Rumours of strife at the Manse of Mirrors have not gone unnoticed by certain opportunistic ears. The Grand Wizard Zoldar would very much like to get his sparkly wizard fingers on the legendary Eye of Aeons and he will certainly spare as little expense as possible to do so.
Study in Purple
The camera pans down from a chandelier that is really trying it on in the ostentatiousness department, revealing a sumptuous office absolutely full to bursting with the kind of useless tat that Wizards seem to really like. It smells sharply of brimstone and dried blood, but obviously that doesn’t come through as, like I said, this is all on film.
Seated in front of the huge leather-topped desk, on chairs very obviously made smaller than necessary, are five down on their luck adventurers:
- Stickman, a Gremlin Catcher with a flat cap, boots, and spurs
- Bungle a Poorly-Made Downwarf covered in corrections and helpful notes drawn onto his body by other dwarves (everyone’s a critic)
- Greg a foul-smelling Befouler of Ponds
- GBPAR11 a Thinking Engine and ex-golden barge lifeboat pilot, joined by their two hands Metatron and Lucifer
- and finally Lola the Cacogen, a black veiled hunched crone-like figure, ex-golden barge actual pilot (she crashed the last one)
Zoldar breathes out a cloud of woody purple smoke from a pipe,
“Right, so that pretty much sums it up: get in, grab me the eye, get out. I’ll pay you 1000 Silver if you do.”
“Can we have it in advance?”
Camera fades to black to the sound of Zoldar’s uproarious hacking laughter.
Fighting Fire
We rejoin our fated adventurers outside the Manse of Mirrors, the huge stone edifice in front of them looms meancingly. They approach, and climb the massive stairs toward the grand entrance, and the main foyer.
Inside, surrounded by the wreck and ruin of a brutal battle, they begin to cautiously investigate. Zoldar said they’d “know it when they saw it” but was pretty light on details about what the eye actually looked like and where it might be found.
Looking through the first door to the west, they see it blocked by a mountain of odds and ends, discarded furniture and crockery and the detritus of what seems to be many many years. There seems to be no real call to try and scramble over just yet, so onto the next door.
Behind that is a long corridor with many doors leading off it. Lola can hear a cry for help coming from further down the corridor, and the gang set off to investigate. They pin down the door, but find it locked1 . Investigating the surrounding rooms yields no potential other ingress, so Bungle hefts his axe and chops vigorously into the wood, opening a small hole2.
GBPAR11 sends in a hand to investigate, and it skitters through the hole into the room, only to skitter very hurriedly back out again as an Alzabo lunges and attempts to crush it with a massive paw. The cries of help turn to a guttural roaring scream and the creature lunges for the door and snaps its fleshless jaw through the opening.
With the door now structurally weakened, the Alzabo begins to attack it with some vigour, and the whole gang can tell that it’s going to break in fairly short order. To mitigate this, Lola attempts to cast Flash through the opening, but the Alzabo seems unfazed. Bungle has an alternative idea, lighting his lamp and hucking it at the door. It catches, and the Manse is now certainly on fire3. At the very least, the Alzabo is probably going to die in there before it manages to make a nuisance of itself.
Magic Mirror on the Floor
Hastily, the party beats a retreat from the burgeoning blaze and continues on into the Manse. Through the large double doors in the foyer, they find themselves in a large domed room littered with shards of glass and the ragged remains of torn tapestrys. Inspecting them, gingerly picking their way through the glass, they find a little more out about the Manse’s history and some of the Cyclopean legends. They also find a tapestry mostly intact that appears to depict the Eye of Aeons - a huge glowing jewel radiating magic.
Everyone has been avoiding stepping into a large white circle in the middle of the room. Greg decides to risk it, and everyone holds their breath as he steps over the boundary. He seems unharmed and unfazed, so begins to lift the tapestry piled in the centre to reveal a mirror lying on the floor.
Lola joins him, and reaches out a black-gloved hand to touch the surface. As she does, it ripples alarmingly and she wrenches her arm back and free from the force dragging her inside.
That’s weird, well, only one solution to this for Greg: better piss on it.
The mirror doesn’t really react to being pissed on, aside from just impercitbely a voice hisses, “oh, what the fuck?“.
Bungle flips a silver coin onto the mirror as well, but nothing happens again. It seems the mirror only reacts to living beings. Luckily Stickman has just such a living being trapped in one of his glass jars. He uncorks the stopper, a string of muffled expletives suddenly become much louder, and hucks the gremlin out into the middle of the mirror, the expletives stop for a moment, “Ooh, a penny”.
