Osric: The grey (10)

Jenks, Dan and Jane all are finally freed from their lycanthrope treatment. Scabs has managed to sell the glowing blue ring (a ring of continual light) to finish paying off the cost of treatment. While dickering with the wizard (one Helminster), he finds out that the wizard is willing to sell a powerful magic robe (The robe of eyes) for the princely sum of 50k. Not like we have anything near that amount...we're actually mostly cleared out at this point.

We proceed to leave shadowgate and head towards the dungeon, pausing to sleep at compliments. Thought the snow is deep, there has been some steady progress in building labourer housing. The smithy of Gideon is pumping out some steady amount of tools and we can see our training militia has better equipment. No reports of abducted villagers has come back to us. Thank goodness for small favours, we already have enough on our plate.

We continue to head north towards Greenich and the crypt of Kas, despite the worsening weather. It's been a tough winter, and there seems to be a new storm brewing off the ice fang mountains. Jenks, the druid, decides to find a safe location to weather what appears to be a bad storm and leads the group off the road towards a forested gully. As they descent the icy treacherous path they hear the boom of wings and chilling screams of a massive beast above. Passing his wisdom check, Jenks decides it is an arctic dragon, and the group picks up speed a bit to get into the safety of the narrow gully.



Once on the bottom they scout out and find a mostly buried cave entrance. Entering only the front portion they send the dark seeing gnomes, Scabs and Chester, and dwarf Archon to scout the deeper portions. A pile of wolves near some sort of door is discovered, the wolves appear to be hibernating. The scouts report back and Jenks decides to go cast animal friendship on some wolves to help head off problems and recruit some allies. Unfortunately the approach of the Druid and the 2 fighter escort seem to wake the wolves.
 
The first surprise occurs when the wolves start yipping and growling amongst themselves as if conversing. Jenks casts speak with animal and attempts to parley with them, asking only to stay the night at the front of the cavern. The wolves do not want their master disturbed and are fairly hostile. Jenks attempts to reassure them, and notes that blood will be spilled if they can't come to an agreement. The wolves charge.

The second surprise comes when the wolves breath blasts of icy cold damaging wind on us. We are facing something tougher than normal wolves. Jenks manages to cast some hold animal spells and eventually the fight turns into a mob up operation. Archon deciphers writing on the gate and it speaks of a lord with a cold heart that should not be woken. We decide it's probably the dragon and we proceed to ignore the door completely as we camp. There's a hint of loot in the cavern, and we decide to skin the wolves for their wonderfully warm looking pelts. It turns out this was a fantastic idea as the pelts are winter wolf pelts, a rare and endangered (Jenks feels bad here) species with valuable pelts.....VERY valuable.

Overnight we all sleep poorly and have nightmares of the gate opening and something terrible coming to get us. When we look in the morning we find all the wolf carcasses are gone. We get the hell out of there and decide to head back to shadowgate with our lootz. Shopping around we manage to sell the pelts and buy the robe of eyes. We finally decide to let Jenks wear it so he can cast faerie fire on invisible enemies.

The massive sale of loot counts for xp and pretty much every character levels up. We are much more prepared for our next run of the crypt of kas the bloody.