Campaign Journal: Clouds over Thornfall

[Seruvius]

Having read a few wonderful journals on here and having just had the first sesh of what looks to be a great campaign, I decided to try writing one. Join me and my companions on our weekly Adventures in the coastal city of Thornfall.


Glyndan Liadon, wood elf monk Hermit (ME =D)
Ulf Strongbeard, mountain Dwarf Fighter
Reed, Lightfoot Halfling Sorcerer Pirate
Caren Burrows, Lightfoot Halfling Ranger (female) Folk Hero

Ability scores are the standard array.


We are level 1 mooks, all of who were wronged by a local Kingpin of the underworld named Gaedran Lamm. My temple was burned to the ground as we had been healing those addicted to drugs supplied by Gaedran, reducing profit. Strongbeard's Clan has received threats to evacuate their ancestral holdings or be driven out. The crew of the ship Reed belonged to were taken by Gaedran's men. Caren has a strong dislike of child trafficking and knows Geadran is behind a large trafficking ring.
A few days ago each of us found a Tarot card in our possessions with writing on it, telling us that the owner had also been wronged and wishes to join forces with us to get revenge on Gaedran. A time and location for the meeting are specified, a run down area near Thornfall's docks.

Thornfall itself is a city-state on the decline, neighbouring city-states siphoning off trade and populace, so there are many sparsly inhabited areas and monuments attesting to its former glory. The city still boasts a sizable population and the honour of being the first settlement on the continent of Inea. Most non-lethal crimes are tollerated with a fine rather than imprisonment for those caught as long as it does not disrupt large scale commerce. An official thieves guild that runs protection rackets are also the tax collectors. Other powerful organisations include the Hellknight Order of the Nail( Lawful evil Swat team), Sable Company (kings elite guard, all mounted on hippogryphs) and the Acadamae (large magic school/guild).
While there is no official religion and the temples in the city tend to keep to themselves a number of evil deities receive official support. Ruled by King Eodred Arabasti II and Queen Ileosa Arabasti.
.


Session 1

One by one all 4 adventurers arrive at the specified adress. They find some food, drink and a note on a table, asking them to wait for ye quest giver. After basic introductions, awkward questions about who was wronged how commence. The cards are examined for any clues and are noted to all be part of the same deck. Suddenly the cards fade away to nothing as a human female enters the room.

The mysterious lady (strong gipsy fortune-teller vibe) introduces herself as Zellara. Most of us are quite wary of this unknown spellcaster, but all decide to at least listen to her first before running away in panic. Zellara explains that she can find the location of Gaedran if she has some personal possession of his or even better some hair. She tells us that there is a tavern nearby that has a druglab underneath. The lab and the tavern belong to Gaedran but we must be fast or silent as the area is patrolled by his thugs who will respond to any problems. Off for a drink it is then!

Arriving outside the tavern, the party splits, a tactic well known to never go wrong. While Caren searches around outside for a side entrance, strongbeard and Reed walk straight in while Glyndan checks for patrols or lookouts around the front. Caren finds a back entrance to the cellar, but as there are 2 burly men guarding it, she decides to join the rest inside.
Inside mr. Strongbeard and Reed get drinks, Strongbeard declaring loudly that the ale is terrible and asking loudly about where drugs can be found here. So much for subtle. Reed tries to calm evyerthing down, but other patrons take offence and tell Strongbeard to leave. After almost killing a man with 1 punch everyone decides that maybe the drug question wasn't that insulting after.

During this ruckus Glyndan and Caren have entered and are observing the whole scene from the crowd. Caren notices a pair of youths in the back corner, talking fast to each other with a crossbow under their table pointing at Strongbeard. Deciding to find out what'sgoing on, she sneaks closer. Glyndan in the meantime decides to get back to the sneaky infiltrating and convinces the Bartender to introduce him to the gents downstairs by showing off his knowledge of the local drug Shiver, a compound of spider venom.
As Glyndan heads towards the door that leads downstairs and Caren approaches the youths, Strongbeard notices them watching him and takes offence, standing up and walking straight towards them. The youths pull out a pair of crossbows and all prepare for a fight, but Strongbeard casually takes a crossbow bolt to the armoured chest before smashes one skull into paste andtelling the other to just lay down his crossbow and talk to him, something the boy is surprisingly happy to do.

While the interrogation begins, Glyndan goes down into the cellar, past 2 skeleton guards into a room full of glass tanks with spiders, child slaves and a human taskmaster of some sort. Before anyone could say a word, The rest of the aprty barelled down the stair and started to smash the skeletons to bits. Glyndan knocked out the Slaver, took anything useful lying around while telling the children to run. The party collectively legged it up a second staircase, knocking out and plundering the 2 guards Caren had seen earlier on the way out, before legging it down the nearest alleyway.

The Backdoor turned out to be a great idea. As the party came back on to the main street further up, a large gang of ugly buggers was waiting outside the front entrance, ready to pounce on us poor innocent adventurers. After a detour to shake any possible pursuers the party returns to Zellara. She is delighted with the spoils, especially a comb that has a single white hair on it, one of Gaedran's; Other spoils included a ledger filled with coded writing that Caren keeps for later decription.
After a quick ritual Zellara pinpoints Gaedran's location, an old warehouse on the docks. It is late by now so the party decides to scout it out, rest and take it on in the morning. The party can't stay at Zellara's overnight so she gives them a letter of reccomendation and the address of a brothel nearby owned by a friend.

After arriving and being growled at by the bouncer, rooms are found and inquires made about dwarf and halfling companions for Strongbeard and Reed. In the meantime, Glyndan and Caren leave to scout out the old warehouse. Besides some sort of large vat, nothing useful can be seen through the grimmy windows. Suddenly a rotten plank breaks with an audible crunch and the heroes leg it like rabbits, hearing the barking of a biiiig dog inside as they speed away. Oh dear.

After a good nights rest, some with company, we decided to just use Strongbeard's method as it worked last time. Walking straight through the open door of the fish processing plant that this warehouse turns out to be, mr Strongbeard asks the Gnome at the counter where Gaedran is. The Gnome screams something about intruders and we get back to introducing people to the pointy bits of our weapons. Once again there are many enslaved children around that are ordered to arm themselves and attack us by the Gnome. Reed has other ideas, managing to convince the kids to run away instead.

At various points the Gnome, an old man with flasks of acid, ye big angry dog and a huge half orc with a flail throw themselves at us, with children generally being told to bugger off by Glyndan and Reed. At some point during this, mr Strongbeard decided having slaves wasn't such a bad idea and orders 2 children that watched him crunch the acid man's face into peices to stay and proceeds to tie them up.

After finishing off the Half-orc, Reed and GLyndan arrive and vocally oppose slavery, with strongbeard finally compromising and agreeing to make them servants instead. One of the children pipes up and tells the party of a trapdoor under the stair that the naughty children were taken through but never come back from. Well this is All smiles and rainbows isn't it?

Opening the Trapdoor, the party sees a large hole with a wooden catwalk around it over the water bellow the main building, with a muttering old man one one side who was of course Gaedran and overheard attempts to sneak up on him by GLyndan straight away =(. Then Reed just puts him to sleep instead =P. After tying up ye snoozing baddy an alligator decides to jump up from the water bellow, through the hole and munch on one of Strongbeards 2 'servants'. Coming up for a second helping it gets turned into handbag material by the party who aren't too happy about loosing their newest recruit.

Gaedran finally wakes up, and begins giggling madly to himself. Glyndan has noticed a door in one of the walls and goes into the small bedchamber on the other side. Gaedran giggles louder and tells us there was a nice surprise in his room for us, at which point Glyndan shows his heroic streak once more by legging it out of the room. Caren shows more backbone and investigates, finding among various trinkets the severed head of Zellara and a deck of Tarot cards identical to the ones that appeared in our gear.

As Caren touches the Tarrot deck, an image of Zellare springs into existance. She explains that she has been dead for a while now, killed by Gaedran, but her essence was bound to these magic Tarrot cards that belonged to her. She cannot do much but she can still affect the world through these cards. After this explanation the image fadesaway. Ok, spooky card deck haunted by powerful spellcaster. yay.

Hearing some noise from outside we march Gaedran upstairs and peere outside. The streets are in Chaos. A Sable company soldier on a Hippogryph goes soaring by followed by a swarm of arrows. Palls of smoke can be seen rising over various parts of the city. From the cries we can understand this much. The King is Dead. Some beleive the Queen did it and seek vengeance, others support her as the rightful ruler. It seems a civil war has broken out while we fought in a smelly fish factory. Oh double yay. Gaedran is still giggling to himself and as the party is undecided between a) killing him quickly b) giving him to the alligator or c) keeping as a hostage we end the session here.

End Sesh 1

[Seruvius]

Session 2
Reed, Glyndan and Caren present.

Between last sesh and this one the party voted on what to do with Gaedran, so at the start a quick interrogation, frisk and execution were retconned in, his body being thrown through the hatch under the building. Many floating logs were suddenly surprisingly mobile and a few elegant dorsal fins were also present in the red frothing water. Note to self: Thornfall seems to be in Australia. Do not swim or pet the spiders and look out for Dropbears.

Once we clambered upstairs we noticed all the chaos and the incesant tolling of the castle bells. Staying in this fish shop was probably not the best idea and as Zellara was dead, another refuge was needed. It jsut so happened that not too far away was the temple of Pelor where Glyndan knew some people. A safe-ish location to figure out what to do next. On the way there we saw people looting shops, angry mobs and our first glimpse of the Hellknights, Spiky jet-black Platemail wearing worshippers of Asmodeus, whose cult has one of the largest temples in the city(!). Oh dear.

On our way to the temple we see one particularly large mob moving in a similar direction to us. At the back fringe of the mob, a group of commoners were beating up someone in posh clothes lying on the ground and blaming his queen for the Kings death. Reed wanted to avoid the group, but Glyndan was all about helping people (Flaw is help those in need always), so in the party jumped, Glyndan braining people left and right while Reed told everyone to back off and Caren shot those who couldn't take a hint in their non-essential body parts.
The young noble, a relative of the queen, thanked us for his rescue before buggering off to the nearest guard post. One of those ruffed up was unable to walk on his own, so the party carried him to the temple of Pelor along with them. On the way our new friend told us that the bells ringing signified the death of the king, who is very popular in this city, and hence it must be the queen who did gon dun it. We found ourselves unable to argue with such sound logic.

Once at the temple we noticed a lack of magical healers but a few temple priest and monks who were tending to the dozen or so wounded. Glyndan went straight to his friend, Bob the elf, greeting him in a traditional elven fashion, both having known each other for the last century or so while living in human lands. While Glyndan helped Bob with his charges, Reed decided to aid the healers as best he could while Caren went around and chatted with the various patients. Nothing much was learned, but Caren did find a local council member who seemed a bit dodgy and had injured his leg in strange circumstances. Something to investigate later. The group decided to sleep at the temple for the night, leveling up in the process to level 2. Yay shiny new toys =D

The next morning the party decided to go and gather some intel as the chaos of the last night seemed to have subsided. Reed wanted to head north to the docks where his ship was supposed to be moored and Caren decided to tag along to poke around the docks. Glyndan went with them for part of the way before heading east to the nearest guardpost to try and get some info there. Reed found that his ship had left in a hurry early yesterday with all the crew and would not return for a week or two. Caren poking around in some local taverns and Glyndan getting some Ale for the thirsty Guardmen on duty, Borin and Gareth, turned up a bit more info but nothing substantial. Meeting back at the temple, they remembered that they had a fancy locket with a lovenote for the current queen inscirbed in it. Glyndan showed it to his more city-wise friend Bob the elf, who appraised it as of the highest quality. Deciding they had no idea what else to do at this point, they should head to the Palace and see if they could get a new lead there.

The Palace itself was visible from a long way away, a castle built atop what was a far older structure, some sort of ziggurat made of black stone, at least 70 meters in Height before reaching the Plateau where the Palace was. Steep steps rose up to the palace on each of the 4 sides and guards were stationed at the base. Approaching one of these Guardposts, Our heroes were stopped but after introducing themselves as adventureres were told that the Officers in command of the Guard's of Thornfall, Field Marshal Cressedia, had put out a general call for adventureres and she would love to meet us. A long climb, lots of panting and an interview later we are independant agents of the Guard, tasked with returning some deserters alive and find out why these riots broke out so fast and at the same time by talking to an owner of a vice den who has an info gathering operation. We are given various trinkets including a piece of paper to tell the guards to help us and 1000 Gold for bribes, being allowed to keep any leftovers.

Deciding to retcon Strongbeard as having been training his 'apprentice' and then counting coins for the rest of the sesh, we left the Gold with Bob and a hologram of Strongbeard at the temple of Pelor before heading to the Butcher shop in a poor district that these gents had holed themselves up in .



On the way we decided to bring Glyndans new friends Borin and Gareth as the butcher was near that Guardpost, to come in and actually drag the unconcious deserters away once we were done. Agreeing on a signal to tell them to come in and mop up, we split from them and arrived at the butchers witha line of poor outside, slowly going in. Some questions later it turned out these guys had set up here during the chaos and were handing out free cuts of Beef and Pork.