As the gremlin is sucked into the mirror, and falls to the ground inside, the expletives resume (slightly tinny through the glass). After a moment though, the colour drains from the gremlins face and his eyes widen in abject terror. As he turns away from the mirror, the party see a slender insect-like woman’s hand reach out from where they can’t see and snatch the pitiful creature out of sight.
There is the unmistakable sickening crunch of a small snapped neck.
Lack of Faith
The party decides to heft the mirror up and carry it with them, and move off through the east door. Here, they find a long corridor with a door directly ahead of them and one to the north. Heading northward they find themselves in another dormitory block.
There might be supplies here, so they gingerly put the mirror down and set-to turning the place upside down. As they’re doing so Bungle hears a quiet fizzing pop from one of the closed doors. He gingerly approaches, and listens at the door.
“Get off me you Oaf!”
“I can’t, Falx is on me I can barely move!”
“Here, get your elbow off my hat.”
Bungle knocks tenatively, the voices stop with a sharp shushing hiss. After another moment one of the voices rather gingerly says,
“Urhh, Who is it?”
And Bungle responds with a,
“Meow?”
The voices resume in a whisper,
“Did a cat just knock on the door?”
“There’s no way! Trickery of the highest order!”
“Perhaps not my hastily assumptive friend, I had a cat once who could knock and ring simple bells.”
“What, in all the spheres names, is a simple bell.”
“A basic and normative one, you dolt, a basic string pulled bell.”
“Hardly a great feat for a cat to yank a bell string.”
“T’wouldn’t be, save the creature could chime out the answers to high order mathmological problems.”
“It could not, you blustering baboon!”
Bungle opens the door to reveal three aged wizards in a heap on a bed, their argument comes to an abrupt halt. They scramble up off the bed and the one with the largest hat addresses the party,
“Well good gods, who the hell are you?”
Brief introductions, neither party seems to have much cause to come to blows immediately. It seems that these wizards have been sent by Zoldar as well, and promised slightly more money. Sensing a possible threat to their mission, the party promptly decides to shove the wizards into the mirror lying on the ground.
They succeed with two of them, but the last one manages to loose a quick Flash and turn on them with a cackle. A close quarters fight erupts between the party and the remaining wizard, named Batón. Spells fly, blind shots from Lola’s fusil are recklessly fired off, but eventually caught in a web from Greg’s nose and beaten quite harshly by Stickman’s club, the wizard submits.
Having seen the wizard in action, the party now think it might have been a little hasty, and perhaps some kind of agreement could be struck? They offer a share of their treasure (which they categorically do not intend to honour) and to help him free his two friends. Batón seems a little taken aback,
“Free them? Gods above no - they’re up for the same tenure position as me! Keep ‘em in the mirror I say!”
And indeed, what’s happening in the mirror? Looking inside, it seems that the two wizards have resoundingly thrashed the fiend inside (they’re much more powerful than a single gremlin) and are now shouting and fuming at everyone on the other side. The gang elects to prop the mirror facing the wall and leave them here.
Snails in the Stacks
Moving back to the main dome, with Batón in tow, the party decides to head south. They enter another long corridor and stride confidently down it. About halfway, an obsidian wall materialises across the corridor, blocking the door at the other end.
They turn expectantly to Batón,
“Well, looks to me to be some kind of magical wall.”
The party is thoroughly unimpressed with this answer and approach the wall. As they do, a face materialises in it and booms out,
“Speak the password, clearly and at a moderate volume.”
They don’t know a password (just yet, at any rate), but there are two doors to the east and west of this corridor. Bungle shoulder barges through the east one, revealing the boat house and docked boats, then does the same on the other side, revealing the library.
The library seems like a good place to start, so they head in. On an ornate desk in the centre, surrounded by shelves crammed with books reaching all the way up to the domed ceiling, is a large and demonic looking book chained to the desk.
Batón pushes everyone out the way,
“This is my specialty, everyone stand back and I shall uncover this book’s mysteries.”
The book looks quite cursed in many ways, so the party is quite happy to let him crack on, while they investigate the rest of the room. They rummage around and find a number of valuable looking historical treatises and a slightly less offensive seeming spellbook.
At the very top of the room, nestled in the rafters, one of GBPAR11’s hands is scuttling around and disturbs a nest of mutated Chaos Snails. As they awaken, they begin to squirm at snail speed down towards the party.
