D&D summary

[lederhosen]

So, after some unpleasantness discussed previously, our heroes were banished to the northern town of Frozen Bay, famous for fish and very little else.

They came to the notice of Sister Delver (priestess of Memeri, goddess of secrets, knowledge, and madness) after rescuing her lackey from muggers in a back alley, and she hired them to do some work for her.

Until a few years back, the residents of Frozen Bay had been burying their dead on a small island out in the bay. This graveyard was hastily abandoned after the dead started getting up again and grarghing at visitors. (In winter one can simply walk across the ice from town to the island; fortunately, the undead don't seem to wander that far.) Since then, they've taken to cremation*, but the cemetery remains.

Sister Delver was curious about this, and in particular why only some of them were getting up, so - not considering herself expendable - she hired the PCs to go investigate the island and record the names on the disturbed graves.

They arranged with a local ferryman to drop them off on the island in the morning and come back just before sunset to pick them up. As soon as they got to the island, Edward cast Detect Undead and discovered about two dozen skeletons and zombies, all lying motionless in the long grass or half-buried. There were nineteen disturbed graves in all, and our heroes set to work...

Unfortunately for them, they discovered that the undead had a tendency to rise up and start attacking when they got close. They also discovered that 'killing' them only knocked them down for a short while, after which they'd get back up again... our heroes spent some time whacking away at things, wasting a lot of time changing between edged weapons, blunt ones, and pen-and-paper for writing down the names, but eventually they got their act together and started working as a team, with some people whacking undead and yelling out names while the others wrote them down. They also used oil and deadwood to start a fire and started throwing downed undead onto it; this didn't permanently destroy them, but effectively paralysed them by doing ongoing damage.

They had some hairy moments (and I had a lot of fun moving around the board standing up zombies and skeletons at the beginning of each round), and several of them were nearly killed, but in the end they managed to get the names from all the graves and then pull back to a clear patch near the jetty. At this point, although we'd spent a couple of hours in a running battle, only a few minutes had passed in game time. It was just past six in the morning, and sunset wasn't due till about 8 pm... so they had nothing to do but sit there, watching the fire gradually die, and the charred bodies starting to drag themselves out of it. None of them went very far, but as the shadows began to lengthen our heroes could see the corpses beginning to get up again and wander. None of them approached the PCs, but they were still very relieved when the boatman came back to collect them. (In the meantime they had very sensibly made a backup copy of the list, although the one person who fell in the water getting onto the boat had passed his copy to somebody more agile already.)

And so, battered but triumphant, they returned to Sister Delver and showed her the sheet of names. She congratulated them on a job well done, and then looked at the list...

"So, where are the dates?"

She was just pulling their leg - the names were all she wanted, and all she'd asked them to collect - but man it was worth it for the look on my players' faces :-)

*"Let's turn it up hotter and burn up the ashes!"