s this?” She pulled out a slip of paper. “Blank. Secret writing?”
“Parchment, actually. Probably magic.” Orcan reached into his bag. [10]
“Look low and high for gold, to hear a tale untold. The archway at the end, and on your way you’ll wend.”
“Yay,” she said. “I’ve always wondered about the clever clues left by villains. What is the point?”
“They have to tell you the truth sometimes, or you won’t believe the lies.”
“You fill me with such confidence.”
“There are two doors out. Which one do you want to try?”
“Why not both?” Five minutes later, she said, “Okay, here’s how you get out. Watch out for some of the rooms; they shoot out darts from hidden areas.” She rubbed one buttock. “Got me the first time.” [11]
“That was pleasant. It felt like being a king and having doors opened for me.”
“So glad to help.”
The Hall of Spheres (10)
They were in a long corridor decorated with pictures of people — well, humanoids — holding circles. Well, they were probably supposed to be orbs but perspective was not the strong suit of the artists.
“Can I borrow your trident for a moment? I want to check for pits.”
He handed it over.
“No pits, and a misty archway kinda like the last one. But as Grandma said, no archways.”
“We ignore that unless we have no choice.”
“There are two doors.”
“The doors will be trapped.”
“Oh, they are. They shot magic spears at me when I opened them.”
“Are you okay?”
“Oh, sure.” [12]
“Well, we should start looking for secret doors, then, because the archway is the only obvious way out.”
“Now that the spears are loosed—”
“Magic spears. They’re still trapped.” She shook her head. “I checked.”
“All right. High and low for gold.”
“Yeah, but Asshole-ererak also recommends the archway, which sounds hinky to me. But there is a gold sphere.”
“Let’s look at it.”
It was a man-woman-thing with the gold circle above its head. If it had been something besides a plot by an evil dead sorcerer, she would have pegged it as a sun god of some kind. As it was, it was probably supposed make people think of a sun god.
Orcan prodded it all over with his fork. The tines sank into the gold circle as if it wasn’t there.
“Rock-Paper-Scissors to decide who goes up and looks?” she asked hopefully. [13]
Orcan listened. “Do you hear anything?”
Distantly, she heard a scream. “I think somebody found a pit.”
“The cultists have arrived.” [14]
“And we left a huge hole indicating where we were going, and there’s no gargoyle to slow them down. So I guess we need to be fast.” She held up her hand. “Rock.”
“Paper.”
“I knew it.”
The Three-Armed Statue
She wriggled up to the opening and crawled in. I’m a speedster, not a crawl-ster.
The tunnel twisted and angled down, and she came to the opening.
The room was empty except for a gargoyle statue. It looked like the gargoyle they had fought, but it was a statue. She could tell because one arm had broken off and was laying on the floor beside it.
If the thing came to life, what were the odds she could get back in the passage?
Fair, and there was no way it was fitting in the passage.
She popped out and examined the statue closely, including trying to put the arm back.
It wouldn’t stay, but she noticed that the three arms on the statue had grooves in the palms but the one on the ground didn’t.
Like it was meant to be separate.
Hmmm.
She was still carrying the collar (why, she didn’t know) and put it on the statue.
Nothing happened (thank goodness).
She laid the collar on the palm of one hand so the gem fit into it.
Nothing happened.
She tried the same thing with the other two arms in turn.
Nothing.
Well, it’s not my collar.
She plucked off three of the gems and put one in each palm.
The hands slowly closed and crushed the gems to dust, then dumped the dust on the ground, rotated back up, and then the palms opened. [15]
Ten gems: she could do that twice more. It was a video game, essentially. So she did.
Suddenly a sepulchral voice rang through the chamber: “Your sacrifice was not in vain. Look to the fourth to find your gain.”
The fourth? But the fourth hand was empty.
She reluctantly put her hand on the fourth statue, worried that it would be hot or would grab her hand or...something.
The statue’s hand did nothing, but there was something there. Something invisible. She slowly pulled it up. It was smallish, covered in slime or salve or ointment.
She rubbed between her thumb and forefinger. Eventually a gem shaped like an oval monocle appeared.
She resisted the urge to look through it. Orcan knew more about this stuff.
She groped the walls of the room. She found nothing there; there was only the statue, the broken-off arm, the three new piles of dust, and her.
Orcan had made it to the next circle while she was waiting for the hands. She gave him the gem. “Some kind of gem. Might be useful.”
He looked at it, then looked through it, rotating it so the long axis was horizontal, then vertical. “Truth-scrying monocle. Let’s assume that the poem on the floor tells the truth because he wants you to come to trust him. So we’ll skip green.”
“While you’re thinking, may I?”
He handed her the fork. In a moment she was back and said, “The gold, black, and red circles are illusions. The others are real. Both end in blank walls.”
“One must have a secret door.” [16]
The way he looked at her made her feel like a mule. Quickstep said, “Then, you look for the secret door.”
“You could certainly be more exhaustive than I, in the same time.”
“All right, fine.” She disappeared into the wall, then reappeared. “Hand me the truth-scrying gem.”
Orcan crawled after her and handed her the gem. [17]
He heard her voice faintly coming out of the hole. “Got it. Holy crap.”
The door started to move, so Orcan quickly pulled in his fork. With luck, the cultists would spend as much time or more searching.[18]
The Evil Chapel (14)
They were in a chapel. “Evil, I presume.” Frescoes and paintings showed mostly disgusting things. Ahead, past the railing separating the officiant from the audience, was a shimmering blue altar. To the right was an archway with an orange mist; to the right was a rock or something. A skeleton lay before the archway, like an arrow.
“Boy, he really wants us to take an archway sooner or later. I hope I never have to disappoint Grandma.”
“Did your grandmother really warn against archways?”
“In a way. Is there a secret door?”
“Secret door?”
“Probably. Well, this thing showed me the secret door before—“
She held the monocle to her eye and scanned the room. “Well, I presume the dark aura means evil, so that’s most of it. Can’t see through the archway. Altar is hinky.”
“What is ‘Hinky’?”
“Not right.”
He looked around. “The archway is the most obvious, so let’s ignore it for now. There might be something in the seats. You check behind the paintings and that stone, I’ll look at the altar.”
Before he’d gotten to the altar, she said, “Stone might be useful. It has a letter and a slot for something.”
“Excellent. The altar doesn’t look impressive but it might hide something; help me move it.”
She touched it first, and a bolt of lightning shot up the center aisle. The altar changed colour to a fiery blue-red. She stepped back. [19]
“Do we touch it again or not?”
Orcan sounded frustrated. “It might be what he wants, or it could get red hot and burn us.”
“Let’s look at the stone.”
There was a small slot there under a rune. “A coin?” asked Quickstep. “If we had any millennia-old coins…”
“I have one, but I am loathe to use it. We don’t even know if it’s a gate. Can you go through it and see if there’s something on the other side?”
“Mayyybe.” She started to think deeply about it, her hand on the stone. A little faster...vibrate in a slightly different way. [20]
Her hand sank in and she walked through it. There was a corridor on the other side, and a latch on the door. She pushed it open and he hustled inside.
She shut the door. “That should buy us some time.”
“Stairs.”
They headed down the stairs, around the bend. [21]
Every few feet, Orcan prodded for pits. He found none before the first door. He threw it open and poked. [22]
And Quickstep moved through. [23]
The floor slipped under her feet and she tried to back up; she might have fallen in except that Orcan grabbed her and pulled her back.
“Thanks. I guess we’re not done with the pits, huh?”
The corridor was so narrow that they had to leap over the pit; Quickstep was a little concerned that she didn’t know how far it was, so instead she ran along the wall and slowed down.
“From now on, you go first,” she said across the pit.