Everyone rushes over to Batón, who brushes them off,
“Stop crowding me, I’m not done yet!”
But the snails are, slowly but surely, bearing down on them. GBPAR11 tries to melt through the chain holding the book down, and Bungle brings his axe down on it and breaks the chain with a mighty crack. The whole gang hot-foots it over to the boats opposite the corridor, and launches out into the lake.
Still moving at snail speed, the snails skid to a halt on the jetty, one of them failing to stop itself in time and falling with a splosh into the water.
Snails in the Water
Out on the lake, the party punts out toward the fountain first. On the calm water, Batón and GBPAR11 manage to finish deciphering the two spell books. The demonic looking book contains a “Summon Demon Wall” spell (so that’s a mystery solved), but before the party can do anything Batón rips out the spellbooks arch-page and swallows it4. GBPAR11 does the same with his book, learning the spell Jolt.
At the fountain now, Greg thinks the huge open fish mouths look quite inviting, and as it’s close enough to a pond, decides to dive into one of them. He finds it leads down into a tunnel, though quickly becoming dark.
Luckily, Lola knows the spell Cone of Air, which will let the crew swim through relatively easily. Greg goes first, with one of GBPAR11’s hands clutched onto his shoulder. He swims through safely, eventually reaching a pitch dark dome filled with refuse and detritus and a number of large chaos snails. He lurks out of sight in the water, waiting for the rest of party to join him.
They do so, and then set about exterminating the 5 snails. Bungle goes on what can only be described as a “spree”, crushing snail shells with giant cleaving swings. In short order, the snails are dispatched.
There are three doors to the north-west of this room. As the party are deciding on one to open, from the right-most one a small swarm of eyes (Oculi) push through and float into the room. The party is alarmed, but as the eyes seem to be doing nothing but watching them, they press on, taking the middle door of the three.
The Red Eye
In the large dome they enter, there are 6 doors. One catches their eyes immediately - a huge ornate brass door emblazoned with eye imagery. Sensing their objective may be close by, the party approach and push on it. It’s locked, but GBPAR11 manages to break open the lock with their soldering iron (useful tool), and as the door begins to swing open Lola rushes in to blast any occupants with a Flash.
Inside she sees, unfortunately, that plan is unlikely to work as the cyclops inside is covering his single eye with a huge hand. He wields a large greatsword, and is bedecked in ceremonial armour. Behind him, floating just above a huge altar, is The Eye of Aeons, a huge glittering jewel throwing out refractions of impossible colour in every direction.
The cyclops cries out, mournfully,
“Halt, foes of the Manse! Go no further, this accursed place holds nothing for the likes of you!”
The gang is having none of it, and charge forward as the cyclops blows out a horn blast of alarm. During a bitter fight, Stickman sneaks round to the altar as Lola and Bungle are beaten half to death by the Cyclops. He swipes the huge jewel, stuffs it in a sack and sprints for the door, shouting to his friends to book it as well.
As he does so, Bungle bravely stands in front of Cyclops, he is either nobly holding the monster back from his friends or simply too bloody-minded to flee from the obvious danger. The huge figure opens his eye, and lets out a blast of red energy, incinerating Bungle forever, and the rest of the gang escape, Bungle forever in their hearts.
A New Friend
And this brings us to the end of our tale5, the party flees. During the escape Lola attempts to levitate Stickman, but fails and instead summons a healthy pig. Is this the spirit of Bungle returned to us? We may never know. The camera zooms in on the pig, who winks mischeivously at the viewer, before the credits roll.
Footnotes
-
It should be barricaded but I forgot. ↩
-
Out of a possible surfeit of kindness from myself I decided to let them get a look in before just loosing the Alzabo on them - it’s a pretty gnarly monster. ↩
-
I kind of subsequently forgot entirely about this and didn’t really lean on it very much, which is a shame. It had been a very long day, in my defence. ↩
-
I decided, while running a Slate & Chalcedony session, that this is how spells and spellbooks work in my games. You have to physically eat a specific page from the spellbook (or scroll, or wherever the spell is written) to learn it.
This works well for my games, I’m almost always running one-shots and making spells easy to learn is fun, but this limits it to not letting an entire party learn a spell they find with no cost. It’s a good balance I feel. ↩
-
The bar staff were stacking chairs on tables at this point, it was 10pm so time to wrap up. I would have preferred to make them actually escape as well - but this was a pretty good place to stop. ↩