Another crawl Beneath Nightmare Castle (do over!) – Part 2

I continue my re-play of Beneath Nightmare Castle.

My character’s stats are 9 / 20 / 7 and a willpower of 11. Right now, though, I’m down to 6 luck and 9 willpower, and I’ve just now gotten inside Nightmare Castle. The town was creepy and full of thieves, and the garden was full of spiders and tentacles, but now I’m in a classic dark tunnel with little idea of what’s ahead.

The wine cellar. That’s where this secret passage lets in. So that’s cool, except that for some reason I decide to drink a cup of wine from a random barrel. What the hell, am I already drunk? Drinking a random wine when we’re hunting evil, in a castle known to be full of evil? Even an idiot wouldn’t do that. But it’s FF so… roll… restore 2 stamina. Whew!

And then the door slams open and in come 8 guards, surrounding me. I know that I can’t fight them all, and I surrender. I’m taken to the margrave, and it’s a total Theoden-and-Wormtongue thing going on. The margrave used to have a sharp mind and austere tastes, and now everybody including him is drunk, and a robed figure is whispering to him. He gets bored and tells them to take me away, so they do. At some point I just take off running and remarkably I pass a Test Your Luck roll with my 6 luck (well, now a 5) and get away. Well, no, I don’t. I fall over a rock and get into a fight, and am recaptured. Damn.

Fortunately, the dungeon is really easy to escape. Just lift a few flagstones from the floor, until I find a hole, and Bob’s your uncle. Looks like someone previously made an escape tunnel, big enough to walk in and everything. This is great!

The passage leads to a classic T junction, with three doors visible. Two doors are locked, and the third has a keychain on the opposite wall, on the opposite side of what I assume is instantly deadly acid. But this is more deadly than usual, in that the water comes alive into a humanoid shape, and attacks me. I’m at -2 penalty so it’s a 7 to his 8, and he does 4 damage and a willpower test on each hit. Meaning, it’s a very short battle as the living corrosive beats me down and dissolves me into a puddle of leather and slime on the floor.

My adventure ends here, in most gruesome fashion.