SESSION 48D: ALCHESTRIN’S MURAL

January 9th, 2010
The 26th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

Through the last arch leading out of the hall they headed down a narrowed hallway. At its end – perhaps a hundred feet or so further on – they could see a huge bas relief depicting a wolf’s skull that took up the entire wall. But before they reached the bas relief, they came to a pair of facing doorways.

Passing through one of these they found themselves in a semi-circular chamber. The far, curved wall of the place was covered in an immense, detailed mural. Although the paint was faded and chipped here and there, it was still impressive in its scope and artisanship. Ranthir, in particular, was fascinated by it. And while the others kept a nervous guard in the hall, he spent the next twenty minutes studying it in detail.

ALCHESTRIN’S MURAL

This mural appears to depict – in juxtaposition – a series of events of either historical or mythological character.

FIRST SEQUENCE: Two magi are shown casting a powerful ritual creating a vortex of energy.

SECOND SEQUENCE: The magi are shown bowing down before a huge, purple crystal that juts up out of the ground.

THIRD SEQUENCE: A great castle has been built around the crystal and a great city has risen up around the castle.

THE GREAT SPIRE OF PTOLUS

FOURTH SEQUENCE: Divided from the third sequence by a depiction of the Spire. The crystal, castle, and city remain – but now the tableau is littered with corpses. A single figure is shown with her hand raised to the crystal, a lance of purple energy connecting the two.

FIFTH SEQUENCE: The castle and crystal have disappeared. The city is in ruins and fallen into darkness.

THE CRYSTAL AMONG STARS

SIXTH SEQUENCE: Divided from the fifth sequence by a depiction of the purple crystal set against a backdrop of faded stars. A skull-faced figure is shown standing before the Spire, leading a great army of malformity.

SEVENTH SEQUENCE: A smaller number of malformities, led by a black serpent which walks like a man, stands upon the plain before the Spire. They surround a huge machine of twisted metal.

EIGHTH SEQUENCE: The castle seen before, enshrouded by coruscating beams of black energy emanating from the machinery, is seen before the Spire.

THE CRYSTAL AMONG ENEMIES

NINTH SEQUENCE: Separated from the eighth sequence by another depiction of the crystal, this one sending out lancing beams of energy which strike the malformities from the seventh sequence. The ninth sequence shows a young boy laying his hand upon the side of the quiescent crystal.

TENTH SEQUENCE: The boy, bathed in the soothing light of the crystal, is shown coming of age in a series of sequential images arrayed around the crystal. This culminates, at the top of the sequence, with a figure of the boy-turned-man – his arms outstretched to the heavens – above the crystal itself.

ELEVENTH SEQUENCE: The man is shown locked in arcane battle with the skull-faced figure.

THE MAN AND THE SPIRE

TWELFTH SEQUENCE: Separated from the eleventh sequence by a depiction of the Spire with the man – seemingly grown to the same gargantuan proportions as the Spire – laying his hands upon it as if he would rip it from the earth. The man is shown still locked in arcane battle with the skull-faced figure, but now the crystal has appeared behind him and sends a beam of energy lancing into his back – the man writhes in pain.

THIRTEENTH SEQUENCE: The man, shown bleeding and clutching at his side, is shown retreating into a great hole in the earth at the foot of the Spire.

The final image of the mural is a depiction of Alchestrin’s seal, as shown on the iron plug above, along with the same inscription.

ALCHESTRIN’S SEAL

The full perusal of its contents made them suspicious of Lord Zavere again. If the man depicted in the mural had fought against Ghul the Skull-King, why had the crystal of Castle Shard attacked him?

“I’m going to be pissed if it turns out we’ve been feeding information to Ghul’s heir or the Banelord reincarnate for the past month.”

But Ranthir pointed out that, if Castle Shard were villainous, then Lord Zavere wasn’t likely to send them to the place where they would discover his villainy. “Didn’t he say something about Alchestrin leaving Castle Shard under a cloud of suspicion?”

“That’s true,” Tee said. “It’s not like the mural in the evil tomb isn’t going to be biased.”

“Then why would he send us here?” Elestra asked.

Tee shrugged. If Zavere was 900 years old, trying to sense his motives was a waste of time.

