Nightwick Abbey - Session 48 - Everyone Has Two Grandmothers

The halls of Nightwick call for blood! There is an opening for new adventurers to join us on our weekly delves!

Session 48 - 16th of Primes 1392

This week's adventurers:

Blossom (Rogue 4)

Sotar (Cleric 4)

Mayfly (Magic-User 3)  

Liminal Space (Changeling 3)

Yevgeniy the Coward (Cleric 2)

Verinka (Changeling 2)

Mechtild (Fighter 2)

Hirelings: Gerung Floating Disk (MU 1), Ticze (Changeling 1), Ditl (Cleric 1) + All the others

Downtime in the Village

Last week, the gang (sans Sotar) acquired a new house! There were people in the basements or dog breeders? Now we have a hangout spot for the crew and hopefully a safer place to store party treasure. The White Lady, one of the old gods of the land, is still harassing the roads to the north and so we decide brave the 3 day journey to Blackleg in the south to hire some mercenaries to go deal with her. Blossom scouts to try to get a handle on what forces the White Lady brings with her and discovers that she seems to have a horde of pigmen as her army with elves serving as officers, though Blossom is unable to determine the size of her forces.

On the Road Again

We set out on the road south in the morning, passing the traders and villagers seeking refuge in town on our way out. Scouting ahead, Blossom sees eight bodies on the road a few miles out. The bodies have a thick cloud of black flies hovering over them and have all been stripped of valuables. Seems like bandits have been in the area. There are tracks in the mud leading into the fog-bound forest. While the possibility of bandit loot is tempting, we continue south towards Blackleg

The Joust!

As evening approaches, we arrive at Knightpath. On the road just outside of town, we hear the blast of a trumpet and a man on a horse holding a lance calls out to us. "Present Yourselves" We tell him that we are in service of Lord Eckhard of Nightwick. The man introduces himself as Sir Dietmar, the Knight of Knightpath. He mistakes us for knights and challenges us to a joust, an offer he quickly withdraws when we assure him we are not knights.

Mechtild, however, demands he take her up on his offer of a joust. She gets his squire to lend her his horse and the two line up to joust. For this fight, the Referee pulled out the jousting rules from the wonderful Fantastic Medieval Campaigns and the two engaged in three rounds of jousts. Mechtild removes Sir Dietmar's helmet in the first round and unhorses him in the second, but she too is unhorsed and injured. In the end, she loses by points but manages to impress him.

Courtesy of Traverse Fantasy, your #1 source for OD&D retroclones, the communist manifesto, and mac & cheese recipes.

"Sir Dietmar, you are rude and pigheaded and I think I can fix you," Mechtild tells him as he escorts us to town after the joust. Approaching the town, we see 3 gibbet by the gate. One contains a man, tarred and feathered and raving mad, and another seems to have been burst open from the inside. The middle cage, between them, contains a desiccated corpse.

Free Fredman

As we draw near, the raving man calls out to us, begging us to not leave him there. He claims that the corpse in the 3rd gibbet came to life and sucked the blood out of the person next to him in the night. Sir Dietmar reveals that this is Fredman, the former lord of Knightpath. He was displaced from his role for allowing too much bandit activity in the region. Last week, he was sentenced to the gibbet as punishment by the new Lord of Knightpath, Lord Wyglo. Liminal Space plans to ask the Lord if he can ransom the old lord to take along as his servant. 

Intrigue an the Court of Knightpath

Sir Dietmar leads us into the city to meet Lord Wyglo, and discover a scholar, a powerful magic-user, Laurentius, is visiting him. "You have arrived just in time. Things have been a little weird at night," the scholar greets us with. Liminal manages to ransom the life of the Fredman with a suit of chain mail and a promise that he will live an undignified life with Liminal and Sir Dietmar is sent off to retrieve him.

The mage Laurentius asks us numerous questions about Nightwick Abbey. Mayfly, aware of how knowledge is power and how valuable good information is, is hesitant to tell him anything meaningful about the wicked abbey. We learn that Laurentius and Halfdan, Mayfly's mentor, have a long feud of the most bloodthirst sort - they've both published peer-reviewed articles arguing with the other. It seems that the two of them disagree on the exact nature of Nightwick abbey.

Lord Wyglo is acting strangely, we notice. He rarely speaks, only grunting affirmation to the mage and said mage seems to be treating him as a servant, ordering him to put away the chain mail, for example. Tensions between him and the party rise as we try to tactfully explore why the lord is acting so strangely. Eventually, as matters get to the point where we are about to be kicked out of the manor, Liminal Space casts Hypnotism on Laurentius and forces him to answer out questions truthfully. He reveals that he has the Lord under a Glamor. Reasoning that he is a very powerful, evil mage who will want revenge against us for revealing his treason, we rush him as the hypnotism spell wears off and kill him.

Grannies Varkolak

At that moment, Sir Dietmar and Fredman, still tarred and feathered, come rushing into the lord's manor, slamming the door closed behind them, expressions of fear on their faces. Knock knock on the door. "Who's there?" we reply. "It's your grandmother!" comes the reply, in a screechy voice. Sir Dietmar explains, "It is a vampire - a varkolak!" We see a giant eye outside of the window, peering in at us. "It's me, your other grandmother, won't you let Grandma in?" it yells at us. "Yes, everyone has two grandmothers. Let us in, it's cold out here," says the voice behind the door.

We decide to bar the door and wait them out. These vampires can't enter the manor unless invited in, so we should be otherwise safe. In the meantime, we search the dead mage's body and find 66sp and his spellbook. In contains several spell - Protection from evil, Light, Sleep, Charm Person, Web, ESP, Mirror Image, Protection from Evil (10'), Lightning Bold, Fireball, Mass Morph, Growth of Plants, Conjure Demon. Mayfly can barely contain his excitement at what he can learn from the dead wizard and we are all relieved that we didn't have to fight him in a fair fight. We also receive a reward of 1,000sp as a thanks for saving Lord Wyglo from the mage's powers.

17th of Primes 1392

Back on the Road

The next morning, we depart town, having stayed safe from the vampires. In the morning, we find almost 30 fresh, emancipated, still armed and armored corpses on the road, looking like dead bandits, with a track coming from the swamp. They were clearly victims of varkolaks. We take the time to loot the swords and bows form the corpses, but forget to properly dispose of the bodies, which could lead to more varkolaks. We continue down the road with our 27 bows and swords.

The party after looting the bandits.

Shortly after noon, we find a Frogling caravan headed up the road, made up of about 100 people, with them a cart holding a large drum of water. We sell the looted equipment for 1,215sp, tell them about the corpses, which they assure us they will dispose of by burning, but forget to ask what the drum of water is for. We reach the town of Frogguts by evening and see that their idea of a welcome mat is a Frogling's head mounted on a spear in front of the town gates. There we end our session for the week. Next time, we'll pick up on our entry into Frogguts.

Final session rewards: 120gp, 1081sp, 51xp.

This was a good, old-fashioned hexcrawl session. If we are indeed successful in hiring mercenaries next week, then we're discussing further using Fantastic Medieval Campaigns for its mass combat rules (aka Chainmail). We got a lot of money this week, which could be good for mercenaries, but little XP as we didn't bring any of that loot out of a dungeon. The real reward, I think, will be the defeated wizard's spellbook, which will allow Mayfly and other party Magic-Users to learn some good spells.