After a few more people went in the two soldiers in defaced uniforms at the counter shouted out that that was all for the day, so the tripo decided to sneak in from the back. A wall provided a bit of an obstacle for the Halflings but with the aid of Glyndan evyerone got over the wall without much effort, calmed down the spooked cows and avoided the Tusked boars in the nearby pen to rush through various doors, using sleep spells from Reed and general non lethal quarterstaffs and Crossbow quarrels (wait what?) to bludgeon the 4 Deserters into submission.
Glyndan especially seemed to be doing rather well at the non-lethal punching and pumelling, scoring 5 (!) crits out of 10 Attacks made against the poor Guards.

As we were told there were 4, Glyndan used his medical skills to make sure all 4 would survive while Reed climbed a small flight of stairs, running into the boss leading these 4, whom we had totally forgotten about. He also went down after nearly killing poor Reed. The boddies were looted for small useful items such as coins and ammunition before the signal (a piece of wood with green fire on it) was thrown out the main window and our ragtag bunch made their escape so the guard could loudly take all the credit.

End Sesh 2

[Seruvius]

Session 3

Caren, Glyndan and Reed present, plus a new player, Loghtarak, War Cleric 2 variant Human Outlander, who seems to have replaced strongbeard as the resident loud/crazy person.

Post legging it from the butcher shop our heroes valiantly decided to head back to the temple to have a kip to refresh their various resources, despite it being about 1 in the afternoon. On the way to Pelor's temple we noticed a new plume of smoke to the north in the cities rough districts like there had been during the riots and a large number of armed people in small groups heading in its general direction. While armed people are not unusual in Thornfall, these people were from all walks of life and all heading to the poorest roughest district of town.

While Caren and Reed kept on back to the temple Glyndan decided to repeat the great strategy of splitting the party and shadowed a few of the groups, overhearing somethng about a reward for the head of some female assassin who was up in the north. Deciding to heal up before looking for assassins he rejoined his friends and along with reed had a kip at the temple. Caren, deciding a bed was better than a stone floor and that splitting the party really was a great idea, headed north on her own.

Near her house some of the aforementioned armed groups were still hustling about but ignored Caren. However when she came to turn down her street she walked into a group of armed thugs, who kindly asked for a donation to the local armed guard, i.e. them.
As Caren loudly refuses and tell them to bugger off from her street, a Burly shadow detaches itself from an alley behind this group. Lokthar, 2 meters tall, muscled and shirtless, places a large hand on the shoulder of one and offers them the choise of paying the ladies cab fare or getting a foot up their arse. A bag with some gold is dropped and they leg it, caren pressing it into Lotkhars hands, telling him to put on a shirt and she doesn't need his help. Lotkhar enjoys a flirt with the feisty lady while she doesn't, so he slips back into the shadows, confident that he has so far fulfilled his contract to protect this group of adventurers.

After a nice long rest Caren Glyndan and reed meet up at the temple of pelor around 11pm. Caren knew where we could find our next contact, Devargo. He runs a collection of ships tied to each other which serve as a den of scum and villany. Perfect place for Reed, being a pirate. Glyndan the monk was less happy about it, but off they went, taking the 1000GP in bribes that they had been given for just this occasion. After reed bluffed his way past the guards by pretending to be here on the orders of his captain and glyndan pretended to be the ships doctor Caren got denied entrance for being a small female.

While Caren bickered with the bouncers, Reed enjoyed himself at the gambling tables and Glyndan walked around awkwardly. Reed circumspectly asked some question about where one could find devargo and how one can get an audience with him. Overhearing this talk, a tall broadchested human in a very small shirt stands up form a nearby table. Logtharak points at Reed and yelled out where to find devargo, and that devargo was a bastard. Everyone else muttered something along the lines of 'bloody log again' and got back to their games.

Having had his rant, Logtharak decided to go for a wander and found his favourite damsel in distress, Caren. She was less than happy to see him, but as he managed to get her in, decided to play his girlfriend for the moment. Reed and Glyndan arrived at the entrance to devargos personal ship at the same point as Caren and Logtharak. Reed asked to speak with devargo on behalf of his captain while Log said he was here to pay his substantial gambling debts. Palming a bribe, the guards let them pass.

Downstairs there was a large room. 6 rough looking humans with various arms and armour were sitting at a few tables either side fo the entrance and at the other end was a wooden throne with a well dressed man on it. Glyndan noticed the floor in front of him had well concealed hinges , a trap! He and the rest of the aprty also noticed a large spider climb across devargos chest before hiding behind him. While Reed tried to talk with devargo to try and buy the information and evidence of who was behind the riots, Logtharak tried to get out of his debts.

Devargo grew bored of the talks and asked for entertainment, calling for a favourite game of his. 2 combatants tie their left forarms together while standing on a table across from eahc other. a dagger is thrust into the middle of the table. Coins are thrown on to the table by the bistanders. The first to collect over half of the coins or knock out the oponent wins. Reed nominated Glyndan laying a hand on his shoulder and casting mage armour on him, suddenly experiencing a flash of emotion and a roll for wild magic. Glyndan not noticing this was happy to finally do something useful here so stepped up. After realising he was far better at hitting than collecting coins, GLyndan just beat up the minion he was playing against with headbutts.

Suitably entertained, devargo agreed to haggle, finally giving the group a good price if they payed log's debts and promised to keep him away. While paying, Reed noticed a cage in a corner with some sort of reptile in it. Asking devargo about it he was informed that it was a Pseudodragon left here by a wizard to pay his debt, which had been rather alrger than Logtharaks. The dragon was on sale for 400 GP, way more than we had left. Devargo handed Reed a letter, which had the name of the and his signature, a man called Boren Nekikio.
As the group went to leave, Reed was bombarded by emotions of fear and pleading, shutting off after the door behind him shut.


Once past the bouncers at the entrance, Caren headed off (player left early) to go find a pet to tame for her beastmaster upgrade next level. Talking to the other 2, Reed spoke of the imprisoned Pseudodragon and made a plea that they help him free it. Logtharak, knowing he is supposed to protect these people, pointed out the issues with attacking a place full of armed guards. Glyndan while leaning towards Logtharaks logic could not deny that it did not sit well leaving the pseudodragon a prisoner, so with the other 2 wanting to rescue it now, Logtharak agreed to help.

Back on the boats, Logtharak headed for the Whorehouse district and proceeded to create as much fo a distractiona s possibel by throwing the main pimp overboard into the shark and croc infested water, then loudly shouting righteous slurs about how prostitutes are ungodly, while slapping devargos favourite prostitute about. Roused by the commotion, devargo and his men ran from his boat over to see what the ruckus was about, giving Reed and glyndan the chance they needed to slip in and get the dragon out. Being an elf, glyndan was immune to magicla sleep, so Reed put most of the guards left in the room to sleep, only 1 remaining awake, but unable to stop them freeing the dragon and making a run for it.

As Logtharak saw Reed adn Glyndan bursting out of the door with the Pseudodragon flying over Reed, he dived overboard, trusting in his god and his massive pectorals to protect him from the puny sharks of these southern waters. As most of the nasties were busy fighting over the scraps of the pimps body, he managed to get away, and celebrated his victory by urinating on the sharks from the pier he climbed up on.

Reed and Glyndan were now the obviosu targets, with the Pseudodragon flying overhead bombarding Reed with extatic positive emotions, making concentrating on spells rather hard. devargo noticed the theft and shotued for all his men and pet spiders to go after them. Through a combination of magical armour, dodging and spells/ki points the 2 somehow managed to avoid at elast a dozen guards and 2 big ass spiders to get off the boats and dissapear into the night, Reed using his halfling size to hide while Glyndan used his monk trainign to sprint away like a true hero.

Level up to 3! Boah these levels go by fast it seems. GLyndan goes Open Hand, Reed advances sorceror, Logtharak advances Cleric and Caren goes Beastmaster.

End Session 3

[DragonSinged]

Enjoying reading this, hope you keep updating! Sounds like a fun game so far.
I'm playing an Assassin/Shadow Monk in a game, just getting into monk levels,would be happy to hear how the character is handling, mechanically, also.

[Seruvius]

Glad to hear that you're enjoying the journal so far =D Well the DM said we should expect a 6 month campaign roughly, so hopefully will keep updating for a while yet =)


Monk is really reliant on short rests in my experience so far. Without his/her ki points the monk is pretty limited in what they can do. Decent damage early thanks to the bonus action unarmed strike.
THe mobility is amazing: able to move around to flank, reduce ranged attackers effectiveness or just get the heck out of dodge.

[Seruvius]

Session 4

Didn't get time to write down lst weeks session before i went out into the Australian outback for a week long intensive course, so sorry for the late write-up to anyone reading these. On the other hand I might get both last week and this weeks session up soon, asuming I can make sense of my notes. :smallsmile:

Players present: Caren, Glyndan, Loghtarak and Reed, all level 3 now.


After making sure that his charges manage to slip away from the mobsters, Loghtarak walks off as well, aiming to return to his employer to report.
Completely exhausted, Glyndan and Reed manage to get to the Temple of Pelor and collapse into uneasy dreams.

The next morning, Caren returns from her trip riding a new addition to the party, a Panther called Radikk named after her Dead brother, and finds Reed and Glyndan with a new Pseudodragon friend. She is filled in on their Navy seal shenanigans (Arf Arf!) by Glyndan while Reed has a chat with the Pseudodragon, learning that his name is Majenko and that he will serve Reed for 2 years to repay us for his freedom. On a sidenote, DM decided that as Reed is not attuned entirely to Majenko, he must roll for wild magic on any spell above level 1. Bring on the Fireball TPK.

After the introduction are over we decide to go visit Field Marshal Cressedia again to give her the news. On our way to the palace we notice several groups of hellknights heading north and overhear them talking about the assassin who has yet to be found.
As we reach the palace and are escorted to the Field Marshal's chamber, we hear some loud noises coming from the other side of the double doors. After a knock we are called in and see Logtharak sitting in there, clearly in a drinking contest with an older gentleman who has a grey ponytail and a fancy rapier belted to his waist. The loud noises were these two boasting about their prowess to each other as Cressedia watches on with a faint grimace.

The gentleman is introduced as Vencarlo, an old friend and confidant of Cressedia and owner/founder of a prestigious fencing acadamy in Thornfall.
We pass the letter to Cressedia while explaining our findings, including our "liberation" of the pseudodragon. She also asks us about the deaths in the fish warehouse belonging to Gaedran, which we confirm was us. Cressedia says shes cool with us taking on crimelords (yay) but tells us that under the fishery there were a ton of crocs and sharks shredded by something with big claws. Oh dear.
That slight foreshadowing aside, we are told that while this info we've found is great, there are more urgent matters to attend to. The identity and location of the probable assassin has been found by some of Cressedia's informants and she wants us to get to her before the mob or the Hellknights.



Everyone listened in now, even Logtharak paused in his drinking. First off Cressedia tells us the King is confirmed dead and that the palace clerics say he was killed by mundane poison slowly over a long period, with a final large dose having pushed him over the edge. A young woman called Tryna is the suspected killer as she had been hired to paint the king and a few guards noticed her behaving strangely at times, walking around and mixing contents of various vials and tubes. The Guards first just asumed this was what a classy painter did but after the king's death one reported his suspicion. Interestingly this guard commited suicide soon after by jumping off a high tower. Not suspicious in any way.

This young woman is a former student of Vencarlo, hence why he's here. Cressedia knows that the Hellknights will just kill her to bring peace back to the streets, the mobs will tear her appart and she's not evne shure she can trust her own guards as they may kill her out of patriotic love for the king. We are to capture the supposed assassin alive and return her to the palace so she may stand a fair trial rather than a lynching. We agree that if she deserves a fair trial, which Cressedia promises will happen as she herself is doubtful of the girls guilt.
Capturing a possible Assassin from an area containing vengeful mobs and hellknights? What could possibly go wrong? We accept and head north towards the shingles (Poor slums, where Caren lives).

Vencarlo walks with us for a while and we ask some question about his former student. He too says that he never believed she had it in her to kill someone in cold blood, even though she certainly had the skill for it.
He bids farewell at a large crossroad, heading back to his acadamy, while we conitnue north into the shingles. Arriving there we notice that there are Hellknights banging down doors one by one, obviously searching for our target. The party stops at Caren's house to make a plan and remembers that we have Zellara's spooky magic deck of cards.

Reed takes out the Deck and focuses on them, suddenly the whole room changes appearance and looks like the room we first met up in, in Zellaras house. THe walls are covered in Silk cloth and Zellara walks in through the main door (which was the bathroom in Carens house). We ask Zellara for help and she takes the deck of cards and starts drawing them, placing them on the table while talking to us.
She tells us that the death of the king and the hunt for the Assassin are but the first moves of pawns in a long game of chess. The cards tell of dark clouds coming from the Ocean that will fall over Thornfall. Zellara also points at Caren, telling her that the Silver dagger that we found has a magical connection to the spirit world. And Poof, back in reality again.

Generally spooked and worried but no wiser we decide we need to get Tryna the 'Assassin' before the Hellknights do and we know her adress, so leaving the deck of cards in Carens place we head off to get **** done.


