Casually you saunter up to the massive Gateway.
Whistling innocently, you begin to push the Gateway closed.
Smiling grimly, the Thing pulls you inside the Ghastly Kingdom of the Dead.
Now stop messing about and go to 59.
That's done it! That's torn it and no mistake! You are in a vast, gloomy underground chamber, measuring 40 feet square. The floor, walls and ceiling are composed of large black granite slabs. The only light is a single flickering torch set in a bracket on the north wall.
There is nothing in the room (except you, of course) and most upsetting of all, there is no door out!!
Is this it? Is this the end? Is this where the brave adventurer ends up, wasting slowly in some dank chamber of the Ghastly Kingdom of the Dead, lonely, miserable, cold, unhappy, facing no brighter prospect than the final solemn journey to the dreaded 14? No, of course it isn't. Pull yourself together. If you look in the southwestern corner you'll find a scrap of ancient parchment on which there is a map. Go to 65 and study it carefully. It may show you a way out of this mess. (And probably into an even worse one, but that's a different story.)
Now there's something to get your teeth into! This looks as though it might turn into an interesting adventure after all. The scrap of parchment seems to be a map of the ghastly place you're in (see Appendix p.219). You'll notice 65 is marked as a 40' x 40' room, exactly as you've discovered it to be. But the map shows no less than four secret doors out. Two of those doors lead into rooms, two into corridors. And the various rooms all have section numbers so you'll know where to go.
(Don't do anything yet, Pip--it's dangerous to rush into things down here.)
At the bottom of the parchment somebody has scrawled a message in blood, or possibly tomato ketchup:
'I have opened the Gateway and hidden the Key! Find it if you can, Sucker!'
Yours in Chivalry,
The Black Knight of Avalon.
So that's where the trouble started. The dreaded Black Knight of Avalon, the most wicked noble in the Realm. Looks as though he was the one who opened the Gateway to the Ghastly Kingdom of the Dead and let loose that Brass Dragon you killed a while ago. He must have used this map to find his way around the Ghastly Kingdom, so maybe you can do the same until you discover where the Key is hidden.
Now turn the parchment over--there may be something on the back.
There is something on the back: a set of instructions for adventuring in the Ghastly Kingdom of the Dead. The handwriting is different to that of the Black Knight, so you should be able to trust what they say. What they say is this:
LEVEL 1
Study the map carefully. You start from the room marked 65. You may pick any of the four secret doors shown as your exit. If a door leads directly into a room, turn to the section number shown to discover what you find there.
If a door leads into a shaded area, you will find yourself in a gloomy 10' wide, 10' high corridor with worked stone walls and stone slabbed floor.
For every 60' (6 squares) you have to travel along a corridor to reach wherever you are going, you must roll two dice to find out if you have encountered any Wandering Monsters. Check the result on the Table headed 'Level 1 Wandering Monsters' in the Appendix.
Sometimes the roll will show you meet no Monsters. Sometimes it will show you do. Wandering Monsters are too stupid to be bribed, and too bad tempered ever to give you a Friendly Reaction, so when you meet any, you must fight to the death.
If you kill the Wandering Monsters, you may continue along the corridor (still checking every 60' in case you meet some more.)
If the Wandering Monsters kill you, then it's off to 14 to re-equip and roll up new LIFE POINTS. But--and this is important--if you are killed anywhere in the Ghastly Kingdom of the Dead, you do NOT have to start the whole adventure again. Instead you return to 65 and start from there. (Or rather here, since this is 65.)
One more thing. The torch in the wall bracket of this 40' x 40' chamber is almost burned out. If you have no torches, lamps or other light sources in your equipment, you must travel in the dark. You'll be able to find your way all right, but you will not fight nearly so well as usual. You will score damage normally, but you will need to roll an 8 or better to hit, even if you're using EJ.
That's the bad news about Wandering Monsters. The good news is that they usually carry a bit of gold around with them and if you manage to kill them, you can add their gold to your own store. The Table shows how much gold each class of Wandering Monster usually carries.
That's it for the corridors. Now the rooms.
What you'll find in the rooms is anybody's guess.
Good luck.
The Black Knight who was name-dropped for the past 2 books is finally featured here!
The obvious bad news here is that we have no light source (we actually bought lamp and torches in the previous book but nobody chose to bring them for this trip! The text doesn't make it too clear, but I think we're supposed to take the combat penalty while we're in the shaded "gloomy" corridors, not in the white rooms.
The good news is that we're actually not very likely to run into wandering monsters on Level 1 as long as we have the Luckstone: thanks to the 3-point modifier, we only run into them If we roll a 12 on the Appendix:
LEVEL 1 WANDERING MONSTERS:
Here's the map for level 1. It's a bit blurred on one part, but that happens to be the room Pip's in right now (65), right at the centre. The map shows that 1 secret door leads to 125 (with no apparent exit from there, so we may be backtracking after that), 1 leads south to 85, another leads into a "gloomy corridor" before opening into 90, and the last leading into another dark corridor that goes into 75 and 70.
LEVEL ONE MAP: