Tuesday, December 12, 2023

Nightwick Abbey - Session 77 - Getting to Know the New Neighbors

Previously, in Nightwick Abbey...

Session 77 - 7th of December, 1397

This week's adventurers:

Blossom (Rogue 5)

Mechtilde (Fighter 5)

Ulf (Magician 4)

Verinka (Changeling 3)

Liminal Space (Changeling 3)

Krupe (Cleric 2)

Lemony Spice (Changeling 2)

Poppy (Fighter 1)

Voorhis (Cleric 1)

Hirelings: Helusch (Magician 1)

Downtime in the Village

Mechtilde spent the week adorning her armor with the spikes from the spiked armor we recovered last week, granting her enough XP to push her to level 5! Mayfly is gone for the week, but he leaves a scroll of Protection From Demons for Ulf to use in case of emergency. 

Mechtilde also buys a bolt of linen with which to disarm the face trap from last week.

Our map of Level 4 after Session 77
(We take this game very seriously)

Into the Abbey

We again continue our exploration of level 4 of Nightwick Abbey, uneventfully journeying through level 3 to reach the 30' by 30' landing on level 4.

We first go to the stone carved faces to the north. Blossom takes two cuttings from the bolt and deftly uses her spear to drape them over the faces, covering them completely.

Liminal proudly steps forward, between the faces, to test if they are disarmed....and he is fine!

Mechtilde then uses rope to secure the linen around the statues and makes our solution more permanent.

Fly Time

We open the door beyond the trap to the north.

Before is is a 20' by 30' room. A burned cradle sits in the center of the room (likely left over from last week's Fireball). Two large dog-sized flies are buzzing around and land on the cradle.

Liminal calls out to them, "Hello there!"

The flies don't seem interested in diplomacy and take flight to attack.

Ulf fails to cast Light on one of the creatures, but Liminal Space casts Spook, forcing one to flee. Mechtilde steps forward and strikes the scared one down next, then hits the other but fails to kill it.

The surviving fly sticks its proboscis into Liminal, between sections of his plate armor, and starts sucking out blood, dealing 7 damage to him. Mechtilde strikes the beast down on the next round.

Inspecting the cradle, Blossom determines it once held "unmentionable human detritus" and leaves it at that.

Swarm From The West

This room has 4 doors, one in each direction.

Blossom listens at the door  on our right, which we think is east, and hears ocean sounds. She hears nothing at the northern and western doors.

We open the west door; we see a long hallway before us, with a single door on either side. At the edge of our torchlight we see motes of something floating through the air. Once we opened the door, we can also hear an intense buzzing, we think its more like locust than flies.

Gaze of the Evil Eye

We're not interested in that, so we close the door and look north.

This door opens up into another 20' by 30' room.

On left wall is a mural of something that resembles a nazar amulet, on the right wall is a door.

Liminal enters the room to inspect the mural and, as he crosses the center of the room, a beam shoots out of the eye at Liminal, but misses and makes a smoking crater on the opposite wall.

After much debate on how to deal with the eye, Blossom approaches it holding a mirror and manages to bounce the eye beam back into the mural and it burns itself away.

The Formless Void

Blossom and Verinka listen at the door across from the eye and hears the ocean sound again.

We force open the door  - there's 30' corridor to the left which turns back to reveal to us and endless expanse of darkness.

Liminal sees something in the darkness below us - churning water - it seems to be unbelievably far away.

We return to the cradle room and open the eastern door to see a 10' corridor ending in darkness and ocean.

Plague of Locust

Not interested in messing around with the primordial chaos of the ocean, we return to the locust hallway.

Blossom creeps ahead by herself - something is weird about the bugs, but she can't name it.

She listens at the right hand (north) door and hears nothing. 

She listens at the left hand (south) door and hears the sound of women "having a good time."

Liminal casts Wall of Fog on the locusts ahead and it seems to piss them off. So much so that they flee in our direction.

We retreat back and close the door behind us.

Now We Just Wander Around for a Bit and Come to a Horrifying Realization

Not sure where to go from here, we return to the room where we fought the armored undead last week.

While discussing the strange creatures, Ulf comes to the realization about the Blood Knights - we thought they were undead in armor, but actually, the armor was the monster - the desiccated corpses inside were their victims.

Hopefully, they're dead dead, as we brought their corpses back to the village last week, thinking it was potential treasure.

A Cold Welcome

From the room where we fought the Blood Knights, there are doors north and west.

Listening at the north door, we hears the sound of locust, to the west, we hear a "talk-buzzing," like the fly-men we've met before. 

We force open the west door and are met by 4 fly-men pointing polearms at us. This is the big room with the blood trench that we've seen before, but now it's been moved over here.

The flies beg us to leave - we got their friend killed earlier when we asked to meet Plutus.

More Exploring

They're polite yet firm with their polearms, so we oblige them.

We go south to where the blood trench room used to be and come across the fountain room, but the room is now very foggy

Blossom thinks she sees something swirling in the mist.

Treasure!

To our right - at the west end of hallway - is a 20' by 30' room with broken sarcophagus across from us. The sarcophagus is buried under rubble.

We take the time to dig through the rubble and find a crown (750sp) and 5 rings (200sp ea)!!!

Across from the fountain room is a room with a plain sarcophagus - Blossom thinks it's trapped.

Liminal pushes on the left side of the sarcophagus lid - revealing a secret door into the room next to the landing.

More Bugs

We return to fountain room and Ulf casts Light in the middle of the fog.

We hear a sound like a hiss crossed with a scream and the mist entirely withdraws under the door across from us.

We listen at door to the right and hear the angry buzzing - likely the fly-men.

We listen at the door across from us and hear buzzing like a swarm of locust.

The party returns to first swarm because they sound smaller and Verinka casts Sleep in the midst of them.

The bugs all fall down to the ground, asleep. Liminal immediately starts stomping on the sleeping bugs while we take one of them to study and put it in a glass flask.

Up close, we can see that the locust have bearded human heads with a crown-like protrusion on top and a stinger - Ulf shudders at what a sting would do to them.

More Treasure?

This room is 50' by 50'. The center is dominated by a steaming black pool.

We inspect the pool and see a bunch of stuff glimmering at the bottom.

It's about 5' deep, using a pole to gauge its depth, and very hot.

Blossom uses her hooked spear to fish something out of the bottom and brings up 30 silver coins. She thinks that there's a total of 4,000 silver coins down there, but we don't know how to reach them all.

An Expeditious Retreat

From the hallway to the east, a heat ray come scorching down towards the party. Ulf and Verinka are hit and each take 6 damage.

There is a large drawn and emaciated figure, covered in wounds. A large brazen head is buckled to its torso, its hands hold it up. A large number of robed figures stand behind it.

It's late in the evening and we're ambushed out of position, so we decide to hightail it out of the dungeon. Verinka casts Wall of Fog to cover our escape and we successfully leave Nightwick without further compliation.

We recover 1780sp total from the treasure.

Everyone gets 187sp and 285xp each.




 

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