Nightwick Abbey - Session 81 - "That's a lot of lip for something with no skin"

Previously, in Nightwick Abbey...

Session 81 - 1st of Duodecember, 1397

This week's adventurers:

Blossom (Rogue 5)

Mayfly (Magician 5)

Mechtilde (Fighter 5)

Cherwe (Cleric 5)

Ulf (Magician 4)

Liminal Space (Changeling 4)

Krupe (Cleric 2)

Poppy (Fighter 2) 

Voorhis (Cleric 2)

Thekla (Magician 1)

Downtime in the Village

The party was successful at petitioning Father Winter to reincarnate Verinka...however she was brought back at level 1, and so a new character, the Magician Thekla was rolled up in her place.

Mayfly spent the week studying old tomes of Nightwick for rumors of locations to the bones of the Master - the Golden skull he keeps on his person, who he claims can talk to him. Mayfly learned the master used to spend time in the catacombs - we assume this means the level 3 ossuaries.

"This would be a lot easier if you remembered where you left your body parts." 

And so, we decide to return to level 3 in search of golden bones.

Leaving the village early in the morning, we approach the abbey from the west and, passing through the graveyard, we notice 10 freshly dug graves waiting there for us.

We continue into Nightwick Abbey, into the large room decorated with sarcophagi and two now-empty plinths that once held angel statues.

Heading north, we come to an ossuary, 30' x 20'. It's walls are lined with skulls.

The Bone Zone

As soon as we step into the room, the bones in the ossuary begin to rattle and make a great noise.

Stepping through the ossuary quickly, the front rank of the party enters into another crypt and we see four undead figures in mail ahead of us - Blind Brothers.

Winning the initiative, we back up into the ossuary and form a chokepoint to receive them.

Mechtilde Was Somehow Useless This Fight

The slow, shambling figures stumble towards us and Liminal, Cherwe, and Blossom all land hits against them. Unfortunately, sharb blades do poorly against the skeletal figures, but Blossom is wielding the Shard of God, whose magical qualities lop of one of the brother's arms.

On the next round, we kill a brother and Krupe is hit twice, for 13hp! He is alive, but badly wounded and retreats away from the front rank.

Next, Blossom kills a brother but is cut twice by their rusted blades and she, too, retreats from the front rank, allowing Poppy to take her place. 

Cherwe, with her mace, quickly kills the final two undead, ending the fight.

Mechtilde binds Krupe's wounds and gives him her potion of healing before we continue on.

The hallway ahead goes 30' to the edge of our torchlight with alcoves on either side containing bones.

Let's Just Stop Checking For Traps

As we advance, we see the glint of gold at the edge of our torchlight.

Upon reaching the first alcove, we see a large group of skulls with gold coins in their eyes. Before we check for traps, Liminal starts grabbing coins and gets 20gp from a single alcove.

Mayfly jumps in to help while Mechtilde grumbles about going in without a plan and, after a turn, we find 100gp in all four alcoves.

The corridor ahead of us branches east and west while continuing straight ahead.

However, the West and North passages end in scabs - masses of the Abbey's flesh filling up a doorway.

We hear clacking and snapping coming out of the darkness to the east.

As we debate our options - fight or flee, Mayfly sees bird-headed emaciated figures crawling towards us on all fours - Ghouls! He sees at least two, with more likely in the darkness.

Mayfly's Web

Mayfly casts Web across the hallway, trapping the front two ranks of Ghouls.

With them stuck, we fire ranged weapons at the Ghouls through the web until the four stuck in the web are dead. More exist behind the web, panicked and we can hear them retreat down the hallway.

Mechtilde uses Dhinron to detect undead and senses that they have run into a dead end down the hallway.

Some Ghoul

She then uses the magic sword to detect gold and senses more coin as well down there.

We line up and light our arrows and bolts on fire and shoot down the hallway, burning away the web and eventually kill the remaining ghouls.

Up ahead, we find more alcoves with gold coins in skulls and collect another 150gp. 

But we have come upon another dead end and so, we decide to head southwest, where we know there's an unexplored room full of cultists.

We Really Make Up Our Plans On The Fly

Mechtilde forces open the door revealing a 40' wide and 60' deep room, lined with coffins.

There are "a whole bunch" of cultists, as we expected.

They're all wearing black robes; their leader wears a silver mask and steps forward to confront us.

"Hello, welcome!" - Liminal Space, America's Sweetheart, steps forward to introduce us. He claims that we're here to worship the King of Hell alongside the cultists.

Their leader wonders why we carries torches if indeed we are on their side - as all allies of the Abbey can see in the dark.

Thekla quickly charms the leader, who immediately greets her as a friend.

Now that the cultists are friendly to us, we hatch a plan. 

Somehow, We Are The Good Guys

Liminal uses candles to mark a 20' circle and tells the cultists to stand inside so that we may show them how we broke the seals of level 3. 

After the cultists have crammed themselves inside the circle to witness the spell, Mayfly casts Fireball upon then.

All cultists die from the explosion except for two on the edge of the circle. Mechtilde follows up by chopping up the two survivors with her sword.

We search through the bodies and find a fancy dagger and a silver mask (500sp) and a small coffer with 500 silver coins inside.

However, if any of them were wearing ornate, valuable robes (hypothetically), they were burned up.

Back To The Village

After returning to the village, we discover that the dagger is magical! Mayfly vows to study it for the week.

In the end, we each receive 530xp, and recovered 3500sp total, for 350sp each.