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Adventure #4 – The Lair of the Mad Alchemist

At the ruined city of Tlaar the PCs find themselves... Well — only one among them is motivated to accomplish anything & he finds himself incapable of doing so. Gideon wants to go to... What I understand to be another dimension where some Elves live. His ambitions are confusing & unattainable. The rest of the group does a little bit of helping with the newly resettled refugees. Time passes & eventually there's some thought of perhaps following gnoll cattle-thieves trail to their hideout. Mishka has a little interest in this as it seems that her people are being exterminated by these hyena creatures & that there's not much explanation as to how or why.
Loksh the secret rat-man/ tiefling is especially interested in the group's endeavor — he's got an interest in a friend of his who's gone missing.
Long story short- the group uses tricks & wisdom to steal the cattle back & drive them to town for the benefit of all the refugees. They do want to go back though — having lightly tested the boundaries of the Gnoll hideout.

Gideon sneaks into the camp invisibly & finds that the creatures have a stone giant bolted to a stone table — the giant is fitted with all kinds of tubes & mechanical armatures that connect to something underground. He decides to attempt to break the giant out unobserved by the ravening, feral gnolls (much more terrible than most they'd encountered) — only to be attacked by the proprietor of the place — an unknown magician with teleportation abilities & a powerful sense of his territory's boundaries. He attacks & drives Gideon off- but his alarms & wards having been triggered, he calls his minions & they spring to action to defend the base.
This consists principally of a pair of Centaur/Scorpion — things — which charge the plain & make short work of Mishka, Pike & Non — who aren't well positioned to defend against the charge. They are in good shape to magically keep one another alive & it's only at the last moment that Warrill, expending his most substantial psionic abilities wreathes the mysterious base in darkness & manages to mentally beseech the rest of the crew to run.
Which they do — covered by Elwin (activated for this contingency).
Thereafter, confounded & lost, they reconsider their situation & decide that an organized assault of the place may be successful where splitting the party had not been. Indeed they are correct -though the base — and it's mysterious interior of injection molded stainless steel were not particularly well guarded- more hybrids of hyena & scorpion & of course the poor captured giant- — who Pike alone is capable of communicating with.
The group descends into the lair & finds it full of partly dissected members of Mishka's people — all of them surgically & chemically altered & in various (dead) states of becoming Hyena-scorpion-monster-things.
Mishka & Non do their best to destroy the place entirely while Warrill & Pike & Gideon do their best to preserve the uncanny lore that the place contains. They discover many books & papers — among them a letter from Gaz Quercus — Elwin the artificer's longtime rival.

The group frees the giant Grrnn who uses his magical cup to help him forget the recent past including his abduction — but he is the friend that Loksh had spoken of seeking & he is eager to return underground — for there is a hidden city under the earth — a gigantic stalactite that hangs in a cavern as big as a country. There is the Rat metropolis Waeek — where Loksh is from & which Grrnn will return to. He offers to lead the Party there, to the great city — which they agree to.

They make their home in Waeek for a while, planning their next moves...