Episode 02 - Recap

Kyra and Coraline were still in the dining room standing over the battered remains of the animated armors. Urthal and Tannin, dispatched by Morwen with two more of the Duke’s white steeds, were still about an hour away. Krya and Coraline found a snifter of Brandy and decided to spend the time resting at the table in some of the unbroken chairs. Kyra noted that the fire in the fireplace was not making any noise.

When Urthal and Tannin rode up, the saw the remains of the work that Kyra and Coraline had done last session. Tannin picked up one of the dead guards’ poisoned shortswords, and then the hulking 9’2” Urthal smashed his way through the already broken doors into the foyer of the Rivermen’s Manor. Hearing the commotion, Kyra and Coraline came out from the dining room and met their reinforcements.

After everybody sized each other up, Coraline cast detect magic and saw two interesting magical areas one in the dining room and one below the office. The team investigated a rotten smell Tannin noted coming from the kitchen. Urthal kicked the door across the room. Upon investigating they found some lightly used kitchen tools and an icebox stuffed full of hacked up animal carcasses. In the pantry Coraline picked up a container of Assam tea, a tin of cooking oil and some other basic goods.

They left the kitchen and investigated the office, with Urthal tearing another door off of its hinges, where they found two nice desks with writing materials, ledgers, a bookshelf full of books about working ships, and 12 wooden filing cabinets full of reports detailing the activity of the boats of the Rivermen’s guild. One particular cabinet had been torn apart and the reports scattered, but the name of the boat was missing from the cabinet.

The team also saw a hastily closed trap door leading down some well constructed stone steps to a room that didn’t lead anywhere. There was an odd portion of wall in front of them that was as smooth as a chalkboard. When Coraline touched her hand to the wall, red light began to swirl and formed into a riddle: “Use your head to paint me red, inside of thee resides your key, but beware of what you spurn, for what you give shall be returned.”

The team worked out that this wall required a blood offering. Kyra pricked her finger on a knife and pushed the wound to the wall. The wall responded by sucking the blood out of Kyra’s wound, doing mild damage. The smooth wall filled blood red, and then the blood lifted off the wall and coalesced into a blood colored clone of Kyra. The team quickly dispatched of the blood clone, and the wall before them vanished and stood open.

Inside they found what looked like a storage area, with a lot of debris, a heavy footlocker, and a necklace stand. Tannin noted that it seemed that there were the impressions of multiple heavy boxes left in the dust of the vault. Coraline, very carefully picking through the wooden debris, found black scales and the shell fragments from large black eggs, enough fragments for two potential creatures to be birthed. Tannin checked the footlocker for traps and found one, but it had already been disarmed, and the footlocker was empty.

The team went back upstairs to investigate the soundless fire in the dining room fireplace. They noted that the fire gave off no heat. Urthal stuck his hand into the fire to see if it would burn but awkwardly overshot, but instead of his hand meeting a solid wall in the back of the fireplace he uncovered an illusion. Ducking into a narrow, hastily carved out stone passageway, the team encountered a long hallway with a statue of a black dragon in an alcove at the end, overlooking an exit to the left.

Carefully moving down the hallway with Tannin in the lead, they moved towards the dragon statue. The hulking Urthal had difficulty fitting his large frame in this passageway. Kyra was following close behind Tannin. As she reached a certain point in the hallway the statue let off a blast of fire that extended out several feet, but swiftly Tannin dodged out of the way and no one was damaged. The flame burned on for a full minute. Coraline cast detect magic, and with her connection to the arcane discovered a magical glyph on the wall that was focusing magical energy into a beam crossing the hallway four feet high. Tannin, at 3’2” managed to cross under this beam without triggering the statue, but Kyra was not so lucky.

Coraline blasted the statue to smithereens with forceful eldritch blasts, and then damaged the wall upon which the arcane glyph was set, destroying the magical tripwire. The team continued down the rough-hewn passage and encountered another, larger room. In this room was set two more dragon statues, on the left and right. They saw a rickety door set at the end of this room, and they could hear muffled shouts coming from behind it. Tannin checked the room for mechanical traps, but did not discern any.

Kyra (I think?) threw some shards of plate towards the statues, and as it crossed more tripwires (that Coraline could discern but did not point out) the statues on either side were triggered, creating a wall of flame that denied them passage.

While the team talked about how to get past these statues, with Coraline ready to blast these two to pieces as well, Tannin moved further into the room and stepped on a pressure plate. Two concealed doors in the passage behind them slid open to reveal two penned black Guard Drakes, who were left in ambush.

The team was pinned between the dragon statue trap and this new threat. Whirling around, Coraline successfully cast Crown of Madness on one of the drakes, who turned and attacked his partner. The other drake, confused, retaliated. Tannin hit with a crossbow shot. Urthal moved in with his huge hammer and battleaxe and beheaded one of the drakes. The team ganged up on the last remaining drake, making some key shots and utilizing Kyra’s spiritual weapon, and soon this second drake lay beheaded as well.

