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While the Doubley-Doos were traveling to reunite a handful of goblin refugees with their tribe, they stopped in at Opal Town, the village where their adventures first began. They caught up with old familiar faces and marveled at how the town had changed in the wake of Klaas Shrillbeast’s rebellion. However, they soon began experiencing strange, supernatural occurrences — hearing whispers, seeing visions, and it all seemed to point back to an apple orchard at the edge of town owned by former soldier Talbot Clare.

The Doubley-Doos partnered with Talbot and his friend Clairebell and began investigating the senior officials of the town, whom Clairebell suspected of conspiring to cover up the source of these strange occurrences. It wasn’t long before the Doubley-Doos discovered this to be the case, finding to their dismay that old friends appeared to be wrapped up in some sort of snake-god worshipping cult of which the mayor was the leader. In their investigations, Clairebell disappeared.

After reconvening at Talbot’s place to share their discoveries, they decided to attempt one last pass at finding Clairebell in town. They went to her own house, hoping that perhaps she simply went home to rest before reconvening, but found that everything in the house appeared undisturbed, with dishes left out and laundry piled as if she planned to come back and finish chores later. After searching a bit more of the town with no luck, they decided to return once again to Talbot’s house and discuss their options.

At Talbot’s, they examined the stone rune tiles. They found they didn’t have enough letters to write out the phrase they’d found on the paper from the mayor’s — Tybel gb gur Avtug Frecrag / Ivpgbel gb Xynnf. After spending an hour or so debating, they decided the only thing to be done was to search the orchard and try to root out the problem directly at the source.

It took them a couple hours of searching, but they eventually located a tree in the center of the orchard on a hill. In the side of the hill, carved into the tree, was a massive stone doorway with a pair of messages etched into its face:

“The talks between the thirteen lords soon decayed, their perceptions revealing a shift in character.”

“One of their subjects, a baker, sent a dozen messages, hoping to move their wrought iron wills.”

Along with the phrases were 36 square indentations, which appeared to be roughly the same size as the runes they carried. The group got to work, with Talbot and Shelby taking the lead pouring over the runes. They realized that the two messages were clearly riddles, and found that the gaps fit the number and spacing of the letters of the message from the mayor’s office. Talbot realized the message must be encoded in some way, eventually working with Shelby to crack the code. The messages translated to:

Tybel gb gur Avtug Frecrag

Glory to the Night Serpent

Ivpgbel gb Xynnf

Victory to Klaas

Once they had the translation, they recreated the phrases using the tiles in the door. As soon as the message was in place, the door slid open revealing an old stone stairwell that led deep down into the earth. They followed stairs down, down, down, much farther than seemed possible. Talbot couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong — it was literally impossible for this place to exist. It was too old, too massive. There was literally no way he would have missed someone building it.

At the base of the stairs, they found another massive door. Upon opening the door, they faced a large empty chamber lit by torches. There was a door straight across from them, and a door to their left and right. Searching the floor, Dormin noticed footprints in the dust that seemed clustered around the door to the right. He was able to ease the door open just enough to get an unnoticed glance inside. The room was some sort of barracks housing dozens of snake people…including their goblin friends from the Rockmoore tribe. They’d become changed, patches of scales sprouting on their face and arms, their teeth sharper, their eyes slitted.

They decided to instead try the door across from them — there were no footprints, nor signs of any kind of movement in or out of that room. Upon opening the door, dozens of shadows poured into the room and began to attack them. They frantically fought them off, and scrambled inside, finding a medium sized stone room with a dais in the center displaying a stone.

They found places to hide as the door swung open and several snake-folk soldiers entered the room performing only a cursory search before heading back to their barracks. While the Doubley-Doos prepared to bunk down and get some rest, Talbot investigated the stone on display. He found it wasn’t a normal hunk of rock, but actually a gem covered in lichen. As he peeled the layers of growth away, it began to softly glow, and he realized this was probably used to ward off the shadows until it was overgrown.