All the houses in the singles are tall and blend into eahc other, leaning over the street to block out most if not all of the sun. After walking arond a bit we find the mess of windows that contains our target and notice hellknights a bit down the street, so got to act fast. We know Tryna is on the 3rdfloor of this 4floor high building, so decide to attack from above. Finding a nearby alleyway, Caren climbs up the wall using her Panther, ties a rope to a portruding Beam of wood and evyerone else climbs up. We walk along the gravel covered rooftop and find a doorway in.
Majenko the Pseudodragon is told to sit on the edge of the roof, pretending to be a gargoyle and send warnign if anything happens on the roof nearby. Caren silently opens the door and we enter.

This is an obviously densly inhabited building, noises of too many people in too little space come from all around. Moving quickly, we descend 1 level and find the door we are after. Logtharak decides its time for Shock and Awe and kicks down the door (critical success), bowling over the chairs and table stacked against it and casting Hold person against the Lady lying on the bed. His spell fails to hold anything as at the same moment Reed gets an image sent to him of a girl idnetical to the one on the bed scrambling up and across the rooftop.
As the Illusion fades, Reed runs to the window and casts an airburst sleep so that it catches Tyrna as she tries to flee, while shouting out what's happening to the rest of us. Glyndan and Caren race their way back up stairs, seeing the girl fall asleep and start to slide towards the edge, with GLyndan dancing across the moving gravel to get to her in time.

With the target captured, GLyndan ties her up then checks to see if she is in good heatlh, while caren goes back downstairs to help the others investigate. They collect the possibly poisonous paint and an old fencing sword. Glyndan passes Tyrna through the window to Log and climbs back in himself.
She wakes up, bound and gagged, seeing these armed strangers and begins to cry. After being calmed down slightly by Reed who tells her a little about us being here to take her to a fair trial, rather than just death, she protests her innocence, giving a good impression of someone who isn't a deadly killer. Suddenly the sound of a breaking door echoes from bellow, which we take as our reason to leg it across some rooftops, Logtharak casting cats grace on himself to carry the bound lady, now in a bag, with unusual Grace, like a large male russian Balerina.

Finally returning to the field marshal with a big bag over our shoulder that no guard checks, we deposit Tyrna and get a promise she will be watched by trustworthy people.
Logtharak hands over the paints for analysis, but keeps the fencing sword in case Tyrna does get freed so it can be returned to her.

After poor Tyrna is taken away, we tell Cressedia all about the divination we received from Zellara. She couldn't think of a aprticular nation from across the sea, but she promised to keep it in mind as this whole mess was unravelled. Speaking of which, her soldiers had been busy and had found out who the gent from the letter was and where. Turns out we have a necromancer in town who has his HQ in a mausoleum in the Graveyard. A squad was sent in as soon as they found out this info, but its been a few hours and they have yet to report back.

As it is getting late we decide that night is probably not the best time to attack a necromancer in his own lair. As we've now killed 1 and pissed off another of the Underworlds Kingpins, we decide to sleep in the Guard Barracks for the night, leaving before dawn so we have as much sunlight as possible outside to run away into if there are too many nasty undead. Caren also commissions barding for her Panther.

Early the next mornign we travel to the graveyard. The Entrance to the Mausoleum stands open, with mud showing that a fair number of people have come in and out over the last few days. Entering into it. we descend and ind a large hall with a number of dead city guards and a dead Hellknight here. Before we can figure out what happened to them and why a hellknight is here, Loghtarak yells out that hes detected evil in pits either side of this open space.
Approaching the pits we see huge mounds of bone in each. From one side humanoid skelletons appear while form the other a single Owlebar skelleton appears. Logtharak owns skellis left right and centre with some help from the rest of us, especially Reed casting Web on the Owlbear.
After the din dies down, 3 dark skinned gnomes appear and take potshots at us from another entrance, but Loghtarak is in full swing so the throws his axe at one, splitting its head in two (crit and max damage !), following up with an intimidating challenge that sends the other 2 gnomes running for their lives.

So many high damage numbers and crits on our side, so few on the NPC's side. DM decided his dice must be cursed :smallsmile:

End Session 4

[Seruvius]

Session 5

Continuing our Dungeon Crawl through a necromancer infested Mausoleum

Players present: Caren, Glyndan and Reed.


After having owned everything within sight, Logtharak notices that some of the guardsmen lying on the ground are still alive. He starts carrying them out to the temple that runs this graveyard, telling us he will send word to the guards for backup. Having lost our badass undead slayer, we continue on with less enthusiasm.

Stepping over the corpse of the dark skinned gnome that had a close encounter with Log's flying axe, the single tunnel splits into 3 rough tunnels, hewn out of the rock. We follow one and find what looks to be a torture/surgery room with 4 tables with restraints. 2 are occupied by 50cm long 4 winged mosquito-things (i.e. Stirges). A few dead ones lie around and 4 buzz within a cage. There is a lot of medical equipment around and after some investigation we discover these stirges all have bloodsacks filled with human blood and someone has been harvesting this blood from them with a huge ass Syringe. Among other things we find a glass Carafe with old blood in it. Vampires? Freaky experiments?
Reed executes the beasties each with a firebolt through the skull and we move on, feeling disturbed.

The torture room itself also has 2 more exits, so leaving Radikk the panther guarding one entrance and Majenko the one we came from, we move on through the third opening.
We step into a corridor which was clearly made with more care than the rough hewn tunnels we were just in. It extends left and right from us, flagstones cover the floor and the wall across from our entrance is covered with skulls set into the wall. To the right the corridor ends in an alcove with some sort of bone statue in it. It is made of fused human spines and ribcages with a single skull on the top and looks serpent-like. To the left the corridor ends in a corner where we cna just make out another one of these bone-snake things. Everyones Spidey-senses are going crazy by this point.

Finding no trap mechanism, GLydan is still convinced this is one, so Thwacks the Right hand bone-snake in the head, crushing the skull (yet another crit!). AS he does so, both bonesnakes animate and the skulls on the wall start openign their mouths and spewing clouds of acid.
As Reed goes to cast he is hit by wild magic, thankfully just missing TPK-tastic fireball and confusion; instead shrinking from 3ft to 2ft7. 8 inches smaller and he becomes Tiny =D.

The skellisnake facing glyndan gets clobbered and burned to bits, while the other one moves out of its alcove and starts swaying, hypnotising Caren just after she calls her Panther to her side. The panther arrives just in time to eat some acid along with his mistress.
Seeing Carens problems, Glyndan races past her to engage the snake, avoiding more gas and hypno-dancing to be instead bitten by the snake and paralysed, deciding to show off his planking skills.
Reed decides enough is enough and shows off the sorcerors nova ability with quicken and tides of chaos advantage, blasting the snake to smoking bone fragments.



The Skulls empty their last acidic breath before all falling still. Glyndan and Caren recover. At the end of the skull corridor is a door. We open it to find a surprised looking dark-gnome that Caren promptly owns with her pouncing Panther. We are inside what appear to be a kitchen and hear some sort of moaning and hammering coming from the south of us, behind a boarded up door. Reed burns a small hole in the door and sees what looks like an unfinished flesh golem with no arms, trying to headbutt its way out.

Reed weakens the door but before he can get away, fleshy burst out knocking him over. It eats some prepared arrows then gets knocked over backwards by glyndan where it tries to headbutt his shins for the next while. Caren goes all prince of persia and wall walks with Radikk to get behind it. As we are stomping the poor flesh golem something else is drawn to the noise, a humanoid with what looks like a flesh cabbage for his head. Glyndan leaves shinbiter to caren and pummels on cabbage to no effect, so after Reed kills fleshy, caren comes over and owns cabbage.
Examining cabbage afterwards it looks like he is some sort of human/ogre blend with leather armour grafted to his body. Oh my, more delightfull experiments.




Deciding to push our luck, the party continues into this maze, again having Majenko pretend to be a dragon shaped burglar alarm behind us. Entering a room we find a small angry dark-gnome spellcaster and zombie-Gaedran (the Druglord from sesh1), covered in various bite marks.

The gnome spellcaster exclaims something about us intefering with master Nekiko work ( the necro we are after). GLyndan goes for the spellcaster while Caren and Reed gang up on zombie-Gaedran.
While the halfling's wear down the zombo, Glyndan gets owned by the spellcaster, poisoned blinded and recuded to single digit HP, he once again shows his heroics by running away into a corner.

Reed starts trading spells with the enemy spellcaster while Caren seems to kill the zombie only for it to partially knit back together again, while glyndan rocks in the corner crying to himself.
As the blindness/poison dissapates, glyndan rushes in an knocks the spellcaster on to his gnome-backside inside his library downa side corridor just as Caren finally finishes off the zombie that promptly crumbles to dust.
The Spellcaster manages to stand and drink a cure potion, just as caren comes racing past trying to do another wall-run trick. She makes it across but looses her grip on Radikk, ending up prone on the floor. Clearly enraged at this, Glyndan finishes off the spellcaster with both his attacks critting.




With all 3 of us on single digit HP, we decide to block the Library entrance and have a short rest while studying the books in here.
The library is filled with mostly medical books about the human body and human illnesses. Magic plague from the necro maybe?
We also find on the body and hidden in some fo the books a variety of scrolls.
Pondering what this necro mgiht have to do with it all, we remember (with some unsubtle DM hints) that one of our first fights was against a pair of skeletons guarding the spider-drug factory. It seems this necro might have quite a long reach.

After resting, we take some choice books with us to sell later. Exploring nearby we find a lavish bedroom, including 4 poster bed desk and mirror, with a second smaller ensuite bedroom.
Caren is sure that the mirror is magical and spends the next while poking at it and trying out various command words to no effect (Caren: I touch it, what happens? DM: On the mirror something has appeared where you touched it. Your Fingerprint.)
A frankenstein style corpse is in the rpocess of being assembled on a table. Ok, interesting hobby i guess. Under the 4poster glydans finds a box and after poking and prodding it at a distance with his quarterstaff finally opens it to find gold and no trap. yay. deciding to repeat this, he finds another box under the small bed that contians 4 severed hands. yay? After poking them with his staff, they animate and scuttle away into cracks in the walls like spiders.
Reed while looking around also finds a solid glass fist sized sphere and pockets it.

Deciding to explore a little bit further before returnign to the guards, we find the worst part yet.
Following a smell of blood, rot and feces we walk onto a raised platform with 3 pits around it. Looking into the pits we see 2 humans in each, all naked.
In each pit there is a trough with water and many rotting body parts. They plead for mercy, not to be taken next but as theyr ealise we are not their captors they beg for freedom. 4 are malnourished and have been here for some time, but 2 Glyndan just recognises through the grime as they recognise him. These are the 2 guards, Boren and Nera, that he befriended with his small cask of ale back in sesh1, the only survivors of the guards sent here.

We hastily get them out of these filthy pits and decide to get these people to the temple in the graveyard ASAP. Of the 4 who have been here longer 3 are clearly mad, broken by their experience. One though, a female named Tiore, is still sane and tells us that she was kidnapped during the riots following the kings death. The very riots the necro nekiko seems to be behind.
Boren has a festering wound. Good thing that we came here now, if we had waited another day he would have surely perished. The 2 guards and Tiore tell us that there were once many mroe here but often people would come and take them away, never to be seen again, but sometimes they heard the screams. :smallfurious:

We manage to guide our charges out of this mess of a mausoleum with no furhter issues and get them to the temple of Hood, the God of Death and patron of this Graveyard. A quick explanation and the priest start healing our charges, clearly disturbed at the news that a necromancer has been experimenting in an area under their care.

As we 3 are discussing what to do next, a squad of guardsmen appears, having been sent by Loghtarak to aid us. They are informed of the issue and a runner sent to the fieldmarshal with the relevant information.


Damn. That was really hairy twice there. Twice we nearly had a TPK. Still Ridiculous rolling on our side at times though. Standout would have to be the combat against the skelletons where Glyndan crit to hit , then reed and caren crit on initative.
DM is pretty certain that roll20 RNG hates him now.

End Session 5

[Seruvius]

Session 6

It seems that Logtharak's player has left us entirely now, so once again our party is:
- Caren the Halfling Ranger who's hobbies inculde shooting people in the eye and riding her panther as it disembowls its prey
- Glyndan the elven monk who either crits things or runs away like a pansy
- Reed the Halfling sorceror who may soon be a quarterling and able to ride his pseudodragon if he keeps shrinking.



We start the sesh by waking up in the temple of Hood, the local death god. As we enter the main area we notice a funeral is just getting started, but before we can enquire Tamara, the head priestess, sees us and comes over. We find out that Glyndans guard freinds have gone back to the barracks and that this funeral is for a noble family killed in their home after yet another riot broke out while we were undergound fighting undead gribblies. This riot was due to the sentencing of the painter girl as the assassin of the king. Ook, so maybe delivering her to the authorities was not the best idea after all. Caren points out that she said we shoudlve just said she got away and let her do so, while Glyndan and Reed awkwardly shuffle their feet.
Her execution is set for Noon the next day. time for a last visit from us at least. :smalleek:

We thank Tamara for her hospitality and head off to kill whatever is left in this mausoleum. The entrance is being guarded by 2 town guards and a hellknight. The hellknights are basically Asmodeus worshipping SWAT units but this one seems surprisingly non-crazy. He introduces himself as a squad leader and thanks us for taking out this necromantic filth. The dead Hellknight in there had been someone he knew so in thanks for being able to retreive his corpse he owes us a favour. yay?

