'This is supposed to be really good adventure,' said my darling. 'You basicly have to escape from prison of Dark Elves who live in the Underdark and who captured you and your party during one of their raids.'
'Pffff. Easy,' I thought. 'Call me Monte Christo Papillon the Second. Prison escape is my hobby.' There was a time when I was loving prison stories. I have seen four movie versions of Les Miserables, I know the musical by heart and I have read the book. I am sure there is no possible version of Javert which I would not be able to deal with. My dear half gently reminded me one of our last adventures which he was leading as a DM. My character has fallen into the mean trap of powerful wizard, got captured by some weird cultists and failed so badly in all attempts to escape that my boyfriend sacrificed me (my character) to the Devil, woke me up in hell and let me wander through and find the way out after quite a time. He claimed that it was revenge for my character's lack of initiative, but honestly, what can one do when you roll three times quit fail and than you are so shocked from the following events (as any Christian would be) that any initiative is totally impossible.
The talk is about D&D. Fantasy role-playing game when one is the narrator (Dungeon Master) of the story and others are main characters. It is unbelievable fun. We usually enjoy playing one of the official book, when my darling reads the chapter in advance, prepares story in his fantasy and than leads my character through the adventure. Our previous and also very first book were Lost Mines of Phandelver and we were looking forward to start a new one.
Anyway, this time I was sure, that our party is strong enough to deal with anything without too much hassle. We have dog-barbarian which does not speak, but which can do most of the fighting, there is second character, which is played by my boyfriend (yeah, DM has also one character to play and to occasionaly give a hints), which can heal the wounds and do magic and my Ella is already level five. In level one she already had no problem escaping various places, lockpicking and sneakily go wherever she wanted. Usually I don't even need to do that much because the environment is full of causual hints and story nicely flows. Fights can be easily avoided by just hiding and sneaking around the monsters and more or less everything is just fine. So - no problema. Following section contains spoilers, so if you are planning to read the book, stop right here.
What was my surprise when we got not only knocked out and captured immediatly after we started to play, but our dog and my squirell dissappeared and Rufus, my gnome companion which was played by my boyfriend, got purposefully sent for shift with another group, so Ella was left there alone to make decisions for herself. Immediately after she woke up from ten days of nightmares! I honestly did not aspect DM to be so thoughtful and to take away not only equipment of our characters, but even swap their clothes for some sort of striped prison mundur. Which means Ella does not have her beloved lockpick anymore. Which makes escape in chains quite complicated. She also does not have any money, food, cards, pocket knife and neither has she her short sword and crossbow. Usually she finds these things 'accidently' in some storage room nereby, after using lockipick to free herself and than she uses magic to occupy attention of the guards. Not this time, because there is no 'nereby'. There is no escape from the cell apart from the way to forced labour. And conditions are totally awful. People die on the way there. Like actually really die, falling off the cliff and being eaten by gigantic spiders. I asked once the guard for contact for Workers Union and immediately lost half of my health from a kick. Oh my. Remaining health I almost lost for not speaking politely to some bully hyena. Another shock was that in the place is anti-magic zone! OMG! Aaaaaagh! I slowely started to fear Ella is really going to die there. In comparism with this, all our previous adventures were just chilling in the kindergarden! And it got darker.
I started invastigations among fellow prisoners. My plan was either to get a spoons and dig a tunnel or somehow get to the hospital, because everyone knows that from the hospital it is always easy to escape. However, I had to discard the first idea when it turned out, that we do not have decades to stay and just do our forced labour while secretly digging a tunnel. This is not Toulouse Prison. Dark Elves apparently each month sacrifice the prisoners in some citadel to something, probably some sort of spider. (Bleee, I really, really hate spiders, yuk yuk yuk) So we actually have only few weeks and maybe not even so. This is definitely not enough to dig anything, not even with a drill. And I guess they do not have many drills in fantasy world.
I got spontaneous idea to ask my fellow prisoners for some sort of dark market, as it sometimes in prison works. I noted that in Czechia for example, quite a few prisoners managed to get even mobile phones this way.
My boyfriend however ruined this plan with question, whether I aspected to have any connection. At least I managed to get a joint from the meditating frog, Shusha the Awaken. I also made a friends with some baby mushroom which talks with telephaty and I had flirtatuous conversation with fellow prisoner - Dark Elf Assassin, who otherwise refuses to talk. Nice company we have there.
The plan with the hospital has died as well. One of the prisoners, gigantic Orc, started the fight and got shot by arrows with sleep serum. Than he was thrown down the bridge as a food for spiders, which immediately did their job. No mercy. Poor Orc. Poor Ella.
Ojojojooooooj, this will end bad.
I also cannot get any hints from my DM, because Rufus just keeps repeating that he thinks he will die there.
Ojojoj.
This is the whole level thougher than I thought.
Ojojojojojoj.