Games Logs

Sound travels strangely in the fissure between Malbolge and Maladomini — every clash of steel, every furious roar, bounces off stone until it’s impossible to tell where the battle actually is. Kiki, Vali, and Thunk are hurrying back from their errand to retrieve the truck, now shrunk down and cradled against Kiki’s paw. The distant echoes of combat put new urgency in their steps. Sound, being sound, travels in all directions. Someone else trapped in this narrow purgatory hea

"Titania, do you have any answers? Where exactly have you been? You've been gone for days. I do think I'm owed answers." The Votress stands in the doorway of the Hex, glaring at a gawping Titania. They regard one another for a moment. Then the Votress's attention finds Squid. "Ayan, come say hello to your other mother!" She gestures the child toward her. Squid, wide-eyed, shakes their head. "Ayan! Come here and say hello!" As Squid stands, eyes brimming, a small chi

Hector Ortiz. Prince Rolan the Deathless. Shadowfell: Gloomwrought & Beyond, WotC, 2011. Wintersplinter has been dead for minutes. The steam still rises from its wreckage, curling into the grey sky above the western gate. Around it, Vallaki is discovering what it has lost. The Vistani, Viktor and his daughter, crouch in the brush just outside the city gate, have seen the unlikely fall of the behemoth after it had bashed down great sections of Vallaki’s stockade walls. And fro

Urwin and his family leave the companions in the taproom, bidding them a good night. Late at night, the Blue Water Inn has settled into its particular quiet — the kind that feels less like peace and more like held breath before bed. Candles gutter in their sconces. The fire in the cavernous room has burned low, casting everything into amber and shadow. The party lingers rather than retreating to their rooms, drawn together by some unspoken instinct that tonight is not a night

arvalis, Sir Billy the Cockatrice, Deviant Art, 2014. "Which door leads us to Maladomini?" demands Vali. leaving malbolge The first golem does not speak. It simply raises one iron hand and points — a slow, deliberate gesture toward the door on the right — and that is enough. After their twenty minutes of argument, the answer arrives without ceremony. In unpacking the guards' declarations, the party determines it is the first guard who has never lied. The second has: it claime

The tree blight lies broken across the road, branches still twitching faintly as if some sap-thick memory of life refuses to let go. The air reeks of crushed pine and the metallic tang of ichor, and steel rasps against wood as the party and a handful of borrowed guards hack their way down toward the two buried beneath it. Sawdust and splinters settle in their hair like snow. It’s in the middle of all this that Etuttelong makes its appearance — a small, curious creature tha

The Armen do not charge. They advance — measured, deliberate, wearing Arman’s face across every iteration, each one belted with the Giant’s Strength that makes even a clone of a changeling into something genuinely dangerous. The staffs they carry hum with the same force as the one Arman took from Lawrence. Arman himself stands apart from the fray, watching his own face multiply through the chamber, and does nothing. He cannot make himself raise a hand against them. They are h

The dungeon beneath Witherbloom Tower smells of damp stone and, now, brimstone. Orestes the horned devil has left his post — the room where he keeps this timeline's Hexmates — and is standing in the corridor. He was drawn there by the sound of Alistir murmuring to a shambling mound. This is his second student interloper of the evening, and somewhere behind a door that is almost certainly not thick enough, two nearly identical sets of Hexmates are listening to him fume.

The forest is very quiet when a man is dying in it. Torgan stands over the body of the first Vistani, the fallen leaves around him already gone dark with blood. The second one — his captain, a lean man with a crossbow slung across his back and a pair of scimitars still in his hands — circles to the left. Viktor watches from somewhere behind Torgan, breathing in shallow pulls. Arabella, round-eyed, does not make a sound. The captain is not going to fall easily. Torgan can

The Abbey of Saint Markovia clings to the hillside above Kresk, its bells casting a long, resonant toll across the valley. As the sound resonates, the creatures within the abbey yard answer with yipping, howls, growls and screams. Nikolai Wachter sits in the relative warmth of the abbey’s receiving room and tries, very hard, to understand what he is being told. A year. He lost a year. He had closed his eyes — he is almost certain he had merely closed his eyes — and the worl

Diro comes back alone. He is calm about it, which is its own kind of information. He reports what happened below in the even tone of someone who has already processed the worst of it and moved on to logistics: there is a devil down there. He met it. He told it he was a student doing research. The devil — Orestes — let him leave. He told Orestes he was guarding captives. Diro pauses here, letting that land. He believes those captives are the alternates. Their versions, from

Orbart is difficult to miss: a minotaur, seven feet and eight inches of dense muscle, sharpened horn and quiet reserve, wearing a chainmail shirt with a slight hood and boots that have given way at the toe. He carries an amulet bearing a strange symbol, which he uses to channel his magic, and he has his own moral code, arrived at independent of his god. He has been in Vallaki for two months, renting a room from a widow who would not have him if extreme old age had not dimmed

The wagon smells of old wine and worry. And it is making Shifty feel terribly unwell. The next chapter of their adventure has started unpleasantly for him. It is early morning when the party pulls away from the vineyard and the Barovian mist sits low and cold across the road. Shifty is in a deeply pitiable state. He sits hunched against the wagon's side rail, scales the grey-green of pitted copper, looking every inch like something a cat dragged in. The fresh air does not

The cavernous silence of the maze is punctuated by the echoing scuff of boots. The sounds bounce back to their ears, making it impossible to tell from which direction the noises come, despite the evidence of the listener's eyes. Then suddenly, from somewhere — perhaps around the next corner, perhaps from behind them, or perhaps in no place at all — there is maniacal laughter that belongs to no one present. There is also quiet weeping, a child's, high and inconsolable, cutt