Chapter 4 / Episode #106 “Into the Mansion”

 Chapter 4 / Episode #106 — "Into the Mansion"

Date: Flocktime 2, 576 CY
Region: Safeton and the Northern Shore Mansion, Wild Coast
Weather: Stormy. Rain through the afternoon. The coast road is mud by the time they reach the mansion.

Players Present
Bellator Nocturnus, Fantra Paladin
Kagen Sunhammer, Dwarf Cleric/Fighter
Thorian, Warrior-Monk
Barnabuss, Healer
Squints, Archer of Safeton
Ray JeKwit, Half-Elf Fighter/Thief
Zymm, Elf Fighter/Magic-User/Thief

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Flocktime 2 — "New Faces at Breakfast"

The morning after Harry's pyre was quieter than most. The group gathered at Barnabuss's place with the remains of the pig and the particular heaviness of people who slept well for the first time in days and woke up remembering why they needed it.

Two faces joined them that were not there the night before.

Ray JeKwit was a half-elf from Safeton — the kind of man the city produces in some quantity, lean and observant, with the easy manner of someone who has learned to read a room before committing to anything in it. He carried a fighter's bearing and a thief's patience, and he had heard there was work going. Zymm was an elf, slight and unhurried, with the distant quality that elves sometimes have when they are paying attention to something no one else can see. He was harder to read than Ray, which was saying something.

The group made room. They were short a halfling and the mansion was still waiting.

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Flocktime 2 — "The Bleached Salmon"

Slash was at the same corner table, same untouched cup. He listened to the report on the lighthouse — the armory, the chest, the dagger — without visible reaction, which was its own kind of reaction. When they finished he reached into his coat and set gems on the table. Partial payment, he said. The rest when the job was done.

"And the job," Kagen said, "is the mansion."

"The mansion," Slash confirmed.

Kagen, Thorian, and Bellator had gone in to meet Slash while Ray and Squints held positions outside — eyes on the street, watching for anyone taking an interest in who was going in and out of the Bleached Salmon. Nobody came. The gems were distributed evenly when the three came back out, and the group turned its attention to the business of resupplying.

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Flocktime 2 — "The Streets of Safeton"

Safeton on a stormy morning is a city that keeps its head down. The market district was open but moving fast, vendors pulling awnings against the weather, the streets slick with rain that had been falling since before dawn.

They split up to cover ground. Kagen went to the armorer and came back in dwarven plate, having traded in his old banded armor toward the cost and paid the remainder out of his share. The plate was the kind of work dwarven smiths do when they are thinking about durability rather than elegance — heavy, close-fitted, built to outlast the man wearing it. Squints replenished his arrows. Barnabuss made his way to the Church of Trithereon and donated a gemstone toward a silver holy symbol and four vials of holy water, which the church provided in exchange with the particular efficiency of institutions that understand the value of outfitting people who do dangerous work in the name of something larger than themselves. Zymm sorted through his spell components and settled on his preparation for the day.

A mule and cart were purchased for moving the mirrors still left in the lighthouse. Squints took the reins — he had driven before and did not make a production of it.

The street found them before they were done.

A short man materialized at Bellator's elbow with the practiced ease of someone who does this for a living, holding out a cloth bag and talking fast about gems, a bargain, one hundred gold pieces, an opportunity that would not last. Thorian's hand came down on the man's wrist before the pitch was finished and the bag hit the cobblestones and the man was gone into the crowd before anyone had fully registered what happened.

Bellator picked up the bag anyway.

It was empty. Whatever had appeared to be inside it had not survived contact with the ground, or had never been there to begin with. The hundred gold pieces stayed in Bellator's purse, which was the best outcome available given the circumstances.

Ray's belt pouch was lighter than it should have been by the time they reached the edge of the market — his silver mirror and comb gone, lifted clean without anyone seeing it happen. The city had made its point about divided attention.