Having said his bit, mister black spicky armour steps aside and we re-enter the mausoleum. Stepping over the corpse of the dark-gnome that Loghtarak split in two, we turn right down a new passageway, finding the rank smelling sleeping quarters of the dark skinned gnome things. We start to search through the pallets and the room, finding another exit that goes downstairs steeply and a few gold when suddenly Majenko, Reeds Pseudodragon, flashes a warning. He senses movement of something very big through the wall. Oh dear.
Shortly after the warning we hear the sound of crunching bones near the entrance of the tunnel/room we are in. Pearing out from behind the wall, we see some sort of 3 legged, 3 tentacled mosnter with a huge mouth, chomping down on the gnome-corpse. Deciding that we best use this distraction, we all set up and fire, with Caren and GLyndan both scoring critical hits.

The monster starts slwosly moving towards us, hampered by its bulk. We keep backing away and firing but both Glyndan and Caren get caught by surprise by its wide reach. Both get hit hard by its clawed tentacles but manage to avoid being caught and drawn into its mouth. Realising this thing was maybe nastier than we could handle but as it blocked our only known exit, the tunnel downwards being a big unknown, we kept fighting. Caren and Reed both entangled it (entangling stirke and web respectively), so while it tires to get out we manage to whittle it down over succesive rounds of combat (the thing had 114hp!).

With the death of the big tentacle-thing, Glyndan and Caren both retrieve some bolts from its corpse, noting the nasty liquid on it (yay poisionous blood) and we continue exploring. We find the lair of this mosnter, a cave filled mostly with mud and body-parts. Deciding to then try the downwards passage, we walk along a short corridor before finding ourselves in roughly hewn corridors designed for small sized creatures. The halflings rejoice while glyndan groans.
In this secret corridor we find the last surviving member of this little nest, a single dark-gnome. He gets mauled by Caren's panther before glyndan rushes in to stabilise him. Yay a prisoner.

After a last sweep, we decide this is all and walk out, telling the guards to call some reinforcements to clean up this mess. Caren heads home while Reed and Glyndan head to the HQ of the town Guards, dropping off the prisoner into the tender care of the interrogators.





We clean ourselves up before heading to the palace, leveling up to 4 in the process. All advance the same class they were in. Glyndan puts 2 points into Dex, Reed takes the Lucky feat and Caren takes mounted combat feat.

We meet up outside the Palace about 1 hour after dropping the prisoner with the interrogators and are swiftly let in to meet with Field Marhsal Cressedia. She's alreayd heard what happened and we now have access to the guards armoury to restock on basic supplies and weaponry. yay infinite arrows/bolts/rope.
We talk about our findings and one things that comes up is why did the necro instigate the riots to get so many people so fast? Why such a rush? THere must be some reason but we have no idea what it could be, but we are sure we wont like it when we find out. From now on all guard patrolls are larger and have a cleric or pali with each to detect any remaining nests of undead. Thats a start at least.

Now, the ''Assassin". The Marshal says that there was a surprisingly large number of witnesses who atested to the painter acting strangely. She asumes some hidden agenda, but as the Queen herself was present she could not do much. The '"Assassin" is to die by beheading.
As we brave adventurers were the ones who captured the "assassin" (more dirty looks from caren, more awkwardness from glyndan and reed), we have been invited by the queen herself to witness the execution; not an invitation one can easily decline.

When we, once again, mention our unease with the verdict, Cressedia has the doors shut. She mentions off the record that others agree with us and that the execution may not go exactly as planned. Well at least someone either very skilled or powerful agrees with us.
Caren wants to talk to Trina the "assassin", so the Marshal arranges that. Talking with her reinforces the points that cressedia made. She said all the guards that testified against her were unknown to her. The supposedly magically toxic paints were supplied by a simple paint shop near her house, a good location to go investigate it seems.
After feeling Guilty around her for a bit we leave the palace dungeons, returning to the city.




Deciding that we should spend some of the various coins weve found and stock up for an execution that might turn ugly, we first head to the Guards keep to restock on arrows and similar. As we're busy there, Caren remembers that Zellara's cards tolds us that the silvered dagger we found was magical and had a connection to the spirit realm. We decide to find a magic user to identify what this baby can do. After visiting the wizards college we end up at a magic shop recommended by the wizards.
After showing interest in our illegal books and buying them off of us, the store-wizard agrees to investigate carens knife for 50gp per day. We also all stock up on healing potions.

It was late afternoon but most shops were still open, so we decided to investigate the paint shop that sold the deadly paints to trina. As we were walking there, Glyndan and Caren notice that we are being followed. Caren decides whe will duck into an alley, climb to the 2 roof 8 meters up and then pounce our follower. GLyndan and Reed agree. They keep walking and wait to hear the scream. :smallbiggrin:

As Caren reaches the Rooftop she notices 2 things. 1: she is not alone up here, in fact there are 5 people up here, 4 with handcrossbows pointing either at her or at Glyndan and Reed bellow. 2: the one without handcrossbows has spiders crawling all over him and has bladed Gauntlets. It's bloody Devargo, the info broker we rescued majenko from and who's boat we may have accidentily burned down.
Insults are thrown and the surprise round starts.

As Crossbow bolts start peppering Glyndan and Reed, majenko notices Devargo and gets rather angry, flying off to fight him :smalleek:. The gent following us draws 2 long dirks (shortswords mechanically) and charges towards us. Reed goes first and once again our luck gets silly. He uses Scorching ray and 2 of the 3 rays crit, burning the twin blade to a crisp and badly burning the crossbow dude that shot him. Glyndan, not knowing Carens predicament, runs up the wall to another mook, and gets to kick someone off an edge for the first time, promptly doing so.

Just when we think this is going well, devargo slashes Caren with black liquid covered bladed gauntlets. As caren jumps away to the roof that glyndan is on (taking more attacks in the process), suddenly GLyndan seems to morph into a giant spider, as does everyone else. Freaking the crap out, she jumps down on to the street while gibbering.

Seeing a gibbering Caren, Reed casts mage armour on himself, triggering tides of chaos and summoning 4 flumphs that promptly run away from him (lol flumphs).
As Glyndan finishes off the burned mook with an arrow and more crossbow bolts fly around him and Reed, Devargo opens his mouth and lets out an inhumanly loud screech. As he does so 4 big ass spiders appear (medium sized creatures), climbing out of chimneys and similar. 2 pounce on retreating flumphs while 1 each heads towards Glyndan and Reed.
Imagine what this must look like for poor Caren. As she jumps off the roof to get away from a big spider (glyndan), she lands beside a big spider (Reed), whcih then promtply sumons 4 more spiders (flumphs) and then another spider on the roof screams and 4 more spiders appears (spiders looking like spiders? whod have thought). Understandably she legs it full speed, but manages to regain her senses at the end of her sprint so will at least get to rejoin us.

Seeing the slightly desparate situation, Reed pulls out the scroll of crown of madness we found in the mausoleum library, and manages to dominate Devargo. His eyes glow even madder and a bloody iron crown appears on his head. He attacks one of the mooks beside him, missing completely.
During all of this, Majenko has arrived and proceeds to attack devargo for the next couple of rounds, scoring a silly number of hits and crits.

Glyndan duels his spider on the roof, getting bit but avoiding poison before squishing it, Reed backs away from the gribblies and casts a quickened m.missile at one of the spiders, getting yet another wild magic, poisoning himself for the next hour. His control over devargo holds however and this time devargo destroys one of his minions in a single round, causing the other surviving minion to run away.
Glyndan and Caren crush the spider going for Reed, another spider gets damaged by devargo before he finally breaks free of Reeds mental control.

Looking around, devargo realises this is a lost fight and after a few choice insults he transforms into a weird spider-humanoid and runs away. Reed and caren fire at him but miss while glyndan finishes a last spider, managing to trip the 8 legged bugger somehow.

After looting the corpses we decide tis probs time to heal up.
Now we have an evenmore pissed off were-spider crimelord on our case. oh dear :smalleek:



We actually forgot about Devargo completely. Was a complete "oh holy crap" moment when we realised what was happening. The wild magic flumphs actually were a great aid, distracting some of the ogre-spiders from us. Caren's player had all the lovely details of the flumphs society explained to him by the DM, feeling worse and worse after each details of their utopian society.:smallfrown:

We also seem to keep loosing our shouty players, 2 for 2 so far :smallbiggrin:

End Session 6

[Seruvius]

Session 7

The usual 3 suspects present. To balance out our dungeon crawling and Otyugh slaying, this sesh was full of RP. The Write-up will probably be longer than usual due to the 4 odd hours of RP stuff =)


The party wakes in the temple of Pelor, having rested up after our spider themed battle. Reeds Pseudodragon pet Majenko has yet to return from following the spider-thing Devargo across the rooftops. Looks like we are going to have to mount a second rescure mission for the bugger if he doesn't come home soon (navy SEALS the second! "Arf Arf!").
We talk with Glyndans friend at the temple, Bob the elf (couldn't think of a good name at the time =P), once again. He tells us that more people have been getting sick of late than is usual for the time of year. After mentioning the undead threat and the possibility of magical disease of some sort, we convince him to send for aid, petitioning the far larger Pelorite temples in the nearby cities for aid. Well if all goes ploin-shaped, at least there might be some divine assistance on the way.

Deciding that as we have some time before the execution at noon, this is as good a time as any to talk to Zellaria. We decide to leave the temple and get a private room in a nearby bar, as the cards are sort of necromancy and pissing off one of our few allies would not be a great idea.
She appears once called as usual and seems excited, saying she had been waiting for our call. After filling her in on our necormancy related adventures she reads the cards for us, warning about a range of things. This includes "Orange lights drawing near, bringing death with skull-faced boxes from acress the sea" and "the city will fire up soon, evyerone will have red crosses. The clammering of the crowd will drown everything else." Red crosses, possible magical plague; we need to get moses in here it seems :smalleek:.
Before she leaves she identifies the glass orb Reed found in the necromancers dungeon, giving us the command word to activate it. once activated it floats behind the perosn who spoke it, sheding light but generating no heat.



Deciding it would not be the best idea to arrive late to an invitation by the queen, we set off towards the square where the execution will take place. Wooden scaffolding has been errected around the edges to rpovide seating and most of the nobility seems to be present and dressed up for the occasion. Feeling distinctly under-dressed we are let in to the noble's viewing area. The rooftops nearby are filled with common folk here for the show. Noticing Field Marshal Cressedia and The Fencer Vencarlo in the crowd, we head towards them.
On the way we notice a lot of Hellknights on the edges of the crowd and a lot of guards patrolling in it. As we reach Cressedia, her and Vencarlo are just finishing a conversation. Vencarlo himself leaves, saying he cannot stand to watch this execution. Cressedia grumbles that this whole thing is just a spectacle, being used by the queen to take peoples minds off the riots and similar of the last 2 weeks.

Before we can talk any further, drums and trumpets begin to sound. A gate in the wall to the palace nearby opens and a ton of people come out. First servants, then the queens household guard and her personal guard, a female human in fullplate with a broadswoard called Sabine who we learn is the rumoured lover of the queen. We also learn that Sabine was trained by Vencarlo. Interesting.
The queen is in a black mourning dress and followed by a hulking scaly humanoid (Dragonborn?) in an executioners hood with a big ass axe. Behind all this comes Trina, the supposed assassin.

The queen speaks loudly (magically enhanced?) to the crowd. Talks about how she feels for everyones loss as she herself has also lost her husband. Goes on a bit but ends with saying that the death of Trina will salve the cities wounds.
As the Executioners hefts the axe up high, suddenly a dagger sprouts from between his knuckles and he drops his axe. People begin shouting and screaming. We manage to make out a shouted/whispered name from the Crowd: BlackJack.
A Human male in dark leather clothes with a rapier in 1 hand and a dagger in the other jumps out of the crowd and cuts trinas bonds. He shouts :"Long live Thornfall! Down with the Queen!"

The Crowd erupts into violence, turning on itself. Some seem pro Blackjack, some pro Queen. Some are even calling for a democracy. The QUeen and her bodyguards retreat swiftly back to the gate they came out of while other guards and the executioner mov ein on BlackJack and Trina. BlackJack manages to avoid them, climb up and over a wall while being peppered by arrows. At the top of the wall he and Trina drink some sort of potions, give one last wave to the crowd then escape.
Hellknights start moving in to the crowd, breaking up the fights with rutheless efficiency, but on the roofs thngs are still crazy with people falling of the roofs everywhere.

What were our Heroes doing during this? Mostly trying to stay the crap out of the fights and not get the Halflings trammpled (Glyndan took a few blows for them but nothing serious). While we manage to see all this, we are too far away to do anything either way so we decide to get the heck back to the temple to help with the inevitable wounded and wait till everything calms down.



