Previously, in Nightwick Abbey...
Session 66 - 24th of Sextember, 1392
This week's adventurers:
Blossom (Rogue 5)
Mayfly (Magician 4)
Cherwe (Cleric 4)
Mechtilde (Fighter 4)
Yevegniy the Coward (Cleric 4)
Verinka (Changeling 3)
Ulf (Magician 3)
Gerung (Magician 2)
Krupe (Cleric 1)
Hirelings: Assman
Downtime in the Village
Gerung talks to St. Samson about resurrection services, but the saint is not powerful enough to ressurect someone from the dead. The Bishop of Lichgate is the only person in the region powerful enough to do such a thing.
Gerung, however, is interested in resurrecting his old master Liminal Space. However, the deceased was a changeling, so only a powerful druid could bring him back with a Reincarnation spell.
Mayfly spends the last two weeks studying the Lightning spell from our captured spellbook and succeeds!
A new player joins our credulous crew. They bring with them a new cleric, a doomsayer, from Karst - this distant island kingdom where everybody has silly names. This one is named Krupe.
We outfit him with some extra plate armor and a mace to help him survive a little longer.
Mechtilde spends the week carousing, but catches a stomach bug from something she ate. She is at -2 to all rolls this session.
New Magical Mentors
Giving up on the ways of the Church, Gerung decides to join Ulf in his journey to meet the Old Gods, scraping together 100gp to pay for the necessary supplies, including wigs and traditional Bogdani dresses.
The two magicians are also instructed to shave their beards and are led to a building in the village they had never been to. Evidently, only the women among the Bogdoni practice magic and so Ulf and Gerung have to attempt to fool the magic-folk of the Bogdoni into thinking them women to learn their magic.
The building before them is of Bogdoni construction and painted with a number of flowers. The woodsmen, who will not go in, tell the two that they must go in and meet with the sewing bee.
Ulf and Gerung enter into a hot, smoky room. Several women are inside and appear to be sewing, but their faces are obscured by the smoke.
"Step forward," one of them calls out.
The two magicians present themselves and offer their gifts. The head sewer informs them that they will be provided with a book of magic in three days.
As Ulf and Gerung turn to depart, the sewer calls out one command after them, "do a better disguise next time."
In Search of Hidden Treasure
The next day, our party wakes up early and departs for the abbey. Over the past year, we've collected four sigils from the undead Meisters of the Sword Brothers and today, we're going to use them to in a specific room as keys to unlock...something.
We quickly traverse level 1 and reach level 2, the realm of the Bloody Baroness, without incident.
The landing for the floor is a small (30' by 20') room with two columns leaking a red fluid too thin to be human blood. Blossom listens at the door and hears people talking in the distance, muffled in a way that makes her think they might be eating.
Chewing in the Deep
We extinguish our torches and open the door. In the darkness, Blossom and Verinka see movement down the hallway to our right. Blossom hears what sounds like eating coming from them.
We only need to make it 20' to our left, so we decide to extinguish our torches and let the Blossom and Verinka lead us through the dark.
Our pitch black trip is mercifully short. The hallway to our left ends in complete blackness that not even our torches could penetrate.
Stepping into the darkness, however, brings us into a 30' by 30' room, completely white, made out of right angles that seem extra severe and hurt the eyes to look at.
A Wonderful Blasphemy
We relight our torches and proceed into the next room, similarly designed to the previous one.
On the wall are four depressions, into which the four captured sigils from the Sword Meisters fit perfectly.
The three clerics and Mechtilde each take a sigil and they simultaneously place them in their slots. Immediately, the wall flies up, revealing a sword stuck in a dais in the middle of a room.
Mechtilde uses her sword, Dhinron, to detect magic in the room and gets a strange reading from the sword - as if the material the blade is made from is pure magic itself.
After checking for traps, we approach the sword. Gerung attempts to pull out the sword, but fails.
Studying the blade, Krupe realizes that it is a quasi-heretical object in the Church that is believed to be a shard taken from the God of Law from when the devils tried to pitch him off of a cliff.
Awed at the power before us, we realize that we need someone able to wield the blade to draw it out.
Unfortunately, only a fighter or a rogue can do so and Mechtilde's sword, Dhinron, has a jealous streak. This leaves Blossom, squishy Blossom, as the only one fit to wield the sword.
She effortlessly draws the sword out of the dais. The sword is entirely composed of right angles, yet fits comfortably in her hands. The tip is even squared off, flat like an executioner's sword.
Taking the sword with us, we return to the first white room and go north. We come out into a room with three more doors.
Dealing With Cultists
To the east of us are the cultists that Blossom saw earlier.
Verinka hears them behind the door - they're still there, eating.
The talking on the other side of the door ceases - the cultists must now be aware of us.
Mayfly leaves a torch on the ground and we go around the other way, to where we first saw them, in an attempt to flank them.
We come up upon them and charge. Failing to suprise them, we nonetheless win initiative and Verinka casts Sleep, dropping all of the cultists.
We find 100gp on them and load three sleeping cultists on the floating disk to "rehabilitate" them like we did Assman. Blossom tests out her swords by killing the other nine cultists that won't fit on the disk.
As she lops off their heads, she discovers that the sword sometimes slices through the next like butter - more testing will be needed to determine the full extent of the sword's powers, but this is a good sign.
Deeper Into The Abbey
From here, we take the stairs down to level 3. We decide to return to the sarcophagus where Mayfly previously discovered a secret passage.
Descending down, we go west into a room with a domed ceiling and a map of the world on the floor.
We wander past there, past the four glowing sigils on the floor to a room depicting the Sword Brothers' battles in the Desert Land. There's some difficulty in navigating there as Ulf's map doesn't quite map up with what we see - a side effect of the abbey's ability to rearrange itself.
We eventually reach the sarcophagus with the secret passage behind it. Cherwe goes first and sees nothing but winding passages - all clear.
The rest of the party follows behind. We find dead ends to the west and north, but to the east, we see ominous, pulsing lights in the distance.
A New Foe?
As we approach the doorway from which the light emanates, passing a alcove filled with dried ectoplasm, a strange scent fills the air. If we had the language to describe it, we'd call it the smell of ozone.
Mechtilde takes a moment and uses her sword to detect gold - and senses some to the south by southeast of us - the room where the light is coming from.
Gerung turns Blossom invisible and we send her ahead to scout out the room.
She finds a room with 3 open sarcophagi. Hovering over them is a glowing orb of light. Robey tendrils of slime stretch out from the orb into a sarcophagus.
We've never encountered this creature before and are unsure how to deal with it.
Mayfly peeks into the room and casts Fireball on the glowing orb. We immediately book it but Mayfly notices, on his way out of the room, that the orb seems completely unfazed by the Fireball.
Back To The Village
We leave through the closer graveyard entrance and return to the village safely.
This week, we each gain 177xp and 11gp. We also recovered three live cultists from our previous fight. Gerung also reaches level 3!!!
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