This should have been subtitled Vengeance for Vraazox. Following their narrow escape, Tulk and Hazel swore vengeance on the ghostly necromancer who’d slain their friend. They went back with reinforcements:
- Tulk: marked half-orc, ranger 3
- Hazel Ravenvale: outcast halfling, thief 2
- Nubbin Stump: drawn halfling, fighter 2
- Ylva Fekyue: outcast halfling, bard 3
- Mirena the Outcast: outcast human, priest of Freya 1 (reserve PC for Vraazox’s player)
… this crew sure does seem to attract a lot of halflings and outcasts for some reason.
Skulking back to the sunken crypt, the PCs once again found themselves facing the defiled statue of Gede. Tulk, having come properly prepared for a delve, expended one ration to pour wine into the carved chalice held in one of the statue’s hands. This seemed to finish the previous process of cleansing the statue, and wine began flowing from the pitcher in the statue’s other hand into the chalice.
Tulk, being a worshipper of Gede, promptly took this for the miracle it was and drank from the chalice. When she didn’t spontaneously combust or fall down thrashing in anaphylaxis, the others followed her lead, gaining a minor boon from Gede (roll with advantage on their next attempt to resist a spell or supernatural power). This would prove fortuitous shortly…
Moving into the crypt, the crew encountered signs that someone had been at work. Doors were closed; signs of hasty flight were cleaned up. Passing through a door they hadn’t explored before, Nubbin, in the lead, was fine – but when Tulk followed him, she felt the icy sting of something biting her ankle, and her life force began ebbing. Mirena quickly healed her, which seemed to stop the effect, but Tulk’s ankle now bore two puncture wounds of the approximate size and spacing of human(oid) canines.
Looking closely at the floor, Mirena discerned a necromantic rune trap drawn in powdered gypsum, bone dust, and powdered dried blood. Hazel attempted to disrupt it with her silver dagger, but the rune struck at her, too, inflicting a similar wound on her wrist. Again, Mirena’s swift healing saved the thief from an unsavory fate.
Mirena inspected the rune more closely and determined that it was specifically attuned to attack Hazel and Tulk. Disgusted by this evidence of vindictiveness on the part of an undead necromancer whose crypt she was invading, Hazel salvaged several planks of rotting wood from the tomb’s former furnishings and built a walkway across the rune trap.
Moving onward into a heretofore-unexplored section of the crypt, the crew encountered several coffins. One bore evidence of having been sealed from the outside, and Hazel was able to discern faint scratching and mumbling emanating from within its thick stone. The crew was about to open a different coffin when a pack of skeletal wolves charged them. Mirena hurled a searing turn undead, vaporizing three of the skeletons on the spot and sending the fourth fleeing.
As the last wolf disappeared into the darkness, the sound of clanking armor announced the arrival of the expected undead Vraazox. The crew oriented to face this new threat. Mirena again called on the power of Freya to turn the undead, not only impairing Vraazox’s fighting power but also laying to rest three of the four skeletons that were about to fall upon the crew’s rear from an undetected secret door.
The fourth skeleton burst forth, nearly dropping Mirena before Hazel and Nubbin put it down. Meanwhile, Tulk exchanged blows with Vraazox, taking a severe wound but unable to pierce the goblin death knight’s armor and unholy defenses.
Mirena’s light spell expired, plunging the party into darkness. The ghostly necromancer chose this moment to enter the fray, floating out of the secret passage and materializing behind Nubbin. Nubbin resisted her attempt to possess him. As Mirena advanced on Vraazox, forcing him to withdraw from her presence, Tulk shifted her focus to the necromancer. An attempt to possess Tulk likewise failed (praise Gede!). Under a flurry of blows from Tulk, valiant efforts from Nubbin, constant luck token refreshes from Ylva, and a well-flung silver dagger from Hazel, the ghost finally discorporated in a shower of ectoplasm.
The crew advanced through the secret passage to clear the necromancer’s tomb, only to be met again by Vraazox, who’d circled around through another route. Tulk battered down her former comrade’s defenses, opening the way for Hazel to drive a silvered shortsword through Vraazox’s torso. The unholy flame faded from the goblin’s eyes and he whispered a final, grateful, “praise Memnon,” to Hazel before crumbling to dust.