Our doughty adventurers arrive back at the temple with just a few scuffs and start helping get things ready for the waves of wounded whcih soon start to appear. Many have burn wounds, as some of the buildings seem to have caught fire during the fracas.
While Glyndan and Reed use their medical knowdlege to heal the wounded, Caren starts talking to thoe already treated, trying to find out who this BlackJack is.
It turns out this BlackJack is some sort of local Hero of the City. He has been known to move against corrupt Politicians, Merchants and similar in the past and has been around for at least 200 years. The last sighting of him before this day was 10 years ago however. There seems ot be different rumours on who/what BlackJack is which include: - a series of male humans, 1 in each Generation - A dark Elf - Used by the city leader to keep the noble houses in line - a member of the sable guard (elite force of city but loyal to the city not the throne).
Whatever the truth it seems its always a male humanoid and always with black leather armour and wielding a Dagger and Rapier. Ok, seems Zorro and Robin Hood had a lovechild at some point.
Hmmm. Vencarlo is a master with the Rapier, left the area before BlackJack arrived and would probably have loved to save his student. Maybe we should drop by his place later to congratulate him on his subtle disguise :smallbiggrin:.




As more casualities keep coming in, Caren realises she isn't getting any new info and that Glyndand and Reed can handle this situation quite well without her. Deciding to go check up on what the wizard has found out about her knife, she and Raddik go out for a girls shopping trip.
She picks up the Barding she ordered for Raddik a while ago, then heads to the magic shop where her knife is being examined. Knocking on the door, no one answers so she pushes on the door that opens. Entering into the foyer, Raddik growls and Caren smells blood.
Moving in to the main area of the shop she finds the wizard who has been butchered. Large chunks of his neck, face and body are missing, gouged out by what looks like claws. The silvered knife she asked him to examine is in his hands.

Her first asumption was that maybe something nasty was bound inside the dagger and had come out and attacked him, so was understandably hesitant about touching anything. She then remembered (with help from Reed and Glyndans players) that she has a scroll of Speak with Dead on her. She sucesfully casts the spell and asks her 5 questions of the Wizards spirit:
- How were you killed? "Humanoid. First human woman, then feline Head and Claws. ripped to shreads by its claws."
- Where did this creature come from? "Through the Front Door."
- What did you find out about my Dagger? "The knife is bound to something. The Knife is the Heart of a Prince."
- Who is this Prince? "A Snake"
- Where is the money I payed for you to look at my Dagger? "In my Belt Puch."

Deciding that she might as well take the bets contents. She gets her Gold back plus a bit more and 4 potions, 1 each white yellow blue and Green. In the cash puch she also finds a single Jet Black Pebble.

Returning to the Temple, Caren waits till Glyndan and Reed are finished with the last few patients then huddles with them. Glyndan uses his medical skills and identifies the potions as 1 each of Giants Strength, Climbing, Heroism and Animal Friendship.
As Caren tells us about the circumstances around the magicians death, Reed (with a 20-something on his Arcana check) realises that the creature being described is a ****ing Raksha. Among their abilities he remembers is that they are immune to spells bellow lvl6, resistant to tons of stuff and can basically appear as any humanoid they feel like. and its 5e cr, which is 13 :smalleek: Great, now weve not only got a spider-shifter thing but a shapeshifting fiend which is well outside our league (DM congratulates us on good use of scroll and arcane roll, weren't meant to know about this bugger for a while yet).
Oh bugger.

We also examine the pebble which is perfectly round and smooth. Seems special somehow, but as of yet no clue how. Might need to use the cards and ask Zellaria for some help again.

We decide to chill in the temple overnight so we can help the acolytes take care of the wounded.



In the early morning Glyndan is awake and tending to the wounded. He hears a loud sound (described as a Thwack by DM), as if something massive had collapsed, Echo across the city. Deciding to see whats going on, he goes outside and climbs on to the Roof of the temple (Glyndan: What do my elven eyes see? DM: .... sigh.)
He notices some activity to the northwest on the wall/fortress guarding the entrance to the docks. It looks like one of the Trebuchets was fired and something out to sea is on fire.

At breakfast the same morning, Glyndan mentions this to his companions. We decide that first we want to talk to Cressedia about BlackJack, the botched execution, devargo and the Rhaksa so we head off to the palace. The number of guards is higher than usual, but we are still waved through without much fuss.
Asking her about BlackJack she confirms our info so far and says that he has never been caught in his 200 year history. BlackJack is known to see himself as an impartial Judge and fights against corruption and people that abuse the common folk.
The queen has taken the rescue of Trina rather personally and is distraught. Oh well, not our issue right now, but having a hysterical ruler with all these problems going on is probably not the best.

We tell Cressedia about our fights with devargo, his identity as a were-spider, the Raksha and ask about what happened at the wall last night.
Wondering why Devargo attacked us, we tell her of our rescue of Majenko. While she is far from impressed, she understands us wanting to rescue the sentient being and that Devargo was tollerated untill now, but open attacks on the street will be punished if found. The Raksha is a bigger issue however, as it is so powerful and could be disguised as anyone, especially anyone in high society. She desiced to send off for experts (i.e. higher level adventurers than us :smallfrown: )to take care of it.
We ask her if she knows of a way that we can find Devargo before he finds us again and she suggests we talk to the thieves guild. She gives us the adress of the cloth store they use as a front and the code word to get in. We are told to speak with Aren Heltor.

The ship that Glyndan heard being blown up last night was strange. It was completely dar, except for 4 orange lamps (that prophecy ringing a bell). No crew was seen and it ignored hails, trying to enter the harbour without allowing for the cutsomary inspections so it was blown up by the guards.

We leave the Field Marshal and decide to drop in on Vencarlo at his school on our way to the thieves guild. Arriving there and being let in, we apologise for our role in capturing Trina and express our delight at her escape. Talk to hm about BlackJack and he points out that his school teaches a similar fighting style to that used by BlackJack and that many of his students aim to be the next one. We drop some subtle hints that we think he is BlackJack and that we approve of his actions, but he remains straight faced.
Vencarlo warns us that evyerone who had contact with tryna is now being watched, i.e. him and us among others. The cities leaders still think Trina has some sort of mind-control abilities so are trying to find out who if any of us are under her spell. As we leave his fencing dojo we notice someone keeping an eye on the place from across the road.

The thieves guild is our next stop and after walking through the secret door in the cloth shop and stating our business we are lead to Aren Heltor, the boss of this branch of the thieves guild. Aren turns out to be a young looking female elf with a couple of Half-Orc bodyguards. As she herslef has an interest in Devargo disappearing we get a good deal and will be contacted once his location is known.

With nothing else to do, the intrepid trio head to where Glyndan saw the ship burning earlier that day. After asking around it seems that the ship that sunk was Reeds ship, the Saltspriggen. The question of why the bugger did his ship come back without hailing anyone can now be added to the question fo why the buggery it left so suddenly at the start of our adventure.
One of the guards told us that some bloated corpses had washed ashore already in the poor quarter and had been sent to the cemetary for burial. This set Glyndans alarms bells tingling (high roll medical) as water corpses dont bloat up and float within 12 hours, it usually takes a few days at least. We decide that they must have already been dead or otherwise tampered with. someone maybe trying to cover up the murder of Reeds crew? If so, why not just let the ship never return, lost at sea as it were?
Deciding we need to inspect the bodies, we hurry down to the temple of Hood.

We find Tamara, the head priestess with whom we already had dealings, and she leads us to where the corpses are. In some sort of magically protected area where they can inspect diseased bodies with no chance of being infected themselves, mundane or magical illness. Reed recognises one of the 2 corpses as one of the low ranking officers on his ship.
The corpses are indeed very very bloated, so we back off very worried. Glyndan points out (with some DM pocking, i.e. orange lights warning and those on the ship, death from over the sea etc. divinations from zellaria) that a) this matches the divinations, b) we know there was some sort of necromancer with an interest in human illnesses c) these decaying corpses are far from natural so probably some sort of magicical illness and d) allthough there will be no infections in this holy temple, the corpses were found in the poor district. --> Magic Plague brought by Reeds old ship?! :smalleek:

After telling Tamara of our suspicions we head back in to town. Reed hits up the nearest tavern and drowns is sorrows at the loss of his friends in vast quantities of Ale, while Glyndan and Caren stay around to help him home.

The next morning, there is a knock on the door of the temple. Gareth, one of Glyndans guard friends, is standing outside. Seeing Glyndan he asks in a panicked voice if Glyndan can come quickly to his house as his niece has suddenly become very sick.
Oh dear.:smalleek:




A roaming Raksha and MAGIC PLAGUE! Oh damn man, this is not looking good at the moment. We are seriously considering using the potion of animal friendship and hijacking one of the Sable Guards Hyppogriphs and just getting the heck out of dodge.

On a side note, the Elemental Evil player guide came out a few days after this sesh and Me and Carens player realised that with the animal friendship potion (turn animals friendly) and the new speak with animals spell from EE, we just need to find a spider and use these two to find where Devargo is. DM says its cool to use EE spells but the baddies will as well =(.

The use of the Speak with dead and Reeds high rolling was pretty sweet. Poor DM, once again ridiculous rolls on our part messing with his carefully layed plans :smallsmile:

End Session 7

[Seruvius]

Sorry to the 5-odd people other than the party that have been reading this (Hi mom! =D). Have had the first sesh in a month today, so I'll hopefully get the next writeup done soon. :smallsmile:

[HoarsHalberd]

Sorry to the 5-odd people other than the party that have been reading this (Hi mom! =D). Have had the first sesh in a month today, so I'll hopefully get the next writeup done soon. :smallsmile:

Well I don't know who else has been reading but I have and I've been finding it very interesting, and hope you've been having even more fun playing.

[MrStabby]

Also given I missed the first bits doing this to pop it back to the top has let me see it.

I do like it!

[Seruvius]

Session 8

The plot thickens in a roleplay-sesh. So once again probably a long write-up. =D

At the end of the last sesh Boren, one of Glyndans watchmen friends, had come to us in the temple, asking for help with his sick daughter. Bob the elf decides to tag along with us to witness this possible plague. Boren leads the party to his house, where we find his wife talking with a man in white and gold robes. He introduces himself as a priest of Abadar, a good god who is all about money. They do good, but always at a price. Those that are rich are seen as good/blessed in his eyes and most of his clergy are bureaucrats.

The priest's name is Ishani Dhatri and is a cleric of Abadar. He tells us the child has some sort of illness which he has never seen or heard of before. High fever and red patchy blotches everywhere are the main sypmtoms, and the patches are starting to swell to form lumps.
Asking the parents to give them a bit of privacy, the party has a talk with Ishani, informing him about the probable plague and the dead sailors. Ishani thanks us for the info and says that after this is dealt with, he will get the other members of his temple scribing scrolls and similar.
During this talk Bob has inspected the girl, and indeed her weals match those on the dead sailors. The 3 healers go upstairs together and Bob casts lesser restoration on the girl (Didin't know he was a spellcaster. nice), healing her. Yaay the spell worked =D.

After receiving the good news the mother rushes upstairs, while Boren remains downstairs. Ishani heads back to his temple and we have a chat with Boren, about when and where his daughter got ill. Sadly we didn't gain any useful info. On the way back to the temple, Bob asks us if he should reserve a lesser restore slot for us, but we say that we can afford to buy healing from abadars temple and he should keep his slots for the poor that can't afford to buy healing from abadar.






As we return to the temple a lanky human youth steps out in front of us and salutes. Reed turns his hat sideways, puts his hand into his shirt and tells him in a french accent to stand at ease. Looking slightly confused, the boy bows to us and says that Vencarlo would like to talk to us. As we had nothing else to do, we decided to head over and see what he wanted. On the way we bought some new clothes and decided to go for a meal. As we were deciding where to go for food, we noticed that we had some gents shadowing us, as Vencarlo had said we probably would. So we went to the cafe across from his dojo and sat beside the dude who had been watching it last time, making him rather uncomfortable, especially when raddik wandered over for a sniff.

After freaking out the DnD KGB, we cross the street and knock on the dojo door. The sign saying that classes are currently cancelled is still up. After letting us in he guides us through to the kitchen where, surprise surprise, we find Trina (the supposed assassin).
Vencarlosays that after he returned home on the day of the execution, BlackJack was there with Trina. He told us he'd worked with BlackJack in the past but hadn't seen him for 10 years. BlackJack confirmed Vencarlos suspicion that Trina was innocent, and then he rants about the queen for a bit.

Once he calms down again, Vencarlo tells us that whle he first blamed us, he understands that we acted honourably and believes he can trust us. Friends of his outside the city will take care of Trina till this mess blows over, we just have to get her out. Plans are made for Glyndan and Trina to disguise themselves and leave, while one of Vencarlos trusted students dresses up as Glyndan and buddies the Halflings around town to keep the watchers happy.
We agree to meet next morning, then head off.





Deciding it would be a good time to drop in on the field marshal and give her an update of our shenanigans, we head her way. After updating her on the great news of the impending plague and the issues with Reeds ship. Wonder about possible places the ship coudlve gone and returned from in its 7 day trip.
The field marshal returns the bad news favour by tellings us that the Queen has formed a new army unit, the Grey Maidens. An all female unit which is composed of the best females from both the watch adn the Sable Guard. Each Maidens has the authority of the queen herself and must be obeyed, something the Marhsal is far from happy about. With so many sides all more or less pissed at each other, this is looking worse by the day.
If the necormancer doesn't get a ton of bodies form the plague, he can get it from a civil war. :smalleek:

Caren decides to go out to the pubs in the night and get some info on the situation from old friends. One of her friends is now a member of the grey maidens and interestingly, she was recrutied a week ago. Before a lot of this particular pile of feces hit the fan. Hmmmm.