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Flocktime 2 — "The Mansion Gate"

The road north along the coast was familiar enough from the lighthouse work, but the storm made it worse than it had been. The cart wheels found every soft patch in the track. The rain came in off the Woolly Bay sideways and the group arrived at the mansion fence soaked and in no mood for additional obstacles.

The gate was locked.

They tried it the straightforward way first. When that produced nothing, they took ten minutes with the picket fence beside it and opened a gap wide enough for the cart and mules to pass through. The mansion sat beyond the fence line — stone, two storeys, shuttered windows, the double front doors closed against the weather. Large enough to swallow the lighthouse twice over.

The front door was locked as well. They found a window.

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Flocktime 2 — "The Entry Hall"

The room they came into was large — eighty feet by sixty, the ceiling high enough to feel like intention rather than accident. Rain-grey light came through the shuttered windows in thin lines and showed them the shape of things: a floor of old stone, a bear rug spread across the center of it, a balcony running the width of the far wall with stairs rising to it on either side. Two hallways opened off the main room, one north, one south. Double doors stood directly across from their entry point.

The bear rug was enormous. Whatever the bear had been in life, it had been significant.

The group moved it out of the center of the room — not from superstition but from the practical understanding that large dark shapes on floors in abandoned mansions have a way of becoming problems when the torchlight moves. With it shifted, the entry hall was just a room. A very large room in a very quiet mansion on a stormy afternoon, with two hallways and a set of double doors and no indication yet of what was waiting beyond any of them.

They brought the cart and mules inside, out of the rain.

Then they began to plan.

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XP Award — Episode 106

XP this session is awarded for gold recovered and returned to Safeton.
Partial payment received from Slash — XP per player to be updated on character sheets when full payment is collected.

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Watch the campaign unfold at @thedmandfriends — blog.hommlet-dark.com

Chapter 4 / Episode #105 “What the Chest Cost”

Date: Flocktime 1, 576 CY

Region: The Lighthouse and Northern Shore, Safeton, Wild Coast

Weather: Overcast. Wind off the bay. By evening, clearing.

Players Present

Bellator Nocturnus, Fantra Paladin

Kagen Sunhammer, Dwarf Cleric/Fighter

Thorian, Warrior-Monk

Barnabuss, Healer

Harry, Halfling Thief

Squints, Archer of Safeton

Flocktime 1 — “The Top of the Tower”

The door at the top of the lighthouse spiral was stuck in the particular way of things that have been

wedged shut deliberately and left long enough to forget. Harry checked it for traps first, found none,

and then the group spent the better part of an hour failing to open it. Kagen snapped a crowbar against

it. The door did not move.

Harry looked at the exterior of the tower, at the rope in his hands, and made the calculation that

halflings make when they have decided the straightforward approach is no longer available. He tied off

and went up the outside of the fluted stonework, hand over hand in the coastal wind, until he reached

the window at the top level. On the other side of the stuck door he found the spikes that had been

holding it — driven into the frame from the inside, someone’s idea of making sure no one followed

them up. He pulled them and the door opened.

The top room held the lighthouse mechanism — mirrors, once used to throw firelight out over the

Woolly Bay. Burn marks on the housing showed how it had worked. Two ornamental blue quartz gems

sat at the base of the mechanism, low value but worth carrying. Bellator tested one in the housing to see

if it produced any effect. It did not. The group dismantled the mirrors carefully, stacking them for

removal. They would fetch something at market.

The torch went out during the work. They finished in the dark.

Flocktime 1 — “The Hidden Room”

Squints ran a feather along the wall of the corridor below the top level, checking for air movement,

looking for gaps. The stone gave him nothing on the first pass. On the second, a seam.

The hidden room behind it was not a treasure vault. It was an armory.