Orcan jumped easily. [24]
They found the next pit easily enough and the third one moved so easily he tumbled right in the pit. [25] [26] [27]
She had already moved ahead, running on the wall, when he fell in. She reversed course (cursing herself internally) and headed for him. She couldn’t catch him — she wasn’t moving fast enough to keep them both from hitting spikes — but she could push him out of the way and avoid the spikes. He’d still get a bruise from the fall (and the push) but he wouldn’t have to heal from the spikes.
Hell, they were probably poisoned. At least dusty.
She stood at the bottom of the pit and offered him a hand to stand up.
“I guess this one’s trapped.”
“I guess so,” he said, imitating her dry tone.
She looked at the pit wall behind him. “Is that a door?”
“What?”He looked and examined it. [28]
“Yes. It’s a secret door,” he said as he moved past her.
“Not that secret.” She flicked on her flashlight for him.
“I can see in the dark,” he said. “Ocean depths.”
“Well, I can’t.”
“Then it’s good you have it, because you should check this out. Then we’ll see where the rest of the corridor goes.”
“Give me a sec.” She mentally flipped a coin. [29]
Locked Oaken Door (16)
She followed the corridor to the end and found a wooden door, with sounds of a happy life behind it. Probably a trap; I can’t imagine happiness in here. She tried to replicate what she had learned in the chapel and went through the door. [30]
Mindful of pits, she raced along the walls. Here the walls were different: polished white stone, not marble. Clue? Maybe.
There was nothing at the end. She went down to the floor to check— [31]
—-and as soon as she put her foot on the floor, it moved and started to sink. She saw the flames beneath and began to run again, up and up. She didn’t even pause when she got to the wooden door, just ran through it.
False Crypt (18)
Orcan was holding up the lid of his pit with his fork, so she zipped in.
“You can let go now.”
“I just got it up. What’s up there?”
“Big pit, with an ever-burning fire at the bottom.”
“Then either this is the way or there’s another secret door somewhere that we haven’t found.”
“The way this is going? The latter.”
He popped the latch on the secret door. It was weight activated, and opened easily.
“I should ask them what grease they use,” she said.
“Magic.”
“You keep saying that.”
“It keeps being true.”
There was a small passageway that opened out at the head of a stairwell. They descended the stairs.
“This cult...what do they want?”
He paused. “The oceans are in a terrible state.”
“Yes.”
“They think… Instead of thinking Acererak was a bad guy, the theory is that he wasn’t so bad for his times.”
“People still talk kindly of Vlad Tepes,” she said.
“I presume that was a bad person? The cult, they think that Acererak can be summoned back in times of great distress, and he will lay waste to the surface world and end their damage.”
“But the official line on Acererak is that he was a bad guy?”
“Yes, that is the official stance.” [32]
Orcan said, “This is more frightening than it should be,” but Quickstep was gone. [33]
“Quickstep?”
There were long moments of silence and then a rush of air. A door at the far end of the corridor must have opened, beyond the webs, and suddenly there was a breeze that carried away the bad air.
“Sorry,” said Quickstep. “So sorry.”
“For what?”
“Some kind of gas. Next thing I knew I was outside and terrified . I got control of myself and rushed back in, figured opening the door at the end of the tunnel would help: there must have been stairs here to keep the gas in, if it was heavier than air.”
“Your apology is accepted. We do not know what kind of traps we might meet.”
She nodded. “There are seven cultists now and they made the altar explode, which killed one of them. Now they know that the stone is a door because, uh, I left it open on my rush to get outside. I mean, I closed it when I came back, and none of them had gotten in.”
“Time is of the essence, then.”
“I’m pleased to see you have gender parity among your cultists.” He looked at her. “There were two women.”
“The group I was told about had no women.”
“It changed.”
“Or some trap we avoided.”
She shrugged. “Then we have to hurry. Into the next room?”
“I presume you went through the webs?”
“Oh. Yeah.” She reached out and touched one. It stuck to her hand. “Hmmm.” She started vibrating and got her hand free, but the web was not harmed.
She said thoughtfully, “I don’t know if I have enough control to take someone through things with me.”
“Here, let me try something. The blast of the Tritonis Spear is magical and burns underwater. Perhaps we can burn away the webs. That will make it easier for our opponents, but with luck we will be gone by then.”
Quickstep got behind him and he loosed a gout of flame. The webs crackled and smoked as they disintegrated. [34]
“What’s this?” Orcan picked up a mace from the floor. The mace was inlaid with silver and began to glow when Orcan picked it up.
“Um,” said Quickstep. “You figure this place is untouched since it was created?”
“I don’t know,” said Orcan. He swung the mace experimentally.
“Assume that others got in here. Where did it come from?”
“I don’t--someone might have brought it?”
“Maybe. But there’s no dust on it. Stuff is out only if Acererak wants it out.”
“It’s a trap?”
“I was scared by the fear gas, but now I’m mad. That thing is isn’t a useful relic that just happened to be left by the slaves. Why would someone clean up the corpse but not put that away?”
He nodded. “I’m still taking it.”
“Sure. It could be useful. But it’s too convenient that it’s waiting for us.”
The room beyond was a once-opulent chamber decayed by incredible age. Everything wooden or leather was rotting. Only the gold burial couch was intact. On it lay a mummified person, a crown on its head, slowly rising.
“Who dares to disturb the rest of Acererak? It is your death which you have found!”
The two heroes spread apart, even as the mummified corpse gestured as though it were going to cast spells.
Quickstep reached in and touched its nose.”Boop! Hi, bunkie.” [34]
It swung at her and missed. Orcan levelled the Tritonis whatever and loosed flames. They hit solidly and did nothing.
“Don’t use the mace,” Quickstep called and she punched the mummy in the gut as it was trying to stand up. [36]
By now, Orcan had run up and he stabbed it, trying to pin one arm against its body. Couldn’t do magic if it only had one arm. It swung again at Quickstep but hampered by the fork it couldn’t connect.
“Really? A blast of mystical flame, a stabbing and a punch? Man, you ate your prehistoric Wheaties.” [37]
She missed, but Orcan’s second thrust tore it in two and left it lying, re-dead, on the couch.
“That was exciting.”
Orcan frowned. “It was too easy.”
“I agree.” She disappeared, searching. “There’s nothing here. I mean, yes, some money, some scrolls, but nothing useful.”
Orcan rummaged in his bag and pulled out a lens of seeing like hers but mounted in a ring of chased silver. He paced the room, looking at the walls and the couch. Finally, he said, “No secret doors.”
“None?” She made a disgusted sound. “Then this whole room is meant as a distraction. How far back was the right turn?”
“I don’t know. Let’s go back to the passage in the pit, and on the way I’ll look for secret doors.”
“Those are handy.”
“They last only 24 hours after first use. Then they shatter.”
“This one too?”
He shrugged. “Acererak had his own spells. Maybe it shows truth for six hours and lies for eighteen.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before I used this one?”
“If we’re not out of here in 24 hours we have worse problems.”
Secret Door By Steps (17)
There was a secret door beside the steps. “Well, that’s progress,” said Quickstep. “If that thing’s good for 24 hours, why don’t you have it screwed into your eye all the time?”
“I have enough trouble seeing in air as it is.” He thrust the trident into the floor hard enough to make a chip of rock fly.
“Let’s hope there’s something good behind this— Oh, crap.”
“I was going to use an obscenity.”
Laboratory And Mummy Preparation Room (19)
The room was maybe a laboratory: it was cluttered with a desk, tables, jars, tools, bottles, tongs, equipment, dried herbs, and more. Over it all was a thick layer of dust. “Probably something good here,” said Quickstep.
Orcan looked at her.
“Magic or not, this place has some way of controlling how old or dusty things are. If it’s not dusty, it’s probably trapped. One bag in that burial chamber was not rotted but the rest were. I wouldn’t look in that good one. If it’s dusty, my guess is that he doesn’t want people to examine it.” She looked around. “Or to waste time looking at it. Okay, clock me: I’m going to look in everything I can, and I bet I can do it in under two minutes.”
