Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
The Tower of the Obsidian Prince
by Lot Smordyce
Part 3
After they left the pass on its northern side, a desolate plain stood before them. They followed the barely-visible road for about half a mile, but then it faded out of existence. Before them was nothing but empty scrubland with scattered plants growing in it.

'So how we gonna find this tower thing in this?' asked Skarn.

Ellion got out the map and his compass. 'According to the map, the tower lies... a few degrees west of due north from here. We could just ride by compass.'

'A few degrees?' asked Finandriol. 'How many is a few? What bearing do want to take us on?'

'About...' Ellion thought hard, 'three-forty I'd say.'

'You'd say?' snapped the wizard. 'What if you're five degrees out? We'd miss it by miles. That's if the map's even accurate, which I doubt it is.'

'Face it,' said Skarn flatly, 'We'll never find it.'

Finandriol looked hard at the map. 'Look, if we ride north-west we'll hit this river,' he explained, pointing and gesturing. 'Then we follow it - it goes north - and it takes us within about thirty miles of the tower.' He looked pleased with himself.

'Then we just head east from the river and we reach the tower. Good,' commented Ellion.

'How do we know when to leave the river and turn east?' asked Skarn.

'Look, there's a thing marked here on the map, just a few miles south of where we should turn east. If we head out from that, bearing say seventy-five degrees, we should come close enough to the tower to see it.'

'What do you mean, a thing?' asked Skarn, trying to get a closer look at the map. 'What sort of thing?'

'I don't know, some sort of... thing. Look, there's this symbol here,' Finandriol pointed to the map. There was no writing anywhere on the map, but most things were self-obvious. The tower was marked with an obviously tower-shaped symbol, the hills were marked with hill-shaped symbols and the rivers were wiggly lines. But the symbol that Finandriol was pointing to, it wasn't clear what that was supposed to be. The bottom part was the outline of a square; on top of that was a shaded triangle, its long side on top of the square, overhanging the sides like a peaked roof with eaves.

'It looks like a well to me,' said Ellion.

'A well?' asked Skarn in disbelief. 'Right next to a river? That'd be daft.'

'Looks more like a gazebo or summer-house, I reckon,' said Finandriol.

'Oh well, we can all go there and have high tea with the ogre-masters then can't we?' retorted Skarn tartly. 'Cucumber sandwiches, how delightful.'

Finandriol ignored his sarcasm. 'It's obviously a building of some kind. Whatever it is, if we go upriver we'll come to something we'll recognise as a building, or at least some sort of thing. It's going to be a thing we can see. Something we can recognise. Right? So when we recognise it, we know we're there.'

'I dunno,' said Skarn. 'Going up a river trying to find a thing to use as a landmark. I mean, what if we come to some other thing, which isn't marked on this map? Then we'll say to ourselves, aha, that's a thing, let's ride off to the east and we'll find this tower. But we won't cause it'll be the wrong thing.'

'Well, then we just turn back and carry on upriver till we find the right thing,' said Ellion. Since no-one could think of a better plan, they eventually went with this one. They struck out to the north-west. Pretty soon they hit the river, and followed it until long after dark. Eventually they camped, taking watches in turns through what was left of the night.

The next day they set out again, following the river. Eventually they came to a point where it forked.

'I don't remember anything like this on the map,' said Finandriol in worried tones, 'Give me the map and the compass.' Ellion handed them to him. The wizard looked at them with increasing dismay. Finally, he said, 'This river's nothing like the one on the map. We should be heading roughly north, but we're going almost due west.'

Ellion took a look at the map. 'Maybe we're here,' he said, pointing out a part of the river that turned west.

'We're making bloody good time then,' retorted Finandriol. 'We shouldn't be there til tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. And there's no fork there either. No, this map's just wrong.'

'Maybe the river's changed its course,' said Ellion uncertainly. 'They do sometimes, you know.'

'Yes, I know,' said Finandriol, slightly peevishly.

'If the river had changed course,' asked Skarn, 'wouldn't that leave a dried-up river bed? Wouldn't we have seen one of them following the old course of the river?'

'Yes... you'd think so,' Fnandriol didn't really want to commit himself on this.

'Did we pass anything like that?' asked Ellion.

'We might have passed it in the night and missed it,' said Skarn.

'Alright,' sighed Ellion, 'let's go back.'