But something else about the mural had captured Tor’s attention. “Has anyone gone to the top of the Spire? What’s up there?”

“Jevicca told us that Jabel Shammar – the citadel of the Banelord – remains intact up there,” Tee said. “That’s more than I had ever heard before. But everyone who grows up in Ptolus knows the stories of the people who have tried to fly up there.”

“What happened to them?” Tor asked.

“They don’t come back,” Elestra said.

THE GOLEM DOOR

The mural had proven informative, so they decided to check out the bas relief. But as they drew near, they were somewhat terrified to see the entire sculpture come suddenly to life.

“WHAT BUSINESS WOULD YOU HAVE HERE?”

Ranthir was fascinated. “You speak modern Arathian. That’s fascinating…”

Tee, who also spoke Arathian, addressed the wolf-skull directly. “We come for the knowledge of Alchestrin.”

“THEN YOU MAY PASS.”

And the mouth of the golem door gaped wide, revealing a broad stone stairway on the other side. After a moment of hesitation, Tee nervously agreed to go through. And, after some confused deliberation, Tor and Nasira went with her. (A meat-shield and a healer. Everything was fine.)

The stairs twisted down fifty feet or so before bottoming out before another door of iron. Unlocking this door and swinging it wide, they looked down a long, wide hall of finely-fitted stone – the work of meticulous craftsmen, although the age of the work was clearly immense. There were scorch marks, broken sword blades, and the like littering the length of the hall, which disappeared into a deep gloom beyond the reach of their lights. But at the very edge of their sight, they could see a pair of facing doors.

Tor shook his head. “This place is huge.”

Running the Campaign: Art Handouts – Campaign Journal: Session 49A
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 48C: ENTERING THE TOMB

January 9th, 2010
The 26th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

After perhaps fifty or sixty feet, Tee emerged into a small chamber of unadorned stone. The shadows seemed even deeper here, stubbornly clinging to the corner of the room.

There was a single door of iron. As Tee took her first cautious step off the stairs towards it, Elestra – following behind her – gasped to see the shadows literally dart out from the walls. Catching Tee unaware and from behind, the first shadow clawed its incorporeal hand through her shoulder while the other plunged its own straight through her heart and chest.

Tee gasped, fumbling for a potion to fight off the cloying cold gripping at her limbs. As she stumbled away from the stairs, the supernatural shadows pursued.

Agnarr raced down the stairs. Tor, who had been watching the party’s rear, pushed his way past Ranthir and the others still on the stairs, but couldn’t get past Agnarr without exposing his own back to the shadows.

Elestra, cut off by both of the fighters, instead turned into a bird, flew through a gap in the stone balustrades of the stair, and alighted by Tee’s side. With soothing hands, she helped her shaking friend.

Nasira grasped her holy symbol and raised it high. The nearest shadow fled from her faith, passing through the iron door. This allowed Agnarr to safely back away from the base of the stairs, giving room for both Tor and Nasira to descend.

As Nasira came, she called aloud the name of her goddess – “SAYL!” – and in a burst of holy light the remaining shadow was blasted back into the floor of the chamber. There it remained for a long moment – like a shadow imprinted without an owner – before it faded away into nothingness. The palling darkness of the chamber seemed to lift at its passing.

HAUNTED HALLS

Beyond the iron door was a long hall of dark grey stone that seemed to serve as a crossroads of sorts between four narrow arches. Web-encrusted skeletons lay slouched in a dozen shallow niches that lined the walls of the hall. Tee was taking no chances and stabbed the nearest of the skeletons through its exposed sternum. As she did so, the skeleton in the next niche lurched suddenly to its feet… and then stumbled and collapsed into a broken heap.

Tor and Agnarr did a quick sweep around the circumference of the hall, bashing each skeleton in turn (although they evoked no response from any of the others). Ranthir, inspecting the remnants of their bone-bashing, noted that the skeletons had been covered in small, detailed runes – arcane in nature, but drawn in an archaic style. Some of the runes appeared necromantic, but not all of them, and Ranthir was puzzled as to what their purpose had been.

Passing through one of the arches leading out of the hall, Tee found herself in a huge chamber. Dozens of chains dangled from the ceiling, each tipped with a vicious, serrated hook. On two or three of the hooks she could see skeletal remains hanging limply.

