Year: 2021

The third Landing was a maze, one of such great size that traveling through it, even on the correct path, was going to take a while. The walls were a hundred feet tall and twenty feet apart, featureless dark grey, capped with regular lighting that gave a hostile, institutional vibe. It was all laid out […]

Moving through the rooms was easier, now that we had the crystals in our heads. Using them, we could confirm that it was Earth, or at least a version of it, since one side benefit of the crystals was that they were capable of telling you whether or not someone existed. We all picked different […]

You might be asking what I expected when we met Uther. Honestly, I’m not sure. Maybe I thought that it would all just end, and the Dungeon Master would pop out from behind a curtain and say, ‘Hey dude, congrats on saving your friend, it’s all over, you can do what you want with Aerb’. […]

I thankfully still had multithreading. As I spoke to Uther, half of my mind was focused on the ring on his finger. I didn’t know what, if anything, to do about Bethel. The entire reason we’d brought her was because of her immense power, and if it had been possible for us to bring that […]

Naturally, the easy ride couldn’t last long, but at least it was for a reason we’d seen coming. “Halt,” I said, and Bethel spat us back out, into a room with cerulean blue tiles and a large bathtub in the middle, one with an octopus that hadn’t done anything yet. I was keeping my eye […]

WAR DEPARTMENT FIELD MANUALTACTICS AND TECHNIQUE OF DELVING THE LONG STAIRS REGARDED CLASSIFIED BYAUTHORITY OF DOD DIR. 5200. 1 R BY Lt. Ralkers ON 01-17-1991 Section IGeneral Purpose and Scope — This manual is designed for the use of the fireteam leader in training members of the fireteam in missions which pass through HELLMOUTH and […]

The second time was a lot different from the first. For one thing, we weren’t flying in, we were teleporting in. For another, we had more experience after that first round, and three additional years of planning. And this time, there was a chance that the Dungeon Master would elect not to totally fuck us. […]

Back on Aerb, I was pulled from a large machine, one surrounded on all sides by death. It was a huge auditorium, one that looked similar to the portal I’d just left, but laid on its side. Instead of a wide variety of different mortal species, there were Dorises, each of them with their brains […]

“Make the pun,” said Lisi. “The what?” I asked. “The pun,” said Lisi, looking at me with distaste. “Oh,” I said. “It’s a hell-a-copter.” It was only kind of a helicopter, but the basics of its flight were more or less right. The helicopter my dad had used to teach me the basics had been […]

She was dressed in a cloak and simple clothes, barefoot, but she held a spirit blade in one hand, and looked set and determined, as she often did. She slipped into the room before I could say anything, in part because I had no idea what I was going to say, and she dismissed the […]

“Fenn,” I said again, not believing it. Fenn Fenn Fenn Fenn. She looked exactly like I remembered her, minus the yellow-fall all over her and the grim expression. If infernals had illusion or shapeshifting power, I might have questioned whether she was real, but outside of some unknown and powerful magic, always a remote possibility, […]

I was naked and falling, the cold air stinging my skin. By reflex, I tried to use still magic, but nothing happened, and with a terrible awareness, I realized that I didn’t have any of my extra senses either, no sense of water, no ability to feel the vibrations around me, nothing. There was no […]

Fel Seed’s palace wasn’t biological in nature, not built with bricks of bone and beams of muscle. In the session I’d run, that had been improvisation on the part of the players, a suggestion that I ran with because it was better than what I had thought up on my own. There was a red […]

The plan had been to fly in as quickly as we possibly could, moving in a straight line toward the City of a Thousand Brides while in Bethel. We would go at multiples of the speed of sound, completely warded by Grak. We were going to make a crash landing, with Bethel killing almost everything […]