GURPS DF Session 208, Felltower 135 – Exploring the Air Gate, Part I

Game Date: 3/30/2025
Weather: Wet, warm.

Characters
Chop, human cleric (362 points)
Duncan Tesadic, human wizard (346 points)
Hannari Ironhand, dwarf martial artist (360 points)
Persistance Montgomery (322 point knight)
Thor Halfskepna, human knight (358 points)
Vladimir Luchnick, dwarf scout (318 points)

We started off in town, with the PCs gathering rumors despite a desperate desire to not get sidetracked. They did not – they finished their shopping and headed right into Felltower.

They went in through the well and reached the 1st, and then 2nd, levels, using their usual path. From there, it was through the Giant Fantastic Staircase and down to the “gate level.” They began to head to the air gate, but Hannari and Vlad suffered from the stale, close air of the level. As they moved forward, Vlad heard a clop-clop noise, like hooves, and a ragged, deep breathing noise. He peered around to the left in the intersection they needed to take, and saw, quite a ways down the hallway, a hunched blue figure and two boars. The Lord of Spite!

They ran back up to the 2nd level and found a place to hang out, away from any dead ends. After 30 minutes or so, nothing – the Lord of Spite didn’t follow them.

They went back down . . . and did the same routine. Only this time, Durak was closer – only a dozen yards or so away. Vlad saw him, and he saw Vlad – and laughed, low and breathy, at him. They ran, but this time in a big circle to get to the air gate by the long way. They managed to do so, and heard the drag-stomp of the Lord of Spite moving in their direction. Again, they ran.

They reached the air gate, 9′ off of the ground in an ovoid room. They felt wind picking up and smelled ozone. So they piled through the gate, wing-cloaks at the ready and Walk on Air on everyone.

The gate deposited the delvers on a cloud. They stayed above it, but found the steady and often strong breezes made it hard to stay “on” a cloud while staying above it to keep their cloaks dry – they won’t work wet. They saw a nearby cloud with a giant bird flying around, but they got distracted and the bird was gone when they looked again. Eventually, they headed in the direction of the only significant thing they saw in the sky – a large cloud with a fairy tale looking castle on the top. Walk on Air was too weak, but their magical wings did it. They flew and landed on the cloud near the castle. They approached it. It was a beautiful grey stone, with fluttering penants of blue and white. Thor knocked on the door using the giant knockers on the pine-like wood-made doors. A voice boomed out, “Who rings?” and Thor answered with his name.

The door opened up and let them all in. Beyond was a castle – empty, and not recently used. The doors let into what they called a “great hall,” lined with banners. There was a “trophy room” – with giant animal heads, includings dragons and giant crocs and a huge bison, and also broken (mostly human-sized or SM+1) weapons. There was a kitchen with a smoky door that opened to the trophy room, sized for huge beings but without any sign of recent use. And so on. Stairs led up to an “aerie” above, with T-shaped posts and giant bird feathers here and there.

Also, all of the PCs felt just calmer and more relaxed upon entering the castle. Others, Thor and Percy (I think), felt very calm. They decided it must be some kind of gas attack (I’m not sure who decided this.) They explored the castle and used Gift of Tongues to read the names of the banners – it seemed like there was an overall slogan repeated – “We rule the skies and ground” – and a half-dozen other phrases they decided were kingdom names. Thor suggested the castle is a neutral meeting place, but Vlad is going with a hunting lodge for a group of giant-sized big game hunters.

As they searched, though, a large cloud closed in on them – they called it “cloud #2” – and they used their wings to go to it – deliberately choosing to go around the “back,” away from where it was facing. Up and around the cloud, and to the top. They saw a crystal dome on top of a low tower. They climbed it, they looked for entrances, tried to get in any which way but could not. Tempers flared (mostly out of game) and people got frustrated.

Eventually it occured to someone that maybe the entrance was at the front. And lo, it was – they’d out-thought themselves and snuck up on a building to the roof and couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t a door. But the entrance was a flat aerie, with some T-poles and staple-like crosspole (a “hitching post.”) Lots of feathers and a couple of man-sized bird crap piles also decorated the platform – it was clearly in use, unlike the much cleaner previous castle. A glowing rectangle in the wall of the white-stone building embedded in the clouds turned out to be a touch-open portal . . . 50′ high and 30′ wide, just like the corridor beyond.

They followed it into a circular room with eight exits. Each had an archway, colored around the outside edge, that led to a short hallway to a large portal. The archway behind them was yellow, and the others in a circle going clockwise were orange, red, black, violet, indigo, blue, green. They decided the colors must mean something. Two people said, “Black!” and two “Anything except black!” so they decided to go for orange. They got zapped for 10 injury, and found the portal they saw was gone, but they stood at the lip of a pool of water 3′ down from the corridor with 10 enourmous (but not G-giant) crocodiles and a door beyond it. They stayed out of reach with Walk on Air and Vlad shot them in the eyes until they ducked out of sight. Naturally, he dropped his bow on a critical failure and had to have Duncan retrieve it with Apporation from the murky water.

They opened the door and water flowed out, filling the room and releasing the crocs from their pool. A couple survivors went into the main room. The PCs followed them out, bracing for damage but receiving none, and Vlad shot them down. They did note the archway was white from the far side.

They also noticed the colors changed, wheeling around one each in (IIRC) a clockwise direction. They proceeded to try the same archway with a different color – this time, 24 damage zapped them. They spent a chunk of time, lots of paut and potions, and managed to heal everyone enough. The same croc pond awaited them. Hannari posited it must be a proving ground – a rite of passage to prove your manhood, say, or a gladiatorial challenge kind of thing. Hence, the puzzle and the post for birds.

This time the colors didn’t change.

They ended up trying all of them, in complementary color order, and then what felt like more or less at random in process of elimination. Each color did something different – inflicted catatonic madness, delt damage, poisoned to death (only Duncan fell victim, and was saved from Mortally Wounded by Chop), turned ethereal, and even petrifaction (Duncan, again, saved by Chop.) They delt with a pit to the ground below (Thor avoided it), an acid pit blocked with a force wall (Hannari and Walk on Air foiled that), a dead end, an empty room, and so on. The colors changed sometimes, sometimes not, sometimes clockwise, sometimes counterclockwise. They marked furiously on note papers and with black wax in the room itself. They couldn’t figure out the pattern or what room and color went together, or what color order was the way to go.

In the end, they healed up as best they could, and went for black.

And found themselves elsewhere. Behind them was a dead end, with a black-edged archway. A glowing portal lay ahead.

We called it there for time.

Notes:

– The players were being a bit timid today – not just avoiding the Lord of Spite. They wanted to fly safely, sneak up on the castle, sneak up on cloud two. It’s when they got a little bolder that things got moving a bit.

– Persistent height advantage is lethal to animals.

– I didn’t design this puzzle, and it didn’t seem like it would be as cunning as it turned out to be. I’ll tell where I stole it after the Air Gate stuff related to it is finished.

– MVP was Chop for a lot of critically important healing.