10 Lamashan 4715

Sunday

Session 37

-Rebellion Turn (Mechanics in Sesh 39)

On the way to the Lucky Bones casino, the Ravens encounter a stray dog on the street just outside. It starts growling at the group and while some of the members are initially hesitant to beat a stray dog, it gives them no choice when it suddenly lunges at Ayse. As the party jumps into action to defend themselves against the creature, a number of arrows fly out from surrounding alleyways landing in the pup, and killing it.

Shortly after, six halflings start approaching from various directions. they claim to be the street gang known as the Black Eyes, and claim themselves to be the rough and tumble group that will take over Old Kintargo.

The Black Eyes argue that they should be the ones to get credit for killing the dog and claiming the Dottari reward. Lucius points out that the reward is only for live dogs, and that their estimate of 50 gold was over a hundred times the actual price. This upsets the Halflings and they begin demand the money from the Silver Ravens. Tallulah seems ready to give them a piece of her mind, as opposed to a piece of copper, but Lucius has Ham grab her and physically move her away from the situation, then asks the Black Eyes to get lunch with them to talk things out tomorrow. The Black Eyes agree and set about their business, and the Ravens continue towards the ruins.

What’s left of the Lucky Bones is little more than burnt rubble, but a careful inspection by the team find some sections that have been recently tread upon, creating a trail to a hidden trap door that leads down from one of the fireplaces. The trap door is easily pulled open, implying frequent use and care, to reveal a set of steps leading down.

Session 38

Ham leads the party down the steps beneath the trap door. After descending a fair distance beneath the ground, Ham sees a landing where space opens out to the left. Turning the corner, He’s immediately greeted by three particularly vile and horrid creatures that lurk in darkness down here. They’re covered in filth, and piles of excrement and garbage cover the floor of the chamber. While Ham fends off the nauseating surroundings, the creatures attack.

The group presses in and fans out to avoid staying stuck in the narrow stairway unable to support. The monsters’ lashing tentacles dont make this easy, and Perfidus and Zach succumb to the noxius air in the room to make matters worse. Despite this, Ham draws the brunt of these creatures ire, and keeps the Ravens shielded beside and behind him. Tallulah uses the cover to swiftly eviscerate two of the abominations with her magics. Ham and Lucius are able to surround the final monstrosity and take it down together.

The party takes a moment to recover, fighting to breathe through the awful miasma of this rancid den. While some recover, others recon, identifying usable salvage in a few of the “Nests” of garbage piled up by the creatures. Ham even detects some magic, and after carefully peeling back layer after layer after layer after layer after layer of garbage, refuse, and feces, manages to pull out what is identified to be a bead of force!

Once sickness an injury were subdued, the party makes way to the door at the back of the chamber. Ham opens it, only to receive a needle wound to his hand. At first, all seems fine, but shortly after, the Sasone leaf poison begins wracking him. It passes through him quickly, but leaves him temporarily weakened.

The party pushes forward down another smaller stairway, following a curved hallway to a closed door. Ham checks this door far more carefully than the last, and hears creatures beyond. The group prepares, then opens the door to a large, worked stone chamber. The inside of the room is covered in insectoid graffiti, and four women stand throughout who challenge the groups entry. One steps forward and offers a riddle to the party. Ayse is able to answer it, and the women seem less openly hostile, but still ask the party to leave. Lucius presses their luck, trying to glean more information from them, and they reveal that they worship Mohathala, one of the four “Whore Queens”. Tallulah gets impatient, and starts arguing with Lucius about why hes stalling. While they bicker, Ham decides to strike.

He steps into the room and lays into the closest woman with his Morningstar. The party rushes in, and two of the women fall quickly. The other two, however, run around a corner into another hallway, and seem to disappear entirely. Once the action dies down, the Ravens begin thoroughly searching door by door in what appears to be a common room ringed by individual bed chambers. While not much of interest is found here, the party does uncover several hidden doorways that lead to secret passages behind the rooms. Ayse finds some glass in the second hallway the women ran down, and determines that they used potions of invisibility to escape.

Still with an abundance of caution, the group presses forward slowly, and one of these hidden doorways reveals a rather ornate lounge or smoking room. Complete with hearth, a writing desk, and a rug, this room seems out of place. Another secret door besides the hearth reveals a tiny prison chamber with two young men bound in chains, beaten, and starving. They’re nearly besides themselves when the party enters, but Perfidus and Ham are able to calm them, and convince them that the Ravens are here to help.

The boys turn out to be twins, abducted from near the Iudeimus Tenement building. They’ve been missing for about two weeks, and were told that they were to be sacrificed just before their 18th birthdays’. They identify one woman in particular to be the leader: the one who wears a green and gold mask with long ears.

The party discusses what is to be done with the twins. Deciding they cant be left alone, the group makes it way out with the boys to return to the Nail, where they enlist Setrona’s help in getting the two boys home.

