A few days ago, we went up to the Cracked Keep, determined to investigate it and help Prihelm fulfill his destiny... For a place with such a formidable reputation, it certainly looked harmless enough, but looks, as we well knew, could be deceiving (and in this case, we suspected, they probably were).

At any rate, no sooner had we gotten into the place than we ran into another undead. I don't know what it is about this place, but I sure have been seeing a lot of them! I'm even getting almost blase about it! I mean, we never had those back in the forests and such where I come from, but it seems like every time I turn around, there's another slobbering horde of the blasted things. I'm getting rather sick of them, but at least they're not as scary as they used to be!

This one was the grand-daddy of all undead vermin. We'd seen a pile of white something or others as we'd wandered into the room, so over we went to investigate it, and it clambered to it's feet, showing us that it was the skeleton of a giant or something, since it was a good fifteen or twenty feet tall! But as the brave heroes that we are, we charged it, figuring that he was only one and we had such capable fighters as me and Tolec to help cut it down to size. Of course, things weren't quite that easy...

What we had failed to account for is that in the enclosed space, there wasn't as much room to dodge and avoid its attacks, so no sooner had I managed to deal it a few wounds with my trusty blades than I found myself flying through the air and becoming one with the wall, an ugly bruise already developing on my side. I was beginning to understand why people had never returned from the awful place, but since I had a bone to pick with that monster (pun fully intended), I painfully got back to my feet and charged back into the fray, resolved to be a little more careful this time! And my resolve paid off, because I was able to duck in time to avoid its next blow! Of course, Tolec got clobbered instead of me, and had to peel himself off the floor, but by the time he'd done so, Prihelm and I had already managed to finish the big thing off!

After a brief pause to heal up some from the battle, we moved on into the next room, which seemed to be the great hall or something along those lines. There were all sorts of interesting features about it; several exits, of course, a whole lot of skeletons (thankfully, just dead, not undead!), a great big chasm running across the middle of the room (must have been caused by Torm's wrath or something), and a decorative fountain, with a few coins inside! I was a little curious about the last thing (I was thinking it might be a wishing well, really!), so I went over to take a look, and I must have hit something bad, because the next thing I knew, there was this bubbling hissing green goo flying everywhere! Thinking it wise to not let the stuff touch me, I avoided it readily, but my comrades were either not as sensible or not as skilled as me, and several of them got themselves covered with the stuff, which turned out to be acid!

Let me just state for the record that I have no idea why my friends did not at this point merely leave the room, since most of them were close to the door, but they didn't, and the next few minutes were a blur of people rushing around, dodging streams of acid and cursing as the stuff ate into them! When the fountain finally stopped spewing the stuff, I alone had managed to avoid any serious injury, and Haley had even passed out from her wounds! Since we were all so wounded, we decided to call it a day and went back to town to heal and rest up. I felt remarkably sheepish; one of my great skills should have been able to detect a trap, but I failed, and my best friend almost died because of it! No one has really said anything about it, but it still makes me kind of unhappy! Fortunately, the temple was able to heal us up just this once (after this, apparently, we will be required to make a donation for such services), and we were ready to go again in the morning.

We got past the great hall, and chose to take one of the exits at random. There wasn't much to see, and as we moved deeper into the keep, for a while, all was quite boring. But suddenly, we opened a door and found ourselves face to face to face to face (etc.) with a bunch of ghouls! Still MORE undead! I really really hate those things!

Sam, it seems, hates them even more than I do, since his eyes got this maniacal glint in them and he went charging in to attack them! I couldn't let him be killed, so I went to help even while Haley and Alamon started to turn the things! They were mostly successful, leaving us with only one to deal with, which Prihelm finished off readily enough. I'm very proud of the man; I told him that if he worked with me often enough, his swordsmanship would come around!

We stood around debating what to do with these creatures; Sam and I considered them abominations and wanted to get rid of them, especially since we knew we would eventually have to face them again anyway, since the turning wouldn't last forever. Most of the others were afraid that we wouldn't be able to defeat them in an even battle, since they have that paralysis touch thing, even though it doesn't really bother me! Eventually, we decided to go for it; the plan was originally to have just Sam and I standing in the doorway so that the ghouls could only get at us one or two at a time, and we could have Alamon and Prihelm help heal us if necessary. But things didn't quite turn out that way, and after I'd managed to kill the one that Alamon had turned and Sam and I had killed another one with missile fire (breaking my bow in the process! I think it must have been damaged when the skeleton bashed me, or maybe it got hit by a little acid or something), the remaining five charged at us, and things rapidly grew extremely chaotic!

When the dust had sebtled, all of us were wounded, Prihelm was out cold and lucky to be alive, and one of the ghouls, in attacking Sam, had manged to ruin his armor's breastplate! It was very discouraging, proving to me that the party isn't as capable of working together as one might like. I guess we already knew that, but still, sometimes I think I ought to just declare myself leader and get everyone to agree to listen to me for a change!

There was much debate again at this point, with a few of us wanting to go back to town to recover and the rest of us determined to press on a bit more; we in the latter group won out, and onwards we went! Of course, in the next room, someone set off a gas trap, and the group quickly followed my lead in going down the stairs into what I had presumed was the cellar but which we thing was, in fact, the sunken tower!