Riddles in the Dark: An adventure transcript

[librarycharlie]

This is a rough transcript of some of the events from our campaign's last adventure. I hope some of you either enjoy the tale or can use some of the riddles in your own campaigns.

Previously in the Campaign: The adventurers have been recruited by a powerful Asuran priest to retrieve the Mholor Durinhal, an artifact that supposedly convinced the ancient Vendhyan people not to be cannibals, as their cousins in Kosala are. The adventurers, not even able to obtain a description of the artifact, made their way down a heavily trapped cave.

The characters:
Danae, female Bossonian archer. Independent and callous.
Sergio, male sexy pirate. Impulsive, leading-inclined.
Shao Fei, male martial disciple of Khitai. Patient, wise.
Mesraphon, male Stygian scholar. Arcane, unknowable.
Elena, female temptress/pirate. Former leader, hot.

"Alternate" Conan world history:
Every empire rules for a series of thousands of years, at the end of which an Old One (similar to Lovecraft, less infinite) shows up, foreshadowed by a global "Black Rain," a slightly oily rain that now beats above their heads in Vendhya. The most ancient such empire known is that of Mholor, which was ended by the Durinhal, as the characters are learning. After this came Vendrya, precursor to modern Vendhya. Then rose Acheron (and Atlantis), ruled by the half demon offspring of Korg and Eurynome, the queen of Atlantis (who they have encountered, and who perpetually views the future in a magical font). Acheron was protected by a demon the adventurers have fled before, named Korg, and attacked, they suspect, by an Old One called "the Ophion." And now, the Hyborian age is ruled by no single empire, and the black rain falls again.

 

[librarycharlie]

The adventurers discoverd a small group of terrified tiny humanoids, huddled and hiding behind a palisade deeper within the cavern. These beings, dressed in rags, identified themselves as Digger, Carter, Winky, Picky, Leery, Shorty, and Wanker.

Wanker was the most talkative, and explained that they were sentinels, left from an age long before Vendhya, and guarding an ancient secret that their forefathers guarded long before them. They recognized Shao Fei as the "Easterner" and Elena as "the Breasted One," from a tapestry brought to them many generations past, likely by Eurynome (who was around in ancient times and viewing the future even then). All that remained of the tapestry was a small sliver of greenish cloth, and even that was wasting into nothingness.

The small people were the remnants of the empire called Mholor, which stood great and strong in the era before the founding of Atlantis, Mu, or Acheron. Their empire was destroyed, they said, by the Durinhal. And it was this Durinhal that the adventurers sought, still deeper within the caverns. The small people told them that it was said, by their elders, that it required great wisdom to extract power from the Durinhal, and that the adventurers would need to flex their minds, rather than their muscles, in the halls ahead.

The adventurers left the chamber and came to a great stone door, dozens of feet across and nearly forty feet high. The door was elaborately carved, with the image of mortals tumbling through the heavens and onto a battle between a man of iron and a vast serpent. Carved into the door in a language none recognized were words. Beneath this, carved in Vendhyan, was a simple statement:

Speak my name and enter.

The adventurers called out, "Durinhal!" and heard only a scraping, as of vast stones far beneath them. The door remained firmly shut.

The scholar of Stygia grinned, looking at the crude riddle, and spoke correctly, saying "my name" in Vendhyan. The door creaked open.

Beyond the door, a small stone lift waited, uncounted ages for adventurers such as these.

Sergio and the two women climbed in, and without a sound, the device decended, leaving them plunging so far into the depths that the air grew cool and their ears pulled and popped.

At the bottom of the long shaft, the cart stopped, and as the three got out, it descended mysteriously into a hole in the floor, only to appear (by mechanics that seemed magical) shortly thereafter before Mesraphon and Shao Fei at the top of the shaft.

Riding it down, they joined the others, and the five adventurers advanced, coming now to a door identical to the previous one, except that this door had no words inscribed, no hint as to how it could be opened.

They screamed, pulled on it, and even battered on it with their fists, all to no avail. And then, in a fit of inspiration, one of them said it.

"My name."

The door opened. The riddle, perhaps cleverer now that it was unwritten, had been answered, allowing them passage. Behind the door, a stench as vile as death itself blew outward. The stale, putrid air reeked of an age of sweat and excrement, but the broad chamber soon dissipated the odor.

Within the chamber ahead, a thin bridge led to a tall spire of stone in a vast and seemingly bottomless chamber. A pair of statues stood like guardians on a platform before them, and beyond this was an enormous tablet, standing in the heart of a small stone pavillion.

