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The party has now reached Mountainroot Temple and fought the Slystone Dwarves and the sirens in a room which is actually 1,000 square metres in size. I'm mentioning this in passing because the idea is that the Slystone Dwarves (actually a kind of malevolent gnome) herd PCs in the direction of the sirens who sing and screech, but the sheer size of the Chamber of Doors and the apparent laziness of the sirens made this unlikely. In the end, the sirens had to come down off their perches only to find that Power and Plot were music critics.

Anm. Yes, yes, I know the creatures are harpies. I now have a theory that one of the WotC kobolds got "harpy" and "harp" confused and conflated them with sirens. In fact, "harpy" is derived from a Greek verb meaning "snatch, carry off" and the creatures are,

When I read the earliest Sherlock Holmes stories, it was clear from Conan Doyle's language that he was trying to be sensational in the way articles in tabloid newspapers are sensational. The openings to some of the tales at least seem to begin in the vein, "Of all the most peculiar cases with which Sherlock Holmes dealt, the most most peculiar was the Case of the Sausage Grease and Beer Stains."

I've just finished Chapter 3 of The Temple Between, which got to be so long that I've ended up splitting it into five shorter sub-parts.

I started by sending the party off to Stone Anvil, which is the main temple of Moradin in Overlook. It was mainly to give them something to do because the ambush in the alley pointed them in a more useful direction. Although they know General Zithiruun is giving

The Temple Between kicks off with the party going to see Lavinya in the Temple of Erathis in the Divine Knot in Nine Bells. Her main conern is her friend, Haelyn, who's the caretaker of the shrine of Erathis in Tradetown. She also mentions that the senior clerics in Overlook have all been behaving slightly strangely. She doesn't mention any reward for services rendered.

While Gunpowder doesn't mind asking around about Haelyn, he isn't going to put out for free, and takes the view that poking senior clerics with a stick is probably a bad idea. (Well, you wouldn't do the same to the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Pope, would you? In fact, you wouldn't get much within five metres of them at the best of times.) This is a cash-for-questions gig rather than free-to-air service paid for by the

The completion of Den of the Destroyer took longer than I was expecting and now that I've been thinking about Gilgathorn, the elf bounty hunter, I find that I've made some interpretation errors of my own.

I'll start with Gilgathorn. In the end, I thought I might use him as comic relief after the massively long and strenuous battles in Graystone Fortress. Because of the eye patch and the scars, I had the party keep calling him a pirate, which annoyed him, and when he attacked them, he tripped over a dead gnoll. His elderwood falcons flew off to hunt rabbits and the ironwood hounds treated the whole thing as a bit of fun. Gunpowder let him go after making him promise not to bother the adventurers again.

Gilgathorn's problems started in Nine Bells. When someone with an eye patch and scars

Let's start with some whimsy today. I'm sure I can't be the only person to have wondered whether Spiderman really is evil because he ought to find favour with Lolth. What might she have written on her blog after seeing the third Spiderman film?

What a load of rubbish! First, Spiderman only had four legs!! That's not a spider!!! That's a dog!!!! Just like the film!!!!! LOL(th)!!!!!!

Then he turned into evil four-legged Spiderman! And then he turned back!! I cried so much!!! And the Raven Queen was all like "Shut up, dude!!!!"

(As you can see, Lolth is a little prone to the excessive and pointless use of exclamation marks.)

I've almost reached the end of Den of the Destroyer, but kind of let the final battle and then the severing of the links to Yeenoghu's realm get a bit dragged out.

I'm sure that when Demogorgon instructs one of his kobold clerics to devise a new adventure, the lucky minion devises a plan. Planning is good as I frequently tell my little darlings because, as non-native speakers of English, they need to do it to help the quality of their writing. Even for native speakers, it's a good idea if you're producing some formal piece of writing and need to be sure of what you're going to say. The problem may be, though, that the resulting essay is mechanistic – the five-paragraph essay, which Americans so seem to like, or the stultifying Chinese 八股文 (Bagu Wen "Eight-legged Essay), which was the mainstay of the imperial examinations.

Of course, it's possible to plan and still produce utter nonsense because you also need to think about what you're

I had the party follow Witch Stream to a place called Tradespur (which I envisaged as a small trading post where goods might be ferried between the Giant's Shield Mountains and the southern parts of Elsir Vale) before they set out overland to Graystone Fortress.

The battle on the steps against the guards wouldn't really favour either side. The gnolls kept getting hit in the legs and tumbling down the stairs, and the Stonewalker Spirit was at a disadvantage because the statues it was possessing had no legs and kept toppling over and squashing the gnolls.

At that point I paused for a bit and looked at the details of Graystone Fortress, but someone seems not to have been paying much attention.[1] For one thing, the map in Den of the Destroyer is of a dungeon not a fortress, and it's laid

So, in Den of the Destroyer, Sertanian summons the party back to Brindol to have a chat with a talking sword called Amyria.

"[Take] me to Fortress Graystone and free me from this prison," says Amyria.

And off the adventurers are supposed to go without even asking whether Amyria is good or bad or whether she's been imprisoned in a sword for some very good reason. What's the party to do?

I have a good mind to transform Amyria into a small, female balor.

"I'm a balor? What does that mean?"

"Well," replied Gunpowder choosing his words carefully, "you eat bankers, stock brokers and politicians for destroying the world's economy, and give puppies and kittens to children."

"Oh, that sounds nice. I'm not really sure about the wings and the claws, though."

"All the cool monsters have claws

Instead of sitting here thinking about Den of the Destroyer for the rest of the year, I've actually got on with it. The party has reached Brindol, spoken to Amyria, and defeated the bounty hunters who burst into the Hall of Great Valour just in the nick of time to keep the action going. Lord Sertanian, who happens to have acquired a hammer called the Fist of Moradin when he was an adventurer himself, beat one of the dwarves to death because he was so incensed by the damage done to the hall so soon after its restoration following the attack by the Red Hand of Doom. Gilgathorn was planning to mop up after the bounty hunters, but the circumstances weren't quite right, and he was also a little unnerved by Sertanian wandering around with a bloodied hammer. Well, the old boy is almost as mad