Previously, in Nightwick Abbey...
Session 32 - 29nd of September 1391
This week's adventurers:
Sotar (Cleric 3)
Ianthe (Changeling 2)
Liminal Space (Changeling 1)
Verinka (Changeling 1)
Brother Farthing (Cleric 1)
Copronymos Maximus (Cleric 1)
Hirelings:
Ticze
Heyno
Fidgety Nodge
Timo
Downtime In the Village
Since last week, Mayfly the Magician stopped by the Medusa's Head and translated the runes on Mechtild's new magic sword. "Steel" the runes read. It seems a bit anticlimactic for a magic sword, but maybe once we see it in action our minds will be changed. However, that won't happen yet. Mechtild's still healing from losing a leg and will be out for a few more weeks (though she can pay for better treatments to quicken her healing). Verinka and Liminal both go carousing during the week, in anticipation of the upcoming feast day of St. Toad (on the 1st of Shocktober). In his drunkenness, Liminal Space burns down several houses and is no longer allowed into the Medusa's Head.
 |
| We covered a lot of ground this week. |
Back into Nightwick
The weather is turning cold as the party makes its way through the woods to the abbey. We are continuing our exploration of the northwest corner of level 1 of the abbey and return to the altar room we cleared out last week. On our way there, we see a Manimal (Trash Man?) at the edge of our torchlight. It shrinks back, away from the light and we hear a door close in the darkness, but we continue on to the altar room without incident. Everything looks untouched from last time.
Maggots for the Mad God
Liminal Space listens behind the door to the west that we haven't been through yet and yet again hears a cacophony of voices wailing in pain. We hear a gasp, and our faithful follower, Timo, fades away from existence - it turns out he was a ghost, a memory of his former self that just now faded from the abbey after his death (We all forgot that Timo had died a few sessions ago and kept including him in our delves. While I was trying to look up who had originally hired him, I discovered this fact mid-session). Brother Farthing takes up the crowbar and forces open the door to the next room. Inside, we see a room with almost 20 giant maggots who have human faces. The room is at least 20' high and, while we look on in horror, another maggot falls down from an opening in the wall above. Brother Farthing immediately closes the door and comparisons are made to a certain scene from the movie Mad God (I'm not including a photo of that scene for reference, sorry).
Further Exploration
The party stops to debate its next move. We don't want to go through the room, but we saw a door on the far wall and we think there must be something back there. We can go back to where we previously encountered fire babies and goblins and go north, but first some party members think there's a chance that there's a secret door in the immediate area, judging from blank spaces on our maps.
Liminal and Verinka search the wall of the altar room, but find nothing. It's covered in a white wash or plaster, so we decide to bring a group of peasants next week to help us clear the wall to see if there's anything underneath. We move to the hallway and then to the halted decay room (the room where things inside seem immune to the effects of time while inside, but catch up should they be removed from the room) and continue searching the walls, but find nothing. After a while, we hear a noise from the hallway outside - behind us are five altar boys, having snuck up on the party. Our reaction is shock at how normal looking they are, until they produce knives and slash at Heyno and Fidgety Nodge. In a round, we kill them quickly. However, when Heyno steps out of the room to loot the corpses, the altar boys turned into ratmen before his eyes. With some experimenting, we discover that if either the altar boy's corpse or the viewer is in the room, then they appear as altar boys, but if we look at them outside the room, we see them as ratmen. It would seem that the room makes things appear as they were back when Nightwick was undefiled.
Goblins and the Crying Woman
Giving up on our search for secret rooms, we decide to go west, where we had previously encountered goblins, in an attempt to find away around the maggot room. We return to a room full of burned corpses where we once fought fire babies. Liminal hears nothing behind the west door and the sounds of a woman crying to the north. We go north, finding a short hallway with another door and the end. We open it and the sound of crying grows louder, but we see nothing but some scattered papers in the room ahead. Ianthe and Sotar enter the room, but accidentally rustle some of the papers on the floor while doing so. Suddenly, the crying stops and they feels claws rake across their bodies, under their armor. Both survive the attack, but barely. Sotar heals Ianthe's wounds while another party member binds his wounds.
We decide to go around, though the goblin territory to the West. The goblin sentries ask us for a tribute for the Goblin King and Liminal brandishes the horn of the Butcher, a Nightwick demon we killed a while back. They let up pass out of respect, hinting that the goblins may soon be expanding into its former territory. From here we can only go north, as the goblins won't allow us into the realm of the Goblin King proper, to the south, and to the west, the door is scabbed over and impassable to us. North is a short (40') hallway. Ianthe notices an indention along the eastern wall ahead of us. Prodding the wall with a 10' pole, Br. Farthing finds slats in the wall and pushes them open. He immediately feels claws scrape against his skin but is miraculously unharmed. He immediately closes the slats, but before he does, Ianthe sees the face of an old woman looking at her though the slats in a neighboring room.
More Goblins!!!
We go back to the goblin sentries and ask them about the woman and passage to the north. They reveal that they interact differently with the architecture of Nightwick - fading out of midair and reappearing from the blocked doorway to the west. They take our inability to comprehend this as heresy and attack us. We put them to sleep in 1 round and finish the fight (sleep has been the absolute MVP of this campaign). We find 15gp! on their bodies - quite a find for random goblin loot. Liminal goes south, into the darkness of the goblin's territory, to a 4-way intersection and sees more goblins to the east who have humans in cages. He approaches them and, brandishing the Butcher's horn again, introduces himself as an "ambassador from other parts of the world." The goblins greet him warmly and show him their "wares," 6 captured humans - 2 woodsmen, 1 merchant, and 3 "women" (actually 2 women and a man without a beard). We resolve to rescue them and come up with a plan while Liminal and Verinka search the adjoining rooms so that we can know what we're up against, finding more goblins to the south.
Ianthe casts sleep again on the room, putting all the goblins plus one captive to sleep while Sotar gets hit badly from missile fire from the goblins to the south. Ianthe puts those goblins to sleep next round, but is now all out of spells. Before being downed, the goblins got the alarm out and a light not appears to the south and we see figures moving in the shadows. A large goblin carrying a glowing sword approaches, along with a few other regular goblins with spears. Copronymos is killed right away from a spear through the throat. Liminal casts fog to buy us some time by slowing down the goblins as they have to walk over their sleeping comrades while Ianthe unlocks the prisoner cages. Brother Farthing and Fidgety Nodge set two sleeping goblins on fire, burning the oncoming goblins who must step through the fire. Fidgety Nodge, the hired porter, earns himself some XP! However, he and Brother Farthing are killed by the Great Goblin and one of his underlings, but Verinka kills the Great Goblin, avenging them and we are able to return the captives to Nightwick.
Back to Nightwick
It was a long session this week. We fought with 5 different groups of enemies and by the end, we were really running low on resources - spell slots, HP, and goodies such as flasks of oil. This session really highlighted the tension between cutting and running and pushing forward for that one more potential reward. In this case, the draw to free captives pushed up to stand and fight - if it had just been treasure that the goblins had, we probably would have run away to return next week, but hard decisions like this really make the game interesting.
No comments:
Post a Comment