The background is that one of the PCs, a rat-man, had managed to get invisibility cast on him at the end of the last session, so was still running around invisible. So they went into the room with the gnome statues, and after a bit of poking around, Slippy (the invisible rat-man) picks up one of the statues, which promptly also goes invisible. The kobold which was hiding in the cupboard spying on the gnomes and now the PCs jumped out of his skin seeing the statue disappear, and let out a yelp which alerted the PCs to his presence. They opened up the cupboard and found him sniveling there in the corner, waving a rusty short sword at them. Soon enough the whole group of 10 kobolds was gathered in the room, trying to defend their territory and assert their claim to having found the gnomes first. Slippy, taking advantage of his invisibility, tried to trick the kobolds into thinking that he was speaking as the spirit of the gnomes (a la C3PO in return of the Jedi), and managed to convince them that they should let the PCs pass. So they descended down the stairs into the abandoned temple level. They quickly found the weird extra-dimensional corpse, which they'd been paid by a wizard to extract from the dungeon, and began making plans as to how on earth they were going to get the thing up the stairs and out of there. They came up with the idea of enlisting the help of the kobolds to lift it out, so Slippy went back upstairs to try to exercise his supernatural sway on the creatures once more. The kobolds, in the mean time, had been making their own plans, and their awe at the "voice of the gnomes" had turned to suspicion. They wrestled the rat-man as he re-emerged, managing to locate him by the clanking of his armour. So the tables were turned and Slippy soon found himself being shaken upside down, with the kobolds yapping gleefully as items of his equipment fell onto the floor and became visible. The rest of the party returned after a while, wondering what had happened, and a judiciously used sleep spell sent Slippy and the mass of wrestling kobolds into a slumber. They awoke to find themselves tied together, chain gang style, and were taken down to the weird corpse to help try to move it. Of course the giant flies attacked at this point, and in an unfortunate carnage of burning oil, all of the kobold helpers were incinerated! A rather grisly end.
The PCs eventually managed to get the body out though, after returning to town and buying a horse and cart and some strong ropes.
And, by the way, they did take all the gnome statues, and were rather weirded out to find them vanished the next morning and only a note reading "touch us again and we'll cut your hands off" left behind.
So I just wanted to share that little snippet of the story, and thank everyone who collaborated on the dungeon -- an excellent time was had by us tonight!