“I don’t have a watch.”
“Here’s my phone. Use the stopwatch. Go.”
One minute and fifty-nine seconds later, she said, “I didn’t look in the three vats. Two have water, one has jelly or something.”
“Water?”
“Liquid of some kind, then.” She made a face. “Yeah. The ointments and ingredients have dried up, but the vats still have water in them. How inconsistent. So we should look in the vats.”
“Trapped?”
“At least one of them.” [38]
The vats were broad and circular, wider in diameter than a man was tall, and more than waist high. Each was about three-quarters full. Orcan grabbed a long spoon from one of the tables and prodded the fluid in one of the end ones. It slipped in easily. He swished it around, then pulled the spoon up and touched the wet end. He licked it.
“Water. Water and dirt. Not much organic.” He reached in gingerly and searched, then stuck his head in. [39]
“Nothing. That was water, so this might not be.” He stuck the spoon in, swirled it, and then tasted. “Athid,” he said, making a face. After his tongue had grown back, he said, “That’s promising.”
“I saw a tube of some kind...here. Let’s siphon some into the other jar. That will dissolve the jelly, so we can look there. We can’t siphon all of it; they’re the same height. But we can do some of it.”
The tube was not flexible, and cracked.
“I might have a pump.” [40]
With tape (“Duct tape?” asked Quickstep; “Magic,” replied Orcan) they fixed the tube, lining it, and Orcan found a small motor that could be turned into a pump. He started running the acid into the third vat.
The jelly extended a tentacle or pseudopod up to the tube. Orcan quickly put his hand in the way.
It flowed up his arm. [41]
Orcan grabbed it instead and tried to yank it out of the vat. It stretched like taffy, and began flowing out of the vat toward him.
“Not the way I meant to do it,” he said, “but adequate.”
It. Kept. Coming.
Quickstep eyed the tables. She might have to jump on one just to be away from the thing.
There was enough of it out that she could look in the vat it had occupied. She zipped over (the tentacles were too slow to hit her) and she plucked a half a key from the bottom of the vat.
“Have half a key!” she said.
A tentacle swung at her but missed. She watched her glove slowly disappear because of the acid. She peeled off the wrist part of it and tossed it aside.
“Can we guide it to a pit?” he asked. [42]
She tried to remember. “There isn’t one, but the room has a door.” She moved to the doorway. A treat or something? She didn’t even have an energy bar; she had given everything to the children. “Have you got food or something I can throw to it?” [43]
“Seaweed.”
“Give it,” she said. He tossed it over and she broke it into pieces in a trail. One pseudopod grew over them.
Orcan shot magical flame at the back of it to try and encourage it along. [44]
By fits and starts, they chivvied it out of the room. Then Quickstep jumped back in and shut the door.
“It will flow back under the door.”
“But slowly. That might give us the time we need.”
The pump had finished filling the third vat with acid. Orcan reached down and pulled up the other half of the key.
Quickstep fit the two halves together. They fused magically to form a single key.
“Here’s the question,” she said. “If what we need to do is make it impossible for the cultists, what if we just leave with this?”
He considered it. “We don’t know that it is essential to summoning Acererak. It might be a diversion, like the mace.”
Or you’re a cultist who will double-cross me at the end. But she didn’t say that. This was the first thing he had done that might make her doubt him at all, and she hated herself for thinking of it right away.
She glanced over at the door. The blob had not yet started to come back, but she was sure it would. “Dead end, yet again. So there must be a secret door.”
“We start here and if we don’t find it, then we start checking the corridor.”
“There’s a blob out there.”
“Which will soon be in here. You look on that side of the room, I’ll look on this side.”
“Check the bottom of the water tank, too. We haven’t really examined that.” [45]
With the help of the monocles, they found the door just as the blob was seeping back under the door. “Au revoir,” she said to the room and the blob, and shut the secret door behind her.
Pit with 200 Spikes (20)
This corridor was dark, which Quickstep took to be a good thing. The more awkward and uncomfortable it was, the more she felt they were on the right path. Orcan didn’t seem bothered but she got out her flashlight and looked ahead. Turn and stairs and turn--
Eventually they came to a pit. Unlike the others, this was an open pit with a few hundred spikes in it. They could lower themselves down and carefully navigate it, then climb up the other side.
“Wait a sec,” she said, and played the beam of light along the walls, looking for items that might be slippery or trip her up.
“I’ll walk.”
“There will be some trick.”
“Yes.”
“Let me get out to the far side first. Let’s see what’s over there.”
She backed up and took off, racing along the wall. Because it was not much extra time, she ran to the end of the wall (dead end) and back, then stopped maybe twenty paces from the far side of the pit, and carefully stepped forward.
About a meter from the edge, a dozen spikes shot into the air. She backed up in time.
“The spikes are growing back,” called Orcan.
“Still want to walk?”
“I can jump it. Stay there at the edge of the trigger, so I know to get farther than you.”
“I think the ceiling is too low.”
“I think I can do it.”
“Your funeral.”
She stood by the wall and waited, half expecting a volley of spikes. [46]
He landed safely and rubbed his hands together. “It felt good to accomplish something. This whole trip has been drifting in Acererak’s current. At least I did that.”
“You did. This tunnel dead ends, so….secret door?”
“We now know that Acererak loved secret doors.”
She held her gem of seeing and started moving down the hallway. When she thought she had found one, she waited until Orcan met her and agreed. Then she checked the rest of the hallway. Nothing else.
The Agitated Chamber (21)
The monocle showed him the latch, and he opened the door.
They moved slowly, with him checking for pits, and then entered a room that looked like it had been looted.
“Yes!” she said and pumped her fist in the air.
“He is not here,” replied Orcan.
“My theory is still that if it looks awful, it’s a trap and in the right direction. We went through thirteen secret doors to get here. Why would this be looted and not, say, the chapel back there? Why was the door in the entranceway still hidden? This room looks looted to discourage us.” She made a quick survey and came back, just in time for the room to shake and then settle down. “Six big boxes and twenty-four small ones. I figure they’re all probably traps.”
“Can we walk without making the room shake?”
“I don’t think so.”
He peered at the room with his monocle. “I don’t see any secret doors or obvious traps.”
“Behind a curtain?”
He corrected her. “Tapestry.” [47]
She started, then stopped. “No obvious traps. Sure, the boxes could be trapped but there’s no guarantee that we’d open one. The secret door is probably behind a curtain.”
“Tapestry.”
“But he’s a guy who loved traps. Therefore, the curtains are a trap, or hide one.” She looked at Orcan. “Burn’em. Get in the middle of the room and spray them with your fork’s fire.”
“It’s not a ‘fork.’” She looked at him. “Fine. I’ll do it. But it’s not a fork. It’s the Tritonis Spear.”
She stayed outside the room.
When she walked back in, the room was cooler. “What happened?”
“Burning the tapestries makes things colder, not hotter.”
“Trap?”
“Probably. But the secret door is right there.”
She had an urge to look in the boxes. What if they were missing something?
Yeah, about twenty-four traps.
Beyond this secret door the corridor curved around and down a stairwell, then on to a pit at an intersection.
“Can you punch the wall hard enough to make a mark?” she asked Orcan.
“I don’t need to.” He rummaged through his bat and pulled out a piece of chalk.
“Good. I don’t want us confused. This could be the start of a maze.”
The walls here weren’t covered with plaster but were bare rock. Orcan wrote a single symbol on the wall.
“Thanks,” she said, and started along a wall. “All of them end in doors,” she reported. “I didn’t see that one was a better choice than another.”
They drew straws and went right first. The door was a fake, and Orcan got a spear in the chest for opening it.
He got better.