Sergio reluctantly led the injured adventurers. As they advanced, one of the statues grated on the hard white stone of the floor and turned to face them.

"Greetings," it said in Vendhyan. "I am Mholo, and if you have come, it is because your age too is coming to an end."

 

[librarycharlie]

"That which sustains me," said the stone man, his jaw grating with a low, scraping sound, "are those above. Tell me, how do they fare?"

Sergio answered, "They live. There are seven who remain."

"Enough, I think, for another age," the small statue replied. Then, looking at the still statue beside him, he said, "But not enough for both of us. You now go in to face the Durinhal. Its wisdom is dark and dangerous, but it was bested and if you can convince it to speak, it will tell you what you need to know."

The adventurers watched as the statue became inanimate once more, and they progressed to the enormous stone within the colonnade. It said, in a language long-since forgotten, words that none of them could read. Then, beneath that, in Vendhyan, a phrase that translated into a warning of what lay ahead.

They moved on, to the top of the shrine where they looked out upon the basest terror of the world.

Fanged and horned, the face was that of the terror that had infected mankind since his first ancestors had known nightmares. It was a dragon, an entity of the Outher Dark, infinite and indestructible, eternal and wicked.

It was large. Larger than any thing they had yet seen, dwarfing the kraken and the great spider of the Turanian lands. Bigger than the beast of Nezvaya or the crablike terror that had hunted them in the white plumed mountain. It was death. Its very existence bespoke the end of civilization.

And yet...
In the dim torchlight, a curious and impossible fact slowly dawned upon the adventurers. In vast, seemingly unbreakable links, the beast of nightmare was, in fact, bound. It fumed, and its fury was terrible indeed, but those chains held, some as broad as bridges to death, others as thin as gossamer laced almost invisibly over its muscled and scaled flesh.

And to their unutterable horror, it spoke.
Its voice was an earthquake, shaking the cavern in which it lay.
"So," it said, "Another age is dying, and mortalkind must turn to me, once more, for answers. But why would I provide them? What have you to offer me, but entertainment? We shall riddle, you and I. If you answer my riddle, I shall answer a question of your choosing, and then I will take a turn with you as riddler. Guess my riddles right and the game goes on, as it may if you can trick me. Fail..." the being spoke no more of its strange, twisted rules, but riddled them, its face grinning with diabolous malevolence.

"The first is easiest, a test. Two dogs sit on a porch - one dog is fat and one is thin. The little dog is the son of the fat dog, but the fat dog is not the father of the thin dog. Can you explain?"

The adventurers argued among themselves. Elena believed that the little dog and fat dog had no relationship to the dogs on the porch. Before she could speak, Sergio shouted into the darkness, "The fat dog is the little dog's mother!"

The dark eyes of the beast narrowed as it assessed their answer, and nodded, the vast chain at its neck shaking the very pillars of the earth.

(size reference image)
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2273/2388406380_c052af90fc_b.jpg

"I will answer the question you pose, mortals." The dragon's voice was dark, but filled with a peculiar tenor of forced honesty.

"What are the two sources of light at the end of days?" Shao Fei asked.

"You speak not of the future, but of the past," the dragon said mysteriously. "I can not answer what the light is, but I can speak to the dark. My name is Durinhal, Darkness, in your tongue. At the end of each age, one of my eternal brethren rises from the eternal dark to lay waste to the age of men. Chattur'gha, Sardion, Korg, Cthulu, Durinhal. These are names of my brethren. We are the end of all you will know."

"A riddle now, for you," the dragon said, his answer clearly done. "Pulled by a night pearl. I bow politely and slowly straighten up twice a day. What am I?"

The adventurers struggled through half a dozen possible answers before replying, "The Ocean."

The dragon sneered. "You are half correct. The Ocean contains a hundred things, many of which are not the answer, but a small piece of this more accurately describes what I have said. The tides are the answer. I will give you half an answer."

They asked, at Sergio's suggestion, "What questions would you ask, were you in our position?"

The dragon answered, seeming to smile. "The first is 'how can I survive the coming dark,' the second is..."

"What?" they demanded.

"I promised you half an answer. You have it," the dragon said. "Now, do you have a riddle for me?"

Elena provided one. "You can see me with the naked eye. When in a box, the box becomes lighter. What am I?"

The dragon grinned and answered in kind, "The answer to your riddle is another: I am the only thing that grows larger, the more you take away."

She smiled triumphantly and said, "Wrong! The answer is 'a hole!'"

Sergio muttered something about how, with Elena, it was always about a hole.

