Session 42 - 12th of January, 1391
This week's adventurers:
Sotar (Cleric 4)
Mayfly (Magic-User 3)
Blossom (Rogue 4)
Liminal Space (Changeling 2)
Mechtild (Fighter 1)
Anston (Fighter 2)
Hirelings: Gerung Floating Disk (MU 1), Ticze (Changeling 1), Heyno, Elger
The party leaves Nightwick in an orderly manner after tonight's delving.
Downtime in the Village
Sotar was absent from the previous delve down into Nightwick Abbey, but at the Medusa's Head tavern, he was regaled with the tale of the grisly death of Grolmes, Mayfly's longtime faithful hired help. Alas, his magic sword Dhinron, a gift from Father Winter, was left behind in the abbey along with his corpse. Sotar proposes returning to level 2 in an attempt to retrieve the powerful sword (and Grolmes's body).
The Ghost Trial
We pass through level 1 unopposed and make it to level 2, and go through a secret door we had previously found. Inside is a gathering of ghosts - a trial - and the grandmother of one of the local villagers is the one on trial. Liminal Space steps into the room. "Objection!" he yells out. "You are her champion?" the judge asks. "Uhh...I am... the Herald of the Chamption," Liminal stammers out as the court fades a way and a ghostly armed figure approaches him. It is apparently a trial by combat for the ghosts. Liminal's explanation of his role isn't heeded and he is struck by the wraith, and has a level drained from him. Mayfly responds by casting Lights on the wraith, blinding him. At that point, it is trivial to gang up on him and slay the ghost. Liminal regains his lost XP when the wraith is killed (the GM goes easy on us sometimes) and Grandma Ghost is acquitted! The whole party feels as if a weight was lifted from our shoulders. Her grandson (who might be one of our deceased hirelings - I honestly forget at this point) will probably be pleased. Unless if he is dead.
Treasure and Missing Keys
Free to search the courtroom, Mayfly inspects the dais with a seat on it. He notices a panel in its base and finds a piece of parchment inside. It is a drawing of the room we came from, with the southeast corner of the room marked out. Liminal searches that part of the room and finds a brick in the floor with an irregular crack. Lifting it up, there is a silver dagger and a large sack of silver in there. The sack it too big to take out of the hole, so we take the time to pull all the coins out of the hole, 1,000sp in total.
Into the Dark
From there, we go south. The passage seemingly ends in abrupt darkness, that light cannot pierce, but once we step into it, we find ourselves in a 30' x 30' room with a door to the south. This second room has 4 depression in the western wall. Last week, the party discovered that we need 4 signet rings from the Sword Brothers (we have one already). After our GM assures us that we haven't acquired and sold one of the rings, not knowing what they were, we go to explore the eastern side of level 2. Going up a hallway, we spy a gibbet monster - a mass of flesh and limbs stuffed into a gibbet cage. Our Sneaky Sneak Blossom sneaks up on it to close the door to its room - and fails because, while she does sneak successfully, the room has no door.
Some More Wandering About
After that, we retreat down the hall rather than face the gibbet monster and return to the trial room to explore to the west. Scouting ahead, Liminal announces, "Oh, the Sister's there!" Sotar has never met said sister, but apparently the rest of the party has and they are not interested at all in seeing her ahead (I think she was responsible for Grolmes's gruesome death last week). Liminal makes an auditory illusion that sounds like 8 Grolmeses crying out from the grave, which distracts the Sister enough for us to sneak across a hallway. We pass a room with a lone gibbet cage hanging from the middle and go through a torture chamber featuring a large iron maiden (which our GM is quick to point out was not historically a real medieval torture device). We enter into a room with a large pool of blood and two lion statues vomiting into it. Finding nothing here, we continue on into a large room covered in bat guano. A giant, human-sized bat swoops down on us and we chose to leave the room rather than take that fight. We decide to call it a night there and retreat from Nightwick Abbey, each of us gaining 150xp.
Conclusions
We explored a lot tonight, but weren't up to the task of picking a fight. In Old-School Essentials (and B/X), recovering treasure is far more important than picking fights. We usually have seasons of scouting - exploring a level to find the most important treasure while avoiding the worst monsters. Once we're convinced that a certain treasure is worth it (like the juicer from a while back) or we have a good plan to give us an edge in the fight, only then do we willingly take a big fight. In the meantime, mapping, especially knowing multiple routes to a given location, is valuable treasure in its own right.
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