AT THE TAVERN: KaM and friends gather at the Steel Tavern. A swig (or two) of ale to steel their courage, and the hunt begins.

NORK-10: The party lands in the deepest depths of the Nork dungeons and is warmly received by the inhabitants. These are BIG NPCs of all classes.

OUTSIDE THE LAIR: The south door leads to twin lairs, one for each warden. Gwaine is the forger of the greatsword Excalibur.

WARDEN BATTLE: Notice I have one hit point less than when I started the hunt? 920 hits was not enough to prevent me from being one-shotted by the warden. He sucks hits and lots of experience on a fatal wound. As players fell, they were resurrected in the middle of the battle and redressed. And players did fall. Some were hit for over 1000 points in a single round.

Proning, flattening and stunning are the basic tactics. Nothing really fancy. At skill 25, I sometimes had trouble landing a blow because of the high MA skill of the warden.

It also has a powerful PSIMIRROR disc on it, so magic damage attacks by psionic users are not possible. However, healers and mentalists play a very important role in the hunt for their support spells.

Wardens have a perpetual HIDE disc active. They are extremely difficult to see off-hex unless a skilled healer casts AIDE on you, and then they were invisible to me from 2 hexes away. Yes, this is a hunt for BIG players! For this party, it was not a long hunt, but it was an intense hunt.

DAGGER: Wats wields an exotic metal dagger wrenched form the corpse of the warden. You can see the description in the scroll window. I do not know the stats on the dagger. If you accidently twig to Cobrahn with it on your belt, you will not be able to go back to Nork with it as it is considered "Cob" gear. Hold the dagger in your left hand and walk through the Tree Town portal to Nork to activate special code to get around this bug.

HEART AND EXCALIBUR: Navarre has just traded a warden heart for the famed Excalibur greatsword. Check out the description in the scroll window. The sword releases the EarthCrush disc on each hit, which can slay friend as well as foe.