The Cavern of Gold And Silver Mists (22)
The next door led to.a gentle slope and mists at the bottom. The mists were visible to both of them, though Quickstep could make out more.
“Hang on a minute,” said Quickstep. “I’ll hold my breath and see if I can get through.”
The mists hid an island; overhead was a sort of “sun” — a bright disk of light that moved across the ceiling. On the shore was a bench, and a beautiful woman holding a lyre. The woman was clearly not a woman: she had wings and bird’s feet.
“Hello,” said Quickstep. She probably doesn’t speak English.
“Hello,” said the woman. Quickstep’s thought that it might be mimicry was broken by, “Are you enjoying the dungeon so far?”
“Not particularly,” said Quickstep. “Seems a rather cruel and capricious place.”
“I wouldn’t know. Never been there.”
“You speak English?”
“I speak all languages,” the woman said airily, waving her hand for emphasis.
“How did you end up here?”
“I was on my rock, waiting for sailors I could lure— You’re not a sailor, are you?”
“Never even been on a boat.”
“Good. Cultural imperative, don’t you know. Anyway, a sepulchral voice offered me a choice: nearly eternal life or same old, same old.” She shrugged. “I was bored.”
“The sepulchral voice was apparently a demi-lich or something. Bad dude.”
“I was very bored,” explained the woman. She looked vaguely Mediterranean. “The whole thing was trap men, use them to grant life to one of our kind, trap more men. It was a circle.”
“I can see how you’d want to get out.”
“This is no better, really. Everyone until you has been vicious and cruel and half-mad. And heavily armed. Usually I make them go mad and they leave, or I turn one of them on the others.”
“I’m trying to shut it down. The dungeon.”
“That’s nice.”
“Do you want to join me? Afterward you’ll be free to do what you want.”
The woman sat up. “No one has ever asked. What’s the outside world like?”
“Wonderful,” said Quickstep, “and awful. Things of ugliness, things of beauty, things in-between. Technological marvels you cannot imagine are ordinary but people are still people. However, you don’t have to have a child if you don’t want to. We’re slowly eliminating some cultural expectations.”
“You don’t make it sound like a buffet of wonder,” the woman said doubtfully.
“I don’t think it will ever be a buffet of wonder,” Quickstep replied.”But there is nearly infinite variety and you can choose how to respond to that. Even if you don’t want to, there are always new things.”
“I’ll do it.” Sacks farther up the shore disappeared; Quickstep caught the vanishing rather than the sacks.
“Great. What’s your name?”
“Teles. Yours?”
“I have several names. When I am dressed like this, you call me Quickstep.”
“It’s a title?”
“Sort of. Do you have things to get?”
“Just my lyre case,” Teles said. “Let’s go.” She fitted her lyre into a wooden case, strung it over her shoulder. “I knew someone was in the dungeon because my lyre got better. The strings repair themselves.”
“May I carry you? I can move quite fast and that will get us through the mists quickly.”
“Ah.Quickstep. Of course.”
Quickstep bent so that Teles could get on her back. She had to go slowly through mist but once she found the single turn, she was able to speed up and return to the crossway that Orcan stood at.
“Orcan, Teles; Teles, Orcan.”
“You are of Poseidon’s people.”
“And you of Demeter’s. I am honoured to meet you.”
“And I you.”
Quickstep warned Teles of the hidden pit, then said, “Teles, you never found a hidden door on the island?”
“Never, not over the years.”
“Then the answer is probably up this corridor.”
False/True Door (23)
There were no pits. Teles and Quickstep stood to one side as Orcan threw open the door to reveal a blank wall.
“But no speak,” said Orcan.
“That’s suggestive,” said Quickstep.
“Is it?” Quickstep nodded. “Secret door?”
Orcan pulled up his monocle and said, “Yes. Yes, there is.” He felt around and opened the secret door to reveal a new tunnel. “Check for pits,” said Quickstep.
“This dungeon world of yours seems like it’s a lot of waiting,” said Teles. “I don’t see it as much of an improvement over the island.”
“Outside the dungeon is nicer,” Quickstep assured her. [48]
“Oh ho,” said Quickstep. She pulled her gem from before her goggles. “Not a pit but some kind of door.”
“Well, which do we take?
“Hidden is good,” Quickstep said. “But I’ll check the corridor.” In a moment she said, “This one ends in a dead end but a door off to the side.”
“You didn’t open it?”
“I am not the one who gets better after a spear to the chest. I say we follow the tunnel, open the secret door at the end because there’ll be one, and if it’s good, go that way. We can come back and find these doors if we need to.”
“I’m with her,” said Teles promptly.
“It makes sense.” Then he muttered, “I’m not sure you get a vote.”
The tunnel contained spiral stairs that led down to a flat area which ended, as guessed, in a secret door. They expected it and it was quick to find. Through that door and another turn, and they hit another door, this one obvious. It was a dark green gemstone of some kind. “Jade?” asked Quickstep.
“Adamantite,” said Teles. “It’s obvious.”
“To you. Glad you decided to come with us.”
“Can you get through it?” asked Orcan. “Maybe like the stone, it can be easily opened from the other side.”
Quickstep started to vibrate and pressed her hand against the door. Nothing happened. She frowned and checked the walls beside it. She still could not go through it. [49]
“Three slots,” said Quickstep. “So something goes into at least one of the slots.”
“About the width of a sword blade,” said Teles.
“But simultaneously or in sequence?” asked Orcan, and he rummaged in his bag again. He pulled out three flat sheets of metal the right width, tape, and a rod. He handed one metal “blade” to Quickstep. “First we try each slot and see if something awful happens to the metal. If not, we try the six possible sequences, and if none of them work, we try the three ways of trying two simultaneously, and then all three.”
“You hardly need me for this, because we have to wait and see if it responds.”
Teles said, “I’ll do it.” She took the sheet of metal and thrust it into the top. She pulled the metal out and examined it. It was unchanged.
Same result for the middle.
Same result for the bottom.
Quickstep had the urge to grab it from her and run through the the next ten possibilities, but she didn’t. She didn’t know the siren well, really, and the woman might as well be useful.
Finally, the last attempt using all three metal blades was successful. The door opened and nothing stabbed at them. Quickstep zoomed in and said, “No one here. Come on.”
The door started to close and she grabbed the other two and moved them in. before it could finish closing. “Sorry. Hope we’re not trapped.”
“Thanks. I think.”
The Pillared Throne Room (25)
“Why do so many pillars?” asked Quickstep.
“Certain architects thought they were lovely,” said Teles.
“I think there’s more to it than that. Two devil faces up on the wall — we’ve seen them before, Teles — a throne, and a glowing orange gem circled by charred bones.” She rapped on one of the pillars. “You think these are trapped?”
“Yes,” said Orcan as she began to rise in the air. “Touching them seems to make you float. Is there a breeze up there that wafts you to a certain doom?”
From halfway to the ceiling, Quickstep said, “I’ll let you know.”
Teles turned slightly and spread her wings, then flew up and grabbed Quickstep by the upper arm. “I won’t allow it.”
Quickstep didn’t bother to point out that she had figured out several ways to escape. Teles sang a brief melody and weight returned to Quickstep. [50]
“One wall with obvious doors. One wall with an obvious throne. Two walls with nothing. The working theory,” she explained to Teles, “is that doors are usually useless. Secret doors tend to be away from the obvious places. So they’re right behind the door or beside the door or away from the door.”
“Like in the pit,” added Orcan helpfully.
“So it’s a puzzle?”
“A huge puzzle.”
“The ceiling?” the siren said.
“He did provide a levitate spell,” admitted Orcan.
Quickstep frowned. “That makes a kind of sense. Can you go up and look or would you be too likely to hit a pillar?”
“I will probably hit a pillar. I have not had a chance to practice tight flying in some thousands of years.”
“Okay. I can take a quick look.”