… and many of the chains were drifting slowly in the breeze of a room in which the air was perfectly still.

The effect was unnerving, and after quickly confirming that the room was otherwise empty they went through the arch on the opposite side of the hall. Passing down a short flight of open stairs and through an antechamber of sorts, they entered another large chamber, this one with a wide pit in the center of it.

Carefully approaching the edge of the pit, Tee looked down to find it tightly packed with two dozen or more ancient zombies – their grey and desiccated flesh stretched cross across browned bones. When they became aware of their presence, the undead things began to claw wildly at the walls, although they found no purchase and there seemed little risk of their escape.

“Desiccated?” Agnarr said. “That sounds flammable.”

Tee sprayed some oil into the pit and lit ‘em up. The party backed out of the chamber as it started to fill with thick, black smoke carrying the stench of burning flesh.

Running the Campaign: Undead for Effect – Campaign Journal: Session 48D
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 48B: THE FALL OF TEPAL

January 9th, 2010
The 26th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

With the negotiations finished at long last – and satisfied that they had made a good deal (while doing their best to protect the Hunters from the horrors of the Labyrinth and vice versa) – they headed downstairs and grabbed some newssheets.

The news was actually in the middle of a sharp shift: The biggest story of the morning hours had been a mysterious fire in the Guildsmans’ District – an apartment building on Storm Street had burned to the ground in flames that witnesses reported to be a bright, phosphorescent blue (leading authorities to suspect magical arsonry).

But that news was being rapidly forgotten by the larger story sweeping across the city: An army had marched out of the Southern Desert, taken the city-state of Tepal by surprise, and sacked it.

Nasira was taken aback by the news. Learning that the news had arrived in Ptolus on three refugee ships she headed towards the docks. Speaking with passengers from the ships, however, she could discover little in the way of detail: The ships had sailed free just as the city was falling, and they could tell her nothing about the fate of her temple or the city itself once it had been taken. Worse yet, the descriptions of the army made it clear that it was the Atapi who were responsible.

In confusion, Nasira retired to her room at the Ghostly Minstrel to meditate and pray, finding nothing in her thoughts to reconcile the sudden war-like change in the Atapi.

THE TALE OF GISSZAGGAT

Tee and Agnarr, meanwhile, were taking the crates from Mahdoth’s to the disposal site in the Temple District. Then they dumped the drakken’s body and fenced the loot they had collected from Mahdoth’s and the would-be assassins.

Ranthir, of course, spent the day studying (as was his wont).

Tor took Blue down to the Wings Falls. Riding down the long, mossy slant of Blue Street he quickly learned where it had gotten the name: The thick, watery mist cast up by the raging falls filled the air and turned it blue – in fact, blue rainbows were cast prismatically through the air.

Wings Falls itself proved to be a six-tiered step falls where the King’s Gorge narrowed into the ravine which carried the river between Midtown and the Temple District. The water sped up through the narrow pass and almost leapt over the steps of the falls. The falls took their name particularly from the uppermost step, where the water divided itself around an obelisk of harder, uneroded stone – leaping up and around it the water arched to form two “wings” that seemed to beat and dance through the air as if they would lift the entire river in flight.

While Tor frolicked in the mists, Elestra was trying to find some hint of the Haven of Gisszaggat. Following the Voice of the City she was guided to a small, worn-down shrine tucked into a nook of the Temple District.

Within the shrine she found an elderly, robed priest sitting in cross-legged prayer before a meditation flame. When she asked him of Gisszaggat, his eyes widened. “The tale of the demon Gisszaggat has been long forgotten save in a single tome.”

He told her the story: More than 700 years ago, in the days before the city had descended down from the cliffs of Oldtown, the demon Gisszaggat had risen from the caverns beneath the city. It had plagued the city and single-handedly laid siege to it. “It was written that Gisszaggat had never truly been defeated, but in pain and suffering he retreated back into the caverns beneath the Plain of Ptolus.”

“The Plain of Ptolus?”

“The vast expanse of grassland between the cliffs of the old city and the Docks by the sea.”

In other words, the area now inhabited by the Midtown and the markets and the Temple District.

