Was too tired to take notes or map, as I had been up too late flying the last couple nights before ;-) but here is roughly what went down, as best as my muddled memory can do. We started in the tunnels under the mountain whose entrance we had discovered in the cellars of the ruins of the Dwarven monastery where we went on our quest for magic fungi for the disease cure in the previous session.
After a bit of wandering, an earthquake, and a stirge encounter, we discovered a clan of cannibalistic cave men and a crippled up escaped dwarf victim who had to write his responses, since they cut out his tongue among other wounds. We avoided them, using a (secret?) door the dwarf led us to and he guided us on to a dwarf city in a large cave on the far side of the mountain.
The city was under siege by "barbarians", some of whom seemed to actually be local knights who were trying to maintain human territorial claim over the region. The dwarf king (named something odd I wrote down) declared he was taking up his rightful ancestral claim and wanted us to serve as mercenaries to defend the dwarf city against the siege. The politics sound a bit like the ongoing mess in the Middle East to me. My dwarf Glant is naturally sympathetic to the dwarf king, but Weasel of course is looking to the first opportunity to sell him out, and the rest are more into the idea of finding the legendary lost dwarf treasure, so I keep pretty quiet in the negotiation. However as we start to wish the king a good war and bugger off, he offers us 500 gold apiece to help defend the citadel which puts a different complexion on it, so we tentatively agree.
The dwarf cleric takes us aside after our royal audience and dispatches us off to go find a maguffin, the blue crystalline lower half of a statue of an elf hero dwarf-friend, that rejoined, might summon the dude back from the dead to break the siege or something like that. He'll cover for us while we run his hopefully game changing errand. The prospects of loot seem better than reenacting Masada as mercenaries so we go off with the map he had from a wounded dwarf explorer of the deep passages, to the place where he found the top piece of the statue.
We go through some ancient dwarf ruins, experience another Earthquake of Foreshadowing and eventually reach the spot marked X, a large room with a big rough hole in the floor and some albino big eyed subterranean lizard-workmen. They won't let us look at the boxes of stuff they are piling up next to the hole but aren't offensive, so after the usual ethical hemming and hawing of a dungeon party let them be and go down their hole. We promptly run into their larger work party below the rough stair and a couple of tough, well armored guards. Worklizards run off when the inevitable fight starts and we are doing well against the guards, aside from the pelting our front line guys take from bad slinging by the party rear.
Then a big pack of pasty lizard guardsmen and the lizard shaman with the obligatory skull headdress that instantly gets knocked askew by a well placed slingstone show up and things look bad for our interlopers, so we go into fighting retreat mode, planning to lay down a flaming oil barrier below us on the stair as we retreat upward.
And there Cliff hangs for another couple weeks. Seriously, the fighter at the front getting pelted by friends is played by Cliff.
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