Talbot took first shift while everyone else slept, and to his shock and surprise, as everyone drifted off to sleep…they vanished from the room. He couldn’t even feel where they’d been laying. When Shelby suddenly reappeared, waking with a start, Talbot warned her that when everyone falls asleep, they seem to vanish. He suspected the same would happen to him.

He was right. As he drifted off, he vanished from Shelby’s sight. He dreamed he was in the galactic void again, floating on a stone island, adrift in space. He called for someone, threw rocks, shot arrows, but didn’t seem to draw any attention or hear any response. He noticed that when he threw things, they seemed to continue to float off in the same direction at the same speed without slowing or falling, as if gravity was only localized to where he stood. As a large island with a castle floated relatively nearby, he took a risk and leaped into the void, floating across the gulf of emptiness and only landing when he was over the land formation. He was allowed inside the castle walls where he found some sort of festival happening. Once he was on land, the star-filled void was gone, replaced with bright blue sky and a brilliant sun. Birds sang, and everyone was smiling and happy. They offered him free drinks and partied invited him to join their party.

Meanwhile, everyone else had similar dreams about standing on land masses floating in space. In the distance, they could hear a strange hissing sound. They caught movement out of the corner of their eye, but it was always gone when they turned to look.

Dormin woke next, and he realized that besides sleeping to get some rest, he still had not been tired since he’d arrived at Opal Town. His narcolepsy had not bothered him once. Suddenly…an idea occurred to him. He suggested to everyone that they were actually all asleep somehow. He didn’t understand what was happening when they went to sleep in their dream, but it made the most sense–given that nothing made sense. Talbot actually agreed that it made the most sense — he reiterated that this structure literally should not exist without him knowing about it.

They discussed what this meant — could they try to wake themselves up? How would they do that? They knew that when they fought, they were really getting hurt, really feeling pain…so it seemed like that wasn’t a viable option. Shelby suggested they may need to simply see the dream through to the end.

With this newly realized information weight heavily on them, they plotted what to do next.

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Jaz’s dad joined us again this week since his character had ended up being unexpectedly important to the plot — not necessarily vital, but not disposable either. And with that twist at the end of the session, he happily agreed to come back and play again to finish out this arc.

I first got the idea for this way back. I had been thinking about how Matt Colville adapted different movie storylines for his adventure arcs, and I thought that was such a fun way to take familiar premises and make them something fresh by recontextualizing them in D&D. I was still trying to plot out a bit more of what Klaas’s overall plan was, and I thought doing A Nightmare on Elm Street but in D&D would be a fun way to handle things. I was a little afraid that with the revelation that everything happening was a dream, that they’d either be annoyed or frustrated and think that none of this meant anything. But they were all excited and game to keep playing to see what happened.

I had been giving them little hints throughout the game. As the game progressed, I would switch to a new playlist, each one with progressively more sinister music — and I slowly worked in more and more Nightmare on Elm Street tracks into the mix. I started with the remake’s theme because it was less identifiable. By the time they made it to this little mini-dungeon, I was using the actual proper theme. And it still took them a bit to realize it. I’d even been wearing shirts for the past few weeks that had Freddy Krueger on them.

As for the translations and the riddles, if you didn’t figure out the answer to them, it was part of why I was so keen on Jaz’s dad coming back — I knew he was the only one that could solve the riddles. The messages were written in Rot13, a type of cypher where you shift the letters of each word 13 characters, replacing them with a different letter further in the alphabet. Get it? Thirteen lords with a SHIFT in CHARACTER? A BAKER’S DOZEN messages? WROUGHT iron wills?

Jaz’s dad actually laughed out loud when he figured it out. I was glad to be worried, though — literally nobody else had even heard of it before, ha ha. But thankfully, that all worked out well.

The next session was the finale, and it was a ton of fun. We haven’t played since because…well…the Coronavirus kinda put a kink in our scheduling, but we’re going to try to stream our game over Google Hangouts or something soon.

‘Til next time!

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