Intro to a one-shot I’m running for extended family on the 26th:

Intro to a one-shot I’m running for extended family on the 26th:

If there’s one thing your mumma always told you, it was: “don’t get involved dwarfish politics”. (Or she would have, if she’d bothered staying sober long enough to give you any advice at all.) And yet here you are. The Brightforge clan have accused the Quartzhammer dwarves of kidnapping some of their children.

Why in the Forty-Three Hells would they do that? Some tiresome tit-for-tat that goes back centuries, but you zoned out and missed the details. Why do you care? You don’t. Except that the Brightforge matron says she knows exactly where you can find Doctor Pinchferret, that damnable heretic you’ve been hunting all these months. And Inquisitor Valeria ain’t the type to give up just because a thing is impossible.

But that’s all academic at the moment. Now you’re in the forest, things have a simpler shape to them: tracks to be followed, lookout to be kept, wildlife to be murdered.

Does it strike you as strange that the trees are crowding closer and closer together as you go, to the point where they’ve blocked out the sun and you’re losing all sense of time? Not really: you endured far worse in the Mire of Dreadful Parasites. What about that hypnotic, otherworldly singing on the edges of your hearing? Nothing a bit of bread in the ears won’t fix.

But now… well, this is a little strange. Unless you’re much mistaken, the Quartzhammer clan don’t make their home in a dumpy little hut in the forest’s deepest glade. And yet here the trail leads.

You suppose there’s nothing for it but to draw arms and kick down that rotten-looking door…

The hut is the Grumblehut, from Johnstone Metzger​’s Market in the Woods. What follows is a “dungeon” inspired by Alice in Wonderland and Terry Pratchett’s Carpet People.