The shouts from beyond the door continued, and Coraline blew the rickety door off its hinges with another wave of eldritch force. Through the doorway they saw the same hooded figure they had chased through the streets of Daggerford standing behind a stone altar and shouting commands in a panicked female voice at several hooded figures. Two of the figures were moving down a passageway behind the altar, roughly dragging some humanoids in manacles. Urthal rushed in and threw two handaxes into the back of the hooded figure, The hooded figure, interrupted, turned around and began raving about how Victor was long gone, and that they had outsmarted the team.

Combat ensued. Urthal was viciously attacked by two cloaked figures who sliced at him with fanatic energy with poisoned scimitars, but the team quickly dispatched one, with a massive hammer hit from Urthal smashing one of their heads flat down into its neck, Tannin firing bolts with sneak attack damage, and Kyra using her spiritual weapon, a pumpkin shaped ball of radiant energy. The hooded figure let down her cloak to reveal a woman with shoulder length silvery hair and crazed blue eyes. She continued to rave at the party…then pointed her wand and unleashed a devastating fireball. Amazingly, none of the team went down, though Urthal was badly hurt. Some clutch saves were rolled. The woman, with a magically amplified voice, shouted behind her to set off the charges, and a massive explosion could be heard from down the passageway, which partially collapsed.

Soon the second cloaked figure was dispatched, and Tannin “shot that bitch in the face.” Kyra attempted to heal the badly wounded Urthal, but with a quick reaction the crazed woman cast a counterspell with a mocking retort.

She wouldn’t be laughing long. After another round of the team doing damage, Urthal made a heroic leap over the stone altar and landed vicious attacks on this wizardly foe. Putting all his effort in, he used an action surge and brought the woman down to one hit point. Before the team could render her unconscious, the woman pulled a dagger out from beneath her cloak and said “You don’t even know what you’re up against. You have no chance, you’ll never stop us,” before slitting her own throat.

With the threats gone and the passageway blocked, the team investigated the room. They found a pile of pickaxes stacked in a corner, a large brazier full of ash and human bone. Investigating the corpse of the woman, they discovered a wand of mislead and a shortsword coated in a different poison than what they had seen before.

Investigating the right hand door that led off this room the team discovered two slaves in hastily built wooden cells. There was a blue tiefling man, and a frail looking human woman. Both of them were in bad shape, worn from work and starved. Urthal ripped the cell door apart, Kyra gave these two some good healz, and they were grateful and seemed to gain more strength, while Tannin freed them from their manacles.

The tiefling man and woman recounted how they came to be there. The Tiefling told the team that they had been taken from the nation of Rodaro. The woman worked in the castle as a servant, but upon speaking out at the harsh treatment of the servants under Ilothar she was shackled and given over to the slavers.

The tiefling told the team that ever since Ilothar’s rule began, he had declared all tieflings in the land to be hunted down and captured. He had fled his home and his adoptive parents to try to find a rumored resistance group, which were supposedly meeting to try to contest the brutal reign of Ilothar. He had managed to meet up with a group of these people, but their hideout was raided and after a brief fight for which they were unprepared, they were captured and loaded onto a ship. The group which assaulted them was led by a tall, strong, brutal half-orc wielding a crackling, magical axe who called himself Tosk. They had sailed on this ship for many days, then transferred to another boat, and were led into this manor house where they worked on tunneling out the passageways below the house. There were many slaves brought to the house, and the tiefling had counted fourteen. All were taken from Rodaro.

When the tiefling mentioned Tosk, Coraline’s tome began to radiate heat. Coraline unstrapped the tome from her back and leafed through the pages of unknown symbols until she came to a blank page. As she looked on the page began to fill with ink, and a large symbol filled the page. As she gazed on this symbol a vision of Tosk’s cruel face came to her, and a strong feeling of hatred swelled up inside of her.

The tiefling went on to say that every now and then one of them would be taken from the cells, and amidst the sounds of ritual chanting they could hear the screams as their brethren were murdered, and smell the stink as the corpses were burned in the brazier. He suggested the team search the other cell block to see if there were any more slaves.

In the other cell block they found a heap of a man in the corner. He had many cuts on his arms and hands and face, and he was very weak. They learned that this man was in fact the prior master of the Rivermen’s Guild, Wally Windrunner. They had been keeping Wally here to get into and out of the blood vault, as it was magically keyed to allow free passage with his blood. Victor had been keeping an amulet in there, but Wally noted that he had seen Victor remove the amulet the last time they were in the vault. He told them how they had ransacked the treasure reserve of the Rivermen’s guild, and killed his wife and child. Wally asked about the state of his mansion.

As they led Wally back out through this makeshift dungeon, he did a double take at the corpse of the woman on the floor, and revealed that the woman was Sybill, his wife.

That was the end of the session!