Rosia Lightfoot's Journal - Part 8

In the room behind the trapped door which got Curbag, we met two lizard-folk, Kahliss and Slith. They attacked us at first, Slith was a druid who summoned up a ball of fire which he could move to attack us. When they realised we weren't orcs (or at least most of us weren't!) they offered a truce. We discovered that they had been hired by Longtail to guide him through the mountains to this place, Kahliss turned out to be a ranger who presumably had knowledge of the area. Anyway, they told us that Longtail had summoned up the FOs (which turn out to be called Darkmantles) and then lost control of them. They weren't very happy with him, or the other members of his retinue, and were waiting for a chance to escape this place. They also told us that this place used to be a prison, which explains all the traps and manacles. I wish we could find some way of making the traps think we were guards!

We spent the night in the room with Kahliss and Slith, they offered us some rats to eat, but I decided I would scrounge some rations from Quercus instead. He made me pray to Pelor for an hour, but it was worth it to avoid the rats. (I was secretly praying to Ehlonna, but I don't think I'll tell Quercus about that...) We decided that it might be good to go back to the Kobolds we'd met before and try to parlay with them. We though that they might have more information about this place. We managed to form an alliance with their leader, Boyik, despite the fact that he didn't really have anything to tell us. (He made us drink blood wine to seal the pact - ugh!) But he did agree to join with us on raid of the Darkmantles' lair. We thought it would be best to deal with them before we explored any more, as we didn't like the thought of them popping up when we least expected it. With the Kobolds (and the strange cat-like creature they have with them called a Krenshar) we made quite a force. We decided to ambush the Darkmantles, using Curbag as bait. Being the fastest of us, he volunteered to run out into the FO lair and bring them back into the large room where we would be waiting to surround them. It all went a bit wrong though... The Darkmantles wouldn't come out of their room when Curbag went to the door, so he ran further in, but was caught by one and surrounded. We all waded in and it got messy and scary very quickly. I was nearly strangled by one, but Isaak zapped it with his magic missiles. I was too busy trying to breathe to watch how he did it this time! We finally managed to kill them all, with the help of the kobolds, but it was a tough battle. I think we are ready to move on now, but I'm not sure how long our alliance with the kobolds will last.

Still no sign of food, other than rats...