She was gone for a few moments and then back. “I don’t think there was anything but good idea. I opened the two blue doors. The eastern room is empty but the western one has a mummy. The middle one is empty except for some swords and shields on the walls.”
“You didn’t go in?”
“I did not. I thought I was already taking a chance on a spear through the chest.”
“I’m sure they wouldn’t hit you at full speed,” said Orcan.
Quickstep rubbed the spot where the magic bold had hit her buttock. “Not sure about that.”
Quickstep and Teles took the eastern wall, Orcan took the western one. No one found secret doors. They worked their way to the throne. None.
“Um,” said Orcan. “There’s a secret door in the throne. I saw it.”
“How do you activate it?”
“No idea, yet.”
The side of the throne had a tiny picture of a crown on it. “Like the crown on the throne here?”
“Oh. Uh, yes.”
Quickstep touched the crown to the picture. No effect.
“The scepter?” said Teles.
“The image shows the crown, but sure. Though it might release a thousand rats or something.”
Teles took the scepter. “Which end do you hold?”
“Traditionally? The knob at the end is the ceremonial bit.”
She nodded and touched the round end to the image.
The throne sank into the floor and revealed a secret passage.
Teles whistled happily and put the sceptre in her lyre case.
Quickstep made a note that by her own value of apparent innocence, the room with the swords or the room with the mummy were both still good candidates. But it looked like they could get back to it if they needed to.
[51] The tunnel widened out to a set of stairs, each of a different coloured rock. The walls were burnished copper, and wood, and ivory; the ceiling was silver.
On the stair was a key. She touched it and then drew her hand back without picking it up. The key filled her with dread.
“It’s probably trapped,” said Quickstep and she made no move to pick it up.
Orcan had gone ahead to the doors. “It might be the key for here, but it seems too obvious.”
Teles stepped forward and scooped up the key. “Where do you think it goes?”
“Hole here,” said Orcan. Quickstep watched from the bottom stair. Going closer would mean she had to get closer to the key.
“Well, you think it’s trapped, right?”
“Right,” said Quickstep, her mouth dry.
Teles opened her lyre case and traded the key for the sceptre. “The ball should just fit here,” she said. She fit the gold ball into the depression.
The doors swung silently open.
False Treasure Room (30)
The room was opulent and rich. An iron statue stood in each corner, every statue with a different weapon.
Against one wall was a granite sarcophagus flanked by two huge iron boxes. In the middle of the room was a bronze urn. [52]
Quickstep zoomed along the edge the the room and stopped at the sarcophagus. It said ACERERAK on the side, and someone had crushed in the end, possibly long ago. This was one of the dust-free rooms, which made Quickstep suspicious. She poked her gloved hand in the sarcophagus. This body was buried with some kind of staff. There was a skull but nothing else of the corpse.
She called over to Orcan. “Any clues?”
“There was something in the runes. The iron men of visage grim to more than meets the viewer’s eye. The statues?”
“You said he would come back if called. There’s nothing here but a skull. He’s not coming back from this. I don’t think this is him.”
Orcan looked at the four weapons. “Sword, mace, morningstar, and voulge. But Acererak was a mage, not a fighter.”
“The sword and the morningstar have mystical connections in Western culture. Athame and Lucifer.”
He looked at the two and headed over to the sword because it was closest. With the monocle of true-seeing in his eye, he examined it closely. “No secret door.”
“Is it secretly hollow? Does it move?”
Orcan put his arms around the thing’s legs and heaved. It did move--it took someone with Orcan’s strength to move it--but the floor held nothing visible.
“There are four statues,” said Quickstep.
Teles, bored, was looking at the bronze urn. She opened it. Quickstep was looking at the statue with Orcan was did not notice in time.
Flames shot out of the urn and settled into a human--well, humanoid--shape.
Teles said something in a language that none of them understood, but it sounded like hello.
The figure spoke back.
Teles called, “Shall I have him move all of the statues four cubits to the centre of the room?”
“Sure?” said Quickstep.
The figure of fire flickered and all four statues moved.
“Who is he?”
“An Efreet with a lovely name. I offered to have him join us, but he is apparently working on something. That was the first of three tasks he will perform for us.”
“Will he answer questions?”
“Not particularly. This one is learned in the area of applied thaumaturgy, so you could ask him questions on that. He is finishing a book on it; Acererak promised him the time to do so. He is three-quarters done, he says.”
“He’s had millennia.”
“He is learned. It is the way of the Efreeti.” Teles rolled her eyes. “I almost didn’t invite him to join us.”
The flame being hissed and spat at her.
“Sorry. Apparently he can also comprehend all tongues. I beg your pardon, Efreet.”
Orcan was beside them. “I found a stone plug which hides an entrance to something below.”
“Or,” Quickstep said, “We give one key to the Efreet here and he takes it away to his urn-palace. Probably the sceptre. Then no one ever gets past the big doors there.”
“I must figure out how they will return Acererak and stop that . Hiding the key is a partial measure.”
Quickstep sighed. “I suppose that technically you’re correct.” She said to the Efreet, “I am sorry for bothering you with so minor a task, but could you open the rest of the way to Acererak’s body? And as a third task, can you show us how to get there on that safe path?”
The Efreet looked at Teles, who nodded
“Very well,” he said in a voice like wet wood on a roaring fire.
Quickstep felt a little less weight on her belt and realized the key was gone. She saw also that her remaining tissues and sticky notes were burning; she snuffed them out. Flaming arrows appeared on the floor and the walls indicating the secret passage.
“Well,” she said to her companions, “shall we follow the flaming signs?” She disappeared and reappeared ten seconds later. “Should have asked the Efreet to make things safe, too.”
Orcan said, “Thank you. I would not have gotten this far without your help.” He began down the stairs.
Quickstep said to the urn, “Thank you, and I hope you finish your treatise before the next people who bother you.” She began to walk with Teles. “You know his trident shoots fire. Be wary.”
“Of course it does. It is the Tritonis Spear. I am surprised to see it in the hands of someone who is not the king.”
The Crypt of the Demi-Lich (33)
It wasn’t far to the actual crypt. There were a few turns and a secret door, now wide open. Inside that room was the key that Quickstep dreaded standing before a gorgeous metal mausoleum. It was gorgeous; maybe a silver pewter.
Orcan looked at Quickstep and then threw open the door. A moment later they heard a cry.
“He’s gone!”
Quickstep climbed the two steps into the crypt and said, “Apparently that was timed. If you didn’t attack him to give him form, well, he went back to whatever otherverse he was in.”
“You knew! You knew it was timed!”
“Me? Nah. Having the Efreet do stuff turned out to be lucky because by the time we walked here at a normal human pace, well, that pretty much ran out the clock.”
“How do you know?”
“The other Atlanteans told me. The ones following us after you stole the Tritonis Spear.” She zipped back to the secret door, took out the key and broke it in half. “Clever getting me to help you but I’ve seen too many bad movies to really trust you. I don’t know you. But getting rid of half the key would have solved your stated problem and you didn’t want to do that. Fortunately several of them read and write English as well as the old runes, so I’ve been carrying a conversation on with written notes.”
He made a noise deep in his throat and started to head for her, then ran for the dust and bejeweled skull.
“I can activate him again!”
“Probably,” agreed Quickstep.
He grabbed the skull. It rose into the air, taller than any of them, and then a ray stabbed out and hit him. He dwindled and shrank until he disappeared into one of the jewelled teeth.
There was a pile of armor and weapons and gems and scrolls on side. Quickstep sorted through it and grabbed all the scrolls.
“What are those?”
“Some of the Atlanteans are cursed. I figure one of these might talk about how to remove curses.” Teles nodded as they walked out. “Do you mind getting that key from the floor? I’m still afraid to touch it; I don’t know why.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s easy to fix.” She spread her wings and touched Quickstep on the forehead. “There.” Then she picked up the key.
