Spellbreaker, the final showdown – Part 2, the rats of Aryll

With only a little cheating at some required points, I made it through Hallow’s Well with the herbs, the potion, and the animal control devices that I’ll need to get further in my quest. I’m walking down page 300, the road west from Pilgrim’s Hallow. I take a southern fork towards the village of Aryll, which is in the throes of an awful plague, because I know they need my help… and out of character, I need something from Gwythain’s tomb there.

I enter Aryll and walk past doors with red Xs on them, and a corpse fire burning to the side. Oh man. I ask the town elders what I can do to help, and they have a straightforward plan: I play those magical rat-charming pipes, and lead the rats into a barn. The villagers then lock the door behind me and burn the barn down. Sure, that sounds absolutely insane.

Also, I am given a new statistic called Infection. If it reaches 15 I instantly turn to page 13 which I’m sure does NOT say “you take the day off work with some Nyquil and TV; get well soon” but probably something more like “your eyeballs explode and your blood boils out of your ears, your adventure ends here.” At this point, I decide that I bought some tagrin back in town too, so my infection score starts at 0. And I dodged that rat bite earlier, so still 0.

So, on with this suicidal plan. I gain 1d6+1 Infection points, and that same number of stamina damage. Then there’s a fatal-if-failed Test Your Luck (bringing me down to a 6 from a once-respectable 10) and 2 more stamina just to rub some salt in the wound. And the townsfolks don’t even offer me dinner afterward to heal up.

Instead, I ask about the name Aryn’s Hill instead of Aryll, because I was totally paying attention to that guy’s story back at the Pilgrim’s Rest Inn. The pilgrim’s story says that Gwythain killed The Canker, an evil god of disease, and buried the body here before he also died and was buried nearby. So if I want Gwythain’s loot (notably, the third herb for the salamander potion), first I need to confront a god of disease in its tomb. This day just keeps getting worse!

We arrive at the tomb of The Canker, and immediately I get +2 infection. I make my way past rats and zombies and plague-carrying flies with no difficulty and some luck, but now a hefty 7 infection score. That’s halfway toward an eyeball-boiling death by a thousand canker sores. In the main tomb, I find it – a swelling, pulsing blob of flesh and protoplasm, real gross and totally something from Call of Cthulhu RPG. Eeew! I’m offered a few choices to fight it, and one of them is fire. This really feels like fire is the right choice. And it is – once it’s on fire, The Canker isn’t so tough – but it does give me +4 Infection, so I’m barely hanging on with 11. Again, at 15 I die terribly, and any time I would have fought a zombie or a fly I would have gained +2, so it’s only far-fetched luck that I survived this far.

Anyway, I come out of the tomb smelling like somebody set every corpse in Allansia out in the sun then rolled around in it for a while. But the plague is lifted and the townsfolks are happy to see me, and give me some food and gold… but more importantly, they also told me where to find Gwythain’s tomb. And that is my next required task.

Oh, did I say the plague is gone? I meant to say the plague rats are gone and the source of the plague is gone. Anybody who had the plague is still infected and that includes me. I feel the terrible pangs set in, so I gulp my blessed heal-all and pray a bit. The fever passes, and I can move on… to the tomb of Gwythain.

This episode, I passed with a lot of luck and only one cheat. If things had turned out slightly differently, I’d have hit 15 and died.

Next: the tomb of Gwythain