Sodden Temple - IV

I've got a cold and was a little run down on Friday, and yet I had the most fun I've probably ever had playing D&D.  Mostly because its such a great group of players.

The chaotic party that ended up trapped down in the temple

Gail MU
Mollie DP
Toral DP
Tori hireling
Laria hireling
Alamon DP
Darius F

The party spent as much time shopping in Nidus as they did in a return trip to the Sodden Temple. Toral's gold was burning a hole in his coin purse. Together, the party visited an opium den, tattooist, bought phials of tears from one vendor, and bought the pickled tongues of emperors from another vendor.

Friday. Probably talking to a vendor, they shopped so much.

They stopped on the oustskirts of Nidus to talk to the prophet of the pot who turned out to be the opposite of helpful, happy as he was in his ascetic existence. On feeling threatened he ran off. He did return later to give the party a few tidbits of knowledge about the temple and the fly cult and the relationship between the two.

While still in town the party remembered the tall, stilt-like shoes they'd found in the pack of the luckless adventurer in the temple. Alamon put them on an felt them tug at his feet in the direction of the temple.

They proceeded to head toward the temple and use the shoes to guide them. Getting to the second level of the temple without much problem, they were confronted with a long hall filled knee-high with water. After some experimentation they formed a conga line following Alamon's exact steps.

A door opened into a room with four cultists. The party made quick work of them, a few criticals meant they were felled in one round.

A few more halls, another room, and the chopines lead Alamon to a sunken statue of solid silver.

While investigating the statue they heard noises from the next room.  They searched to find several prisoners chained to the wall.  Apparently they had been kidnapped from the outskirts of Nidus and were, one-by-one being turned into the fly-headed creatures.  The party cut them free and gave them the lanterns to hold.  Toral poked around and found a secret door.

The party tied a rope to the statue and managed to heave it through the secret door.  Back in a flooded hall, they investigated a door.  It opened into a medium sized circular room with a waterfall pouring into it.  Apparently the room is quite deep.  A headless statue juts from out of the water.  A clay sealed door was on the opposite side of the room.  Gail, the magician swam across and was breaking the seal when the rest of the party was attacked by hungry rats from behind.

Again the party had little trouble dealing with the rats.  But decided to leave the unexplored door and get the heck out of Dodge.  After much engineering including some stripping of armor. swimming, and rope tugging.  They managed to get the statue out of the temple and back to Nidus.

They sold the statue and were shopping in Nidus again when Toral realized that a wound on his leg was not healing. He asked for divine aid and the wound healed only to reopen before their eyes.  After much soul searching and actually consulting a mystic in town, he thought he knew the reason.  A quick cut of a blade on Alamon's arm and on Darious' seemed to confirm it.  They had stolen cursed coins from the temple!

At least that's their best hypothesis right now.  And if that is the problem the look on Toral's face showed the difficulty that lies ahead since they spent all that gold on various thing in the Shifting City.
______________________________

Some thoughts
These players are hilarious-- Darius' player decided she would have him get a tattoo of a unicorn horn on his forehead, Toral's player on encountering a vendor selling the pickled tongues of emperors, bought as many as he could.

Part of all this shopping was Toral was trying to spend his cash to earn XP.  Consequently he was the first player in my new era of gaming to ever make it to second.  Let's wish him well with that nasty curs currently on him.

I need to think about the actions of clerics, Toral was smokin' dope and looking for hookers, what does the Allfather think about that?  I think I'll talk about it with Toral's player.  I like the idea of rogues with hearts of gold, but feel there should be some limit.

The prophet of the pot was almost a bust.  I was trying to act out a Diogenes character and realized that he is the antithesis of an adventuring party and would probably have little interest in them.  So I started to improv some flaws for him.  I think he might be a little lonely in his ascetic existence and maybe a bit of a coward or he might have been an adventurer too.

The work I put into generating those wonders in Nidus keep paying and paying.  I thought they would just be color, but I finding the players will interact with them if they can: smoking at communal hookahs, buying weird crap they have no apparent use for.

I'm thinking about exotic animal fights, gambling, and still trying to figure out the exact abstractness of Nidus-- does it have landmarks, does it have neighbourhoods?  Why?  What would they add?  Etc.

I've been researching ships some, since Nidus is on an island.  Found some images.  I'm looking to Moldvay for some simple sea traveling rules.