“That’s so much nicer. Thank you.”
“A boon for a boon. Describe your world to me. I wish to be current.”
Characters
Quickstep (“Suzanne Poole”)
Origin: Transformed
Great (6) Prowess Good (5) Coordination Good (5) Strength Good (5) Intellect Good (5) Awareness Fair (4) Willpower
Stamina: 9 Determination: 4
Specialties: Investigation, Performance [Dance], Power [Super-Speed]
Powers:
- Amazing (8) Super-Speed Extra: Defensive
Qualities:
- Eye for detail
- Not soon enough
- Professionally curious
Artwork copyright by Ade Smith, used by permission.
Orcan (unpronounceable)
This is Orcan as he was originally rolled.
Origin: Birthright
Good (5) Prowess Great (6) Coordination Incredible (7) Strength Good (5) Intellect Poor (2) Awareness Fair (4) Wisdom
Stamina: 11 Determination 1
Specialties: Martial Arts, Weapons, Underwater Combat
Powers:
- Good (5) Telepathy
- Great (6) Aquatic
- Great (6) Regeneration
- Good (5) Blast [Trident] Extra Strike (Bashing)
- Good (5) Gadgets We’re going to say that these gadgets were a gift to help him try and get to the [whatever] of Acererak first; they’re not part of his usual gear.
Qualities:
- I need water daily to survive!
- Archenemy of the Cult of Acererak
- Helping the helpless
Teles the Siren
Origin: Birthright
Weak (2) Prowess Fair (4) Coordination Average (3) Strength Good (5) Intellect Fair (4) Awareness Great (6) Wisdom
Stamina: 9 Determination: 1
Specialties: Aerial Combat, Performance [Music], Occult
Powers:
- Incredible (7) Magic Limit: Each effect only once per day. Typically Emotion Control (Limit: Madness only), Emotion Control (Limit: Charmed), Invisibility, Mind Control, Transformation [animal], Dispel Magic
- Bird Powers: Fair (4) Flight; Extra: Super-senses [Extended Visual +1; Improved Visual +2; Comprehend Languages]
- Fantastic (9) Intellect Drain (Energy Drain, Extra: Intellect, Limit: Extra Only, Limit: Always down to one)
- Great (6) Healing (Limit: Performance; Extra: Remove Curse, Restorative)
Qualities:
- Looking for something new
- Fanatically loyal to Quickstep
Icons Conversions
Methodology
Numbers are figured in terms of an 11th level fighter (for saving throws) with an AC of 2. The target when necessary is figured as something “Fair” because characters are generally better than average. So converting (say) a magic spell with a saving throw of 10 or better on d20 (55%) becomes an Affliction where the chance of a moderate success is roughly 55%, which is an Affliction 5 versus a 4.
When I need to calculate a percentage chance to hit, I check both AC10 and AC0 and see which has a better number, though they translate to a 3 (AC10) or a 5 (well, more than a 4) in ICONS.
Spotting secret doors is 1 in 6, so a +3: Difficulty 7 but searching lowers that to Difficulty 3, and a gem of seeing makes it happen automatically.
My first few monsters had Fast Attack because the Tomb of Horrors stuff is big on multiple attacks, but then I switched to increasing the strength of the attack (1 attack: +0; 2 attacks: +1; 4 attacks: +2)
Assumed characters
Saving throw vs magic (11th level fighter): 10+ out of 20 (55%) (+0 if marginal hit will do, +1 if moderate necessary)
Figured for AC 2 but average fighter AC is -1 in sample characters.
To hit AC 0: 55%; + or - 5% for each AC off that.
Creatures
These characters are derived from the versions in OSRIC and not (unless noted) from the ones in Icons Menagerie. Note that OSRIC movements are given for a round (60 seconds). Unless I messed it up; that’s the kind of thing I mess up.
Not all the creatures have been converted; I will gradually convert the characters I didn’t use, but at this point, that’s not many of them.
Animated Sword
The series of attackers starts with a sword at +1 (AD&D +1) and moves up to +8. That’s a move from 15% to hit up to 50%. In ICONS terms, that’s Prowess 1 to Prowess 4 (given our assumed character is Prowess 4).
Instead, we’ll say that the shields and swords advance like this:
- Prowess 1, Coordination 1, DR 3, Material 1.
- Prowess 1, Specialty Weapons[Sword & shield], Coordination 1, DR 3, Material 2
- Prowess 2, Coordination 2, DR 3, Material 3
- Prowess 2, Specialty Weapons[Sword & shield], Coordination 2, DR 3, Material 4
- Prowess 3, Coordination 3, DR 3, Material 5
- Prowess 3, Specialty Weapons[Sword & shield], Coordination 3, DR 3, Material 6
- Prowess 4, Coordination 1, DR 3, Material 7
- Prowess 4, Specialty Weapons[Sword & shield], Coordination 4, DR 3, Material 8
When a sword/shield pair is down to Material 0, it falls lifeless to the floor.
Asp
See Icons Menagerie; use “venomous snake.”
Demon
I started with the Warrior Demon in Icons Menagerie, but demons are assumed to have standard powers (such as casting darkness); I assume they are all subsumed under the quality “demon.” This includes darkness (treat darkness as a Dazzle power, extra: constant limit: concentration), detect invisible object, and the ability to (sometimes) summon others of their kind as a Willpower task of Difficulty 8.
Type 1 Demon (Vrock)
Prowess 5 Coordination 5 Strength 4
Intellect 2 Awareness 3 Willpower 4
Stamina 8
Specialties: Power [Talons]
Powers: Average (3) Extra Body Parts [Wings]; Fair Slashing; Great (6) Fast Attack, Fair (4) Telekinesis; Average (3) Damage Resistance; Supreme (10) Life Support
Qualities: Vulture humanoid demon; Loves gems & jewellery; particularly stupid.
Type 2 (Hezrou)
Prowess 5 Coordination 5 Strength 5 Intellect 2 Awareness 3 Willpower 4
Stamina: 9
Powers: Average (3) Leaping; Supreme (10) Life Support; Great (6) Fast Attack; Great (6) Strike; Average (3) Damage Resistance
Qualities: Large; Humanoid toad demon; Mutual hatred for Vrock
Type 3 (Glabrezu)
Prowess 5 Coordination 5 Strength 5 Intellect 3 Awareness 3 Willpower 4
Stamina: 9
Specialties: Power [Pincer strike]
Powers: Weak (1) Flight, Great (6) Extra Body Parts [Arms: Fast Attack], Average (3) Damage Resistance; Supreme (10) Life Support; Great (6) Strike (Slashing), Average (3) Magic (limit: Each effect once per day, limited to Emotion Control [fear], Telekinesis, Transformation, Summon)
Qualities: Large; Dog-faced four armed demon;
Type 4 (Nalfeshnee and others)
Prowess 5 Coordination 5 Strength 5 Intellect 4 Awareness 3 Willpower 5
Stamina 10
Specialties: Mental Resistance, Occult
Powers: Incredible (7) Damage Reduction (limit: Not vs. magic or magic weapons), Great (6) Magic
Qualities: Named Demon; Large;
Efreet
Prowess 3 Coordination 5 Strength 7 Intellect 5 Awareness 3 Willpower 5
Stamina 10
Specialties: Occult Expert (+2)
Powers: Good (5) Damage Reduction (Limit: Fire), Incredible (7) Alternate Form (fire), Great (6) Flight, Average (3) Super-Senses, Incredible (7) Magic
Qualities: Large, Can grant 3 services, Precise about rules
Mutant 4-Armed Gargoyle
Large, so +1 to adjust Gargoyle in Icons Menagerie.
