February 2, 118 SE
Having spent nearly a week recovering, Elvish and Grrrr Yip are finally feeling better and ready to continue adventuring. During this time, the mayor of Duskveil has summoned the leaders of the other nearby villagers for a council, and he requests that the party attend.
They arrive at the town hall and are escorted into the council chamber. There, the mayor explains that the council's highest priority, apart from organizing local militias and patrols, is to send a message to Vornheim for help. With the ongoing war, the roads are not completely safe due to bandits and monsters, and they aren't confident that a typical messenger could make it through successfully. The villages don't have much money left to pay them with, but they offer them free horses and 100 gold pieces in order to go to Vornheim and get help from the King. In the meantime, the villages will organize another expedition to finish clearing out the shrine at Frosthaven and searching through the town.
The party, however, don't want to leave the shrine to someone else to explore, and eventually convince the council to let them finish exploring the shrine before leaving for Vornheim. The council asks the party to take Ellesera, Duskveil's guard captain, along with them, so that she can see the shrine for herself.
Wasting no time, the party head to the stables, where they receive their free horses and meet up with Ellesera. They head out for Frosthaven, pushing their horses in order to make it the village as quickly as possible.
They arrive in the late afternoon, and head directly to the shrine in order to continue exploring it. Near the room where they found Gelden and Kira, they take the other path they hadn't explored, and arrive at a small bedroom. This is probably the least unusual room they've seen so far, as it appears to be a simple bedchamber, containing a bed, a wardrobe, and a desk. The desk is empty and the wardrobe contains mostly black robes, but the bed is somewhat interesting - the frame is inscribed with arcane runes. They are able to determine that the runes are somehow intended to prevent change.
Taking another door from the main shrine, they find a larger chamber that seems to be a storeroom for rituals. It contains some mundane items such as linens, cloths, candles, and the like, but also some grisly containers full of bones, skulls, and in one case, a mysterious dark brown liquid.
The final door in the main shrine leads behind it, to a complex of crypts. The halls within contain hundreds of burial alcoves, all labelled with names, but all empty. The floor is covered in a strange, crumbly vine that appears to be dead. In the main section of the crypts stand about two dozen skeletons and zombies; while clearly animated, they don't seem to notice the party.
Dark Star sneaks up to the undead creatures to try to figure out what they're doing, but he stumbles and makes a lot of noise as he approaches. They don't seem to react. Curious, he stops sneaking altogether and approaches them openly; they still don't react at all.
Unsure of what's going on, Ellyanna heads back to the shrine and plays the organ, wondering if this will affect the undead creatures, but it does not. The party decide to simply destroy the creatures. They attack, and the skeletons and zombies make no effort to defend themselves, allowing the party to easily get rid of them.
With the undead creatures taken care of, the party notice a pedestal in the center of the main crypt, upon which stands a book. Dark Star takes a look at it; it's written in High Imperial and is titled "Book of the Dead". Inside, it is simply a list of names; probably about a thousand in total. He is able to match some of the names to inscriptions under the alcoves in the crypt.
There are no other obvious unexplored areas in the crypt, so the party split up to explore the various rooms more thoroughly. Kaplan and Dark Star search the bedroom, while Calanon and Elvish investigate the organ, methodically playing each key, but none of them discover anything of interest. Meanwhile, in the storeroom, Ellyanna discover a secret passage hidden behind a large crate.
Behind the secret door is a larger room, that appears to be an armory. It contains rack after rack of ancient shortswords, as well as stand after stand of ancient armor - enough to equip hundreds of soldiers or more. They appear to be the same type of weapon that the skeletons were using. On closer inspection, Ellyanna realizes that these are specifically the standard arms and armor of the ancient Legionnaires of the First Empire.
Continuing their search, Ellyanna decides to detect magic throughout the entire shrine. She finds four major sources of magic: the bronze doors at the entrance radiate Necromancy, the bone organ radiates Enchantment, the bed radiates Transmutation, and the summoning circle radiates Conjuration.
Having investigated the crypt to the best of their ability, the party decide that it is clearly a place of great evil, and should be destroyed. Thus, they finish their expedition by going through and burning or otherwise destroying everything that they can. The only thing that they leave intact is the secret armory.
The shrine destroyed, the party leave and return to Duskveil. The remaining undead are gone, but they still have no idea why the village was attacked, who was responsible, or where the bulk of the undead creatures have gone.
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