3
You scrabble around, tearing open the mummy's wrappings and trying your usual tactic of opening blood vessels, but your instinctive attacks don't work well against something that can't bleed. You just get claws and mouthfuls of dust and weird black tar before the mummy manages to grab hold of you with a fist and start crushing - you suppress a squeal of pain as you feel something in your right wing
snap.
6
You twist around and bite into the tendons of the hand that's crushing you, wriggling enough leeway for you to savage at it with your sharp, bladed claws. As you tear and slash open the musculature, the hand slackens and you start disabling the rest of the arm. The mummy lets go of the glaive and tries to bash at you with its other hand.
8!
You scrabble over the hand and slash away its gripping tendons, then tear away the musculature at the elbows. Robbed of the practical use of its arms, the mummy tries to push the casket off with its long, muscular tail, but you're not done. You clamber up to its neck and start driving your claws into its throat, tearing open a dry, dusty hole that you can keep digging into. You bring your flat, bladed claws together like a shovel and drive it through the exposed spinal column beyond the back of the throat. As soon as you sever the spine, the mummy's struggling ceases and it goes limp. You see a little movement in the jaw, but it is actually sealed shut with its wrapping of bandages and hence helpless.
You take the opportunity to remove the mummy's bronze mask and pop it into your satchel {
100 silver coins} and also find a tarnished silver necklace that was buried with the corpse as well {
80 silver coins}. Finally you clamber out, stiffly with your painful broken wing, and drag the long glaive with you {
50 silver coins}.
7
It is simple enough to find a groove in the doorframe and insert the glaive into it, then push your body against it to create leverage. With a heavy groaning and simultaneous squeaking (akin to the sound of chalk rubbing) the door swings on its central bearing enough for you to pass through. Dragging the glaive with you, you find yourself in a long, dark tunnel which climbs upwards. At the very end, you can see a glimmer of light.
One very long journey later, you find the entrance to the tunnel, which has been sealed with a series of heavy boulders that seem to have been pushed into place deliberately rather than a natural rock fall. Nevertheless, there is just enough space for you to crawl through yourself, and you find yourself on the edge of a small green hill rising out of a point in the swamp, heavily colonised by trees and other plantlife, maybe two miles away from where you fell in. Sunken into the nearby swamp, you can see broken pieces of masonry and ancient foundations, but no other signs of the Ophidian civilisation. Taking a few minutes to get your bearings, you sight a clump of trees in the direction of your lair and slink your way back home.
Once back in your lair, you arrange your new treasures, using the bronze mask as a centrepiece with the two garnets placed in the eye sockets, and lay the glaive along the entrance to the lair for want of another place to put it. Still, not bad. You straighten your wing out as best you can and settle down amongst your treasures to rest.
Hoard Value: 1080 silver pieces.
About a week later, you rouse yourself from your slumber to find that, once again, your lair is a little more cosy than you might like. There's still enough space for you and your hoard, but you are now the size of a
spaniel or
sheepdog after your nap. Your wing has healed nicely, though, and you can detect another significant change in your body as well.
A) Your breath has quickened, allowing you to breathe fire at last.
B) Your wings have developed some muscle, allowing you limited flight.
C) Your muscles have bulked out, granting you even more strength than your new size would allow.
D) Your claws are sharper and stronger, and the material of your claw has hardened to one akin to soft iron. You could now dig through hard clay or soft sandstone.E) Your claws have become more nimble, allowing you greater manual dexterity.
F) Your eyes and nose have grown sharper, allowing you greater awareness of your environment.
G) Your scales have hardened, making you tougher and harder to harm.
H) You have grown stouter and hardier, making you harder to kill, able to take more damage and resist illness and poison.
I) Your soul has quickened, allowing you the spark of inner mana needed for magic.
Author
Topic: SPAMDRAGON: Swamp Baron (Read 36647 times)