Prowess 3 Coordination 5 Strength 4
Intellect 2 Awareness 3 Willpower 3
Prowess 4 Coordination 3 Strength 6
Intellect 2 Awareness 4 Willpower 4
Stamina 10
Specialties: Power [Slashing]
Powers: Good (5) Claws; Average (3) Wings; Good (6) Stone Form 6 (includes DR 6 & effective STR 7) ; Good (6) Extra Limbs [Extra arms] Fast Attack 6, Large (+1, figured in); Supreme (10) Life Support
Qualities: Made of stone; Hideous
Ghost
Prowess 0 Coordination 0 Strength 0 Intellect 4 Awareness 3 Willpower 4
Powers: Supreme (10) Life Support 10, Invisibility 8, Phasing 8, Good Mind Control 6 (Merge, Possession), Great Aura of Fear (Emotion Control [Limit: Fear only, Extra: Burst], Spectral Touch (Affliction Extra Affects non-phased)
A ghost is awful to look at, has a wither attack (call that Affliction), and can possess you. So the Ghost in Icons Menagerie, with Possession, Terrifying Appearance, and Spectral Touch options
Mummy
Prowess 0 Coordination 0 Strength 0
Intellect 4 Awareness 3 Willpower 4
Powers: Supreme (10) Life Support, Good Mind Control 6 (Merge, Possession), Great Aura of Fear (Emotion Control [Limit: Fear only, Extra: Burst], Spectral Touch (Affliction Extra Affects non-phased)
Ochre Jelly
The Blob from Icons Menagerie, but Huge (figured in).
Prowess 4 Coordination 3 Strength 8
Intellect 0 Awareness 0 Willpower 6
Stamina:
14
Specialties
: Wrestling
Powers
: Amazing Fluid Form (gives DR & Stretching), Supreme Life Support, Supreme Mental Resistance
Qualities : Huge (figured in);
Both ochre jellies are Giant Blobs as described in Icons Menagerie . The gray one in the laboratory is described as Huge, so that’s +2 to Fluid Form and Strength.
Siren Teles
Origin : Birthright
Weak (2) Prowess Fair (4) Coordination Average (3) Strength
Good (5) Intellect Fair (4) Awareness Great (6) Wisdom
Stamina : 9 Determination 1
Specialties : Aerial Combat, Performance [Music], Occult
Powers :
- Incredible (7) Magic Limit: Each effect only once per day. Typically Emotion Control (Limit: Madness only), Emotion Control (Limit: Charmed), Invisibility, Mind Control, Transformation [animal], Dispel Magic
- Bird Powers: Fair (4) Flight; Extra: Super-senses [Extended Visual +1; Improved Visual +2; Comprehend Languages]
- Fantastic (9) Intellect Drain (Energy Drain, Extra: Intellect, Limit: Extra Only, Limit: Always down to one)
- Great (6) Healing (Limit: Performance; Extra: Remove Curse, Restorative)
Qualities:
- Looking for something new
- (If freed) Fanatically loyal to <person or people who freed>
Skeleton (Giant)
Prowess 6 Coordination 5 Strength 6
Intellect 1 Awareness 3 Willpower 3
Stamina 9
Specialties:
Powers: Twin Scimitars (Incredible (7) Slashing), Good DR (only vs piercing or slashing); Supreme (10) Life Support; Size +1
Qualities: Undead; Huge (figured in); Immune to mental attacks
Wight
Prowess 3 Coordination 3 Strength 4
Intellect 3 Awareness 3 Willpower 3
Specialty: Claw/nullify attack Expert, Mental Resistance Master
Powers: Supreme Life Support, Average Slash (Extra Secondary Effect Poor Power Nullify [Extras: slow recovery, nullifies]); Supreme (10) Damage Resistance (Limit: not vs silvered or magic attacks)
Qualities: Undead monster; Invulnerable except to silvered or magic attacks.
Note that the nullification is cumulative, because of the slow recovery time.
Fake Acererak (Magically enhanced zombie)
Prowess 5 Coordination 3 Strength 5
Intellect 0 Awareness 1 Willpower 0
Stamina 10
Powers: Supreme (10) Life Support; Great (6) Absorption (Extra: All Energy Limit: Temporary); Great (6) Slashing
Qualities: Undead; Pretends to be casting
Note that it never manages to cast a spell, but it sure looks like it will. Players will assume it has Fast Attack.
Traps
Entrances
Effectively it's (part of) a mountain falling on the characters in one case, so call it Amazing damage, but the characters get damage resistance and there are a number of ways to survive it.
In the other case, the stone requires Supreme strength to move, but the characters have two pages to get out, and the ICONS movement rules are somewhat more lenient.
Pits
- Find them while searching: Difficulty 2 Awareness test.
- If you haven’t searched for them, Difficulty 7 to avoid falling in.
- If you fall in, falling is a Difficulty 3 Strike, and there’s a Difficulty 4 Coordination check to avoid spikes and poison. If you fail to avoid, take 1 Stamina for each degree you fail that avoidance test. For each Stamina you take, check for poison: Affliction 4 and it takes strength as well.
A value of "average" in AD&D is a ICONS attribute of 3, and an 18 is an ICONS 6. Not falling in is a Coordination test. A Dexterity 10 (average)/Coordination 3 person has about a 10% chance, which is Difficulty 7; a Coordination 6 person is at Difficulty 8. I went with 7.
Wizardly Workshop Pit
It's deeper, so it's treated as a Fair (4) Strike to fall. Otherwise, see Pits.
The Forsaken Prison Pit
In ICONS, a hundred foot drop is still noticeable. Good (5) Difficulty Strike. Otherwise, see Pits.
Fear Gas and other saves vs poison
An 11th level fighter saves vs poison 70% of the time, which is a roughly a -1; versus our standard of 4, that’s a 3. Saves vs. poison are thus Strength checks vs Difficulty 3, or avoided with life support of the correct type.
Fear Gas is Average Emotion Control [Limits Fear only, avoid effects by not breathing it]
The Agitated Room Traps
Asps are given above. Green slime is stopped by stone, so presumably Damage Resistance 6, a stone-like alternate form, Ability resistance, or force field would stop it. Because it’s a kind of transformation (say, Alteration Ray Transformation 5), If you burn the slime, the flame is essentially an Incredible Affliction of cold but it is close, not ranged.
The Second Key
The saving throw for the spell of antipathy on the second key is a Difficulty 5 willpower test
[1] Mythic: Does Orcan spend time looking at the runes? (50/50, CF 5) 30, Yes.
[2] ICONS: Maneuver based on Super-Speed to get an advantage to stunt Surface Movement 3; she gets an 8+1 vs 3+5. So she still does it, not as well as she’d hoped.
[3] ICONS: The demon should have 4 attacks, so it’s Prowess 2 for all of them, so they’re all massive failures.
[4] ICONS: Initiative: Quickstep (12), Orcan (9), Gargoyle (8). Quickstep decides to try pummeling the gargoyle multiple times to see if something gets through. She uses a Maneuver to create an advantage that gets used to stunt Fast Attack. With that, she can hit the gargoyle three times: The original and two at Prowess 4. All three hit, that’s +2 she can apply to damage: That’s a damage of 7 but Damage Reduction 6. The gargoyle gets a marginal hit on Orcan, for 2 Stamina loss. Orcan decides to hit her too. He gets a moderate hit, and he’s Strength 7, so that’s another 1 Stamina (total for gargoyle now 8). Since Orcan hit him last, the gargoyle attacks Orcan. The gargoyle gets a marginal hit against Orcan, for 2 lethal damage.
[5] ICONS: Using the “Eye for Detail” quality and Super-Speed to try and create an advantage. The difficulty is the gargoyle’s Coordination and a d6; so that’s 8+6 (14) versus 3+4 (7), and a massive success (free Advantage and three free activations).
[6] ICONS: Orcan uses one of the activations and decides to activate the quality to increase his own power (effectively Strength 8). He hits (8 vs 6), and does 2 stamina again (gargoyle: 6 Stamina).
