Matthew Hunter

The grinding noise came from the two statues in the hallway. An expected they had animated. As we heard their footsteps stomping towards us, I gave Morin my large sacks and a torch, telling her to stuff anything valuable from the secret room into the sacks as fast as she could while u-Heury and I tried to deal with the statues. u-Heury set himself up by the door, planning to hold it closed as long as possible.

Faran Magebane We met with the wererats, and despite my best efforts to provoke a fight, ended up with an agreement in principle to mutually defend the city with the deep gnomes. However, the agreement hinged on our group tracking down the source of the ooze and slime invasion nearby. Information from the wererats indicated the pudding invasion had a leader; Speaker for Puddings, or Oozemaster, or God of Slime, or something.

The last two rats fell or fled as we tore apart their nest, finding a few gold coins in the process, but with that Denara’s blessing faded away. We deferred searching the rest of the nest immediately, though we did make an effort to block the hole to the outside to prevent (or at least delay) reentry. We chose to investigate the secret door in the back of the chamber.

We had landed in thick forest, so u-Heury climbed a tree to look around. He saw a few flying creatures in the distance and the cloest way out of the forest to the northeast. We headed in that direction, briefly interrupted by a harpy that didn’t seem interested in us. The harpy eventually flew off, asnd we made it out of the forest and approached one of several towers. Ygnas recognized the emblem above the tower entrance as belonging to Kelguumer, a wizard famed for his interest in insects.

A note from Feverborne brought me to Thatchem. He has been flirting with the new goddess of clensing lately, and frankly it seems to be good for him. I sense a new confidence and strength of will in his manner, though the world seeks to test his faith. While Cloacina is clearly no match for the significance of Denara, even a bathhouse must engage in commerce. Mmhmm. At any rate he had found mention of the floating tower my church had requested I investigate some time ago.

We found Thatchem to be very inviting. Their local temple even has a small shrine for the lesser known divinities. I made an appointment with the local priest (following the ritual clensing rites) and had a symbol of Cloacina the Clenser added, so those of my faith would have a place to express their veneration. It’s small, but a beginning. At the inn, we met a man who calls himself Morrigyn and claims to be an adventurer who lost the rest of his party in Highfell.

I discussed the matter of what to do next with Forrest, and we decided to explore to the north where Verminbane and Cloacina sensed a threat. A town there known as Thatchem was reputed to be only a few miles away from the danger, so we planned to buy horses and scout the road there. Forrest agreed to lend me Verminbane for a week - whatever I chose to do with the blade during that time.

The dwarves melted down the Squeeblade while I watched, after which the high priest thanked me for bringing it to him and conveyed an invitation to see the dwarven king after lunch. I accepted, and arranged to meet with Hammerick on the way out. Hammerick agreed to find Mindy a safe home with a dog just like Kiki. The king asked us to explore the King’s Gate entrance to a dwarven city known as Dwarrowdeep.

One very useful command for locating files and performing operations on them is find with the exec option. find [path] [arguments] -exec [command] {} ; I’ve found this to be particularly useful when adjusting permissions to allow group owners to list a directory: find [path] -type d -exec chmod g+x {} ; The part that’s tricky to remember is the escaped semicolon, hence this post. Applying it only to directories avoids issues with normal files being treated as executable.

In the early days of the internet, and even before that, there was a distinct difference in the terminology used for the people who obtained unauthorized access to computer systems. The term hacker meant someone who created an interesting hack, usually something interesting that used a system – not necessarily even a computer system – to do something outside its design intent. A Rube Goldberg machne is a good example of a hack.