The Last Ride of the Zen Jihad
Postcards From the Abyss



Voodelmar


Yeah, so there we are in Pazunia. Plane of a Thousand Gates. The First Level of the freakin' Abyss. Not found in most guidebooks, but quite an interesting place, nonetheless.

For example, the Sun, or whatever that looming red thing in the sky is, never seems to move. That is, it never seems to move *sideways*. You get the feeling, though, that sometimes when it gets angry, or maybe hungry, it comes in real close to the ground. That would explain the melted stonework poking out of the rusty soil here and there.

The soil itself is noteworthy. Drip water into it and the water quickly disappears. No big deal? Try dripping blood on it. Hordes of tiny bony creatures appear out of the ground and fight each other for the nourishment. They crunch underfoot during battle.

We've had lots of opportunities to try the little blood-on-the-soil experiment. This is probably no surprise to you, but the Abyss seems to be full of demons, and they sometimes attack folks like us.

Us? We're the freakin' Zen Jihad, baby. Ever hear of us? The guys who killed Bane's Son? Founded the Kingdom of Bloodstone? Led the armies of Damara against the Witch-King Zhengyi and kicked his moldering ass off the plane? Yeah, baby, that's us. Doomsday, Herak, Smith, Broomhilda, Thyatius, Berk. Names that will go down in history.

Only most of those guys *are* history. Doomsday's the only one of them still here and he's not all here, if you catch my drift. Who else have we got? Lets see, hmm: a giant spider, a paladin of evil, a high priest of the deathgod, the wizened servant of a mad Thayvian lich, a demon--no, make that one and a half demons; the other demon thinks he's a dwarf . . . I could go on. No wonder the troops cheered when they heard we were going to the Abyss.

Why did we go to the Abyss? Good question and I've got a good answer for you. When an even half dozen gods tell you to go somewhere, my friend, unless you've got cojones the size of Heliogabalus, you pretend you were going to go anyway and start packing. Plus, this Zhengyi guy was really beginning to irk us, what with all that zombifying, sodomizing, and hanging from the parapets shit he kept pulling with our buddys' corpses.

Anyhoo, so we're shipped off to the Abyss to find the Witch King Zhengyi and bring him back to Damara to stand trial in a court of law. Hey! No hitting! I was just checking to see if you were listening. Ok, so we're sent to the Abyss to give Zhengyi a long-overdue check-in at the Myrkul Inn. (You get the sense that the guys sending us wouldn't mind if we checked in with him, if you know what I mean -- and I think you do.)

So we pop into the Abyss to be met by your run-of-the-mill three headed demon. A dog head, a cat head, and some kind of snake, whatever--I don't remember. We let him say his piece and then kill the dude. Multi-headed demons make us nervous these days. Sue us.

In the middle of the battle we're joined by some kind of gnoll-like demon who seems to be on our side. The party welcomes him like a brother -- some kind of prophecy about gnolls or something to do with Doomsday's ex-wife or something like that. I missed it--I was too busy checking out the tiny bony creatures swarming in the big pool of blood that was forming around the body of the dark paladin.


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