A Dangerous Trial

Well there isn't a lot of fame to be had from returning a giant to town (everyone tends to be focused on the giant you've brought back).  We did however end up with a decent bit of gold and items.  The knight checked in with the baron's castle right away and ends up getting a beat down in a jousting tournament and then a relaxing swim with sharks (yes its a theme for us).

The barbarian heads to the tavern and ends up picking an arena fight with an Ogre.  This goes as well as one might think and the ogre gets pummeled into the tavern floor but is only knocked out.

The ranger yet again attracks the attention of an Assassin, this time a BL 4 one!  Even though this one was two level higher the ranger comes out on top with some luck, barely.

We did end up finding a new quest and for some reason though we could handle a +1 BL dungeon!  This one comes from the (nearly finished) Traps! expansion: The Trial.  The horrendously eccentric baron of this port has created his own dungeon, setup plenty of traps and stocked it with dangerous monsters.  The obvious next step is to invite a few morons, er, heroes to best its challenges for reward and fame!

 This is an odd thing for a baron to invest his gold in for sure but the khornate symbol on the first doorways makes us wonder if its madness or corruption that built this dungeon...

 Turn 1 step one: roll a 1!  The first encounter is a nasty one with a selection of skinks and saurus and much worse, a saurus champion on cold one!  The cold one charges in targeting the barbarian pushing the ranger into range of all the saurus spearmen who have gang up at this level...

The saurus and skinks are blasted sworded away fairly quickly but the gold one mounted champion keeps beating our barbarian down until he becomes the first to hit the floor.  Thanks to the permanent injury table he even gains a concusion (bad treasure for sure).  This will reduce him to WS 1 for the rest of this adventure!

This causes the mounted champion to send his attacks (the cold one ate the barbie...) against the elf.  Thankfully we still have healing potions!

Eventually we bring down the cold one and are left with the champion itself.  The battle doesn't last much longer and we finally get to move on to the exploration of the dungeon.

The first room discovered is the crocodile pit.  The Baron may be mad but our sanity is in tact enough to try another door!  We nope out of that path right away.

And wouldn't you know it another '1' is rolled on the event die and we get our first demons (which per the scenario are more likely to show up in this dungeon).  Stocking the dungeon with lizardmen is one thing but summoning demons to infest your hobby dungeon?  We should probably not live in this port anymore...

We make short work of the nurglings but yet again a 1'1 is rolled before we can regroup and we have to carve our way through a few witch elves and shades! The shades have hit and run so the one remaining shade at the end of the turn runs away to join the next monster group.

Finally the event die behaves and we end up staring into the bridge of peril.  This isn't a particularly nice room to find but it seems less dangerous than the crocodile pit as in there monsters can throw you in and destroy the party!

The party (foolishly) jumps onto the bridge and we roll for the monsters, two groups, one at BL 3 and another at BL 4...

Pink horrors and  flamers are bad enough at this level but rat ogre champions and jezzails make it much worse!

The bridge rotates and the mage summons a fimir to aid us from the cube of terror.   Our weapons are nigh ineffective against the rat ogres and their damage output forces the mage into a healing role instead of a nuke role.

We get lucky with the pink horrors as they aren't casting any tzeentch magic that we can't deal with however the barbarian and ranger are dropping every turn to the 8 rat ogre attacks !

Some of the jezzails at least get set on fire by the Tzeentchian flames but the rat ogres are barely wounded at this point and the mage is not built to keep up with the healing duties!

The bridge finally rotates after a few painful turns and after a quick negotiation we get out of there fleeing an inevitable death.

As we flee the monsters load onto the bridge to catch up but as difficult as this room is to clear, its even harder to catch up to a fleeing party and we get out of the dungeon easily.  Our lives are in tact but our pride is badly inured.

We did spoil the rest of the dungeon and it turns out we just had the accursed treasure room followed by our exit room, which would have had objective room monsters.  Certainly with the bridge monsters in pursuit this would have been a death trap but at least we didn't go down the wrong path!