A Group Nightmare in Wonderland – Part 3

We continue our group playthrough via Zoom, of Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland. We have someone on dice, someone with the character sheet, and someone with the book reading aloud.

So far, Alice has breezed through everything without problem. Even the Royal Executioner and the Hatter-Dormouse-Hare-Golem gave her but a minor scratch. She found the Queen of Hearts already dead, at the hands of the Red Queen, who turned out to be a vampire. Still, Alice killed her with a single stroke of the Pen is Mightier.

Well, not quite killed.

When the Red Queen was floored with an axe through her chest, she took a deep breath, then got back up and had to rest a moment to heal. Yep, definitely a vampire, and Alice is in deep trouble.

Just then, the gryphon swoops in! He apparently had a change of heart, and though he can’t help to kill the Red Queen, can at least help Alice get out of here. And they do!

As the gryphon flies her to safety, he tells Alice that according to legend, the Red Queen cannot be killed except by the Vorpal Blade, which is in the Jabberwock’s possession. The gryphon drops her off at the tulgey wood, but makes up some lame excuse that a friend just texted him and he needs to take off. Alice finds her way through the wood, being menaced but not attacked, and finds her way to a cave wherein lives Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the two-headed ogre. Alice kills him in a few strokes of the scissors, and moves onward to a rook (a tower).

Inside the rook, she finds a white marble statue of a king and it’s holding a non-marble sword. This must be it. She guesses the name of the white king (not surprisingly, it’s White King) and the sword begins to come loose… just as Alice is asked whether she has solved a chess puzzle, which I saw while flipping pages, but which we never saw.

We haven’t. So the sword is still locked in the White King’s stone grasp.

So, when the Red King appears to also claim the sword which can kill his Queen, Alice is defenseless. In a cut scene he kills Alice, and “though her adventure ends here, the nightmare is just beginning”  Ouch.