33 The Hireling Who Went Up a Rope and Came Down a Giant

Dec 10-19, 861

Session Report
    The players decided to answer a notice posted lately in Falkirk. The notice offered thousands of gold pieces for information on the army of one of the tribes of the Northern Steppes (the Akithians) and the head their ruler (the Warrior-Queen Temyris). After hiring some muscle, and buying up all of the horses in town, the party set off to the North.
    
    After days of crossing short grass and frozen earth of the all but featureless plain, the part spotted a tower in their path. They camped well off from it, and first thing the next day (Dec 14) ventured inside.

    The party discovered that graven in the floor of each room was a number. As they entered rooms in sequence, more and more magical lights accrued around their heads. Proceeding through the rooms they found a thief in a blue cloak (Billhemina, the son of his mother, Bill). After an unfruitful exchange, Carxaris pinned his cloak to the wall, while Illuman brained the thief with the pommel of his dagger. Carxaris took the cloak, the rest of the party split the thief's gold.

    As they picked their way carefully through a room of Giant Pelicans ,careful not to upset the ugly birds, the party noticed that Carxaris was no longer visible in her blue cloak. The players supposed it was a n invisibility cloak, and celebrated.

    Next came a long argument about hot to bridge a 10' gap with 50' of rope and 2 iron spikes. They proceed to enact an extraordinarily complicated sequence of back and forths across the pit which resulted in a spike on each side of the pit, next to the wall, with the rope tied between them, such that they could wander across the tightrope with their hands on the wall for balance.  
The Next room was a garbage pit at the bottom of a 40' shaft. So they sent 2 hirelings back to retrieve their rope spikes with even more complicated instructions on the manner in which it was to be done (instructions which would have abandoned one of the hirelings on the far side of the pit). The hirelings ignored these instructions, and both soon returned with the rope and spikes.

    The Adventurers next chose to form a human pyramid to drive a spike nearly into the top of the shaft, before climbing one by one into the next room. Now, this sounds absurd, but at 36', the party's human pyramid was 3' short of the tallest human pyramid on record. When you start hiring every merc in town, you give yourself more bizarre solutions to your problems.

    First up the rope was Oddric. When he climbed back down to relay what he'd found, he had doubled in size (to 12' tall). The party therefore didn't take his reports of Giants in the next room very seriously. Up went the whole crew. Once at the top they rushed the giants, Oddric grappling one, while the archers pin-cushioned the other two. 3 Giants killed without a single party casualty. Rather than carrying the Giants' sacks of silver coin with them, they dragged them to the windows, and dropped them down the side of the tower to where the horses were picketed.

    Finally the party reached the top of the tower. Instead of being surrounded by the grassy steppe, as far as the eye could see was a green ocean. With 2 dozen magic sparks whirling and crackling around his head, the Half-Elf Illuman stepped onto the stone altar in the midst of the tower's highest platform. Whereupon thunderbolts shot from the ocean into the sky, and a thunderbolt struck down from the sky onto the altar, leaving nothing of Illuman but a greasy spot.

    And so the party cut and ran down and out of the tower. Collecting the loot that had landed amongst the horses and meeting Victor Mayhow (Illuman's player's back-up character). With the Giants' silver on the horses, they enjoyed a peaceful remainder of the journey to Sarmat, with enough loot for everyone to level.

Dramatis Personæ
Illuman, Half-elf Veteran-Prestidigtator, Level 1, Dec 14 861, Immolated by a Thunderbolt

Goran, Human Veteran
Carxaris, Half-elf Veteran-Prestidigitator
Victor Mayhow, Elf Runner

Prescott, Micawber, Webb, Hildegard von Blingin', Æthelstan, Oddric, Human Light Footmen
Pumblechook, Magwich, Lemler