Session 28 - The Third Level Discovered
The party
meets the county
patrol and discovers an area of the dungeon labeled, “The
Fountain of
Pestilence.”
This write
up is from Kay's
notes from our April 17, 2024 session. Since our group is
scattered around the
country, we used Discord for our voice communication and
Roll20 for our
virtual tabletop.
Thanks to Jojo for her screen shots.
Continued from: Gnolls, Zombies and a Trap
Date: May 19, 3517
3:00 PM
We were near the ford, going to town directly from the
Mouth of Doom
(MoD). There was a hill to the east, a quarter-mile away where the
trail turns
south when going to town. We noticed four horsemen on our side of
the river. They
seemed wary but not hostile, and we didn’t recognize them. They
were well
equipped with lance or longswords and good armor. Elron got his
sling ready
(they noticed it), and Artie waved at them.
One of them, the leader, introduced himself as Cpl. Berke. He said,
“Hello,
adventurers, you look like you’re coming from the Mouth of Doom.”
He then asked if we have
any loot. Lark said
we have locks and tried to show them to him. We said we found no
loot but got
wounds, and we looked like it.
Larks said, “We saw some gnolls”.
Cpl. Berke: “We’re looking for gnolls too.”
Lark: “There was a hell of a party in town a couple of days ago.”
Blaze held up a stirge stinger that was still stuck through her cloak. “We found some stirges.”
Sinis asked, “Where is your base? If we find any gnolls or bandits, we’ll send word.”
Cpl. Berke, “it’s about 3 days east of here, off the Old Coast Road, in a grove of trees west of the road, across the road from the Mausoleum.” He said “Mausoleum” as if we knew what it was; we really don’t.
He told us, “A band of gnolls attacked one of our camps south of here, that’s why we’re looking for gnolls.”
Blaze said, “We haven’t been that far east yet.”
Cpl. Berke, “It’s southeast of the Mausoleum.” (still don’t know where that was).
Someone pulled out the goblin map and found the
location;
it’s just off the bottom of the map off the road to the east.
With a wave, the four horsemen continued on their way.
We arrived at Zelcor’s Ferry and asked Odo at the inn about any healers who could help Beneddar. He says there’s a cloister of clerics with a temple who may cast a restoration spell, but they would require a donation of about 500gp. They don’t like clerics of other faiths and they’re kind of seedy, worshipers of the Frog God.
He said, “I wouldn’t go at night, maybe stay there at night if you got there during the day; the area is dangerous. It’s down river; the boatman knows the location, he sometimes makes deliveries there. It’s six miles from the Old South Road at the edge of the Dragonmarsh lowlands. Stay out of the Dragonmarsh, there are lots of river trolls there.”
We had brought our loot with us directly from the Mouth of Doom and Elron tried to sell the longswords and short swords we got from the gnolls. It turns out that Big Morgan’s full up on cutlery from the gnolls that attacked the town. Rasmus Pye was willing to take it at half value. So Elron sold 6 of each and planned to take the rest back to the castle for our armory.
4:30 PM
We were waiting for our dinners at the inn and discussed our plans
as to
whether or not to stay the night or push on to the castle. We
would need to
leave in about an hour and a half, as sunset was about 8PM. Sinis
and several
others wanted to stay overnight.
Ulman Dark walked in for dinner. Sinis wanted to do business with
Ulman and discuss
wizardry.
Lark gave Odo the mechanical snake head, and Odo put it behind the
bar with the
other knick-knacks on display.
After dinner, Lark went to the blacksmith and asked about the chainmail he wants to sell; he offered Lark one-quarter value for it; he doesn’t have any use for it, for the same reasons he turned down Elron’s swords. Those 18 gnolls contributed heavily to the town’s surfeit of arms and armor. The blacksmith recommended going to Rasmus Pye, who offered ½ value for it.
We got more specific directions to the temple for the clerics; we could take one of the boats. There are three keelboats, the Yellow Dagger, the Lucky Oak and the Brawler, that show up at random times about once a week. One of them could drop us off near the temple.
Another option would be to travel three days to the coast road, go north on the road one mile past the canyon river bridge and then six miles into the swamp.
Sinis, Ulman and Artie sat at a table talking spells. Ulman seemed to be low level, he doesn’t have much in the way of spells; he has special abilities, but he can’t teach them. He doesn’t have spell books Sinis can read, but he’ll buy any spell books and medical scrolls we find.
Ulman looked over at Beneddar and said, “What happened to you? You look like hell.” We told him about the dart traps and Ulman told us, “He needs a greater restoration spell.”