Longswords. Shortswords. Daggers. Maces. Battle axes, hand axes, javelins, spears. Crossbows and

bolts counted out in stacks. A bardiche. Glaive-guisarmes. Bill-guisarmes. Bucklers and wooden

shields ranked against the walls. All of it freshly forged, well-oiled, without a mark of rust or a scratch

of use. No heraldry on any of it. No maker’s mark that meant anything. Fresh boot prints on the floor.

Someone had been stocking this room recently, and whatever they were stocking it for had not

happened yet.

The group stood in the armory and looked at the inventory and did not say aloud what several of them

were thinking. There was no proof of anything. There was only a room full of unmarked weapons in a

supposedly haunted lighthouse on the edge of a city, and a dagger in Thorian’s pack with a triangular

symbol on the hilt, and the memory of a hooded figure in the Bleached Salmon pointing a blade at

someone who had survived the slave trade.

They moved the chest out of the hidden room first. It could be opened outside, in the light, with room to

work.

Flocktime 1 — “Harry”

They brought the chest outside onto the grass above the cliff. The lighthouse at their backs. The bay

below. A good day for it, or as good as any.

Harry knelt in front of the chest the way he always did — unhurried, methodical, the tools coming out

in the right order. He was the best at this. He had always been the best at this. The group stood back and

gave him room and watched the coast and waited for the sound that meant the lock had given.

The dart came out of the chest mechanism and Harry did not have time to know it had happened.

He was gone before he fell.

The group stood over him and the chest sat open in the grass and the wind came off the Woolly Bay the

way wind does when it has no particular interest in what just happened. Inside the chest: three thousand

electrum pieces and four thousand copper. Not nothing. Not enough.

“He was careful,” Squints said, after a while. “He was always careful.”

No one had anything to add to that.

Flocktime 1 — “The Pyre”

They gathered wood from the treeline and brought oil from their packs. The pyre went up on the grass

above the cliff, in sight of the water, which seemed right for a halfling who had spent the last weeks on

the Wild Coast doing things that were considerably larger than most halflings attempt.

They lit it and stood back and let it burn.

There was no ceremony to speak of. These were not people who had known Harry long enough to

know what he would have wanted said, and Harry had not been the kind of halfling who talked much

about what he wanted. He had been the kind who went up the outside of a lighthouse in coastal wind

because someone had to, and who knelt in front of locked things with patience and good tools and did

not make a fuss about it.

The fire did its work. They turned away when it was done and began loading the mirrors and the

weapons onto improvised carries made from the polearms, and did not look back at the lighthouse

again.

Flocktime 1 — “Back to Safeton”

The road back into Safeton was heavy going with the mirrors and the weapons and the chest, but they

managed it. At the money changer they converted the electrum. At the market the weapons moved for

what weapons move for when they have no history attached to them. The mirrors found buyers.

When it was tallied: one thousand eight hundred and sixty-one gold pieces divided among five. Three

hundred and seventy-two gold each — more than most of them had seen in one place before the slave

cart, and a different kind of weight to carry than the chest had been.

The evening was Barnabuss’s idea. His place, a pig purchased for three electrum, a fire that had nothing

funerary about it. The group ate and drank and did not talk about the armory or the dagger or the

hooded figure or what the weapons in that hidden room had been waiting to be used for.

There would be time for that.

Tonight they had earned the fire.

XP Award — Episode 105

372 XP each after returning to Safeton

Harry, Halfling Thief — killed by a poison dart trap, Flocktime 1, 576 CY. He was careful. He was always

careful.

Watch the campaign unfold at @thedmandfriends — blog.hommlet-dark.com

Chapter 4 / Episode #104: “Bones”

Date: Flocktime 1, 576 CY

Region: The Lighthouse, Northern Shore of Safeton, Wild Coast

Weather: Fog through the morning. The coast offers nothing but grey and cold.

“Three Knocks”

Someone tried the knocker.

One knock. Two knocks. Three.