While Caren is out socialising, Reed and Glyndan decide to pay a visit to the 3 major temples of the city: Abadar, Asmodeus and Hood. Warning the various clerics of the impending nasty is well received, even by the Asmodeans. Their aquaintance, Sgt. Korten, even says he will come and crack some skulls for us in his spare time if we want. Oh joy.





The next morning, we all head to Vencarlo. A young elf is there (a mere 60 years old) and soon he is in Glyndans clothes. Trina casts illusions on the youngling, GLyndan and herself so we all look rather different than we normally do. While Reed, Caren and the youngling leave by the front door, a middle aged couple exits through a secret tunnel ending in a nearby building at the same time. As glyndan and trina make their way towards the nearest city gate, they notice a sizeable crowd in front of the temple of Abadar. Many in the crowd have the red weals of this new disease. They are orderly, but the sheer number of those already infected is troubling. Glyndan and Trina continue and manage though the main gate is guarded more than usual, they are not stopping people leaving or entering so they exit without an issue. In a village about 20 minutes walk away, Trina and Glyndan part ways as she is picked up and gives him a wand of cure wounds for the parties effort. Yay a pocket sized cleric.



While Glyndan and Trisha were busy trying to blend in to the crowd, Reed Caren and youngling head back to the temple of Pelor. Reed tells the youngling along the way that this is a training exercise where he will have to go among the lower folks (the young elf is of nobility) and also teach Reed how to fight, as that is great practice. The plans are soon changed though, as upon their arrival they find a messenger from the temple of Abadar. Ishani wants to see "us". The youngling starts off his impersonation of the charisma 8 Monk by trying to woo the messenger :smallannoyed: . Suitably chasened by Reed, the 3 wander off towards the temple.

As the trio arrive at the temple they see the crowd has increased in size. The crowd is being kept back by temple guards and there is no easy way in past them, so they decide to intimidate the crowd with Raddik the panther and it actually works. Inside there are many priests and nobles. The aprty si escorted to Ishani and he tells them that the disease now has a name, Blood Veil. It got its name from one of its nastier late symptoms where the diseased start to bleed from the weals and the orifices on their head.
The various temples are pooling their forces and want to coordinate with the watch and the state, but Ishani, whos job it is to talk to the Field Marshal, can't leave the building due to the crowd.
He informs the party that they are almost out of healing spells and that may priests themselves have fallen ill. Priests who had only been in the vaults counting money, never having gone outside during the diseases presence. Reed wonders if the money itself is cursed, as this would be an easy way to transmit a disease in such a mercantile city.




With a bit of disguise and a sneaky sidedoor exit the party manages to get Ishani out fairly easily. They take him to the Citadel, the headquarters of the watch as that is where Field marshal cressedia is supposed to be currently. They arrive to see the field marshal talking to all off-duty watchmen. She is on a raised dias, with a bunch of veteran guardsmen behind her. In front of the guardsmen are 3 plague doctors in large leather cloacks and with beaked masks. The docs are flanked by 2 Grey Maidens. Cressedia is obviously just finishing her speech, and she tells the watchmen that they are to asume orders from the doctors or the maidens are from the queen herself and hence to be obeyed. Yay, even more civil war fodder :smallfrown:

As the talk ends, the party manages to catch up with cressedia in her office.
One of the Plague doctors is also present in the study, and he introduces himself as Dr. Davolous, the queens newly appointed chief phisician. Thanks us for bringing this plague to light and that he and his bretheren had been able to arrive on time. (arrive? from where?!)
Ishani Introduces himself here and offers the service of the temple of Abadar, along with the cooperation of the temples of Pelor, Asmodeus and Hood. They both thank him for his offer and Ishani and Davolous walk off to a more quiet area to discuss the details.
Alone with the field marshal she starts to show her emotions. While untill now she has been reserved and obviously hid her feelings, now she is quite openly pissed off with the current development. She wont go into the details at this moment, but asks the party to return the next day.

The party quizes her a bit about the grey maidens, learning nothing new but confirming that yes they have been recruiting the best female foot soldiers from both the watch and the sable guard. The watch is not happy and the sable guard is really pissed, as their whole point is being independant from the queen and loyal to the wellbeing of the city. Again it is brought up that this whole thing was set in motion before we had caught Trina.

The halflings and the youngling bid farewell to the field marshal and head back to the temple of pelor before the illusion wears off. The youngling is gushing about how he wants to become an adventurer, about how glorious the life must be. Reed tries to caution against it, but to no avail. Once evyerone is in the tmeple and the spell wears off, a future adventurer leaves humming happily.



Next morning as we leave the temple we see pamphlets nailed to the walls everywhere. They say that all guards must aid the plague doctors. The doctors have full access to evyerones houses. Impeding their work is punishable by prison. Ill people must be handed over to the care of the doctors. Knowingly hiding an ill person is punishable by death! Well this doesn't sound like a genocide weiting to happen at all. :smalleek:

On our way to meet the Field marshal we see doors with red crosses above them, boarded houses, wagons filled with corpses heading south and heavy guard patrols, often accompanying the doctors on their rounds. We make a mental note to check out where the corpses are going. If this whole thing is just to supply a necromancer with an army, we want to make sure it isn't too easy for the bugger.

We meet up with cressedia and we are given 2 delicate tasks. There is a parfume store selling alleged cures for the Red Veil disease. We are to go there, check it out, and get some of this cure for the palace specialists to analyse. If it is a cure, great we want to mass produce it. If it isnt, we are to shut down this profiteering.
The second task is a bit more creepy. In the noble quarter, one of the plague boarded up houses has had some strange goings on. The neighbours talked about sounds coming form there a few nights ago, sounded like some huge festival or party. Now they are all complaining about the terrible smell coming from there. Well this doesnt sound like some horrible ritual in any way. Time to stock up on holy water it seems:smallbiggrin:.

As we leave the Citadel to get started with Cressedia's missions, a hunched figure beckens to us, asking us to follow it into an alley nearby. Raddik seems uneasy around the stranger and as we draw close, the stranger notices the panther and Squeals, her hood falling back. It's a Were-rat in its Hybrid form. A female, with Rats Whiskers and an elongated snout. She tells us she was sent by the Boss of the thieves guild. She's found Devargo. Hes underground in the sewers, has taken over a wererat colony and is trying to start a were-creatuer uprising against the surface dwellers:smalleek:




Choices choices. To bust into a probably infested mansion, hunt were-creatures in a sewer or go for a possible cure to this plague. And the DM said that we will probably not have time to do all 3 as events will keep hapening.
Don't you love choices? :smalltongue:

Oh and after all that Roleplaying, we leveled up. Yay level 5. We each took a level in our exisiting class.


End Session 8




Well I don't know who else has been reading but I have and I've been finding it very interesting, and hope you've been having even more fun playing.
So far its been pretty great, both players and DM really good.
=) Glad to hear you enjoy it


Also given I missed the first bits doing this to pop it back to the top has let me see it.

I do like it!
Nice to hear you are enjoying it.

[Seruvius]

Session 9

After the monster Roleplay sesh's of late we had a nice relaxing dungeon-crawl that only nearly ended in a TPK.


We start the sesh where we left off, outside the watch citadel in an alleyway with a wererat. We are tld that this wererat is in fact a female and has a name, Eries Yelloweye.
In front of this rather worried rat lady we discuss the merits of which of the 3 tasks to complete first, especially as the DM had hinted that we would not have time to do all 3 tasks. Reed is convinced that the best course of action is to go to the possible cure first. If it is a cure, we could solve the whole plague situation and worst case we take out some scumbags who are profiteering from others plight. Glyndan on the other hand reckons that the plague is already hapening, while the were-creature uprising can still be stopped. We argue back and forth for a while before Caren throws the deciding vote by saying she feels like hunting and the sewers seem the most likely place for a fight, so off to the were-sewers we venture.

Glyndan and Reed follow Eries to the sewer entrance, while Caren quickly rides back to the Field Marshal to fill her in on the situation before catching up with us again. On the way Eries fills us in on the details. The Were-rats have been a long standing underclass for quite some time now, though mostly ignored. With the coming of the plague, people looked for Scapegoats and one mob found theirs in the form of a mentally disabled were-rat who was scavenging for food. The unfortunate fellow was lynched.
Using the fear of the other wererats, Devargo and a male were-rat called Grrigz went all demagogue and took over Eries nest. She was the matriarch and the only voice of reason/caution and was driven out. She wants us to take care of Grrigz and Devargo but if possible spare the others as they are all her relatives.

As we walk across the city, we see barriers and checkpoints being built at major intersections by the various guard forces. Large well armed patrols, Physicians with escorts and corpse carts are all becoming quite common.
This is getting worse by the day :smallfrown:



Reaching the entrance to the sewers near the nest, we see a load of footprints in the muck, confirming this is where we want to be. Eries tells us there are 4 caves that branch off the sewer not far in and thats where we need to go. We are informed that there are roughly a dozen wererats in there, besides Devargo and god knows how many giant-ass spiders. Oh dear :smallfrown:. On the plus side, the rats will probably run away if we take out their leader.

Knowing this, we go all sneaky like up to the first big hole. We spot 3 brown and 1 black wererats near a fire, with the black one being bigger and at the moment busy with bullying one of the browns. The black wererat wields a silver sword, a weapon specially good against his own kind. Interesting. Around a short bend we can see there is another entrance, but there is a loose iron grate in the way. Reed slips through to have a peek and as he approaches the second exit, a pair of eyes appear out of the murk in front of him. It's Majenko, pretending to be the horrible thing that tried to eat Luke in Star Wars IV in the trash.:smallbiggrin:

Majenko tells Reed of how he followed devargo down here and has been waiting for an opportune moment to strike ever since. We also learn of the positions of a bunch more Wererats, so we decide to all sneak through the grate and rush the black rat before the others can react. Glyndan manages to bend the grate open wide enough for himself and Raddik to slip through.
On the count of 3, GLyndan rushes in and trips one of the brown rats then ducks so raddik can jump over him and on top of the Black Rat, while Reed blasts ye baddy with fire. Grrigz manages to stay upright and he and Caren trade blows untill Glyndan comes in and stuns him. Reed then deicdes his calling in life is to be a machinegun of fire, unloading 4 bolts of fire on the stunned Grrigz with quickened Scorching ray and a firebolt and glydan finsihes him off before kicking his corpse into the fire. Suitably frightened the Rest of the Wererats scarper. Yay assassination 1 complete. Now wheres that Devargo sucker?




While Reed and Glyndan are busy finishing off Grrigz, Caren noticed a Combined Swarm of Rats and Spiders coming down one passage, and throws probably the most diluted bottle of acid ever used at them, doing not much.
We hear Devargo getting angry and shouting at the fleeing Wererats, before suddenly dog sized spiders start appearing from various holes in walls all over the place. The Party starts fighting the spiders and then Devargo himself enters the room, gives his usual eloquent speach about how much he hates us, then turns into his Etterkin form. Reed saves our collective Bacon by casting Slow on Devargo and most of his spiders, limiting their effectiveness.

For the next few rounds Caren and Reed play squash the Spider while more keep coming out through the Walls, Majenko flies around to try and get behind Devargo for revenge and Reed plays Hide and go Seek with a persistent Rat Swarm.

Devargo finally catches up to Caren and almost flattens her in a crit hit. In the same turn Glyndan manages to finish off 2 spiders and walks up to Devargo, taunting him to distract him from Caren, who is on single digit HP. GLyndan pays for his taunts by copping a crit and is now on 3HP. Thankfully he did however, as otherwise Caren would've been pretty dead.
The team rallies, with caren charging in and entangling Devargo and Reed dealing massive damage to him, but Devargo is still standing, with two players on single digit HP in his reach and still spiders everywhere, it isn't looking great. Then Majenko comes in. Crits Devargo in the back of the neck with his posioned tail, and Devargo fails his save and falls asleep. Yaaay for Majenko. Glyndan acts next and slits the sleeping beasts throat. With his death the other spiders leg it.



With the combat over, our heroic murderhobos get around to the true spirit of DnD and loot the crap out of everything they just stomped. Besides some potions and poison vials, we find the silver sword still intact and Devargos Bladed gauntlets, which turn out to be a magical monk weapon. Glyndan decides to use them, depsite the fact that they are cursed so once attuned any other weapon used is at a disadvantage due to the gauntlets being jealous. Not the most practical, but badass wins out any time.
Reed prods both Glyndan and Caren with our lovely healing stick while the Wererats notice the noise has stopped so come to have a peek.
after spitting on the corpse of Grrigz, Eries has a good old manic laugh and cackle of how the clan is now hers again. Well maybe this wasn't he best idea after all :smalleek:.

Once Eries calms down again, she thanks us for our help. She knows we are trying to sto this plague and as a repayment tells us that strange debris has been floating up from the sunken ship. Pouches with silver coins bound to timbers and bags filled with dead rats. She says these rats and coins smell bad/evil to her and her kind and they avoid them if possible. (Looks like Reeds theory of infected coins may be true. :smalleek: ). She tells us that she and her kin have access to an Alchemists shop nerby and for a small fee can supply us with potions of Water Breathing, so we can go and inspect the wreck ourselves.

The party decides to hav ea short rest here, befor eheading to one of the other 2 targets. Glyndan examines the various cuts that we sustained and Reed is showing the first signs of sewer sickness from his repeated encounters with the Rat Swarm. The DM tells us that Caren saved against Lycnathropy at one point with a roll equal to the DC, and that us preventing the uprising has saved the lives of 400 people in the poor district.


Well that was waaay too close to a TPK for comfort. Pretty much out of spells, Ki and Hitpoints and then Devargo whos crit on 2 attacks out of 3 fails a con save that he needed a 6(or omething like that) to pass. Majenko saves the day. Go familiar.


End Session 9

[Smorgonoffz]

I just read the whole tread in one go, it's a very ncool adventure...and i like it.

[Seruvius]

Session 10


After a short rest, we three brave heroes set out to go and investigate this supposed cure for the plague. Although we are low on spells we vow that nothing shall stand in our way! Nothing that is, except a 4 block long queue outside the Perfume store selling the "cure". Bugger.
The perfume store itself is painted in a colour resembling green phlegm, while the windows are purple stained glass. How stylish. Besides the ridiculously long queue we notice one finely dressed guard at the door and a few more inside.

We heroically discuss what to do next, coming up with 4 options:
A) Barge in through the front waving the documents the Field Marshal gave us (the ones that say we are acting in her Authority). Simple, direct but they might give us a different potion to the rest and we want to analyse what they are selling to the masses or kick off a fight if this is something sinister.
B) Join the queue. While the simplest option, it will take us roughly 5 hours to get to the front with the speed the queue is moving at.
C) Join the Q, but do so closer to the door. Either charm our way into the line or just use the fact we are armed/spellcaster/huge fricking Panther to intimidate our way into line. Gets us in to the shop, but could go ploin shaped very quickly if we piss off a large portion of the queue.
D) Sneak in through some back alleyway or a window now/later at night. Usual risks of entering a building with armed guards.

Deciding to try option C, then if that fails just go for A, we manage to push our way into the queue in front of some maids. They offer no issue, but some blokes further back start threatening us and catcalling. A Growl from Raddik and Reed having a ball of fire swirl around his knuckles a bit reduces this to grumbling.
After 20 minutes or so we get to the door and are told no animals/pets inside. Caren decides to chill outside with Raddik, leaving Glyndan and Reed to enter.




As Reed and Glyndan enter, they notice hundreds of clay vials behind the counter. There are only a few customers in here, clearly they only allow a few in to stop it getting cramped in here. One of the serving ladies comes up to us and we ask for 2 vials of their cure for blood veil; one for Davolous to analyse and one for Glyndan and bob to analyse. Reed is surprised by the low cost of 10GP (well, low for a plague cure) each and we inquire what is in it. We are told it has only the finest ingredients and uses a rare new ingredient recently discovered. Its effectiveness is supported vocally by other people in the shop who have already used it. Interesting. Glyndan and Reed make their purchase and leave.

In the meantime, outside things are less civilized. The blokes who were muttering earlier have found their courage once more, now that the elf with the freaky bladed fists and the magic quarterling are inside. One of them lobs a stone towards Caren, hitting the wall beside her. They begin muttering angrily and the line begins to form a mob. Caren tries to defuse the situation by pointing to the 5 nearest and offering to buy them a pint, which somehow works in calming them down. One of those not pointed at calls out that Caren is buying everyone a round of Beer. Caren, being a strong independent halfling woman who don't need no man to tell her what to do, decides to slap that person hard across the face and shouts out that she can't afford to buy a round for everyone. She is then surprised when the rest of the crowd react less than understanding and charge her. (insert facepalm here)

Glyndan and Reed exit the perfumery just as Caren slaps the gent and all hell breaks loose. They are both obviously shocked as both roll a 1 for initative. Also we're pretty sure that the perfume shop now must have medicinal marijuana.
Caren tries to intimidate the crowd to stay back with Raddik but fails and is grappled by 4 dudes.
As Caren is struggling with the crowd, Reed casts slow on the mob while Glyndan jumps in and slices the shoulder tendons of those holding on to Caren. She manages to break free and like the heroes we are we leg it from a now full-blown riot that we started. Oh dear :smallfrown:



We decide it's about time to visit the Field Marshal, drop off this potion and get some rest. On our way to the Citadel we pass a guard post and tell them about the riot. The Grey maiden that leads them off makes some disconcerting comment to her troops about how they've been trained to handle incidents like this. :smallfrown: We pass more ill people and boarded houses, plague doctors doing their rounds and pass through a few Guard-posts set up across streets that are blocking the movement of infected people in the city. What a wonderful place to live =)

When we reach the Citadel and are taken to the Field Marshal, we catch the end of a conversation between her and Doctor Davolous. Davolous was talking about setting up a hospital in an unused warehouse in the harbor district.
We give the Dr. one vial for analysis, though he shares our skepticism at its effectiveness, assuming its just someone profiteering from this disaster.

After the Doctor wanders off to his lab to test this 'cure' we talk with the Field Marshal. Caren confesses to having started the riot. The field-marshal facepalms but thanks her for her honesty. We are told that a message has come through from Tamara, the chief priestess of Hood. Seems she is having some sort of issue with the plague cart bearers.
The field Marshal also hands us a package, that was to be delivered to us. In it there is a note saying the time is right. it is wooden and has old elven runes carved into it that are some sort of description of its contents. We thank the field marshal and leave her to her business, going to get a wash and a meal as we still smell of sewer.

After a basic meal and a wash at the temple of Pelor we open the Box. There is a small metallic circlet of yellow and orange colour. the colours seem to move on it, like a flickering flame. It is a circlet of blasting. Yay, more scorching rays for Reed.

We decide that heading to the spooky mansion is not a good idea with low health and spells and tackling possible undead during the night is also not the best plan. We decide to sleep and wake early next morning to go and investigate. We help Bob in the temple for a few hours then head off for some well earned rest. Glyndan also takes some time an starts analysing the "cure" he isn't sure what all of its components are, but one of the main ones is sugar. Hmmm. :smallconfused:



After a nice long kip we get up at a ridiculously early time and head off to the strange mansion. Its still early, with the sun only starting to peek across the horizon.
The Mansion is a large 2 story building and as we approach we notice light streaming out through some of the windows and music playing. Oookaay. A house where no one has been seen in a while and the local are complaining about weird smells suddenly has light and sound. at 4.30 AM. As we approach we briefly notice what appears to be a twirling figure in a top story window. Well this is a bit weird to say the least.

As we approach we notice the sickly-sweet smell of death pervading the grounds. We peer in through some ground-floor windows while Reed sends Majenko up to the top floor window where we saw the twirling person to see if he can see anything there. Majenko sees 5 masked people in metallic costumes, dancing and appreciating the paintings on the wall, but not the twirler. Most of the downstairs rooms are empty, but in one there are 2 seated humanoids in lions masks, being served by someone in a peacock mask. On closer inspection we notice that one of the lion masked ones in fact is a lady and has a crossbow bolt sticking from the side of her neck; but is still moving. :smalleek: Now that we are looking for it, we notice the other lion masked person has a slit throat, and both look slightly decayed. Looks like we were right to suspect undead. Oh dear.

After a quick discussion of what we know about zombies we decide to climb to the first floor and try and get whoever it was whirling around as they must be some sort of either more powerful undead or necromancer or something. Either way, that person may give some answers to what has happened here.
We climb on to the Balcony where Majenko is sitting with some difficulty and peer in to the room ourself, and peer in to the room. We see what appear to be a female Jester in a blood red costume. She has a pure white face and is juggling human heads. 4 zombies are 'appreciating' paintings while a fourth one sits on some sort of drum kit. We decide negotiating is useless and we should try and nuke the Jester ASAP.



Caren and Reed fire through some of the windows while Glyndan burst through a side door and tries to run past some of the zombos along a banister to get at the jester, he falls but manages to jump so instead of falling down a floor he lands near-ish to the jester instead. The Jester takes a hit, then backflips over the banister down to the bottom floor, shooting her crossbow at Reed while doing so. She missed but the bolt gave off a howling scream as it flew, forcing Reed to pass a wisdom save. :smallfrown:

We hear a female voice giggle and announce from downstairs "Lets have some fun dancing!", after this the music got louder. The drummer zombie started beating harder and faster and other instruments could be heard from downstairs. Glyndan Goes straight for the drummer, killing it, but the music is still ridiculously loud.
Reed incinerates 1 zombo through the window, while Caren joins Glyndan inside and they trade blows with the other zombie. Suddenly the Jester appeares from invisibility beside Reed, and Sneak Attacks for big damage, before jumping backwards over the balcony.

We once again hear her voice from downstairs taunting us. Glyndan gets angry and throws caution to the wind, jumping over the balcony , landing beside the Jester and surprising her. He notices that there are 4 more zombo around and one of them is carrying a huge sphere of some sort up the stairs. Ignoring them he hits her 4 times, knocking her over and stunning her. She drops a small pebble that causes the sphere held by the zombo to explode in a huge cloud of smoke and confetti, obscuring everyones vision. She surrenders and the zombies downstairs fall apart, but Glyndan seems gripped by madness and continues to cut her to ribbons.

The others have no idea of this as all they saw was Glyndan vault the balcony, followed by a huge explosion of smoke and confetti. So while calling out if he is OK, they play a nice game of hide and go stab with the remaining zombies upstairs that don't seem to have fallen apart.

After finishing off the Zombies and waiting for the smoke to clear, Reed and Caren descend the stairs and wonder a bit at Glyndan's sanity. Turns out Glyndan became a Monk as he used to struggle with his bloodlust. He has been able to keep it in check until recently but with all this negative necromantic energy flowing around the city, he is finding it hard to remain calm.
Being adventurers we then fleece the Jester and search the rest of the house.



Searching through the House we find a survivor in a locked cellar. It looks like he's been surviving on rats and a water barrel near him. He tells us that the jester came charging in to a party being held here a few days ago and started shooting people with her bolts. Some died instantly, others seemed to be affected by an accelerated version of the blood veil, progressing through its stages in minutes rather than days. We remember Reed got shot by one of the bolts but luckily the con save was passed so he was only infected by the basic one, which Caren cured. Taking this poor bastard out to get him some help we do notice the blotches of the blood veil on many of the corpses. He recognises one corpse as his wife and breaks down so we pretty much drag him to the nearest guard post to tell them what happened. The guards send some of their own and a plague wagon to collect the bodies and secure the place.

Being covered in white chalk and confetti (and in Glyndans case a lot of blood) we decide a wash is in order. After a quick wash-stop at the temple of Pelor we receive a message from Davolous that hes analysed the cure and he thinks it slows the progress of the disease but doesn't cure it. Glyndan also finishes his analysis, which differs from that of Davolous as his one suggests the potion is perfume, river water and sugar. Much profanity was uttered at the expense of the Perfume shop.:smallfurious:

We finish our session by heading to the temple of Hood to find out what Tamara's issue is. She tells us the Plague carts are organised that the people or Plague doctors drop the bodies at designated collection points, usually small allies, and the carts collect it from there and return it to the Temple grounds.
Many of the Cart bearers have been recently hired and some have not returned from one collection spot in the northern districts. A troop of guards led by grey maidens sent to investigate yesterday have not returned.
And on that ominous note, we ended.


End Session 10

[BBNikfaces]

Caren is a strong independent halfling woman. Clearly that riot was not her fault

;)

[Seruvius]

Session 11


Caren is a strong independent halfling woman. Clearly that riot was not her fault

;)
A completely unbiased and neutral point of view from Caren's player. :smallbiggrin:


We start off where we ended last sesh, having just received the ominous news of the missing corpse carts and guard patrol sent to investigate. As we are talking to Tamara we notice the mass graves filled with plague victims. There are 4 already filled up and a 5th more than ahlfway full already. each of the graves is guarded by a Paladin of Hood, so at least they are taking the chance of undead seriously. We ask Tamara how many bodies lie in these mass graves and she tells us she is unsure, but 2-3 thousand at least. The 5 Paladins suddenly don't look like quite as good a defence after all:smallfrown: .

We decide to start looking at the point where these carts were supposed to collect the dead bodies from, so walk off to the north-wst. On our way we pass trough more basic barricades to stop the flow of ill people. As we near the location, the streets seem to be deserted. Near the location, we find a house that has recently burned down and is still smoldering, along with a backpack in front of it on the ground. Caren looks inside the bag and it looks like someones personal belongings. Maybe they were fleeing the fire and dropped it?
We take 20 minutes and make sure the fire is completely out as we don't want a fire breaking out in this crowded poor district. Not sure what to do with the bag, we hang it up inside the house out of view of the street so if the owner comes back it will be easy enough to find. Having doen our good deed for the day, we continue on our journey.