[7] ICONS: One of the additional hits lands but nothing else does, by an amount that makes the additional hits irrelevant.
[8] ICONS: Activating the off-balance quality to disable the damage resistance, all she has to do is actually hit, and she does brilliantly, with an 11 versus the thing’s 5. Alas, she does not stun it but she does manage to hit twice, and she adds the +1 to damage, doing 6 points of damage. That is all the Stamina it has...
[9] Mythic: Does she find the hidden compartment? Unlikely, because it’s apparently well hidden. CF is 6. Roll is 35: Yes.
[10] ICONS: The Intellect test for Gadgets indicates that he has a gem of seeing.
[11] ICONS: Call the darts Affliction 4 vs Str because the math for a fighter saving throw is about the same as Affliction vs Str 3. For a change, chance of more damage here than in Tomb of Horrors. Affliction chooses a target randomly. It did 4 Stamina the first time, but none of the others succeeded.
[12] ICONS: There are two doors with spears, each with a saving throw vs magic is 55% (Difficulty 4 Willpower in this conversion). She makes three saves in a row: Two doors and then opening the second door once more to see if it was still trapped.
[13] Mythic: Are the cultists in yet? Odds likely. Roll 38. Yes.
[14] Mythic: Increase CF by one; now CF 6
[15] Mythic. Ten gems. Does she do it again? 50/50. 5% You bet she does!
[16] Mythic: Black or red? Black is closer, so say Black is likely. 56: They pick black.
[17] Mythic: Odds are unlikely but she has a CF of 6. 36%; she does.
[18] Mythic: Do they notice him? Unlikely, CF 6: 7% You betcha, but he doesn’t know.
[19] ICONS: Did either of them get hit? They might have been standing in the right place. Assume it’s shooting with a Coordination of 0: it rolls a 1, so it can’t hit either of them.
[20] ICONS: She’s going to stunt Phasing 2 with a maneuver. She can’t fail the roll (even the worst rolls gives her 9 versus 8), but how good does she do? Super-speed 10, difficulty is 6, so she has two activations of the new quality “Permeable”. She rolls a 5 to see if she attracts the attention of a demon; she does not.
[21] Mythic: Do they remember to check for pits? Unlikely. 27% Yes, they do. I’d say the CF is 7 now.
[22] ICONS: Does he notice the pit? Difficulty 2, Awareness 2… No.
[23] ICONS: Does she manage to avoid falling? Coordination 5+5 versus 7+3 makes a marginal success.
[24] ICONS: He spots the next one, with Awareness 2+6 vs 2+1. The third, not so much (2+2 vs 2+5). Does he catch himself? Coordination 6+1 vs 7+2
[25] ICONS: Does he avoid spikes: Crd 6+1 vs 4+5, a moderate failure so he gets 1 spike for 1 stamina, and the affliction is 2+5 vs his strength 5+4, so he’s not poisoned. And while down there, he does not notice the secret door (2+1 vs 1+4).
[26] Mythic: Does she actually catch him before he hits a spike? Odds unlikely. 34%. She does.
[27] ICONS: Does she notice while helping him out? Awr 5+5 vs 1+6
[28] ICONS: Does he notice now? Awr 2+3 vs 1+3 — yes.
[29] Mythic: Does she quickly go to the end of the corridor they were in?50/50,but CS 6. 51%, she does.
[30] Tomb of Horrors: Does she attract a demon? A 3; she does not.
[31] ICONS: She needs to create that advantage for the Surface Movement stunt. Call it Difficulty 2 because she needs to make this; she rolls 8+3 vs 2+1, so she makes it easily with three activations.
[32] ICONS: Do they notice the gas? “Slightly” sounds like it’s tough, so Difficulty 7. Each one rolls: Quickstep: 5+4 vs 7+3 Orcan 2+6 vs 7+3. No, neither one. Does the Emotion Control affect them? Quickstep: 3+2 vs 4+4 (yes); Orcan: 3+3 vs 4+2 (marginal, but it doesn’t do anything with Emotion Control).
[33] ICONS: She regains her wits at the start of the next page: 3+2 vs 4+4. She needs to go desolid to get to the door, but does not attract a demon.
[34] ICONS: Given they’re so observant, do they notice the mace? Call it difficulty 3. Orcan gets 2+6 vs 3+5, so yes, but barely. Quickstep gets 5+1 vs 3+6, so no. I don’t want to go on my next dungeon-crawling trip with them...
[34] ICONS: She hits, though she wasn’t trying to hurt it: 6+3 vs 5+3. It misses (5+5 vs 8+4). Orcan pulls up the fork and shoots flames at it, and hits: 6+2 vs 3+2, but the Great Absorption absorbs all of it, and temporarily has 15 Stamina instead of 10.
[36] ICONS: She hits (6+5 vs 5+1, which means she checks for a Slam. She doesn’t get it. Orcan goes next, and runs up and stabs it with the fork (5+3 vs 5+2). Moderate hit, for 6 Stamina, which means it has taken 11 of 15. It attempts to slug the close one again and misses (5+1 vs 8+2).
[37] ICONS: She misses this time (6+2 vs 5+5). Orcan stabs again (5+5 vs 5+2)...and it stops moving.
[38] Mythic: Which vat does he go for first? Vat 1 (1-35%), Vat 2 (36-65%), Vat 3 (66-100%) 20. Vat 1.
[39] ICONS: Awareness test to find something, difficulty 5. Still, he gets +2 because he’s aquatic. 2+2+5 vs 5+2. (Maybe I’m being kind.)
[40] ICONS: Does Orcan have a gadget that will help? Maybe a hose and pump? Call it Telekinesis 4 and put limits on it like “liquid only” or whatever. 5+4 vs 4+2, so yes, he does.
[41] ICONS: That would be trying to wrestle. Prowess+Wrestling vs (higher of Prowess or Coordination)+Wrestling. That’s 4+1+2 vs 6+2.
[42] Mythic: Does she have food or something? (Very Likely) 87% No.
[43] Mythic: Does he have food or something? (Likely) 19% Yes.
[44] Mythic: Does it get out of the room? (Likely) 46% Yes.
[45] Mythic: Does someone find the door? (50/50): Orcan: 84% No. Quickstep: 7% Yes.
[46] ICONS: Strength 7 lets you jump across the street, which is usually more than the length of the pit on the map. However, low ceiling. So let’s say it’s a Strength check against Difficulty 7 (because of the low ceiling). Orcan 7+6 vs 7+4. He makes it.
[47] ICONS: Let’s say it’s Difficulty 7 to figure out that the tapestries are trapped. She’s Intellect 5. She spends a Determination Point to activate Eye For Detail and gets an advantage, which she spends on +2 for this Intellect test. 5+2+3 vs 7+3. She succeeds in thinking there’s something hinky about the tapestries.
[48] Mythic: Will they happen to notice the next secret door? Let’s upgrade it a bit from “No way” to “Very unlikely” because they might still be holding on to the monocle. CF 7 so a roll of 37 is a yes. Wow.
[49] Tomb of Horrors: The module says there’s no way of forcing entry, so I’m going to take them at their word. The demons are not yet attracted (5 & 4). However, there are three smart people, so let’s see whether they figure it out. Say it’s difficulty 5. Quickstep: 11 vs 6, Orcan: 10 vs 8, Teles: 6 vs 6. Everyone succeeds.
[50] ICONS: That was the levitate spell and Teles’ ability to remove curses.
[51] ICONS: The antipathy percentage for a Fair Willpower translates to a Difficulty 5 Willpower test to continue touching it. If they end up touching it, both Quickstep and Orcan fail but Teles succeeds by a fair margin.
[52] Mythic: Is Orcan planning to betray them? CF 7 Very unlikely. 3% Exceptional yes. (Sigh)
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