The crew recovered what they could of Vraazox’s gear, looted the necromancer’s grave goods, and withdrew from the crypt to rest. With a ranger in the party, their slumber was undisturbed, and they returned to the crypt to finish exploring. A brief skirmish with a zombie troll and the remaining skeletal wolf yielded a decisive victory.
Mirena pointed out that if the necromancer had been active and the sealed coffin remained sealed, it probably contained someone or something that the necromancer didn’t want to let out. Considering this, and in light of the fact that this delve’s original purpose was to make contact with an information source, the crew approached the coffin with weapons ready, but without immediate murderous intent.
Tulk and Nubbin put their shoulders into heaving the heavy stone lid off the coffin. The slab topped with a crackle and hiss of binding spells breaking – and a skeleton wrapped in a ghost sat bolt upright, an expression of fury on her face. Only Ylva spoke Elvish, and therefore was able to understand the ghost’s outburst:
“AAAAH FUCK THAT’S BRIGHT! Armin, if you aren’t dead by now, I swear by the goddess I will fucking END you!”
Ylva dissolved into hysterical laughter, which forestalled any immediate aggression on the part of the rest of the crew. Once she was able to translate without excessive giggles, Ylva quickly took point.
The ghost – appearing as a young elven woman with black hair and olive skin – introduced herself as Vervain. After some initial confusion about the current political circumstances, she and the crew determined that she had lived in the time of the Old Empire (just “the Empire” to her).
In Vervain’s living years, the Empire was still consolidating power over the province. The former elven kingdom had withered to a number of enclaves, all still technically under one ruler but effectively self-governing. The elves’ capacity for resistance came largely from two sources: something which Vervain referenced as the “Stone Riders,” and the elven witch covens.
Vervain didn’t know the Empire’s strategy for dealing with the Stone Riders, but she was painfully familiar with that used against the witches. The Empire’s mages had enacted a pact with a fae lord. The witches didn’t know what the fae were getting out of it, but their side of the bargain bound them to the province’s soil and compelled them to hunt down and slay all practitioners of the elven witches’ arts.
Vervain’s lower, Armin, had translated an ancient ritual which was supposed to empower its recipients against the fae. Besotted and ridden with existential dread, Vervain agreed to be Armin’s first test subject. When the ritual failed and apparently killed her, Armin panicked and dumped her body here, in a former temple of Gede reconsecrated to Shune. Vervain subsequently discovered she was only mostly dead, and spent an unspecified but lengthy amount of time slumbering… and learning how to possess her own mortal remains.
After some discussion, Vervain and the crew agreed that it would probably be best if she stayed in the crypt for the time being. Venturing out might expose her to the fae lord and his hunters, who, presumably, were still at large in the present time. The group saw several possible options for ending the threat:
- formally releasing the fae lord from the pact, which would likely require someone with Imperial authority – problematic in this day and age;
- finding a loophole in the pact, which would require a copy of it;
- enacting a new pact which takes precedence over the existing one, with all the hazards attendant in negotiating with the fae;
- brute-forcing the fae lord with steel and the power of his True Name.
At this last point, Vervain looked straight at Nubbin’s weapon, which he’d received from the draugr King Skorvald, and declared, “I know that axe.” She unpacked that a bit – when she’d seen the Axe of Nine Eyes, it had been a lance, but “its spirit remains the same.” As an action, the axe’s wielder can learn the True Name of a creature. This closes one of the axe’s eyes, and when the ninth eye closes, the weapon vanishes, reappearing somewhere else it’s needed and in a different form.
With that, the PCs departed, agreeing to come back and visit Vervain (Ylva, in particular, promised to bring her a trashy romance novel and some reference material to get caught up on history).
Back in town, Hazel continued her study of the longbow. Tulk, Ylva, Nubbin, and Mirena went carousing to hold a wake for Vraazox. Hazel leveled up to 3rd and Mirena achieved 2nd.
This was much more successful than the last attempt at this module. Part of that was action economy – with five PCs in play, the party simply had more options. Resisting possession attempts was also a huge benefit, as that was what wrought particular havoc on the truncated party during the last session. Ylva spent most of her time flinging inspiration and wands, and keeping the party in luck tokens was a hugely effective support strategy.