Last week, while exploring the caves of chaos, we found a room with a big ruby-encrusted throne up on a raised platform (a dais) and twelve skeleton statues along the walls.

Ogus (that’s me), the brash half-orc thief, goes to pry the gems off the throne, but as soon as he touches the dais, to absolutely nobody else’s surprise, the twelve skeleton statues start moving.

Queue the Steve Erkel catch phrase.

Anyhow, all the party joins in to fight the skeletons. We destroy them handily, but Ogus and Tulo (he’s a halfling thief), get beat up pretty bad during the battle.

Then Ogus and Tulo go back to prying gems off the throne, while the rest of the party watches the hallway entrance to the room.

Maybe because of all the loud yelling during the fight with the statues of skeletons turned into magic skeletons, the party attracted more monsters — a horde of zombies appears in the hallway.

Skargan, our badass half-orc fighter, rushes in and starts hacking zombies, while our half-elf rangers, Bane Woodsoul and Althana, use bows and arrows from a distance.

Tulo and Ogus sit this one out and work on prying gems off the throne. They hear somebody yelling from behind the wall.

Tulo finds a hidden door and and then discovers a secret room!

Inside the secret room, a human is tied up, blindfolded, and gagged. His armor and weapons are scattered on the ground, and a closed trunk is against one wall.

The human seems nice enough, so Ogus unties him.

The paladin notices how Tulo is injured, and right after we get the gag off his mounth, he says “Hi — may I touch you?”

Now everybody thinks the new guy comes off creepy.

Later we learn he meant he can do healing hands once daily. Not that he has some kind of small person fetish.

Meanwhile, Decimus our newly second-level magic user does something awesome in the battle vs the zombies. He makes “pew-pew” sounds and points with his fingers and then one of the zombies explodes.

Tulo helps the paladin (Milo Maccabee) put on his armor and Ogus checks the trunk for traps.

Ogus doesn’t notice any traps on the trunk so he opens it. He disregards whatever needle pricked his finger because there’s cool stuff inside the trunk:

• neat-o punching dagger
• bag of gold coins
• a ring
• a scroll
• a potion

Ogus drinks the potion and puts the ring on. The potion heals some wounds! Hurray! The ring seems to have no effect.

The rest of the party finish turning the zombies into paste, and search for loot. The zombies all wear cool 1970s silver medallions with their zodiac symbols on them. Well, not really, but pretty much something like that.

Once all the party comes together to talk about what to do, Ogus passes the potion flask (with two doses remaining) over to Tulo for a swig. And he hands the scroll and the ring to Decimus our elven magic-user. Everyone meets the new paladin (“My name is Milo and I’m from the first temple of heal-the-party”).

It turns out Milo is on a quest to deliver a sealed message to two halvlings that coincidentally just happen to be Tulo’s lost parents! So naturally we all agree that Milo Maccabee should join our group of adventurers.

Somebody even volunteers to let the paladin touch him.

Then suddenly Ogus falls over –poisoned from the pinprick on the trunk! It was trapped after all!

Decimus discovers the scroll is a “find famililar” scroll, so that’s no help. And the healing potion won’t cure poison. The ring has no effect either.

At this point, the party has to decide what to do. Go back to the keep and look for help to cure Ogus, or just let nature take its course? The party decides to go back to town, but also look around for a potion to reduce foolhardiness.

Fat chance that’s gonna work!

Tune in next week for more kickassery.