Nightwick Abbey - Session 50!!!! - Everything is Fine. Nothing is Ruined.

 Previously, in the world of Nightwick...

Art by Don Greer

Session 50 - 30th of Primes 1392

This week's adventurers:

Blossom (Rogue 4)

Sotar (Cleric 4)

Liminal Space (Changeling 3)

Yevgeniy the Coward (Cleric 2)

Mechtild (Fighter 3)

Hirelings: Gerung Floating Disk (MU 1), Ticze (Changeling 1), Ditl (Cleric 1), Andre (Fighter 1), Heyno

Downtime in the Village

Over the week, the party, with our 700 mercenaries in tow, uneventfully make it back to Nightwick Village. We plan to march out to meet the White Lady in two weeks (when all of the players will be available to play) and so this week, we decide to return to Nightwick Abbey. A number of potential hirelings come up to us, offering to be hired, as we prepare for our delve. Our applicants are:

• A single member of the Corbies (one of the merc companies we hired last week), Andre, offers to delve into the dungeon with us in exchange for a half share of treasure (and xp). He brings with him chainmail, a helmet and hounskull, a shield, a sword and a lance.
• Nyze, a peasant girl from the village, offers to serve as a linkperson (basically a torchbearer) for 5sp/month. She's missing her right arm.
• Bero, a member of the woodsman's lodge, offers to fight with us armed with a bow and axe. (1gp/month with 5sp danger pay). He is hobbled and can only move as fast as a man in plate.
• A tongue-less bandit whose name we can't quite make out. He's otherwise well armed. We assume he takes the standard fare, 10sp/month.

Mechtild hires the bandit (swiftly nicknamed "Gutteral,") swearing she can fix him. Sotar hires Andre and Blossom hires Bero to increase the party's fighting power. We decide to enter Nightwick Abbey by the side entrance through the graveyard, where the party hasn't been since session 4, which will take us straight to level 3.

The Mausoleum

We go up the steps into the cliffside of the hill where Nightwick rests and enter into a mausoleum. Before us are two giant statues, easily twice as large as a man. They depict skeletons wearing robes wielding large swords. Sotar vaguely recalls hearing a story from Mayfly of being attacked by a giant statue and is nervous. 

Liminal Space is feeling far braver, however, and playfully parries his sword against the statue. The sword becomes stuck to the statue, as if by magnets (actually really by magnets, however none of the players nor characters know how magnets work, so to us it's just stuck to the statue). Liminal abandons the sword and none of us try to recover it and we move on to the stone coffins lining the room.

Disrespect for the Dead

There's at least a dozen coffins in the room, probably more beyond our torchlight. After Blossom checks one for traps, Sotar pries one open with the party's trusty crowbar. He slides off the heavy stone lid and it clangs to the floor. 

Inside the coffin is a corpse of great antiquity in "crypt-keeper state." There's something shiny embedded in its chest. Sotar pokes at the corpse with a 10' pole, but it doesn't seem to be trapped. Liminal removes the item and discovers it to be a silver stake. Blossom values it at 50sp.

We discuss if the corpse had been a vampire but reason that is isn't, because it would have sprung to life once we removed the stake if it had been. Sotar directs Andre to cut off the corpse's head, just to be safe. Blossom checks the next coffin and finds the same thing - a corpse with a silver stake through its chest. We find a routine (our grave-robbing procedure): open the coffin, cut off the head, take the stake.

Trouble Comes Rolling In

Liminal, Ticze, and Ditl take watch at the three doors to the room while the rest of us start looting. After a couple of stakes, Liminal sees something rolling in from the east through the darkness. Four skeletons strapped to breaking wheels come rolling down the hallway, bones chattering away.

Mechtild and Andre form a front line to meet them while Yevgenly hits one with his sling. Sotar casts Protection from Evil and the party feels the abbey shift somewhere in the distance. (Nightwick Abbey reacts to holy water and some clerical magic. It seems to be itself alive and evil. I'm still not sure how the mechanics work, but the chance of the dungeon's layout changing seems to increase either the farther down we go or the higher level Sotar is). The wheels win initiative again and attack. Andre blocks one but Mechtild is rolled over. The wheel tries to maintain its momentum to roll over Liminal Space, but he blocks it. 

Sotar takes Andre's place at the front line while Mechtild destroys one of the wheels with a mighty blow, killing it. Nightwick fighters have a follow through ability, allowing her to take a small step and attack again when she kills something. Mechtild attacks again after destroying the wheel, makes another great attack and kills the second wheel. Ticze kills another one with his spear and we mop up the final one quickly.

Linear Magicians, Quadratic Fighters

We continue retrieving stakes and, before long, several hooded cultists rush out of the darkness to the east, where the wheels also came from, surprising our sentries. Andre is hit and wounded, but not killed. Mechtild kills two of them and Andre kills another one. 

Liminal casts hypnotize, using his signature move of ordering one cultist to hug another. Mechtild then manages to kill the remaining four in one round by rolling well with her follow throughs, proving, once again, that fighters have always been so much more powerful than spellcasters in D&D.

The Mummy (1999)

We go back to work fetching stakes, but it's not long until we hear Ticze scream out from the south - he's covered in beetles who begin burrowing into his skin. Sotar recognizes them as the Scarabs from the hit 1999 film The Mummy starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, because he's from the Desert Lands where such scarabs live and it's just an iconic movie. We flounder around for several rounds trying to fight the beetle swarm. We figure out that fire works best against them and several party members pull out torches to ward off the beetles.

Sotar, Blossom, and Ticze prepare to fight scarabs.

Death of a Hireling

Sotar and Blossom are swarmed trying to help Ticze before he panics and goes running off. He doesn't get far before he collapses, dead, the beetles having burrowed under his skin and tunneled up into his brain. RIP Ticze, one of our longest companions, who's been with us since session 10. 

Blossom and Sotar linger in the insect swarm for far too long and take too much damage while some of the other party members discuss how to use Floating Disk to fight the beetles (using the disk to scoop them up). Someone sets a corpse on fire to ward off the beetles with smoke, but unfortunately the fire is on the other side of the room from the beetles and they are unaffected. 

Eventually, Blossom and Heyno run out of the abbey (we've been in the entrance room this whole session), Sotar jumps on top of a coffin, and the rest of the party uses torches to mop up the beetles. Sotar then recovers Ticze's body while Liminal searches the cultists' bodies for money, finding 92sp. At that, we decide to follow Blossom and Heyno out of the abbey and return to Nightwick Village.

Back in the Village

Back in town, we mourn Ticze and count up our treasure. In total, we retrieved 5 stakes, worth a total of 250sp in addition to the silver retrieved from the cultists.

In total, we each receive 128xp and 52sp from our one-room delve. Back in the village, Liminal Space manages to convince Lord Eckhart, Lord of Nightwick Village, to provide a single unit of 20 crossbowmen for our upcoming fight against the White Lady.

This was an interesting session for us. We got caught in the most devious type of trap - treasure that takes too long to retrieve. We probably also got unlucky with our random encounter rolls, leading to three encounters and Ticze's death. It was a fun session - we were able to easily dispatch the enemies we've encountered before like cultists as the wheels because we've learned what works. We haven't encountered the beetle swarm and so struggled more while we learned how to fight it. There's possibly at least 500sp in spikes left in the mausoleum, but is it worth the risk to retrieve it?