Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
The Tower of the Obsidian Prince
by Lot Smordyce
Part 1
They sat in the inn in the small town of Harg, the three of them. Ellion and Tholdak, the two fighting men, and Finandriol the spellcaster. Ellion and Finandriol each had a flagon of foaming ale on the table before them. Tholdak had a flagon in each hand, and several more were sitting in front of him waiting. Discarded flagons littered the floor behind him. There was one empty chair at the table.

'So what sort of return are we looking at on this venture?' asked Finandriol.

'The monks will pay five thousand GP for the book,' explained Ellion, 'plus we get to keep any other treasure we find.'

'What's the likely treasure potential of this tower?'

'Well, they didn't tell me much about it. I know it's been deserted a long time...'

The inn door opened and Skarn the thief came in. 'Hi, fellas! I hear you've got us a job, Ellion. What's cooking?' Skarn pulled back the vacant chair with his left hand, waving toward the bar with his right. 'Hey, barmaid! Some beer over here!' he shouted.

'It's a simple recovery job,' said Ellion. 'We go in, get the magic item, fill our pockets with whatever goodies are laying around and leave.'

Skarn sat down. 'Where?'

'The ancient tower of the Obsidian Prince. It's up in the Feening wastes.'

'Who's the Obsidian Prince?'

'I dunno, some bloke who used to live there centuries ago. Long gone now.'

'And what we after?'

The barmaid came over put down a flagon of foaming ale in front of Skarn. She had ample breasts, and one of those dresses that squeezes them together so they look like they're going to pop out at any moment. 'Thanks darling,' said Skarn.

Ellion went on, 'It's a book. The monks gave us a picture of a symbol that's on it, so we can recognise it.'

'Monks?' The barmaid waited patiently to be paid. Skarn was fishing about in his money pouch.

'The Dark Monks of Elbahar. They hired us to get this thing.'

Finandriol chipped in at this point. 'Paying five grand for it as well,' he said. 'There has to be something tasty in that book. I say we should get it then look for an alternative buyer, see if we can up the price a bit.' Skarn put a gold piece down the barmaid's breast cleavage and she went away.

'That's not the way we do things, Finandriol,' replied Ellion with disapproval. 'We get a contract, we deliver. We don't want to get a reputation as cowboys.'

'Oh, like we depend on our reputation so much. Look, we move from town to town, when we get to a new place no-one has a clue who we are...'

Ellion waved toward the door. 'As long as I'm in charge we do things my way. You don't like that, the door's over there.' Finandriol lapsed back into silence. He couldn't be bothered to go over the same old argument again. He let it go.

'How do we get there?' said Skarn.

'I've got a map here.' Ellion got it out of his pack and unfurled it on the table, trying not to get too much beer on it.

Skarn looked at it for a moment. 'So it's about three or four days on horse. If this thing's so valuable, why's no-one ever gone out there and got it before?'

'Perhaps no-one knew it was there,' guessed Ellion in a tone that suggested that he didn't care.

'Look, this Obsidian Prince fella was pretty well set up, right? He was rich?'

'I don't really know.'

'He was a prince, right? At any rate he could afford to build a tower in the middle of nowhere, so he couldn't have been short of cash. Probably some sort of mad sorceror too. Have to be mad to build a tower in a place like that.' He turned to Finandriol. 'I mean, how much would that cost?'

Finandriol put his head back and did a little mental arithmetic. 'Let's see... you've got to transport your materials out there, take your workers out there, feed and shelter them while the work's going on... it varies a lot depending whether they quarried the stone there or hauled it overland, but you're certainly looking at a substantial increase in the cost of building a tower. Potentially five or ten times more than it would cost to build it close to town. Not good business sense at all.'

'Right,' said Skarn pointedly, stabbing his finger down onto the table-top with a quiet thud. 'He must have been a nutter. And rich, that's the point. I bet that place was loaded down with goodies when he died. Even if it wasn't, enough people would have thought it was to go and have a look around. It's been centuries, right? Since he died, I mean.'

'Err... yeah,' said Ellion uncertainly.

'So in all that time you'd think a few people would have heard of the place and gone and had a look-see if there was anything worth having. And they'd have had it away if there was. That place must be cleaned out by now. Anything valuable would have been nicked - and no-one in their right mind's gonna leave behind an arcane tome, are they?' He folded his arms and put on a triumphant look.

'The monks seemed quite confident that we'd find it there.'

'Well how do they know? They probably just found an ancient scroll that had been lost in the bowels of their library for centuries saying that this book can be found there, so they just believed it. That don't mean it's still there now.'

'So you don't want to go?'

'Is there anything in it for us? Will these monks pay us to go and look whether the thing's there or not?'

'I didn't think to ask them... but that's not the way we do business anyway. We don't get paid unless we deliver.'

'Oh fucking great. Meanwhile we starve.'