Treasure map weirdness

[Paul]

Here is a good one. The other day, I killed an ophidian matriarch. On its
corpse was, wonder of wonders, a treasure map. Cool I thought to myself,
level 4 map. Let me get some buds together, decodes this thing, and go dig
this up. So......
I get some buds together, I decode the thing. We sail out to the island it is
on, get all set up in anticipation of all the monsters. So, I dig it up. No
monsters. Hmm weird I think, I thought they spawned death monsters as soon as
it surfaced. I open it, no monsters. I reach in and pull the gold, all 1000
of it. An ophidian matriarch with a level one map, my buds were pissed, we
expected an invasion of power monsters, but got "a" ratman. Now matriarchs
are supposed to have level 4 maps. We pondered this for awhile, and
eventually we decided that the matriarch must have looted it off the corpse of
an ophidian warrior. I had been killing 3 or 4 at a time with energy
vortex's. There had been a gathering of them on a hill that had like 25
ophidians in it, and I had killed almost all of them like that. The matriarch
was the first one that I was able to lead away from that group. Sigh.

Paul