Elestra thanked him, tipped him a gold, and then returned to her room. There, putting Gisszaggat far from her mind, she set herself to the task of studying an anti-poison spell from the Masks of Death that she hoped would prove effective against the corpse flowers or other deadly vegetation to be found in Alchestrin’s Tomb.

ENTERING THE TOMB OF ALCHESTRIN

They met outside the gates of the Necropolis about an hour before sunset. They were met with some suspicion by the Keepers of the Veil, but eventually allowed entry. (Although they were sternly cautioned that no one would be allowed to leave the Necropolis after sunset.)

They reached Darklock Hill and Alchestrin’s Tomb without difficulty, but as the sun set spectral howls echoed from the northern end of the Necropolis. These grew closer and more frequent as they worked, and shortly after the second moon rose they saw a torchlit procession some distance away to the west.

The plug itself turned relatively easily, but leveraging it out proved quite time-consuming. It took them the better part of half an hour to finally breach the Tomb. A twisting stair of stone curled its way down through the iron shaft into which the plug had been set.

They followed Tee down into the stygian gloom, which seemed to encroach unnaturally upon their lights.

Running the Campaign: Laying Groundwork – Campaign Journal: Session 48C
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 48A: A NIGHT IN THE NECROPOLIS

January 9th, 2010
The 26th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

They cleaned the hall and moved the corpse into Ranthir’s make-shift laboratory. By the time Elestra was ready to force answers out of the drakken, they had carefully hashed out two questions to ask her and decided that they would confer on the third depending on the answers they received on the first two.

As Elestra animated the corpse, it jerked into a sitting position. The drakken’s head snapped back, audibly breaking her neck. Her words gurgled jaggedly in her throat.

“What was your mission?”

“To retrieve the askara research materials and kill the elf.”

(“Kill the elf?!” Tee demanded. “Why the elf?!”)

“Where were you supposed to report back to?”

“The Temple of Deep Chaos.”

“Where can we find Wuntad?”

“In the Haven of Gisszaggat.”

Black blood burst from her mouth and the body collapsed.

REVENGE SERVED IN FIRE

“That’s right,” Tee said. “We took all their research. All of that work for nothing.” She thought about it for a moment. “Do we actually need that research? Couldn’t we just burn it and make sure they never got it back?”

“I’d rather not… burn it,” Ranthir said, with a slightly strangled tone to his voice.

After conferring they decided that what they could do was to have Ranthir make a duplicate of the research and then destroy the original in a way that would make the cultists think that it no longer existed.

“We’ll send them burned scraps of it,” Tee said. “Or, better yet, I can cut out pieces of it and use it to write a message to Arveth.”

“This might be why they want to kill you,” Elestra said.

“Probably,” Tee said. “But I’ll make my own death.”

During the night Ranthir, sustained by a magical ring, had been able to continue his studies for several more hours. He spent that time studying the crystalline armor, concluding that – although it was derived from similar technomantic arts – it was not actually chaositech, nor did it bear the taint of such items. It would be safe to use.

Knowing that it was safe, Tor was more than happy to take the miraculously endurant armor. It would make an admirable replacement for his breastplate.

Shortly thereafter, the construction crew showed up for the last morning of their work on the suite. Tee quickly shuffled the body into her bag of holding (“for later disposal”).

They retired to Tor’s room. Tee had Ranthir immediately copy a few of the sheets from the askara research, then she took them, scorched them, and cut out semi-burned letters and words to form a message:

I’m still alive and loving the armor.
Love, The Elf.

THE HUNTER PARTY

Tee returned to the others. While they were gathering up their gear for the day, there came a knock at the door. They exchanged looks. None of them were expecting company.

Agnarr got up to answer it. Standing outside were a young man with his brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and a lithe woman with black hair down past her shoulders. The young man stretched out his hand, “My name’s Marcus Hunter. We’re looking for Tithenmamiwen. We have business from the Delver’s Guild.”

Agnarr slammed the door in their face and went back to polishing his sword.

With a sigh and perhaps a bit of a laugh, Tee went to the door and opened it again. Marcus introduced himself again and the woman as his sister, Talia Hunter.

Agnarr, with a bad feeling about all of this in his ornery gut, brusquely pushed past them and headed downstairs.