Upon returning to the underground lair, the party pushes ever onward, slowly and methodically. They round another corner in the hallway where the women disappeared to find a strange feature of the complex. A pit of wooden spikes sits in a square chamber interrupting the hallway. A metal walkway rings the pit at floor level, and the pit drops down some 15-20 feet, where the bottom and sides are covered in wooden spikes which are themselves covered in jagged, broken glass. The party carefully makes way around the metal walkway, but unfortunately Lucius, Ayse, and Ham fall in as the metal platform suddenly falls away. Lucius grabs the edge of the pit, but Ham and Ayse plunge into the spikes…

Session 39

Zach manages to place fly down to help, placing Ayse and Ham back on safe ground. Ayse says he spots something at the bottom corner of the pit. Zach flies him in but they don’t see anything further. The lever for the trap is found, and once flipped, the platform ringing the pit returns. Ayse deduces how the trap works and conveys that to the party. The group reconvenes to push further in.

At the far end of the hall are a set of double doors with a strange, hazy symbol on them. Unbeknownst to them, the symbol takes on a different shape for each person:

• Ham saw Raven with a white half-mask
• Ayse saw a burning house
• Tahllulah saw mangled devil silhouette
• Lucius saw a flaming great sword
• Perfidus saw a humanoid forehead with ruby
• Zach saw a fish symbol wearing armor

Much conversation and consternation ensues regarding the symbol and its meaning, but Ayse is able to identify it as an arcane lock with some strange, exaggerated effects. he pulls out a scroll of knock and disables it for 10 minutes, but the doors behind don’t budge, so Ham and Zach destroy them. Whilst this occurs, Ayse and Lucius look to the text on the symbol which was written by the Hellknights that sealed this section off. It reads something to the effect of “This place is sealed by the authority of the Hellknights of the Torrent, may the souls of the Gray Spiders put to rest here be damned”. Looking beyond the now open doorway, the halls splinter off to many more doors. Knowing that the cultists couldn’t have gone that way, the group continues to the only other remaining door.

Ham hears strange chanting from within, and shoves the doors open with his shoulder. A brief conversation occurs, as the group takes in the massive chamber beyond, filled with multiple statues, many cultists, a giant wasp, and an altar with a woman lain across. The “leader” of this group, identified by her ornate wasp-like mask, invites the group in, so Ham takes a step and the floor before him erupts in an explosion.

Combat ensues.

The Ravens are swarmed with nets and rays of magic, as they struggle to get a foothold into the room. Two devils appear from stealth, and deal massive damage with their polearms. Ham and Perfidus are caught by abyssal bleeding wounds, and Ham nearly goes down. Perfidus manages to catch one of the cultists in a bead of force, and bisects the room with the dome of force it produces. Tahlulah fires of a bolt of electrical magic, the power of which staggers god himself, and nearly fells one of the devils in a single hit. The group pushes to stabilize and even the odds, while the leader goes invisible and starts to skulk around the outskirts of the room.

One devil is dropped, and the wasp follow shortly behind, emboldening the Ravens grim outlook as they redouble their efforts.

Session 40

In the midst of the fighting, the invisible leader dashes out of the entryway according to Ayse, While the remaining devil is smashed by Zach. Lacula is grabbed by one of the cultists, and threatened as a hostage, though she’s quickly dispatched and the cultists are felled one by one. Eventually, the only enemy remaining is the final cultist who was trapped in the done of force. While waiting out the expiration of the magic, the party sets about looting the room, and comforting Lacula, who is slowly rousing.

Ham, Tallulah, and Zach discuss the nature of Zach’s body in the material plane and take stock of what he does and doesn’t have (ie. blood, clothes, genitals), and how Tallulah professed love for Lacula mid fight. Ayse pulls Lucius aside while Perfidus looks after Lacula. Ayse expresses concern over Lucius asking him to make drugs. Says Lucius has been acting strange, and gives Lucius a vial of something, but refuses to say what it is when Lucius asks. Lucius gets frustrated as Ayse continues to dodge the question and just keeps saying that something is up with Lucius. Lucius argues that he’s upset that Ayse is “prescribing” him something, not telling him what it is, and that Ayse doesnt even know what (if anything) is “wrong”, on top of also not getting what he asked Ayse to make.

Ayse finally relents, and tells Lucius that its an anti-plague to help fight disease. Lucius reminds Ayse that he’s immune to disease. Ayse says hes just trying to help, and Lucius says that this is in no way helping and trying to prescribe something to someone when you have no idea whats going on is concerning. Ayse brushes this off, and say to let him know if theres anything he needs, and Lucius says yea “ the stuff I asked you to make that you said you would” and Ayse returns to looting.

Lucius opens the final door, finding a small sleeping room/shrine area. He goes about destroying the shrine, breaking a profane statue, and coincidentally finds a strange, black scroll with silver/white writing, amongst a few other ordinary scrolls not from the statue. He puts a few other texts, along with the scrolls, into his bag, and takes a seat on the cot to smoke.

Perfidus finally gets Lacula up and talking, though she looks run ragged and distressed. She starts asking after the twins, and reveals that they were going to tell her how she died. She tells the story of two strange figures walking in to her shop and telling exotic tales to catch her attention. They made claims that they were going to fix things in Kintargo, and convinced her to follow them to the casino where they beat and bound her and locked her away. Perfidus does his best to heal and comfort her.