The dragon looked at her in deadly earnestness. She quailed, taking a half-step back. "Our answers are one and the same. I cannot be held responsible if you are not wise enough to understand it."

"Next!" the dragon said, "for the game continues! I shall riddle you again."

"Each morning I roll over
And lie, your servant, at your feet,
I flatter you without a word
And touch you on your seat
You hold me in your dirty grip,
And wash me off at noon
But when you suck, I'm in your mouth
I'll go, but come back soon."

They answered only after great debate. Water, perhaps. Or something dirtier? The dragon seemed to grow more eager with every passing moment. In the end, they answered "Shadow."

"Correct," the dragon said.

They asked it, as suggested, "How can those of our kind survive the coming dark?"

It answered them quickly, "Few survive. It is the nature of the end. Those who survive are usually those in proximity to the darkness. To avoid death, you must walk into that which would kill your kind."

Elena then drew an elaborate riddle with circuitous language.

"I am animal, mineral, and vegetable.
Every man desires me.
The man who consumed me overmuch now regrets it.
I am found in streams
And in the heart of mountains.
What am I?"

The dragon thought only a moment, and then analyzing the equipment of the adventurers, said, "I cannot say what you think the answer is, but I can give you an answer far better. In days before mortal reckoning, there was a being smaller than your feeble eyes can witness. It was nameless in that age, though men will find its name in time, a chimera, an archaebacteria."

The adventurers were uncertain about the dragon's answer, for none had heard such a word before.

"The chimera," the dragon continued, "lived far before the age of man, a speck tiny and without the mind to know fear. It was both plant and animal, in all the ways that mattered, and like all mortal things, it perished. It rests now as do the ancient fish and other beings you have seen trapped in stones, as a fossil, a remembrance of its former self. Such fossils exist in streams and mountains. If a man were to eat stone, he would indeed regret it, indeed, the chimera would have been poison to your kind. And yet men use stones for weapons, homes, and barter, having desire for them, and desiring also the versatility of chimera, which could live on sunlight alone. Now," it said archly, "what did you think the answer was, mortal?"

(http://www.terradaily.com/news/life-05zzzzzzu.html)

Elena looked at the vast creature and said, "You are wrong, it is gold! Men desire it, it's found in streams, it's found in animals, it's dangerous to eat. Gold is the answer."

"Mortal," the dragon spoke, almost in a chuckle, "You are too primitive to know the best answer even to your own riddle. Gold is no animal, though it may be eaten by one. And yet, I am not bored by our game, so I will permit you to answer again. Now a riddle for you."

 

[librarycharlie]

"The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true. Are these sentences true or false?"

The adventurers struggled now. The Stygian scholar applied his logic while the pirates Sergio and Elena tried their cleverness. Shao Fei turned his philosophy toward the problem, and Danae grew tired of the senseless riddling and walked away in disgust.

The dragon stifled its amusement as the argument among the adventurers grew heated. Finally, one answered.

"No."

"This is correct," the dragon said. "The sentences are neither both true, nor both false. Ask a question again."

Sergio and Shao Fei looked at one another, at the formerly-animated stone statue behind them and to the chains binding the elemental of darkness, and said, "How can we defeat one of your kind, or, barring that, trap it forever as you are?"

The dragon laughed, a bellowing and evil laugh that shook small stones loose from the cavern's roof.

"You see me now, bound and chained, filling this cavern. For those with the power, their size is constrained much less, as we grow over time. When my brother comes to this world, there is nothing that mortalkind will be able to do against him. Know also, that you misunderstand my state. I am bound, to you, seemingly forever, but your minds are small and filled with mortal imaginings. You cannot see the sun grow thicker. You cannot imagine the world itself engulfed in flames that sear away the stone of this prison and burn away my chains. But that day will come, mortal. No, my kind cannot be bound forever.

"To defeat one of us, it might be possible, as it was against me many ages past, to use the secrets shared with mortalkind by my brethren against us, but in the intervening ages, mortals have forgotten more than they once knew, while my kind grew in power."

It spoke of great magics, and its words granted no comfort. The dragon, seeing that his answer had discouraged and put fear into the adventurers, narrowed its dimly glowing eyes, leaning forward to the end of its chain.

"There is," it said almost quietly, "another option. If you were to free me, I could rise and force the demon of this age to take my place here, beneath the earth. I could spare your peoples the destruction of the next age, if you but sever these small chains."

"It's a pretty good offer," Sergio said, speculatively. "I mean, do we really have a better plan anyway?"

"No," Shao Fei and Elena said in unison, "We are not freeing the ultimate evil so that we can make friends with it."

