In Session 33, the PCs settled on this task, got the names of some contacts in the area (one from their mercenary company, one from Esteban's handler) and traveled from Chardecum to Grand Terrace, through Shale Pass - a trip that took a fortnight. Along the way one night, a flock of thousands of ravens settled around their camp, and one of them began speaking with Esteban telepathically. After some discussion, he disappointed the ravens and declined to trade away an eye, but reaffirmed his intention to start looking for the Nightwalker's fingerbones aaaany day now. To hold him to this promise, two of the ravens stayed with him - one on his shoulder and one on his saddlehorn.
In Shale Pass, the PCs changed their Tyreman silver maravedis for Gallmontese silver livres. The moneychangers took ten percent, which no one liked too much; several of the characters are quite cash-poor, and this didn't help. (To be clear, it was the characters rather than the players complaining; the players accepted this ruthless money sink with grace.)
In Grand Terrace, they take rooms at an inn and get in touch with their contacts. Alekkvi heads off to a library to do some off-camera research, since her player was not available for the session. The last known bearer of the Theurgist's Stole was Brother Roderigo of Verlais, and he's currently in the wind; rumor suggests that he signed on with some people who hoped to explore the halls beneath the Abbey of the Immortal Saint, which is very illegal.
She explains that she plans to send the bill for these goods back to the Company (which may or may not garnish the party's pay to cover the cost, but with healing potions as the cheap items of the lot at 500 silver, they don't want to waste anything).
The next day, the man they presume to be a captain of the gendarmes is taking breakfast in the common room of their inn when they come downstairs. Not one of your more subtle reminders.
Esteban's
other contact Josephina confirms that Roderigo is not in a secret cell, so he must have never left the lower levels of the Abbey. Josephina agrees to help them sneak into the Abbey by paying off lots of servants, but she feels certain this will risk her cover in the city to the point that she'll have to leave. The group gathers their things, informs Alekkvi in that convenient off-camera kind of way, and follows Josephina toward the Abbey.
While she goes on ahead to grease palms, the four hang back in an alleyway. Spotting a pair of gendarmes trudging up the hill toward them, they have less than half a minute to take cover. The alley offers precious little, but Vizzik recently learned
jump, so he casts it twice, and he and Vorcrech take cover behind a chimney. Lanth takes cover on the ground, as deep into the alleyway as she can go, while Esteban relies on his parkour-style acrobatics to reach the roof as well. Their successes are sufficient to completely conceal them from the less-than-attentive gendarmes.
I expected the PCs would do everything in their power to avoid an encounter at this critical time, and I was right. It's one of the through-line lessons of this session: once PCs start committing effort to avoiding a fight, there's a sense of unresolved tension that just winds up tighter and tighter every successive time they come close to being in a fight. Once you're in that cycle, an actual fight releases more tension than it generates - so let the PCs wind themselves up by giving them ways to maintain secrecy or avoid combat.
Josephina returns and leads the PCs to the servants' entrance, past several winking-and-nodding guards and servants, into the kitchen. From there, she heads back down to the city to pack her things and get the hell out of Dodge. The PCs find stairs downward to a floor of storerooms, and beneath a stack of crates they find a trapdoor. They briefly discuss how to either keep it open or keep it shut, once they're inside, and since they can't decide which, they do neither. Lanth draws her sword, which glows like a torch of blue fire, and they descend.
In the first chamber off to the left of the passage, they find a mail-clad body with a completely pulverized head. Investigation, for this team, includes both tracking his passage and speaking to his ghost, because veytikka. Between the two, they discover that this man came down here with Roderigo, but the group got separated in some mists. Shortly after, he was run down and killed by a massive creature with four legs and two arms, perhaps made of stone.
After taking everything of any worth that he had, they move on. The passage splits, and they examine the right-hand way, discovering a small chamber followed by a suspicious-looking narrow corridor. Esteban examines it and concludes that the flagstones of the corridor are pressure plates. Vizzik notes that one person has passed this way before them. When Esteban disables one of the pressure plates, the group hears an odd ticking noise, followed by a small creature - apparently an animated statue - appearing at the edge of the light cast by Lanth's sword. It takes a long look at the group before it walks across the pressure plates, to no effect, and gets to work on fixing the disabled plate. The four stand and watch.
They decide that there must be a way to disable the pressure plates safely from this side, and start looking for something that would do that. Out in the main passage, they find a stone that they can lift away to reveal a pattern of finger-holes, three rows of five, with no indication as to what to do. They reason that an incorrect code is probably at least as bad as doing nothing at all, and they all confess to being uncommonly attached to their fingers. Vizzik, a Moriscethi veytikka, listens to the whispers of the Dark, and learns the finger-pattern. At the same time, the other three feel a change in the air pressure, as if the air itself is heavy, constricting. When Vizzik uses the panel, they hear wires snap on the other side of the wall and under the floor.
Having disarmed the traps, they follow the corridor to another chamber, where the small stone servitor has opened an identical panel, removed the finger-hole panel from the wall with a technique they don't see, and is grumbling obscurely about the repairs process. They shrug and keep going... and find another dead body.
