Who Let the Dogs Out?

After breaking out their cells and clearing the dungeon floor of guards, the party split up; Torvora, Grat, and Quentinia ventured upstairs, whilst Smeeve and Kurrash went down.

Disguised as a below-average height guard, Quentinia took the lead. Turning left to avoid the rooms with the sounds of guards, she found two storage rooms; one had large chests on towering shelves which had some magical source in it and the other appeared to contain the party's armour as well as the sound on sleeping beasts. She signalled for Torvora and Grat to follow and hide in the easterly room as the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs echoed off the stone walls. The group heard the sound of the guard struggling to take an unruly prisoner down to the dungeons. The group contemplated pretending to help, but Torvora and Grat decided it would be an easy win if they could ambush the guard; so they silently followed the guard back down. The guard, now lifting the prisoner clean off the floor, shouted "Hubert! I have another one for you!", but there was no response back. This silence was quickly cut short as Torvora slipped on the last step, alerting the guard. Quentinia jumped into action, racing down the stairs and throwing her dagger 30ft directly into the guard's shoulder. A fight then ensued and the guard was quickly defeated, but even in death his grip around the prisoner's handcuffs stayed. The party then met Fleet, a gnome barbarian who had been captured for releasing the exotic animals The Queen was keeping in cages to ultimately eat. Fleet thanked the party, gathered their belongings, and left their small red hat on the guards body. The group took a moment to heal and devise a plan for collecting their belongings.

It was decided that Fleet, given their affinity with animals and lightness of foot (as well as apparent expendability to the party at this point) would explore the armoury and recover an object from Grat's armour. They however soon alerted the guard dogs to their presence as they stirred from sleep. Quickly throwing their rations into the corner, Fleet managed to distract the dogs long enough to recover the rounded hollow metal object from Grat's armour. Through the use of magically created enticing smells and actual food rations, the party managed to persuade the hounds out of the room and shut the door behind them. As they donned their armour and searched the room it became clear that many of their items were still missing. The party concluded that it was likely that they were the magical source in the other room.

After again distracting the dogs which were now roaming the hallway, Grat, Torvora, Fleet, and Quentinia snuck into the room opposite. They started searching the maze-like room but soon came upon a nest of rats. After some failed shifting of trunks from the shelves squashed some rats they became irate and began attacking the party. In the panic of their retreat Quentinia was left alone with the rats being unable to see in the darkness of this room and brought close to death by the rats. The scattering of the party alerted some guards playing cards in the room to the group's presence. At the last moment however Quentinia, still disguised as a guard managed to convince their apparent colleagues that they were a new recruit tasked with guarding the items taken from the prisoners. Quentinia was lead to the necessary goods. The rest of the party followed, being harried all the way by swarms of rats. The items were recovered and a hasty exit was made back down below the prison.

There they found an idle Smeeve and Kurrash who didn't seem to have made quite so much progress. Another passage seemed to be loosely boarded up but the barricade was quickly dismantled. Through the entrance the reunited party found what seemed to be an quite small abandoned excavation. However, some expert detective work from Fleet and Torvora's technical knowledge of such work combined to lead the party to concluded that one of the walls was in fact false and could be breeched. The party managed to break down the wall and enter into a much larger mining system underneath the castle.