Ulman told us that 150 years ago, the
dungeon had been cleaned
out, and an order of clerics moved in to the catacombs on the
third level. They
worshiped Solanus, a healer god. They established a hermitage, and
healers from
the shrine traveled throughout the lands, offering cures and
medicines to the peasantry.
The mission of this small community worked well for many years,
and the healers
were welcome guests in the hamlets and villages for a hundred
miles around. The
healers kept the location of their shrine a secret and accepted no
payment for
their services other than freely-granted contributions to their
cause of
eliminating disease from the world.
One day, the priests stopped coming out of the dungeon. No one
knew what
happened to them. It is believed that they left a library of
medical books, and
who knows what else, behind.
Ulman said that they might have left high level clerical spell
scrolls behind.
He would also pay well for any medical books we found.
We discussed what to do; we don’t want to carry our loot back to
the dungeon
from here. Elron wanted to take the loot back to the castle
tonight and start
out from there to the Mouth of Doom in the morning. Some want to
sleep here
tonight and give our loot to Odo to hold onto until we get back,
and go
directly to the dungeon from the town tomorrow.
Blaze wanted to buy a healer’s kit before leaving. The shop was closed for the
night, but Rasmus
opened it up for her.
We went back to the castle, and unloaded the
loot and
weapons. Elron stored our gold and gems in the library where it is
protected by
the electrical trap which goes off about every 10 minutes. Sinis
pulled out
spell books to read. Most of the books are histories of Beneddar’s
family.
We got a long rest.
May 20, 3517
7AM
Breakfast.
9AM
We arrived at the Mouth of Doom. Going down the first set of
stairs to the
first level, there’s a zombie at the bottom.
“Where are they coming from?” Blaze mused, “we’ve cleared out the first level.”
Once we had killed it, Elron looked at its tracks and said that it looked like it came from outside. Lark asked if we wanted to track it back. We decided not to.
Blaze asked the group if they wanted to go down the stairs we used before, or use the second set of stairs we found in the room with the giant skeleton statue and the giant leeches. We decided on option 2. Twenty minutes later, we got down to the other set of stairs going down. The leeches are still there, dead and decaying in the room. We closed the doors to the room, and headed down the stairs. Elron went first, with Beneddar following. It seemed to be a rather spiral staircase, going down 110 feet. This would have to be the entrance to the third level, since the other stairs only went down 50 feet.
At the bottom of the stairs were the words, “Fountain of Pestilence,” written in chalk on the wall. Beyond the graffiti was an oval-shaped room where the floor was completely covered with roaches. Live roaches.
The air was warm and humid; the walls and ceiling are 13 feet high and the ceiling is moldy. There was a loud rustling sound as hundreds of roaches moved away from our lights, disappearing into cracks in the walls and floor, leaving a few broken chairs and pieces of wood with old blood stains on them. The floor was dirty and grimy, the whole room had a feeling of filth.
There were two doors in the room, one on the
north wall and
one on the south wall. The north door had the words “Healing and
Recovery” cut
into the stone above it. The south door had the word “Forbidden”
carved deeply into
the stone, with “until now” scratched by a knife in much smaller
letters below it.
Lark lit a torch, and Artie checked the south door for locks and
traps. It was somewhat
decayed and not locked; there
was no sound beyond. Artie checked the north door, and found the
same things.
Elron opened the north door with no trouble. It was a double door,
so he opened
one door and stood to the side. The room inside showed painted
murals of men
and women ministering to the sick and injured. The room was empty
of furniture
or items except for a few roaches that crawled into cracks in the
wall as we
entered. One figure was larger with a white robe and golden halo
around it. The
mural was defaced with paint and scratches. There was black paint
over the left
hands of all the mural’s figures. Beneddar scraped off the paint
from part of
one the hand and there was just the hand under the paint.
Beneath the large figure were words written in blood in a strange language that no one in the party could read.
Lark and Beneddar spent 20 minutes looking for secret doors. Blaze looked for loose flagstones.
Elron moved to the south door and opened it.
Behind the door
was a hallway going east and west. The party moved into the
hallway.
Blaze began to go east and just barely avoided a pit, 20 feet
deep, that opened
in front of her. There was a 2-foot-wide ledge on the north side
of the pit.
She was able to walk on the ledge and get around the pit. She had
a ball with a
light spell on it, and tossed it to the east end of the hallway to
see ahead of
her.
Elron went past the pit to the east down the hallway and another
pit opened
beneath him with a ledge on the north. As he walked on the middle
tile, it clicked
down and a portcullis dropped between him and Breena.
10:20 AM
Sinis transmuted part of the bars into wood, which Lark whacked
with his sword,
which created a hole big enough for everyone to fit through.
Continued in Session 29: Level 3 Rats & Zombies
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