Sergio shrugged and said back to the dragon, "We'll consider your offer."

Shao Fei and Elena glared at him.

Sergio also provided the next riddle, a classic he had heard in his days at sea, "Alive without breath, as cold as death,
All in mail, never clinking,
Never thirsty, always drinking."

The dragon, its experience of the primordial world somewhat different from that of the adventurers in the Hyborian age, thought through thousands of categorized images in his unspeakable mind, but matched nothing.

"It is a fish," Sergio said at last, when the dragon had given up.

"The game continues," the dragon said. The rules seemed unfair. In order to gain a useful question, the adventurers had to answer the dragon's riddles, and to gain another riddle, they had to stump the dragon. They were the Durinhal's rules, however, and they had no other recourse if they wanted to save their kind from the demons who had brought the black rain.

"Your riddles," the dragon said, "grow harder, and so shall mine.

"When I am empty,
I am untouched,
When full, most men
desire me.
You have found yourself
outside me and within.
You may find me
made by hand
or time.
My teeth are sharp
And if you watch them close
even once, you're long since
dead."

This riddle actually proved easier for the adventurers, who found themselves surrounded by the answer.

"A cave," Shao Fei said, "a mine with resources is sought, while an empty one is unused. It can be mined or made over ages, and if one sees the stalactites and stalagmites merge, many years have passed."

"Correct again," the dragon said, "ask once more."

"How can we defeat Skelos?" they asked, naming their greatest foe, the White King, the last ruler of Acheron.

"You seek one who is neither my kind, nor yours. Born in the age of Mholor, he was the youngest son of Korg and the Witch Queen. He is immortal by his heritage, but not invincible. His wisdom, though, this is greater than your own. He will outwit you at each turn, and you will perish if you challenge him directly. To defeat him, you will require the aid of one more ancient than he." The dragon's unspoken words here echoed his earlier ones, suggesting that if freed, he could be of service to the adventurers.

"There is no love in his family. One option, for you have spoken of her already if you have seen the future as you claim, is Eurynome, who was a witch, long before she was a queen. She was his mother, and she would be willing to kill him, if properly motivated. There are few, if any, others with the power and wisdom in your world to do it. Ask me another to continue our game."

"Thirty white horses, on a red hill," said Elena, "First they champ, then they stamp, then they stand still."

The dragon looked down, at his own black tongue and yellowed fangs, but answered correctly, "Teeth!"

Looking intensely self-satisfied in his triumph, the dragon looked over them as they dejectedly prepared to leave.

"I will give you another riddle, because you have proved entertaining thus far. But be advised. There is a penalty now for failure that there was not before. Flee, if you are so inclined, for our game begins anew, with greater stakes."

"In the sky a dinner table
A golden fork, a plate, a bowl
I am the follower of one,
And without wheel or curve I roll.
By inadvertent fingers dropped
in mansions never quite disclosed
I trail behind and am unseen
Behind the one who I, composed.
When in fear a child's eye
Is wet in any wilderness
Its cause was likely he, or I.
Your senses we will not caress,
I strike without hand,
He burns with no kindling,
I shriek without mouth
And expand as we're dwindling."

They took their time, terrified now that they had agreed to a battle with this ancient mind.

Sergio, recalling a dim piece of his own horrific childhood as a slave, found the answer. Nearly a mile beneath the earth being pounded by the Black Rains, the answer called to him and he spoke, "Thunder."

It fit.

They asked the dragon perhaps the most important question yet, "How can we convince Eurynome to fight on our behalf against Skelos?"

"Wisely asked," the dragon replied, "and near enough to the second part of an answer that you might have gathered earlier. For I would have asked 'how can I defeat my greatest enemy,' and you have now asked questions that will bring you to the answer. It is simple enough. She witnesses all time from the past. Change fate in the way that only mortals can, and surprise her. This will get her attention. Speak then clearly your points and be convincing, for it will last only briefly before her visions run true again. If she believes that you can give her something she has not seen in her visions, she will work to aid you."

Mesraphon asked the next riddle of the dragon, "I am gold, emerald, and ruby. A silver blade, en'less violent instigator, all colors and none, and..."

"Lotus, is the answer," the dragon said, before the final words had left the scholar's mouth. "Your kind is too reliant on it, and its power ever-clouds the mortal mind."

"Enough of this," Shao Fei said, "Dealing with this... thing, it troubles my spirit. We have the answers we sought, and the game is well ended. Let us not remain."