Tee invited them into the room and the others sat down with them around a table.

After proper introductions had been made, Marcus launched into his story. “My sister and I are members of the Delvers’ Guild. Our father, Adatol Hunter, was a member, too.”

Before Adatol had died, Marcus explained, he had found references to and descriptions of a specific section of Ghul’s Labyrinth and the passwords for the bluesteel doors leading there. He had spent the last years of his life dreaming of the treasures he would find if he could only find the places described.

The only problem? The records he had found referred to the “Laboratory of the Beast.” Without knowing where the laboratory was located, he couldn’t follow the instructions. But the research he had performed in trying to track it down included a reference to the Laboratory being used as a place to store the “Drill of the Banewarrens”.

It wasn’t hard to see where this was going: When Tee had started shopping the drill around, it had come to the attention of the Hunters and they had begun inquiries. They knew that the Laboratory of the Beast must lay beyond the Greyson House complex that the group had claimed a guild monopoly on exploring.

“We had papers drawn up with the guild allowing us to exploit your monopoly in exchange for a ten percent return.” Marcus presented them with a contract.

Ranthir tried to weedle the passwords or their maps out of them, but they politely refused.

“Are you planning to go down there by yourselves?” Tor asked.

“No,” Talia said. “We’ll be hiring a full expedition.”

The party tried to offer a reverse deal: They’d do the delving if the Hunters gave them the information they had, and in exchange the Hunters would get a cut without taking any risk on themselves. The Hunters, however, were adamant: They wanted to do it to honor their father’s legacy. And they wanted the challenge for themselves.

(“Besides,” Tor said. “When would we have time for that?”)

They asked the Hunters to wait downstairs while they discussed the matter. The Hunters agreed and excused themselves.

The debate focused around the Hunters themselves: Could they be trusted? How did they know they weren’t somehow in league with the cultists? Or the Surgeon in the Shadows?

“Is it even safe for them to be down there?” Elestra asked.

“They’re delvers,” Tee pointed out. “They’re going to be go delving somewhere.”

Eventually they decided to sign the contract, but with a few additional provisos: First, they wanted the Hunters to leave the goblin clan alone. Second, they wanted first pick of any material relating to the Dreaming Arts. Third, they wanted full access to any lore the Hunters retrieved from the depths. Fourth, when the Hunter expedition was completed, they wanted to know the passwords they had used to bypass the bluesteel doors.

When they fetched the Hunters back up for more negotiations, the Hunters agreed to their terms with the proviso that they would trade knowledge for knowledge: In exchange for the maps from their expedition and the password for the bluesteel door, they wanted a copy of the maps that Ranthir and Dominic had made while exploring the Laboratory. This was readily agreed to, and Ranthir began making a copy of their maps… and when the first (while perfectly functional and accurate) proved not to be elegant enough, he scrapped it and began anew (this time executing a proper work of art).

While he worked, Ranthir made a point of asking the Hunters about putting the passwords in trust. (“Just in case you don’t come back…”) The Hunters said that they would be filing an expedition plan with the Delvers’ Guild which would include that information. “We’re also purchasing retrieval insurance through the Guild,” Talia explained.

The contract was properly amended and signatures were placed on both copies (one for the party and the other to be filed with the Delvers’ Guild showing the Hunters’ right to exploit their monopoly).

Running the Campaign: Contract Handouts – Campaign Journal: Session 48B
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 47C: HOME SUITE HOME

December 26th, 2009
The 25th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

They started towards the Temple District with the crates, intending to dispose of the chaositech as quickly as possible. But on the way, Ranthir convinced the others to let him take the crates back to the Ghostly Minstrel so that he could study them: He was fascinated by what he had read of the technomantic arts of chaositech in some of the lorebooks they had recovered from the cultists and wanted to apply those skills with actual examples of the same. Moreover, even if the material proved useless to them (due to its taint), knowing exactly what these items were capable of might give them some clue as to how the cultists had intended to use them.

When they returned to the Ghostly Minstrel, they found that their new suite of rooms was almost finished: The window wards hadn’t been raised, the secret door leading from the false front room to their actual quarters wasn’t completed, and the reinforced inner door between their quarters wasn’t installed yet, but the rooms themselves were livable and it was clear the work would be easily finished on the morrow.