This one is a woman, dressed in scholarly (or perhaps occult) robes, bearing an iron rod that commonly signifies
warlock. She has apparently bled to death from wounds inflicted by the trapped corridor. The veytikka talk to her ghost, but to their considerable surprise she is
hungry, terribly hungry, and what's worse, she can do something about it. Veytikka don't usually see that kind of functionality in the ghosts they help to pass on. This was the second fight of the session: the ghost (not a
Monster Manual ghost, in this case) manifested as a specter.
My players, God bless them,
know that they don't know what a specter might be able to do. Approximately one person in the party (statistical margin of error: +/-1) has any idea what a
Monster Manual specter can do, and they know that I might change things up. Though worried about its attack, Vorcrech readies an action to push it on to the Ghostlands, while Esteban, Lanth, and Vizzik try to ace her before she gets to act. They succeed.
A single creature appeared and got killed before its initiative turn... but every roll was tense and the players were sweating. I love them for letting themselves feel the tension, rather than deciding to be too-cool-for-school - as I've talked about before, that's super tempting in games.
They found a chamber full of expensive-looking tomes and equipment -
Antikythera mechanisms, all kinds of crazy stuff. They load it up into bags and crates and place it by the exit, visions of lucre dancing in their heads.
They find their way to another intersection; the left passage should lead back toward the entrance, and probably holds the mist that separated the other party. The right-hand passage opens into a chamber with a
massive stone statue, with four legs and two arms. Esteban, as the designated traps-victim, goes first.
Though he is a master of stealth, the statue-creature spots him. Burning eyes flare to life and the head turns toward him. Beams of blue fire shoot out of the eyes and strike him (an improbable failed Dex save). Instead of beginning a career as a tidy pile of ashes, Esteban hears a voice in his head, demanding to know why he is here and what he plans to take. After a few exchanges of thought, the statue demands that they take nothing but the
Theurgist's stole, things that the previous adventuring team brought in with them, and something called the
home stone. Esteban makes this promise, with a few unkind comments on the side for telepathic contact and vows extracted by force.
As each of the other three party members enters the room, the beams from the creature's eyes strike them as well. It asks Lanth if the domain is under threat. In an uncharacteristic move, she equivocates for a moment, and a tremor runs through the whole Abbey. She has a epiphany: she could potentially end Gallmontese resistance before a war with Tyrema even begins, by instructing this creature that the domain is indeed under threat from the Grand Duke. Yet her strict dedication to justice wins out, and she finally says that the domain is under no threat.
Of Vizzik, it asks, "What does the Dark require of me?" Vizzik replies, "Safe passage." The sense of constriction and weight on the other three intensifies.
It asks Vorcrech, "Have the Gods made their will known?" and "Who is the angel of the Abbey?" As Vorcrech is being played by someone other than his normal player (just to get us through the adventure), the player has a lot of uncertainty in answering; I explain that these questions would be equally enigmatic to Vorcrech's usual player. He insists that he enacts the will of the Gods in coming here.
They pass into the next room. It has a light of its own, unlike the rest of these halls; it is twilight, and trees grow from the soil here, forming a grove. In the center of the grove stands a simple stone altar. A crown and a spherical stone rest upon the altar. Another body, apparently dead, lies against one of the trees - and what can only be the
Theurgist's stole is clearly visible upon it. This was Roderigo of Verlais. Esteban takes the
Stole and picks up the stone.
When he does so, five more figures appear outside the grove: pale, slender, beautiful, and radiating menace. In the course of conversation, they explain that the crown once belonged to Kovichir, and they believe it is time for a new Immortal Emperor. They seem willing to insist upon this point - but the group is pretty sure the domain sentinel will murder them if they try to take the crown out of the Abbey. One of these fey creatures also reveals that Roderigo is not dead, just slumbering forever, as a punishment for whatever he came here to do - presumably a necromantic rite of some kind, since he bothered to bring the
Stole with him.
A very uncomfortable conversation follows. The PCs don't know that they can take these fey, and they're pretty sure that even trying will defile the grove and bring down the domain sentinel's wrath. The fey won't let them leave without some kind of agreement. Agreeing to what the fey want seems like it will bring down the aforementioned wrath. Esteban in particular refuses to enter into any new bargain with fey or any other immortal being; his ongoing problems with the Nightwalker are enough, thanks. Vorcrech's current player, for obvious reasons, doesn't want to agree to anything that will bind the character in the long term, and since I agree that would be poor form, he's off the hook for this one. Which leaves Lanth and Vizzik.
In a way, Lanth put one over on them, by promising to come back with a worthy monarch once she finds one. On the other hand, she's utterly sincere in that promise. So... probably a good solution. With that, they take the
Stole, the
home stone, and the gear they otherwise stripped off of the dead fighter and warlock. They leave behind the boxes of research equipment.
The
home stone, they learn, can be activated to teleport the user and some number of other people (number unknown) from anywhere to Kovichir's grove, and then back to whence they came. They also spot - and decline to explore - a staircase leading downward. Without further ado, they hasten out of the Abbey and out of the city, staying just ahead of the gendarmes long enough to lose their interest and return safely to Tyrema.
Breakdown
Whew! That was a doozy of an explanation. Now for some analysis. Things that went right: