Play Report 20: The Throwing of Runalt

The party delves into the nightmare, deciding to venture in at night this time. The tree-hands pass lanterns through the grove in a hypnotic rhythm, casting light but leaving flickering and strange shadows.

The entrance is narrow, requiring them to squeeze through carefully. Once inside, rustling is heard from further in. Hant moves forward to investigate, and I ask his player if Hant’s immediate material desires are the same as the last time he was in one of these nightmares. They consider and answer that a desire to see the holy mountain has been at least temporarily supplanted by a desire to find and kill the holy book counterfeiter. The hand-branches of the trees carry a painting into the room: an indistinct figure holds up a copy of the books Hant wishes to destroy. Hant draws his new sword and cleaves the picture in twain.

Akela is quick to check the walls for the rings she found in the previous nightmare. There are several, also held by the tree-hands, which try to protect their treasures. She breaks their fingers to collect the silver rings.

As the group pushes forward, several skull-faced fiends emerge to confront them. The party wastes no time in dispatching them: Almuund shoots one that Akela finishes off, and then joins Hant in beating another to death. The third escapes into the darkness, as the tree-hands have brought all the light sources to this single room, making it harder to see anything outside. Hant takes the brunt of several attacks in this fight and it is likely that further harm would cause him serious wounds.

With the lizards gone, Akela resumes searching the walls and finds where the creatures emerged from: a painting of Runalt’s reptile house, which she breaks using her wood-splitting hatchet.

Almuund and Hant move to explore where the surviving skull-faced fiend escaped to. What they find instead is first an incomplete mannequin frame, with pieces of fabric stretched across several parts of it but not yet fully painted, as well as another portrait of Runalt, identical to the first they found. Akela is called and the three enter the painting, Cleo being left outside.

Akela, Hant, and Almuund are greeted within the painting by Runalt, who addresses them as guests and demands they bow and listen to his commands. They immediately throw him off balance by mockingly obeying, introducing themselves as “Brunhilde,” “Jonas,” and “Runalt” respectively. Akela demands another horse, to Runalt’s confusion (the previous painting of Runalt and this one do not share memories of the prior encounter). Runalt moves from commanding to threatening to being himself threatened by Akela, who grabs hold of him and tells him that if he doesn’t show the exit she will turn him over to dissenters at his doorstep.

Almuund still has the painting of money that he got from the first nightmare, and curiously unfurls it. Painted coins spill out of it all over the ground, and he scoops a pile of them up.

After some back and forth arguing between Runalt and Hant+Akela, Runalt is cowed into showing his “secret exit,” This turns out to be stairs to the lower section of the nightmare. Akela demands to know of other exits, and Runalt in a fit of ever escalating anger calls Akela a fucker and punches her in the face. It has little effect except to anger her, and she picks him up and throws him into the darkness on the edge of the painting, hoping that it will take him to the real world. The trio of adventurers also leap into said darkness in order to exit, remembering that this was how they had been unceremoniously tossed out in the previous Runalt-meeting.

They land back in the main nightmare just in time to see the image of runalt with a terrified face laying on the floor, as though painted there. One of his hands is smudged and Cleo is wiping her mouth with a cloth. She couldn’t resist trying to taste a king. Unfortunately paint tastes nasty as hell. Nobody really comments on this directly but suspicions are piqued.

Almuund’s painting-coins now seem to be canvas wrapped wooden discs, painted to look like very realistic gold coins. He hopes someone will pay for these. They show extraordinary craftsmanship after all.

Akela destroys the picture frame where runalt once was with a kick, revealing the stairs to the rooms below. The smell of paint thinner and lizards wafts up from the depths.