Ranthir set up his research area in the outer room of the suite (with Tee sleeping on a nearby bed to help keep a watch on the crates). Agnarr, for similar reasons, took Seeaeti to one of the beds in the next room. The others, however, scattered to their old rooms.

Ranthir used several spells to examine the various items in the crates, trying to intuit their purpose. He succeeded with none of them, although he was able to determine that the filigreed manacles could be activated by stroking the oblong device attached to them and the small silver balls could be twisted around their circumference. He also recognized the cord-and-plug attached to the noduled harness as being similar to the one they had found plugged into Shilukar’s neck, suggesting some sort of physio-mental control.

He also discovered, much to his own disquiet, that the floating brain would follow the person closest to it. (On the other hand, it seemed harmless.)

THE SPINESEEKER

Several hours into Ranthir’s candlelit researches, something sinister slithered under the door. Ranthir, intent on the strange intricacies of technomancy, noticed it not as it slipped across the room and attached itself to Tee.

Its first touch was so gentle that Tee didn’t even feel it. And when its voracious, lamprey-like mouths fastened onto multiple points along her spine it was too late… it had taken control of her body. As it drained her lifeblood, she twitched violently on the bed.

Ranthir, unfortunately, remained oblivious.

Tee, waking to find herself trapped in what felt like an endless life-or-death struggle for the control of her own body, felt the creature take her to the very cusp of death before she finally managed to seize a moment of self-control.

“It’s biting me! On the back of my neck! It’s controlling me and I don’t—“

The creature re-asserted its vice-like grip over her body. Tee’s mouth snapped shut.

Ranthir called out for Agnarr while backing nervously away from Tee, who rose from the bed and headed towards the door. Agnarr snorted himself awake and came into the outer room. “What’s wrong?”

“Tee’s acting strangely.”

By this time Tee had reached the door. As she opened it, Agnarr crossed to her. “Tee? What’s wrong?”

Tee smiled up at him. “Nothing’s wrong.”

But something was definitely wrong… She was being way too nice to Agnarr.

Agnarr shared a moment of befuddlement with Ranthir as Tee turned and walked out the door. Ranthir, at a loss for anything else to do, cast a web into the hall – filling it from side-to-side and stopping her from leaving.

But Tee’s reflexes seemed undimmed by her possession. She lithely avoided the worst of the webs and started making her way determinedly through the rest of them. Halfway through the process, however, she managed to wrench control away from the spineseeking demonic worm on her back a second time: “It’s on my back! It’s taken control of my mind! Help me!”

Agnarr, finally figuring out exactly what was happening (and perhaps truly waking up for the first time), used his flaming greatsword to rapidly burn his way through the web towards her.

As the thing tried to regain its control over Tee, Tee reached up, grabbed ahold of its slippery length, and tore it free. She got her first true look at the gruesome creature: A snake-like body covered with the chitinous hide of a scorpion; hundreds of skittering, insectoid legs; and three lamprey-like mouths.

It slipped through the thick strands of the web easily. Agnarr, coming up alongside Tee, swung at the creature, but his blade scarcely scratched its resilient, segmented carapace and the flame seemed to be sucked away in a snare of energy emanating from its radiating spines.

The spineseeker leapt at Tee’s face and its three dorsal mouths raked huge holes in her chest as it scrabbled across her body. Tee – already badly weakened from its possession – collapsed from the excruciating pain.

As the creature dropped away from Tee’s limp form, it suddenly split into a half dozen duplicates. There was a moment of panic at the thought of so many body-snatchers, but Ranthir recognized the illusion for what it was, shouting out, “Mirror image! They’re not real!”

The shouting and sounds of combat, meanwhile, had awoken Elestra and Tor. (Nasira, on the other hand, was far too comfortable in her bed.) While they began scrambling out of their beds, however, someone else had also been alerted: The door at the end of the hall was thrown open and a large drakken woman stepped through. They recognized her as one of the chaos cultists who had ambushed them at Pythoness House, although now she wore blue-mauve crystalline armor.

“Grab her pouch!” the drakken shouted, drawing her sword and advancing.