As the timer on the force sphere get close to expiring, the other four Ravens sans Lucius cover the exits and try to convince the remaining cultist to give up. With seconds left on the dome, the cultist take a potion and goes invisible. The group tries to convince her further, but the door to the room Lucius is in opens. Perfidus commands Zach to get her. Zach runs in, yell to Lucius that they are not alone, and in one massive cleave he drops the hammer onto the invisible woman, killing her.

Lucius thanks him and asks Zach to take her corpse on his way out. He obliges, leaving Lucius to “meditate”. The party comb the ritual room for any remaining items or points of interest. The only thing standing out, save for the pink dust carried by each cultist, is a strange symbol carved into the wall behind the main statue behind the altar. Lucius eventually makes his way back out, and gets Zach to help him move the statue, revealing what Ayse identifies to be the symbol of Norgorber. Lucius askes Zach to remove it, and the earth breaker gets to work.

With the symbol removed, and only the hallway behind the lock remaining, it is decided that Zach and Perfidus will guard that hallway entrance while the rest of the party quickly returns Lacula to Setrona at the Nail. While dropping her off, Setrona remarks on the number of poeple the Ravens are dragging out of the “abandoned” casino, and states that the Dotarri were at the Iudimus tenement when she returned the twins, and are taking credit for their return. A quick 20 minute round trip, and the party reunites outside the arcane lock, which has since reformed and is once again blocking the hallway, despite the door being gone.

Ayse whips out another “Knock” spell after ensuring the group has one more to get out at the end of their exploration. They push into the sealed off wing of the complex, searching door by door down the first hallway, revealing multiple rotted bedrooms with opium pipes. They get to a larger double door at the end, and open it to find a sort of dining room. Multiple boxes and shelves of items cover the walls of the oval shaped room, with a long table in the middles surrounded by chairs.

As the group steps in, they notice a skeleton on the far wall, as a strange form begins to wisp up from it, forming into the incorporeal shape of a halfling woman….

Session 41

The ghost of the woman takes the group in, and shortly thereafter asks them to play a game of “Odds and Evens for her secrets”. Relieved not to be fighting a ghost, and intrigued by her mystery, the Ravens take her up on her offer, and Ayse volunteers to play. She has him “Ante” a bead of of something that she pulls out from inside his brain with her ghostly hand, and she gets to explaining the rules.

Ayse loses the first round, but bets double or nothing on the second, and comes out with the win! Ayse is given the opportunity to ask two questions. He asks an ambiguous question first, which she dodges, then asks a clarifying question about the questions he can ask her, which she answers and counts as number two. Ayse gets disheartened, and gives up the chair to Perfidus, who is peer pressured into replacing him.

Perfidus wins his first round, and asks her how they can get her to leave the casino. She replies that she cant leave unless she truly dies. Not enjoying the esoteric answers to their questions, and weighing the risks of losing a dice game to her with its price, the party decides to push on and figure the ghost out later. As they close the door to her chamber behind them, they hear dreadful barking and gnashing sounds. When they open the door again to check, there is nothing to be seen.

The party continues down the other end of the L shaped hallway, towards two sets of double doors that are left to explore. They choose the set just before the doors at the end of the hallway. Opening the penultimate set, they find a rather unnerving second pit, though this one stretches down what seems to be far beyond sight. The sides of this pit are caked in strange mold, and a winch connects their side of the pit to the other with a fraying rope. They see the remnants of a massive snake skeleton housed here in the pit as well. Ayse is able to use his “spider climb to get across, and Zach flies each member of the party over to the other side, avoiding the sketchy rope and winches.

The far side of the pit opens to a large, rectangular room carved into the rock. Two hewn pillars hold the ceiling from collapse, and the floor of this room is covered in square tiles of different colors, arrange in no certain pattern. Two savagely mangled corpses lie still in the center of this chamber, seeming to have failed on their journey towards the next set of doors along the wall to the right of the party.

Lucius and Ham carefully study the tiles, beginning to formulate what they believe to be a pattern to show a safe walkway through an otherwise trapped room. Whilst they deliberate, however, Perfidus saunters into the room with little thought or concern, and is greeted shortly after by a deep, booming voice announcing that he stepped on the “WRONG TILE”. The voice is followed by a large, 3 armed blob of flesh and jaws rises up through the floor itself next to Perfidus. Combat begins.

The Ravens are eager to get in and protect their softer summoner, but Perfidus seems to be the only target the creature is concerned with, and Perfidus quickly goes down, shunting Zach out of the Material Plane as well! Attack after attack misses the beast, before Ayse finally identifies it to be a “Xorn”. Using this knowledge, Ayse interrupts the fight by offering the Xorn silver if it lets them leave. This piques its interest, and it begins shaking the party down for any stones, gems, or metals they have on them. A fair amount of change and jewelry, and a more deeply felt silvered Morningstar later, and the party is able to leave with the unconscious Perfidus in tow. After a quick round of healing, the party makes haste back above ground an to the Nail.

Session 42
-Shopping
-Team Space X
-Rest