January 22, 118 SE
The party arrive at Frosthaven around noon, having started out a bit later than usual due to their late arrival at camp the previous night. Kaplan persuades them that they should search the entire town and try to find any other survivors. They make their way to the village's single tavern, located near the center of the village. Similar to the temple, it is ransacked, with a higher density of corpses than other areas of the town. There are no survivors here, so they decide to perform a thorough search, spiraling outwards from the center of town and covering every single building.
Several hours pass as they search, without any results, when eventually they overhear the sound of several voices arguing coming from a nearby house. They approach, and discover that the house has been hastily boarded up and barricaded. The voices within are speaking a rough, gutteral language, but none of the party can understand it.
Kaplan moves to the front door and knocks on it with his hammer, demanding that the voices inside identify themselves. The voices immediately go quiet and there is no response. After waiting a few moments, Kaplan switches to his larger warhammer and bashes the door down. In its weakened state, the door falls easily, and Kaplan has a brief glimpse of a darkened hallway before three arrows shoot out from inside. Two of them strike him, and he is knocked to the ground.
A brutish-looking goblin warrior emerges from inside the building and attacks, while three other goblins fire arrows from behind cover inside the house. The party defeat the four goblins, largely due to a well-aimed Eldritch Blast from Darkstar that nearly kills the goblin leader outright, and a Burning Hands spell from Ellyanna that incinerates two of the three archers.
With the goblins disposed of, the party search through the building. Kaplan notes that goblins are not uncommon in this area, so this group were possibly scavengers or raiders. They find several corpses in the building that have sword wounds, but they are unable to determine whether the wounds are from the goblins' scimitars or the skeletons' swords.
Finding nothing of value in the goblin house, the party continue their search for survivors. They canvas the village for the rest of the day, covering the rest of the buildings, but find no survivors. They do find a few people who seem to have died of exposure rather than injuries, indicating that they might have been saved if they had been found more quickly.
Since the undead seem to have left the village, given that they did not encounter any during their all-day search, the party decide to hole up in a house of the outskirts of the village for the night, resolving to continue their investigation the next day.
January 23, 118 SE
The night is uneventful, and the next morning the party set out to investigate the large set of tracks that they discovered a few days ago. The tracks are those of dozens or possibly hundreds of individuals leaving town to the northeast, but the light snowfall since the tracks were made prevent the group from discerning any significant details. No one is able to think of any major landmarks in the direction the tracks are going, leaving their destination a mystery.
They decide to return to the cemetary and continue investigating there. Darkstar sneaks up to the mausoleum, where he sees, as before, three skeletons standing guard. He returns to the rest of the party and they formulate a plan. They know that they need to take out the skeletons quickly, in order to prevent one of them from fleeing and warning whatever is below the mausoleum of their presence.
They decide to sneak behind the mausoleum, while Darkstar waits at a distance, ready to attack with ranged magic. Ellyanna and Grr Yip sneak to the front of the mausoleum, intending to gain the element of surprise, allowing Grr Yip to prevent the skeletons from fleeing with an Entangle spell, while Ellyanna will try to destroy them with a Burning Hands spell.
Unfortunately, neither of the two adventurers is particularly stealthy, and they alert the skeletons to their presence via noise before they manage to round to the front of the mausoleum. Neither caster is able to get her spell off as two of the skeletons rush forward to attack and, as before, the third runs away to warn whatever creatures lurk below. The party dispatch of the two attacking skeletons, then charge into the darkness, hoping to catch the third skeleton.
The sarcophagus that the skeleton retreated into contains a stairway leading downwards, and the party run down it, with Darkstar trailing, as he had stayed further behind in order to fight from a distance. About 100 feet in, alcoves open on either side of the stairs. Kaplan sees a shadowy figure waiting in ambush on each side, and tries to call out a warning and halt the party, but their momentum is such that he cannot stop them quickly enough. Instead, he is pushed forward directly into the ambush.
The two shadowy creatures, which appear to literally be humanoid-shaped shadows, attack Kaplan, and as they touch him, he feels his strength and lifeforce being drained away. The creatures seem to be resistant to physical attacks, as well as most of the party's magical attacks. However, they do seem to be vulnerable to some of Darkstar and Elvish's force- and psychic-based attacks, and the party manage to destroy the creatures. However, even after they are gone, Kaplan still feels weakened, and during the time they were fighting, the skeleton has managed to flee even further into the darkness ahead.
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