Dramatis Personae
Beltin (Aasimar Dirge Bard/Cleric 12).
"Jake" aka Alex, the actual character name but I refuse to go back and edit the old entries (Human Wizard/Rogue 12).
Zai (Human Tetori Monk/Lore Warden Fighter 12). MISSING PLAYER, PLAYED BY JAKE.
Glory, aka the Righteous Fury of Heaven (Aasimar Synthesist Summoner/Bloodrager 12).
Y'all come on back now, ya hear?, Session 19.2 - 11/28/14
Day 48
The party minus Jake
With "the playground" behind them, the party finds themselves in a massive armory. Does any of it look magic? Nope. Masterwork? A few things. Oh. One of them belonged to Glory before his whole getting captured and tortured thing, so he takes it back. Now to find that lost undead menagerie... and Jake.
And so the party begins to explore. They find the barracks next door and look through some chests to find all there to find of monetary value (yay, maybe like 100 gold worth of trinkets!). On one wall they see two cranks and a release lever and wonder what it is and eventually decide to just pull the lever... and a resounding crash follows and then silence.
What was that? Why, it was a giant stone block over the large set of doors across from where the party fought the Bargeras and Jake triggered his doomed Getaway spell! Fun fact: Those massive doors that seemed to lead further into the fortress? Stone wall behind them. Trap. Trying to force the door would result in that giant ass block landing on you. Unfortunately the party never got to figure that out first hand. The party briefly wonders if they just crushed Beltin's undead.
Exploration continues. The party finds the balconies they saw overlooking them in the previously mentioned failed Getaway fight and realize where they are; if they jumped down they'd be right where they were before. Awesome. As ranks of undead with bows and arrows stand up here waiting for orders, they decide to just Fireball them and not have to worry about them being annoying later.
Onward! The party heads the other day and, after breaking down two doors barricaded from the other side, find themselves in a room with a circular hallway. All around are rooms for officers. Huh, based on those double barred doors the officers didn't have much trust in their enlisted men.
Something seems off about the area but it takes a moment to realize what. The temperature is fluctuating wildly, but mostly its getting colder. It's cold. Suddenly so very cold. At times the party can see their breathe and at other times they think they can hear the faint sounds of battle, but then the sounds are gone. There is a definite air of wrongness about the area.
So haunted you don't even know
Religion check from Beltin? Place is haunted. Super haunted. Holy shit is it haunted. As this conclusion is reached the party sees a translucent man in armor appear in the middle of the hall, his throat cut so thoroughly that he looks nearly beheaded.
He screams incoherently and charges the party... and past them. Materializing behind the party, a ghostly orc in similar armor appears and briefly clashes with the throat cut man and then both dissipate. Both phantoms wore the heraldry of the Tower of Weeping Sores.
Yep, haunted, but the uneasy spirits here seem to be stuck in a loop. One that doesn't involve the party. At least not yet.
The party continues along the circular hall, checking all the inner doors and as such all the officer rooms. They collect what minor magical loot they see. As they do so they sometimes see (or feel) the gazes of the dead upon them, beginning to take notice.
After nearly making the whole circle, a ghost of a man steps out of a wall near Zai. He sees him, yet also seems to be looking through him. "Reinforcements at last!" is exclaims and steps into Zai, who manages to resist the possession attempt. The spirit then continues onward and through a wall, disappearing.
The party takes this as the cue to get away from this area. The haunting is escalating and they are definitely beginning to be noticed. Beltin figures that if they vacate the area for some time then the spirits will forget them.
They finish the circle and get to the door they started at, but left for last: A set of larger double doors, clearly important. Across the hallway they see a sign for the command room, but decide to leave that and the other outer rooms for the moment.
As the party opens the double doors a blast of fire hits them, obviously alchemical in nature. A trap. They crash through the doorway, now ready for battle, but the room beyond is empty besides a stairway leading up. They decide to take it as up is obviously better than down and it will get them away from the ghosts behind them.
At the top of the staircase they find a small room with a set of small, but intricately decorated doors detailing the tower's sigil. Zai approaches the door and as he is beginning to push it open he thinks he hears a faint click coming from the door, like it was just unlocked...
Outside he sees night sky. He sticks his head out and sees a maimed looking tower raising above him, clearly the Tower of Weeping Sores, the fortress's namesake. Also above he sees several creatures flying in a search pattern. Vrocks, though he doesn't know it. Further away he sees strange creatures reminiscent of centaurs on patrol, but something is definitely off about them.
Jake sees the party at this point, as well as the massive four armed angelic being that is Glory's eidolon suit, but as he is with his friends it's obviously cool. And so Jake teleports from in from the other side of the door, still invisible, drops his invisibility, and falls on the ground moaning. Fix it, fix it, fix it, says the 9 HP Jake to Beltin. Beltin sighs and does... strangely that shoulder wound doesn't seem to want to heal and stays open, almost like it's cursed. Fuck.
Well anyway: The party has reunited!
"Does it look evil? I charge it."
As this heartwarming scene is playing out, Glory steps out of the door and onto the roof of the main fortress. He sees the Vrocks in the air and they look evil. He cries out, challenges them to face Haven's Fury and they decide they want some. So much for subtlety. Initiative!
Seven Vrocks, split into two groups and each wearing a collar depicting the tower, descend upon the party and from further away the strange centaur-esque creatures, now identified by Beltin as Marrow Knights (undead, torso of a man stitched onto a horses body, has a lance it charges with, has barbed wire sewn through the skin on the back of its horse half to keep people from trying to ride it) begin to rally.
