Nightwick Abbey - Session 58 - Pudding!

Previously, in Nightwick Abbey...

Session 58 - 1st of Leftember, 1392

This week's adventurers:

Blossom (Rogue 5)

Cherwe (Cleric 4)

Liminal Space (Changeling 3)

Mechtilde (Fighter 3)

Yevegniy the Coward (Cleric 3)

Verinka (Changeling 2)

Ulf (Magician 2)

Hirelings: Gerung Floating Disk (MU 2), Grumbletoe (Dwarf 1), Ditl (Cleric 1)

Downtime in the Village

Over the week, the party went carousing with the recently acquired treasure. Verinka goes drinking, gaining 200xp. Ulf feasts, gaining 100xp, but gaining terrible indigestion, forced to rest every 3rd turn this session. Liminal also feasts, gaining 800xp, but angers a passing noble, Sir Sander Hornpike, in the process. Sir Hornpike has now sworn to hunt Liminal down and hang him from the highest tree in teh bishopric.

This week, we decide to go to level 2 in search of the giant ruby we learned about from the cultist Assman. We stock up on flasks of oil to aid us. A single woodsman, Hanslo, also offers up his services to the party and Ulf hires him on the spot.

In Search of a Pudding

We make it to level 2 without incident. Our plan is to start where we fought the cultists who told us about the ruby guarded by the giant blood pudding. Grumbletoe, our dwarf scout, (who sounds like Scruffy the Janitor) hears nothing at the door to their room.

We open the door to reveal several cultists with sharp swords.

Liminal turns to the dwarf and says, "Grumbletoe, you're not being reprimanded, but you can do better."

"I think this is very clearly a case of man against man and God against all," the dwarf replies.

Cultists and Devils and Magic, Oh My!

The cultists rush us and several more come out from the dark. 

Mechtilde kills one and Verinka puts a few to sleep.

The fighter is hit for 4 points of damage and the two cultists in the back open a door out of the room.

She kills 2 more and Liminal hypnotizes 1, ordering it to bar the back door.

We hear the sound of running coming from behind the next door while the hypnotized cultist holds it closed.

Verinka takes over the holding the door duties and we finish off the sleeping cultists and the hypnotized one.

As we maneuver to receive the opponents, the door bursts open, revealing the two cultists and 6 or more devilmen.

Cherwe is nicked by a cultist's sword, Mechtilde is hit for 6 hp, and the two of them each kill a cultist in retaliation.

Verinka ends the fight by putting all 6 devilmen to sleep with a wave of her hands.

We bind Mechtilde's wounds and finish off the devilmen.

Cherwe heals Mechtilde additionally, but the abbey reacts to the cleric's holy magic, shifting its layout somewhere in its depths. We hope that we're close enough to the stairs to still have a clear path back, but it's not certain.

We find 450 gold pieces among the cultist's robes, an unusual amount.

Rubies are Forever

We send Grumbletoe ahead down the next corridor. He reports back that he saw a pool. He didn't see anything moving in the pool.

He looks down the other way (to the east), and comes back, reporting something gross. We peek down that way and see the floor is covered with pomegranates and we hear a loud buzzing and the mess is moving in a way that it shouldn't.

We leave the pomegranate mess??? alone, for fear that "a lot of little guys" will come spewing out if we mess with it, because Nightwick is gross like that and that's why we keep coming back.

We return to the pool which, we suspect, holds the giant blood pudding.

We light several torches and grab flasks of oil and line up at the end of the corridor.

Cherwe throws a torch and Blossom throws a flask of oil on it. Both objects land and we hear the thing scream in a way that is weird for a pool.

Thin, ropy, stringy tendrils of blood come out of the pool.

It's like if you take coagulated blood and separate it...

Smells Like Pork Rinds

...but most of the players have no frame of reference for this.

The blood pudding doesn't seem to be able to reach us with it's creepy tendrils, so we keep throwing oil from a distance until it seems to be dead.

After a moment, a big pool of boiling fire and blood is all that remains.

Ulf takes his tummy trouble rest while we wait for the fire to die down and the remains of the pudding to cool down.

We send Cherwe down into the pit and she retrieves a large Ruby, worth 1,000sp.

An Expeditious Retreat

We explore past the pool room through a dark passage into the bright, perfectly square room where the 4 seals are. With nothing to do here, and at a dead end (we can't seem to use this bright room to travel through the abbey, despite the fact that we've found four separate entrances to it).

Worried about the abbey having shifted, we return to level one to retrace our steps to make sure we still have an exit out.

On our way, we run into several goatmen and begin combat. We kill one and the rest hoof it away.

We grab 2sp off of the one dead goatman and make it our of the abbey, our route unchanged and unchallenged.

After a short, but very lucrative delve, we return to Nightwick village with 450gp and 1002sp.

We each gain 687sp and 772 xp! A very successful delve! Unfortunately, we've just about run out of our rumor hooks for treasure in the abbey. Next time, we'll have to go in with no plan to do some more scouting.