The door swung inward on its own, smooth and unhurried, as if it had been waiting for someone to ask

politely. Kagen spiked it open before it could reconsider. The group filed through into the debris and

the dark, torchlight pushing back just enough of the lighthouse interior to show them what they were

dealing with.

What they were dealing with announced itself from somewhere in the shadows.

“Arr, what’ve we got here then? Lost, are ye? Wrong door, I’d say — though it’s a fine last sight

ye’ll have of the world above.”

The skeleton stepped into the torchlight with the swagger of something that had once stood on a

quarterdeck and had not entirely forgotten it. It had a pirate’s bearing and a pirate’s mouth, and it

seemed genuinely pleased to have company after however long it had spent alone in the dark.

“Turned”

Kagen raised the holy symbol.

The turning hit the skeleton like a wind off open water — sudden, irresistible, pushing it backward

against its will. The bravado went out of it in an instant. Whatever it had been saying died in its teeth. It

turned and fled, rattling down the stairs to the lower level, the sound of its retreat echoing up through

the stone.

The group went after it.

The lower level opened into a long corridor heading north — toward the mansion, if the lay of the land

above matched what was below. The skeleton was somewhere ahead in the dark, still moving under the

compulsion of the turning. Squints raised his bow and put an arrow into it.

The turning broke.

The skeleton stopped fleeing and became something else entirely. Bellator did not wait for it to close

the distance. The paladin charged down the corridor, which is exactly the wrong thing to do in a

corridor that has not been searched, and the floor opened beneath him. He dropped into the pit trap and

the darkness swallowed him whole.

The skeleton, freed from the turning and faced with a corridor now partially occupied by a

paladin-shaped hole in the floor, seemed to find this arrangement agreeable. The fight that followed

was close and grinding — the group working around the pit, Bellator hauled up by rope while the battle

continued over his head. The skeleton took enough punishment to decide the corridor was no longer

worth holding and disappeared back into the dark.

They let it go. Squints was hurt. Bellator was bruised and irritated. They pulled back to the ground floor

to regroup.

“While the Party Was Upstairs”

The second floor called for attention. Harry went up first, then others followed — four giant rats in the

close dark of the upper room, dealt with in the efficient way the group had developed for things that

bite and have no particular strategy beyond biting. Squints worked angles. Kagen worked the stairs.

The rats were finished.

Below them, the ground floor door slammed.

Bones had come back.

Barnabuss and one other had remained on the ground floor, and now they had the skeleton’s full

attention without the rest of the party to distribute it. The fight downstairs was smaller and more

desperate than the one in the corridor

By the time the others came back down, the skeleton was broken on the floor.

Flocktime 1 — While Upstairs

The wolf spider came out of the upper dark with the confidence of something that had not been

seriously challenged in a long time. The group spread across the room and attacked from angles, and

Squints put the killing arrow into it from across the chamber. It folded.

Harry found the footlocker. He found the trap on it first, which is the correct order of operations, and

then he opened it. Inside: copper, silver, electrum, gold, and platinum in quantities worth the weight.

Three gems. And beneath the coins, folded with the careful attention of someone who considered these

things important — a cloak, clothes, and a dagger.

The dagger stopped the room.

The blade was wavy, curved in the particular way that has a name in certain circles. On the hilt: a

triangular symbol, small and precise, stamped into the metal with the care of something meant to be

recognized by the right people. Thorian turned it in his hands.

It was the same mark the hooded figure had carried into the Bleached Salmon the night before — the

tall thing with the knife and the nine-inch tongue that had put its blade in Thorian’s direction and then

dissolved into the Safeton dark.

Someone connected to that creature had been in this lighthouse. The cloak was ordinary cloth — no

magic to it, just fabric. But the dagger went into Thorian’s pack and the clothes into Bellator’s, and the

group stood in the room with the dead spider and the open footlocker and a thread that now ran from

the Bleached Salmon to the hooded figure to whatever had been living here.

The third level of the lighthouse remained above them, unopened.

XP: 40 each