Glory goes airborne and charges one of the Vrocks belonging to the group of three, pouncing and utterly destroying it. The other two move in close and drop spores onto him and try to take him down with limited success. And then Glory destroys the second vrock in one round and the last of that group turns tail and flees, perhaps seeking more reinforcements.
The other group of Vrocks lands around the rest of the party, one flying through the doorway and landing on the top of the staircase the party had climbed. Spores, spores everywhere, and Jake again finds his life dwindling.
Fighting continues and Zai grapples the hell out of some vrocks, making them wish they had never landed, but now reinforcements come in the form of several marrow knights, herding three cloud giant skeletons bearing massive clubs behind them! Yay, thinks Beltin, at the sight of the mindless undead ripe for the taking.
The marrow knights charge Zai and make Zai bleed his own blood quite thoroughly due to those "times three damage on charge" lance hits, but then they immediately regret their decision as Zai manages to grapple and pin, not one, not two, but three of them simultaneously. Yes, he essentially pins three horses at once. Don't ask how.
Glory lands to do battle with the cloud giant skeletons, much to Beltin's dismay. He manages to take control of one though and keep it away from Heaven's Fury, but really he would have preferred to have the whole set. Glory does not seem to like Beltin's necromantic antics.
The remaining vrocks, marrow knights, and giant skeletons go down and there appears to be no more reinforcements on the way. At least not yet. The vrock spores continue to ravage the party, nearly putting Jake unconscious, but Beltin does his thing. Upon being caressed by Beltin and receiving Death's Kiss, Glory is thoroughly disturbed by his temporary feeling of what undeath must be like.
He gets his negative energy healing like the rest but tells Beltin to never do that to him again. A threat is heavily implied.
If I were undead where would I be?
With that threat taken care of the party considers their options. They are running low on resources. They are tired. And yet they still have at least three powerful enemies to kill here... They might not be able to do it.
They quickly debate the merits of getting the hell out while they can and regrouping, but Beltin doesn't want to leave without finding his undead and Glory wants to find the 20k gold worth of starting gear he had from character gen but never got to use due to being captured in his back story.
They settle on trying to cast Locate Object on undead Mallerix's skull to find the undead and then seeing from there. It points them back the way they came. They head back through and find themselves in the armory directly outside of the playground entrance, but things are different now.
Racks of weapons and armor are destroyed, the contents scattered around the room. There is fresh blood on the ground. The party sees one of the doors leading into the barracks next door is ripped of its hinges (wasn't like that before) and they go in, ready for combat but the room is empty, though similarly damaged.
Perhaps that "infernal intruder" met resistance here after they had gone... but where are the combatants now? The party stays on edge and follow the locate object spell. It leads them past the balcony with the undead they fireball'd and into a side door. Looks like this area is directly over the hallway where they got Cloud Kill, demonic bug swarms, napalm, and portcullises dropped on them.
The door gets kicked in and inside the room the party sees a hallway the same size as the one below, but at intervals there are trapdoors in the floor, some clearly broken open from the party's earlier battle down below. Noxious fumes come from various boiling cauldrons and stacks of metallic barrels line the walls at intervals. Inside the room are three siege undead, but these ones have bandoliers with flasks strapped to their chests and each has a flask in hand. They seem to be ready... and intelligent.
The party rushes in and are met with alchemist bombs from the three undead. They explode in fire and a poisonous miasma: Cloud Kill, Cloud Kill, Stinking Cloud!
The party makes it through the poison mists mostly unscathed and the alchemist undead become regular dead quickly, but as the fighting is happening, perception checks: At the end of the hallway directly above the main entrance to the fortress is a number of large vats with black fumes rising from within. Sticking up from behind them is a large scorpion stinger.
A Derakni demon steps out from behind those vats and an Insect Plague joins the dangers of the already poison gas filled hall way. Enervations follow and as Zai moves toward the fiend to do what he does best, it stabs him in the chest with its stinger and Zai gets to know how 1d4 con damage a round for six rounds feels.
Note: It doesn't feel good.
Regardless, the demon goes down quickly after that and Beltin makes it like the poison never even happened.
Back to business. Beltin investigates the large vats and finds them to be full of a highly concentrated acid, perfect for stopping things that regenerate from regenerating. And inside are his precious bloody skeletons, though Mallerix is spread into several containers. The party gets them out and throws them into extradimensional storage.
Advancing in the opposite direction
With Beltin's stuff recovered he takes the philosophical approach of "fuck you, got mine" in the face of Glory's concern for his own gear and the party decides to get out while the getting out is good and still possible. They jump down the trapdoors that were used to dump death on them from above and are in the hallway leading out of the infamous and "inescapable" Tower of Weeping Sores.
The doors, which were open before, are now thoroughly locked but the strength of Heaven's Fury is legendary. As he works to break down the door, the party sees three collared Baregara step into the doorway at the other end of the hall... but they don't approach.
One has a broken arm and it glares at Zai. Seems they don't want none of this, at least not while they are alone and no one is ordering them forward. They remember what happened last time.
The party breaks down the doors, but as they go to make their escape into the night Jake is struck with a blinding pain from his demon cursed shoulder and nearly collapses. He gets the distinct impression of being watched by more than just the demons at the end of the corridor. The pain passes, but the sensation does not.
The party flees into the night. Totally not running away with their tails between their legs. Once back outside the walls of Tsar they teleport away and back to the Camp and "safety."
To be continued...