Ranthir summoned multiple magical missiles to sweep away the spineseeker’s mirror images, while Agnarr launched an assault to beat it back from Tee’s unconscious form. As Elestra opened her door, the creature made a break for it – having failed to secure Tee’s bag of holding.

(Nasira continued sleeping peacefully in luxurious dreams.)

Tor ripped open his door (which had been held shut by the webs) and started chopping his way through them. He felt particularly vulnerable in his lack of armor, which he hadn’t taken the time to don. And when he engaged the drakken he was particularly frustrated to find that her armor was absorbing the impacts of his blade by crumbling away to dust… and then instantly regrowing to repair the damage.

Tor was still half-entangled in the web, however, so the drakken simply backed away and began peppering him with shots from her bow. Agnarr, similarly caught in Ranthir’s web, was also trying to reach her when Ranthir managed to strike him with the familiar spell of growth. As Agnarr rapidly grew to twice his normal size, he ripped free of the webs. The drakken, suddenly finding herself within Agnarr’s reach, didn’t even have a chance to backpedal (or react in any way) before the barbarian’s sword had torn her in half.

But now a quagmire of sorts erupted in the torn remnants at the heart of Ranthir’s web: The spineseeker was ferocious; its demonic, chitinous hide almost impossible to harm. Even the mighty blows of Tor and Agnarr only seemed to deflect harmlessly away. And to make matters worse, it constantly churned out illusionary duplicates of itself and wrapped all of its forms into confusing displacement effects.

Hoping for additional reinforcements, Elestra sent her homonculus to awaken Nasira. But she was forced to call it back again only moments later when the spineseeker, seizing the opportunity of her weakened defenses, leapt at her in an effort to possess her. Elestra rapidly backpedaled, but still suffered deep wounds up the length of her arms as the creature’s claw-like legs and dorsal mouths ripped away at her flesh.

Nasira, however, had finally been roused. Unfortunately, when she opened the door she couldn’t get through the thick webs. Ranthir was forced to burn them away with a wave of magical fire (which also left scorch marks on the wall of the hall).

While Tor, Agnarr, and Elestra’s homonculus continued pounding away at the spineseeker (Tor having circled to take Elestra’s place in blocking its potential escape through the window), Nasira finally managed to reach the side of Tee (who was rapidly bleeding out). With a burst of holy energy she healed Tee, who went to check on the body of the drakken. She confirmed that it was dead (and unlikely to be sneaking away in the confusion).

In a final, desperate bid for freedom, the spineseeker leapt for the back of Tor’s exposed neck. Although Agnarr’s blade caught it in mid-air (slicing off a section of its tail), the spineseeker latched onto Tor’s neck and took control of the knight’s body. Agnarr suddenly found himself facing the body of his friend. He was unwilling to inflict mortal wounds, but uncertain what other choice he had.

Agnarr was just about to abandon his defensive posture and launch a (regrettably mortal) assault, when Tor managed to free himself from the spineseeker’s control. The spineseeker tried to leap to Agnarr’s body—

And that proved its undoing. The barbarian thrust it away and then beat it repeatedly with his greatsword. Finally caught unprepared and in the open, the spineseeker was segmented into parts as Agnarr forced his blade into the chinks they had opened in its devilishly hard chitin.

MISMATCHED CORPSE LOOTING

Agnarr joked about taking the spineseeker to a taxidermist and then hanging it in their room. (At least, the others hoped he was joking. Particularly since they were going to be sharing rooms now and Nasira was convinced it would give her endless nightmares.)

Tee searched the drakken’s body. Then she searched her room. While all of her equipment was of the highest quality (and some of it of considerable interest, like the crystalline armor) the room had been professionally stripped down and the drakken carried no identification of any kind. (The crystalline armor itself proved to be non-magical, leading Ranthir to conclude that it might be some sort of chaositech. They stuck it in one of the crates from Mahdoth’s.)

Tee suspected – hearing from the others about the drakken’s interest in her bag of holding – that they had been sent by Wuntad to retrieve the golden key from Pythoness House. In the morning, however, they would know more: Elestra would call upon the Spirit of the City and speak with the dead.

Running the Campaign: Inserting Bangs – Campaign Journal: Session 48A
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index