If I asked you to name the ideal composition for a five person adventuring group, you would probably say something like the following: two fighters, a celestial caster, and two healers. Maybe you would have a rogue somewhere in there. One thing I am fairly certain you would not say is one fighter, one celestial caster, and three healers. However, on my last adventure to Avendale, I was part of an adventuring group that had exactly that composition. We had one fighter, my friend Julak of House Bashere, and the rest of us were scholars. We had three earth casters in all: myself, the sarr Lask, and the dark elf Wolf. As an aside, Avendale has more wolves that any place I have been except Orakken, what with two wolf scavengers and a dark elf who calls himself Wolf. We also had a celestial caster, the stone elf Lathia, to round out our group.
Now, I could tell right off that Julak was not happy with this arrangement, and I did not really blame him. My sword was the only weapon we had other than his polearm, and having only two weapons in a group of five is often a recipe for disaster. He wanted to add another fighter, but Nanaki, who was taking us on the adventure, would not allow more than five, and nobody was willing to drop off.
Now, here I feel compelled to defend my own actions, for it is easy to say that I should not have gone on the adventure, and stepped aside so that another fighter could be added. After all, that would have benefited the group as a whole, right? That was not my perspective on the issue, though. The way I figured it, I was the second biggest caster there (after Wolf) and also the only other weapon besides Julak. Because of that, my stepping aside might have benefitted the group a little, but not much. If one of the other scholars had stepped out, I believe that it would have created a much greater group benefit. That did not occur, however, so we prepared to go on the adventure with only one fighter.
Before we could leave, however, we had a few other things to sort out. We went to our friend Bling, a celestial caster who had gone on this particular adventure previously, and he (along with Nanaki) filled us in on what it was and what we needed to do. Apparently the area we were investigating was a dungeon of sorts that had just recently appeared underneath a desert. Bling's group had gone in previously and had recovered some type of a book, that we investigated briefly, but couldn't really notice anything discernible about. Bling also told us how to get through the first chamber of the dugeon, and told us that after that we would need to make a map.
With that, we rifted out with Nanaki and came to the dungeon itself. In the first chamber, we each had to choose a role for ourselves. There were five roles we could choose from: the hero, the beast, the wanderer, the wise man, and the trickster. Lathia chose the hero, Julak chose the beast, Wolf chose the wanderer, I chose the wise man, and Lask chose the trickster. We did not know what the roles meant, but we figured it would be revealed to us as we travelled the dungeon. We then followed Bling's advice and poured sand into a cup, starting our time going. To advance into the dungeon, we then all had to read pieces of paper describing our role. Because Julak cannot read, Nanaki helped him out. Soon, we all faded out and re-appeared in the dungeon.
Or perhaps I should call if the art gallery, because that's what it was, an art gallery. There were pictures on the walls, and periodically they would come to life and attack us. We fought off the first wave of them, but then realized that with only one fighter we were best off engaging in as little combat as possible. After we got done with the creatures, we noticed that there were four circles on the ground, and each went in a different direction. One went north, one went east, one went west, and the one that should have said south was blank. We all stepped in the circle for north, and off we went.
We appeared in another chamber, and more paintings attacked us. There were more circles in this room, though, and so we jumped in the circle for north again before they could attack us. And so it went. With every new room we came into, we were attacked, and we jumped in a circle before they could get us. Julak and I would jump in the circles last, so that we could hold off the paintings.
This pattern continued until we finally came to something a little different. It was a room with just a single man sitting there. He appeared to be human, and we talked to him. He was interested in talking to the wise man, so I stepped forward. He wanted me to stump him with a riddle. I asked him the following:
Ten fish I caught without an eye,
and nine without a tail,
six had no head,
and half of eight I weight upon the scale.
Now who can tell me as I ask it,
how many fish were in my basket?
To my utter amazement, he answered it correctly when he said zero. Hence, I was forced to ask him another riddle. I asked him this:
What substance is there that will be unharmed if you drop it off a mountain, but will be destroyed if you drop it one foot into the water?
He again answered this riddle correctly, saying paper. Thus, I had to ask him another riddle, and I asked him an old classic:
What walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three at night?
Of course, he was easily able to answer that one as well, saying man. At my wit's end, I took some advice from Wolf, and asked the following riddle:
If there are three apples, and I take two away, how many apples do I then have?
Amazingly, he missed this question, answering zero. The answer is two, because *I* took two away, and therefore *I* have two apples.
Having successfully stumped him, he gave us a shape that said wise man on it. This was to be some form of key for later on, we reasoned, because we had seen a puzzle in the entrance that required keys of various shapes.
Now having the wise man key, then, we kept wandering, and kept running away from the paintings. The next man we came to wished to speak to the trickster. This was a most curious encounter, for the man simply vanished, and said he would return later, and that only Lask, the trickster, could slay him.
We got no key for that, but moved on anyway. We continued to run from the paintings, and finally came to another man. This man wished to speak with the wanderer, and so Wolf stepped forward. The man wished for Wolf to explain why he was a wanderer. Wolf went into an elaborate story about it, which I cannot retell here, and the man was satisfied. The man gave wolf the wanderer key.
We continued moving about the dungeon for a few minutes more, but then our time ran out before we could find the hero or the beast. There was some treasure as we left, and so we were in some way rewarded for our efforts. We also tried the keys in the puzzle, and discovered that they fit. However, fearing that the keys might be re-taken if we left them in the chamber, we instead gave them to Nanaki, so that the next group of adventurers he brought through might use them.
An hour or so later, as we were fighting a giant field battle against the scorpion clan, the man who was after Lask showed up. Lask attacked him, and the rest of everyone there (including me, admittedly) didn't understand why he was attacking this harmless looking man. It was only after he told me that he told me that it was the man from the dungeon that I began to understand. Fortunately, Lask slayed him and got the key and was able to hand it off to Nanaki.
That ends this telling of the tale of the art gallery. There is more still to be written, though, as another group of adventurers must go in and retrieve the final two keys. If you are interested in seeing the book or the map of the dungeon, I believe you can get ahold of them by contacting House Bashere.
Scribed by Seronia on the 7th day of June in the year 602.