AD&D Session 85 - Even more A-mace-ing events
21st of Duscar, 835 PD
With the green fog ahead looking like the sort of problem you only notice after it’s already in your lungs, the party chose to backtrack through the underground maze and focus on progress they could control. Bibi believed she had the missing insight to one of the riddle mechanisms, giving them a clear short-term aim. While retracing their route, they investigated an alternate crossing and found a suspicious trapped chamber that looked as though it would take time and careful work to traverse safely—time they couldn’t justify spending while their window in Molaesmyr continued to shrink—so they marked it and moved on.
Returning to a previously encountered riddle room, they placed a map on the pedestal, which triggered the locked grates to open on either side. One newly opened path led into a chamber filled with bouncing spheres; when Marcus tested one with his staff, it detonated, revealing the room as a kinetic hazard rather than a simple puzzle. Even after the group began to understand the pattern, Whisper still took a brutal hit from a poorly timed impact, and the party decided not to force their way through while wounded and uncertain.
The other path revealed magical darkness. Bibi, able to see through it, spotted a cluster of giant bats waiting within, so that route was also left untouched for the moment. Pressing their luck elsewhere, the party tackled a second riddle room and succeeded in opening its grates as well—one looping back toward the bat-filled chamber, the other leading onward to a room dominated by a large mirror and several locked doors.
After experimentation, Bibi and Koro managed to manipulate the mechanism enough to open one of the locked exits. Beyond it lay a noticeably larger room with an ominous structure at its centre, seeping a strange dark fog. The shape and presence matched something Marcus recognised from his recent study of forbidden relic catalogues: it looked alarmingly like an Arm of the Betrayers, specifically Bane’s Mace—and the implications were immediate and grim.
Despite the risk and warnings, Enikas attempted to take the weapon and, disastrously, succeeded in lifting it. With no containment, no scholars, and no secure facility anywhere near Molaesmyr, the group shifted from “dungeon problem-solving” to “catastrophic-object triage.” Koro proposed contacting the Cobalt Soul agent the party had previously met in Uthodurn, hoping they might arrange retrieval or containment protocols better suited to an artefact of that calibre.
Only then did the party realise how much time they had burned inside the maze. When they surfaced, it was already dark, and the everburning fires around Molaesmyr were stronger and more widespread than expected. Their route back across the bridge was no longer viable, forcing an immediate pivot: rather than risk the ruins overnight, they left Molaesmyr to the south until they could find a safer place to rest. After a difficult push through hazardous terrain, they managed to secure a campsite at distance.
From there, Koro used Sending to alert the Cobalt Soul contact, explain the situation, and ask whether the agent had a way to retrieve—or at least help quarantine—what the party had uncovered, before the maze, the flames, or worse claimed it for good. The answer cast a shadow over this recent adventure, "I can retrieve it in one week, and not from Molaesmyr."