Games Logs

There is a moment, partway down a portal to the eighth layer of Hell, when the question of who drives the truck becomes urgent. Kiki is at the wheel. She then attempts something arcane to guide the truck safely, and the arcane declines. Kiki is relocated without consultation into the back seat, which is at least still inside the truck. The wheel spins wildly, piloted by no one. Reklaw is in the driver's seat before anyone can call a vote about who should be the replacem

Thunk finally gets his turn to draw. The Knight. A figure clad head to toe in plate appears, kneeling at Thunk's feet — broad, rune-marked, and fully convinced that fate has bound him to Thunk's service. He does not ask questions. He simply kneels and pledges himself. Thunk draws again and gets something rarer than loyalty: The Fates, one chance to tell the universe that something never happened. Thunk puts it away for later. It is the most sensible thing anyone does all day.

The truck rattles through another stretch of Hell's endless carnival midway, and somewhere out the shattered passenger window, a stuffed effigy of the Lord of Blades sits slumped in a game booth, a prize nobody wanted to claim. It's the kind of detail the party can't leave alone. Naturally, they don't. The trouble starts with a rope in Borark's hands. Nearby, the barbarian has spotted a fortune-teller's cart — a table of cards spread out under an awning, unattended, or so

In an attempt at leaving, the truck rolls through the carnival lot toward Vali, pursued by what amounts to the business end of the Nine Hells: three spiny devils and two horned devils are now approach at speed, and a barlgura freed from its recent captivity, loping across the cinders on its knuckles with real aggression. Somewhere behind all of it, the pit fiend former captor of the barlgura, watches. He is patient, waiting for the distance between himself and the truck to cl

The big top empties in a hurry to escape the rapidly spreading inferno— even the pit fiend doesn't linger for an encore. At the top of the bleachers, Kiki slits the canvas with her dagger and slips out through the hole rather than fight the panicked bottleneck at the entrance. Inside the burning tent, the barlgura is still eating whatever weaker infernal it can reach. What's left of the crowd spills into the oven-heat of the Maladomini fairgrounds: a gang of horned devils,

The big top empties in a hurry — even the pit fiend doesn't linger for an encore. Kiki slits the canvas with her dagger and slips out through the hole rather than fight the panicked bottleneck at the entrance. Inside the burning tent, the barlgura is still eating whatever weaker infernals it can reach. What's left of the crowd spills into the oven-heat of the Maladomini fairgrounds: a gang of horned devils, a pair of spiny devils, a smoke mephit drifting in their wake, and

Under the big top, the tail-coated ringmaster sweeps into view wearing an outrageous hat, purple shot through with black. Its two bells jingle, throwing off faint silvery sparks with every toss of his head. Gearloose squints at it, thinking the sparks look almost like insects, swarming and settling in the same breath. Vali does the same, tilting his broad orc head, and between the two of them the verdict comes back clear: this is no cheap prop. Whatever the ringmaster is wear

In front of one of the ruined tents of the infernal fairgrounds, canvas rotted to lace and swaying in a wind that smells of scorched sugar, Thunk crouches beside a hellhound and decides the name Adolph no longer suits him. "Your name is TBA now," they announce. The hellhound tilts his burning head, unbothered by the demotion. TBA seems to take the rebranding as an invitation to work. He noses through a heap of bones at the foot of the tent, selects a yellowed skull with the

On the grounds of Maladomini’s Carnival Eternal, there is tension between the friends and a group of violent clowns. But as quickly as they descended, the clowns are gone — folded back into the crowd like a trick of the light. They leave only chalk dust settling in the churned mud and the faint, retreating jingle of bells. The friends stand a moment, catching their breath, before the Carnival Eternal reasserts itself around them: calliope music, the tang of sulfur-sweet ca

The bloated devil calling itself Gratchis looms over the battered rogue, robes stiff as sheet metal, a tall orange feather quill coiled at the ready above one pudgy hand. "On the authority vested by the Grace of his Excellent Excellency, Lord Baalzebub, on behalf of the Kingdom of Maladomini," the amnizu intones, "you are required to present Fissure Crossing Permit J54-T, completed in triplicate and signed by the responsible party or parties."

In the fissure between Malbolge and Maladomini, the truck — reinflated, humming, improbably intact — sits balanced on a narrow ledge outside a crumbling structure. It hovers on its magical horseshoes, a fortunate circumstance given the decrepit state of the scaffolding suspended high above the arid Maladominian valley below. Two of the party were stone, but have been relieved of the condition thanks to their friend Thunk, the cleric, who has restored them. One other, howev

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

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.

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

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

The Maze simply continues — corridor by corridor, door by door, each turning in on what the traveler least wants to examine. This is, by design, the point. The party is scattered, exhausted, and negotiating with closed and frequently locked doors. Kiki’s movement through the maze is slow, her small clawed feet working harder than they should have to. She crouches before the next locked door and applies her thieves’ tools, but her hands tremble with fatigue. The door remains

In a vault-ceilinged room, the shambling mound shuffles toward the Hexmates beneath Witherbloom Tower, smelling of wet soil and rot. Massive, its vines and branches are held together with some sort of mucus, and they appear just at the edge of decay, suspended by magic rather than nature. Fungi grow in clusters along the upper ridge of what might be called its head and shoulders, some of them faintly luminescent, throwing pale light across the room in uneven patches. Gaping m

The Hag’s Arms is a faded memory far behind them. The truck pulls up to the wall which contains a closed gate. The maze lies beyond. They rest before entering. This is the sensible decision, the adult decision, the decision that every resource management framework and dungeoneering manual would endorse. It is also, in Malbolge, something of a gamble. Night in the sixth layer of Hell is not restful. The hags are gone from their tavern— evicted from their own establishment

The contract room is on fire. The contracts themselves — thousands of them, the accumulated debt of the damned — are burning beautifully. This is not ideal, mostly because Murlack is in the contract room. He is also burning, but likely would not describe the flames that are engulfing his legs as “beautiful,” by any stretch. If anything, there is an urgency to put the flames out. A familiar face appears on the hallway side of the wall of flames. Hope rises in Murlack. It is N

wasana jaigunta, kariyat, DepositPhoto 571766420, 2022 Where everyone is At the moment in question, where everyone is in the Cave of Lost Things takes some explaining. The party is distributed across its tunnels in a way that suggests it might be either a tactical decision or a catastrophic loss of group cohesion. It is the second of these choices. ⚔ In the main tunnel, the cloaker is dead. Freda, a ranger, views this as an opportunity, and draws a dagger from her belt. She