Saturday, March 23, 2024

Nightwick Abbey - Session 88 - Battered by Ghouls and Buckets of Gold

 

Previously, in Nightwick Abbey...

Want to learn more about the world of Nightwick from Miranda Elkins? You can follow her blog here and the ongoing development of Nightwick Abbey at her Patreon here.

Session 88 - 21st of Primes 1398

This week's adventurers:

Blossom (Rogue 6)

Mayfly (Magician 5) 

Mechtilde (Fighter 5)

Ulf (Magician 4)

Liminal Space (Changeling 4)

Poppy (Fighter 3) 

Voorhis (Cleric 3)

Krupe (Cleric 3)

Thekla (Magician 2)

Hirelings: Niklaus (Fighter 1)

Downtime in the Village

Ulf and Blossom spent the week carousing for XP and both wound up sick. Father Roderick of Nightwick Village offers to request a scroll of Cure Disease from the Bishop (for a price), however St. Samson left us with a bundle of such scrolls after we rescued him and we are able to use those to cure ourselves for free.

Mayfly attempt to do research on the lower levels of Nightwick Abbey, but only ends up losing a lot of cash to bad scholars.

It is a dark and stormy morning as we leave the village and head into the abbey. There's a noticeable change in air pressure as we enter into the crypts on level 3, which throws off Liminal Space's delicate Changeling sensitivities.

Into the Abbey

We set off through level 3, making our way to the stairs down, when suddenly, a group of short, naked humanoids with bird heads fall upon us from the dark.

Ghouls!

There are ten of them total and as they surprise us, Mechtilde, Poppy, and Liminal are all hit and paralyzed. Mayfly casts Lightning Bolt, wiping out three ghouls, and Ulf tries to cast Phantasmal Force, but the Ghouls are unaffected by it.

All The Fighters Are Down

Both clerics attempt to Turn Undead but both fail.

The next round, the ghouls swarm Krupe, paralyzing him too. With four PCs down, the ghouls halt their attack, intending to drag the paralyzed off.

Faced with losing four party members, and running out of options, our magicians start throwing whatever they have at the wall. Mayfly casts Web on two of the ghouls and Thekla blinds another with Light.

Voorhis heals Krupe's paralysis with Cure Light Wounds.

Looks Like Meat's Back on the Menu

They seem to be intending to drag off our remaining paralyzed comrades.

Blossom shoots an arrow and kills one, Mayfly casts Web, binding two, and Thekla blinds another with Light. Voorhis heals Krupe's paralysis with a spell while the ghouls start dragging their remaining victims towards the stairs down to level 4.

We chase them down the stairs, casting additional Light and Web spells to stop them and manage to hit the remaining ghouls.

We take some time to bind our wounds and finish off the incapacitated ghouls, then drag our paralyzed companions to the top of the stairs.

A Few Tense Turns of Resting

We wait out several tense turns at the top of the stairs, but fortunately nothing untoward happens to us. While they were paralyzed - our party members experienced a vision of being tortured by Armadeus, the Ruler of Hell.

Once the entire party is back on their feet, we quickly make sure that we still have a route back to the upper levels and then descend to level 4.

Throw Me Up A River

From the landing, we go south, to a room with a cracked southern wall. We crawl through the opening in the wall and Liminal, peeking ahead, spies numerous Fly-People running back and forth with metal swords, dipping them into a river of lava. It seems we've come to the smith area we found last week.

Two of them are carrying the swords and two more are hunched over the river, vomiting into it.

Liminal greets them and asks what they are making the swords for?

They're keeping their secrets to themselves, but, the Fly-People being flies, we offer to trade them rotting corpses in exchange for their golden vomit.

Dead Bodies Can Be Exchanged For Goods and Services

We depart back up the stairs to collect the corpses, grab the 3 left on the stairs and return to the Fly-People.

As we return to level 4, we run into a group of figures clad in dark plate armor. These are undead suits of armor who drain blood form their victims trapped inside - the Iron Squires - and we've fought them before. They have a tendency to blind their foes by spraying blood on them, as they do now on Liminal, blinding him.

Mayfly casts Fireball, killing 3 of the Iron Squires and Thekla blinds the last one with light.

It flails around, shooting blood out of his helmet in a wide arc while we pepper it with arrows until it goes down.

It's Like a Kinder Egg, But a Corpse

From the one who wasn't fireballed, we can extract another corpse from the armor to give the Fly-People.

They are very excited at the corpses, especially one from the Iron Squire, whom they hate.

We take the helmets from the Iron Squires to use as makeshift buckets and the Fly-People vomit into them, giving us about 400sp worth of gold!

Mayfly pries them for information about who they make swords for and they reveal that they make them for the legions of Plutus - though we don't know yet what these legions plan to do.

"You at Least Have Fly Herpes Now"

Liminal exclaims that he loves Plutus, to which the Fly-People respond with skepticism.

After some discussion, Liminal requests that he be filled with gold too and one of the Fly-People grabs Liminal's face and spits molten hot gold directly into his mouth. He is wounded from the kiss(?) but now his face and mouth looks like he inhaled gold paint.

We explore around the room a bit before we decide to leave the abbey for the week. Despite being chased by some Cadaverites on the way out, we make it to the surface in one piece.

We each get 211xp and we recovered 400sp worth of golden vomit, for 42sp each.





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