Finally nearing our destination, we start to smell the disturbingly familiar sickly sweet smell of death. We know from Tamara that the corpses tend to be piled in an alleyway for the carts to collect, and thats what we find, an alleyway filled with bodies, roughly 200 of them. The 3 missing carts are all here, one with a wheel missing. There is no sign of the cart drivers. We start to poke around, feeling rather apprehensive, and notice in the pile the bodies of guards in armour. Well it seems we've found our missing patrol. Reed immediately casts mage armour on himself.
The pile of corpses is covered in flies and rats and there is some movement in the pile. Cue baad feeling about this. :smallfrown:. While Caren and Reed keep an eye out for baddies, Glyndan approaches the pile and inspects the corpses closer. Most have died of the Blood Veil but on the guards he notices puncture wounds on neck -> good religion roll -> VAMPIRES! :smalleek:

Reed immediately backs out fo the shadowy alley into the bright street and fires a bolt at a corpse that seems to be moving. He burns away the corpse to reveal the fang-faced horror that was crawling along under the pile towards us. Roll for initiative.


Reed Reacts first and crits ol Fangface, who then decides to be a spider and wall-walks past the majority of the pile to lunge at Glyndan and bite him in the arm. Caren, surprised at the turn of events, misses with everything, then Glyndan shows his secret affilitation with RNGsus once again by hitting 4 times, 2 of them crits and kicking the vampire into the sunlight. Caren happens to be in the way and doesn't dodge in time and is now wrestling with a burning and severly pissed-off vampire.
Caren manages to avoid being mauled, the vampire expires in the sun (yaay) and then 3 more show up further down the alleyway (boooo!).

Caren tries throwing her magic silver dagger at one and once again misses, not having the best day. Reed keeps firing magical fire at the undead while asking Majenko to scout if there are even mroe of the buggers somewhere. Glyndan realises he is the only one not in the sun, steps out of the shade and the 3 vampire-things hiss in anger before retreating into a nearby toy store through a hole in the wall.

We brave adventurers now face a conundrum. It is afternoon, so the sun will be setting sometime soon. Glyndan wants to kill these bugger before the night to stop them feasting on further innocents, while Reed doesn't want to enter a vampire lair, especially considering the issues we had with just one of these. We realise at elast that we must be fighting vampire-spawn, not a true vampire. Which raises the question of where the real vampire is. In that shop maybe? "gulp" :smalleek:. Glyndan manages to convince Reed to at least try and get these buggers while we still have sunlight, or as Reed puts it "go and get ourselves killed". Reed and Caren insist GLyndan goes for a quick jog to the nearest Guard Post to warn them in case we all die.
While glyndan is off on his run, Reed and Caren amuse themselves by prepare some stakes and taking pot shots at the spawn as they poke their heads out of the hole every now and then. Glyndan returns from his Jog, the sun is getting low, so time to go hunt vampires!



Our trio sneak up to the whole in the wall where the spawn came out of. So far nothing. GLyndan sidles up to it and tells his floating light ball item to go up to the hole. Inside there are halv-finished wooden dolls. A wall of glassy eyes stares back. In the middle fo the room there is a corpse. Of mroe immediate concern however is the spawn clinging to the roof above the hole that jumps at Glyndan as he has a look. It tries to grapple him but rolls a nat-1 so ends up face first in the corpse pile at carens feet instead and is immediately stabbed with the silver dagger.

Glyndan tries to block the hole in the wall so we can handle them 1 at a time, but 1 gets out, leaving Glyndan duelling one through the hole in the wall. Reed suffers wild magic, getting a third eye and now looking like a miniature Tenshinhan.
A rough fight ensues with GLyndan getting pinned between the one in the hole and a second one coming from behind which grapples him while Reed firebolts lefts right and centre and poor caren realises only her magic dagger and bolts do any damage to these things and proceeds to miss a lot, then gets grappled, though manages to escape it.

Trying to reestablish some control, Reed webs the area with the 3 vampires and glyndan. Glynd is now grappled and webbed, so has to pass a disadvantaged dex save. He once again shows that RNGsus seems to be in debt to him and crits on disadvantage.:smalltongue:. Reed and Caren shoot the webbed vampires while glyndan manages to kill the one through the hole over a few rounds, the 3rd vampire-spawn has hwoever fully healed again in the meantime. Fuuuuuuu.:smallmad:

One breaks out of the Web and chases Reed as he tries to keep some distance between him and it, narrowly avoiding a grapple. Caren and Glyndan Kill the vampire in the web, then Caren runs towards Reed who is in the process of being grappled and having his blood drained :smalleek:. Caren charges in and uses Raddiks bulk to knock the vampire off of Reed, who then takes revenge and burns the sucker to a crisp.



Dusting ourselves down and healing up a bit, we notice that each of the spawn has a stylised A branded on their Thighs. To be sure these things are dead, we drag their coprses into the sunlight, where they burn into ash.
Checking out the room through the hole, there is a door to the nroth and a trapdoor leading down. Caren examines the dead gent and notices 8 puncture wounds -> looks liek all 4 spawn drank from him at once. This gent seems to have been the toymaker and has 2 keys on him. We decide to go down the trap door first. In the cellar there are 4 coffins (booooo!) which turn out to all be empty of fang-faced gribblies (yaaay). So this bloke had the beasties here, yet they killed him. There are no fresh drag marks so the coffins have been here a while. Strange.
The coffins contain some dirt and an assortment of foreing coins. Reed recognises the design as being from Astalav, a city a few days sailing away. The city that Reed's ship was heading to when it left harbour and came back all weird and undead in fact. Astalav, Reeds ship, the branded stylised A. Hmmm.

We go back upstairs and examine the dead gentleman closer. Glyndan doubts he's been dead longer than a few days, which would coincide nicely with the report from Tamara about the corpse drivers not returning.
We then check thorugh the other door and its the front of the store. The toys are all of low quality. They seem almost deformed somehow.
Behind the counter Caren finds a lockbox and uses the keys on it. Find some gold but most interestingly an elemental gem and a brass key that appears to be a religious symbol. We recognise it as being from the the cult of Abadar (the mercantile god in this city). It has the number 261 on it. The key to a vault maybe?

We decide this Astalav business needs to be told to Field Marshal Cressedia ASAP, so after one last check we head off towards the Citadel.



On our way to Cressedia, we let the local guard-post know that we took out the spawn and to go and investigate etc.
Once we go through the normal routine of checks at the Citadel we meet the marshal alone in her office. We inform her of our escapade and ask her what she knows about Astalav. Upon hearing our tale she beings pacing and muttering to her herself, before exclaiming that this might just be the lead we need to solve this mystery. She needs to ask a few questions of the right people first, but if her suspicions are correct we are about chest deep in excrement and sinking ever deeper.

Cressedai also has some news about Reeds ship. There are reports of people swathed in dark robes boarding the ship before its fateful voyage. She asks us to investigate the wreck of the ship then return to her so we can pool our knowledge once again. We are told not to trust anyone; especially the grey maidens and plague doctors.
We head off to go and talk to Tamara about what happened.

Glyndans player gets +1 DM point for suddenly realising that while the patrol sent to investigate the missing corpse carts contained grey maidens and guardsmen, the DM did no describe and grey maidens corpses at the vampire scene. -> Dun dun DUUUUN.

We tell tamara about the vampires and though we have been warned not to trust anyone, we decide we trust Tamara and tell her in general terms what is happening and to be prepared. We also get checked out for vampyrism, and all get a negative result (yaaay?)
Tamara thanks us for our service and help and drops an interesting nugget of information: The corpses of the grey maidens are not being buried at the temple of Hood, like everyone else. In fact it is unknown where their corpses are being taken.
Another mystery and yet again these grey maidens are appearing more and more sinister.

We head back to the temple of Pelor for a well deserved nights sleep. Bob also makes us some vials of holy water, just in case we find more vampires to vanquish.



We wake up the next morning to the lovely surprise that both Carend and Glyndan have contracted Blood veil. I guess fighting in corpses that died of bloodveil is not the healthiest battlefield. Caren cures both of them and the party heads off to the Temple of Abadar.

We arrive and there are noticibly fewer priests present than the other times we were here. We are told that most of the priest are busy curing the coins so they do not spread the plague further. On the other hand, they are no longer curing people as they are using all their spells to cure the coins and themselves.
We ask to see the Vault that goes with our new shiny key and when asked if it is our vault we tell the truth and invoke our right to act in the field marshals name. The priest we are dealing with tells us to bugger off, then our old aquaintance Ishani arrives and tells the lower ranking priest to bugger off.

The vault in question is a securely guarded one, so we pass past Paladins of Abadar and normal guards. THe room is filled with large locked boxes, and once we find our one we open it. Inside we find some documents, a small pouch filled with coins, Masterwork thieves tools and a Folded magical cloak.
We study the documents. The first few are diagrams for toy manufacture, blueprints, instructions and similar. One letter however has a very familiar stylised A on it. THis letter is adressed to the now dead shopkeeper and states that he is to receive coins, the magical cloak and more coins later if he takes 4 large boxes into his cellar and asks no questions. It is signed with the name Arkminos.
There is a smaller subparagraph in a different handwriting. It expresses its trust in the individual receiving this from their previous work and that he will do this without asking questions. Signed rolf -> this is the main necromancer. So we know these vampyres are tied to the big necro gent. Nice.

We thank Ishani for helping us, take the contents, except for the gold which is probably cursed as well, and head to the field marshal. She isn't present but an aid is. Remembering Cressedia's advice on not trusting anyone we just leave a message that we want to talk to her and then leave. We head to the temple of Pelor, Hide our new fun documents in a corner and set Raddik to guard it, leave anything we dont want to take swimming then head towards where Reeds ship sank.



We arrive as close to the point where we think the ship sank as we can get, drink our potions and dive in. We were pretty worried, as the last time we had been in the water back when Loghtarak was still with us, there had been a ridiculous number of sharks and crocodiles there; Thankfully no such creatures decided to greet us as we entered, so thats a good start at least.

After a bit of searching we find the ship on the ocean floor, broken in half. While floating above it Reed casts Mage Armour on himself and Caren decides to drink the animal friendship potion we've had for ages. Turns out it was actually a poison and Caren looses half her HP. :smallmad:. Reed pokes her back to health with our healing wand and we head off to investigate the , heading towards the captains cabin. On the way we disturb some Eels, which we quickly dispatch.

We arrive at the captains cabin to find the door swolen shut and us unable to move it. Reed remembers there were large windows at the back so we swim around and bust our way in, with Reed going first to see what has become of his shipmates. In the cabin there are 2 corpses floating around. One was once the captain, and the other is a Plague doctor in dark robes! Reed notices something floating on a chain around the Doctors neck, a religious symbol. The symbol is that of Poliel, godess of disease and plague. The plague doctors actually venerate a godess of disease. Well ****, this isn't good. There are 2 chests in here, but knowing that this ship carried the cursed coins in, we are hesitant to touch them (damn DM, making all the coins harmful and stopping us looting everything. Grrr).

Deciding to explore the rest of the ship we find the hatch to the lwoer decks and swim down. We notice wha tappears to be an old woman with spindly hair wielding a trident lookng at another coffer. Caren identifies as a Sea Hag. An underwater witch. Oh great.
Reed manages to get off a ray on her with his pendant before she causes the whole are to be filled with Kelp, reducing our already slow speed to a crawl. As Caren and Glyndan struggle to swim close to her we realise she is a druid and has a frigging Hammerhead shark companion. We realise this because the shark suddenly burst through a wall, misses Reed and then smashes through the opposite wall back out. Oh bugger.

Reed manages to get sight on the Hag and Novas on her, using quicken metamagic, luck rerolls and other stuff to really hurt her. He then wild magics and greases the water around him. Now hes a particularly tasty treat for ol sharkey. The witch respodns by throwing an exploding ice dagger at Reed/Caren before Sharkey comes back in and nearly kills Reed. GLyndan punches the Witch to death while the shark keeps ciming in and out of the walls. Nearly killing both Reed and Glyndan (both down to single figure HP) before we finally kill it.

The sea Hag was holding a sweet item, an icy trident that glyndan is interested in using. We explore more of the ship and find more coffers, 1 of which is different to the others as it is banded with silver, and more corpses of Reeds shipmates.
We avoid the coffers we know to contain coins (the hint is in the skull shapes on them) and try opening the silver coffer. Bad idea. Water rushes in to the previously sealed coffer and hits the paper inside. Daaaamn iiit.
We do our best to quickly read it before it disolves and find among other things the captains log, the deed to the ship and various invoices.

The important bit is the last entry into the Logbook. Hired by mister R. Davaulus to transport specimens from Astalav to Thornfall. The Handwriting is the same as that of Rolf the necromancer. Davalaus, the chief physician, is the Goddamn Necromancer. The man personally hired by the queen. :smalleek:.

We immediately shut the chest and get back to the surface as fast as possible to get this information to the Field Marshal ASAP.


Well the plot took a twist for the worse this session, but at least we have some proof of who the bugger behind it all is. :smallmad:

The DM told us that we have now finished Act 2 of his 3 Act Campaign. So we probably have another 6-odd sesh untill we finish this. Man I am really enjoying this one, dibs to the DM the twists and story were not expected.

Oh we also level up. yay lvl 6. we all just ake another level of our respective classes.


End Session 11