The dragon, in something akin to desperation, spoke, "Fools, you have not asked the question of me that burns most deeply in your hearts, for it speaks to the future as much as the past. I will even tell you the question you should beg of me. 'How came the end of the last age,' for it seems the stars align to end your own, and such knowledge is of great usefulness in this time."

"And if we fail your riddle and get no such question?" Shao Fei asked.

"Then there are consequences," the dragon said.

"Let's do it," said Sergio.

The dragon did not wait for the others to agree.

"Your final riddle is simplicity itself. What was the answer to the first riddle you answered in this cave?"

They looked at one another in silence. There would be consequences, the dragon had said. Whatever answer they gave would likely determine whether they lived or died.

Sergio started to answer, saying that the dog was the mother, only to have Shao Fei's hand clamp over his moving mouth.

"The first riddle we answered was to enter," Shao Fei said, "The answer was 'my name'."

"I guess you could call that a riddle..." Sergio grumbled.

"You are correct," the dragon said, "ask your final question."

"As you spoke to us," Shao Fei said, "How did the last age end?"

"This I know well, for though trapped, I could feel the battle in the earth itself, and taste the poison of my brethren's war in the fetid air. Korg had done something in the age of Acheron that none of my kind had ever done before. He fathered a half-mortal line, and guarded their empire. In the end, a second demon came and battled him for supremacy, and the right to destory mankind. Their battle shook the world and ended much of it. I suspect, from your varied tongues and garb that this is an age such as the world has never known. I suspect that mankind is fragmented and that no single empire has control, as Mholor once did. As the Vendrya of old once did. As Acheron, which followed. The Old One is coming, for I smell the Black Rain upon you, vying with the stench of your mortality. When he comes, you will perish, for you have no power that can rival his. And all will again be ruled by a single empire, and the world as you know it will be over. Only by freeing me, to battle the coming One, will your world persist."

"We'll take that under consideration," Shao Fei said, leading the group away from the Durinhal.

Back at the stone, etched in an ancient tongue and in Vendhyan, they took the small tools and carved the warning in Zingaran, the common language of both Elena and Sergio, much to Shao Fei's consternation.

They moved then further, to speak again with Mholo, the statue that guarded the chamber of the Durinhal.

 

[Style]

Excellent. I'm a sucker for riddling contests in my fantasy.

 

[Aholibamah]

Very cool--riddle games, a truly epic dragon (dragons if they are around at all should never be ordinary), a dark and daring quest...how long have you been planning this?

 

[librarycharlie]

I spent a few hours planning the riddling itself, including writing a couple of the riddles. There are deeper secrets, like the carved words on the stone leading to the dragon, that were placed much earlier. It turns out that the characters' first adventure (an adaptation of White Plume Mountain) was centered on a riddling undead skeleton from the age of Acheron. They discovered in this mountain that that skeleton was the "adventurer" from the age of Acheron who discovered the Durinhal and eventually facilitated the fall of the Acheronian empire.

Very small details, like the positioning of a librarian-vampire who had been an assistant to the skeletal master in a previous age, hinted at what would come about in the riddling contest, when they discovered that the skeleton Keraptis had been illiterate, something unheard of in Acheronian times, but vital to his character and his relationship with the librarian-vampire.

It's all intricate stuff, but the players love it (I think so, anyway) when things they learned early on become vitally important towards the end. It gives the whole campaign a mystery feel to it.

They just discovered the answer to "Why would a priest of Asura leave his best friend's body headless in a sandy hole, ignoring the funerary rites he'd practiced his entire life?"

The answer comes more than 8 months in playing sessions after the question was asked. "He took the head east to Khitai, where legend had it that an ancient sorcerer could raise men from the dead, using only their heads."

They discovered this because they ended up pursuing the same legend in an attempt to bring back an important NPC from the dead.

And bonus, for fun, the NPC sorcerer seems to be a total con-artist who has just manufactured his own legend through trickery. Maybe he has power, maybe not. They'll have to find out after entering the Great Games of Khitai (Olympics are in China this year!) and winning enough medals to earn an audience with the 2-year-old Emperor.

Some places I get adventure ideas:
Current events (Olympics in China, mass transit serin poisonings, etc.)
Classic tales (seven dwarves, the Pied Piper of Hamlin, Tolkien, etc.)
Mystery solutions (getting them to ask the wrong questions, interview people, look for clues, and maybe just get lucky)

 

[Style]

I think it's interesting that you're running a campaign with such epic scope in the Conan setting. You don't see much of that, as most Conan DMs try to stick more in the sword and sorcery style like Howard. Good for you for doing it your way, and boldly telling the world about it.