Session 29: Level 3 Rats & Zombies

The party continues to explore the third level, discovering a left-hand teleportal and what may have been the priest’s living quarters.

This write up is from Kay's notes from our May 1st, 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 Kay and JoJo for the screen shots.

Continued from: The Third Level Discovered

Date: May 19, 3517

10:20 AM

We were on Level 3, near the pits and portcullis. Lark said he feels like we’re about 160 feet below the surface of the ground. Artie starts to look at the ceiling a lot.

Elron moved along the hallway to the east where the corridor turned north. Going north, the passageway came to a dead end; on the wall was a bas-relief of a left hand. We left it alone and started to look for hidden doors.

Lark handed Artie his sword, and said, “If I don’t come back, sell it and have a party.”

Lark went up to the hand, took a sip of his flask, and put his hand on the handprint. There was a swirl of dust and Lark vanished in sparkles. Blaze belatedly reminded people there was a written journal entry about a handprint on the wall that someone touched and their wizard vanished. It’s too late now.

Elron, Blaze and Sinis searched for secret doors, but had found none so far.

Lark’s sword suddenly disappeared from Artie’s hand. Lark had found a way to tell us he’s still alive; he can recall the sword to him from a distance.

Blaze, Beneddar, Artie and Breena moved back to the corner of the hallway. Ten minutes passed. Blaze threw her ball at the hand and it bounced off; nothing happened. Artie asked Beneddar to use mage hand on the bas relief hand and again, nothing appeared to happen.

Lark had been looking for loot around the space he had found himself in. The rumor he had heard was that the “wealth of the healers” was behind a bas-relief of a hand, but there was little here but a skeleton clutching a scroll and four more bas-relief hands, one on each wall.

He picked up the scroll and touched the hand behind him on the wall.  Four seconds later he appeared in the empty hallway where he started. The group had gone back the other way to the west end of the main hallway. He could hear them talking in the distance and followed the sound of their voices.

At the west end of the main passageway, Elron looked around the corner of the hallway to the north, and said, “Zombie.” Elron could see a passageway to the north, and a zombie with a door behind it. Elron used his sling and hit the zombie, which exploded in a spray of decayed body parts.

Sinis, at the back of our line, said, “There’s someone coming up from behind us.” Beneddar readied his Toll the Dead spell, but it was only Lark, catching up after having returned from wherever the hand had taken him.

Moving up the north hallway, it turned west, past a door on the north wall.

Lark told us that it teleported him to somewhere else and there were four other hands, one on each wall. He got out back to us by touching the hand on the wall behind him. The room was 25 x 25 ft and felt like it was 160-170 feet down from the surface, but he felt like he traveled a long distance. Lark handed the red scroll he had found to Sinis.

Sinis said it contained a clerical spell called “lesser restoration,” and anyone could read it. It can treat or end one disease or condition like blindness, deafness, poison, or paralysis. It’s a one-use only scroll, but a cleric could copy it, if they have 100 gp of materials.

Artie went to the north wall door, listened, and heard nothing. It was locked but corroded, so it’s not unlockable. Lark brought forth his sword of door opening and the door flew open; Lark stepped inside. It’s a storeroom with broken wooden furniture and earthenware, with a smell of decay. Elron looked around at some chests or containers; nothing appeared to be of value here.

The west passage turned north again, and we continued up the passageway. On the west wall was a door, opposite a side passage going east; there seemed to be an open room space at the end of the side passage with a broken table with a lantern fallen on the floor beside it. Tapestries on the walls are slashed to ribbons and unidentifiable.

Artie started working on the door on the west wall in the main passage. He found that it was not locked but swollen shut. Lark opened it.

It looked like a kitchen. There was a fireplace with tables and iron cooking tools on the wall. On the floor there was a knife and blood stains, but no body. Blaze checked two barrels that seemed to be full of a stinking liquid; she put the tops back on.

Going back down the east side passage, there was an open room with seven doors set around the three far walls. The lantern on the floor was good, but empty of oil. Sinis had oil so he took it. The smashed table also had smashed chairs. Artie checked all the doors for locks and traps before opening any of them. All the doors were unlocked but stuck and swollen shut from moisture. At this level, the entire space is humid, moldy, filth in the air, stuffy; the ceilings are 13 ft. high with mold on the ceilings.

There are two doors on the north wall of the room; three doors on the east wall; and two doors on the south wall. We opened them in clockwise order from the north wall.

Door 1: large room with bed, nightstand, wardrobe; under the bed is a chest that Breena found. Artie checked for traps on the chest. He found a dart trap. Blaze pulled the bed out to give Artie more room to disarm the trap. It had a different construction than the last dart trap. The chest contained a couple of cleric robes and several pages of parchment on demon summoning in shorthand for a specific but unnamed demon that had something to do with disease. The notes would be valuable to a necromancer or other practitioner of black magic. Sinis took the notes.

Elron searched the rest of the room but found nothing of value.

Door 2: Lark opened the door, found a broken chest in a small room, a chest of robes, and personal items; all decayed.

Door 3: Lark opened the door and found a bed chamber that had significant blood splatter all over including the ceiling. In the back of the room, there was a zombie in clerical robes missing its left hand. When Lark saw it, he ran up to it and smacked it with his sword, doing considerable damage. The zombie attacked Lark, hurting him. Suddenly Lark felt unwell.

Sinis heard the combat in the room and prepped his acid splash spell.

Elron used his sling shot on the zombie which exploded. Lark was hit by debris for more damage. A piece of it landed on the floor; it was a jeweled healing symbol of the god Solanus. Blaze checked out Lark who had bruises, cuts, and a red patch that was growing in size; she can’t heal poison and asked Parahelia and Sinis for help; but neither replied.

Beneddar, out in the main room, heard the sound of many little feet and warned the group. Parahelia repositioned herself in the northern area of the main room; Breena positioned herself at the edge of the hallway.

Giant rats, looking diseased, came down the hall; Breena cast thunderwave and splattered four of them, leaving one remaining. Sinis moved to see down the hallway, cast acid splash on the remaining rat, but it dodged out of the way. Elron used his sling shot, but missed. Artie moved, cast fire bolt but missed. Blaze moved into position and hit it with a witch bolt which had an effect, but didn’t kill it. Parahelia attacked with her longsword, but missed. Beneddar shot it with a crossbow, killing it.

Blaze used one of her healing kits on Lark but he did not get better. Parahelia tried healing the poison using lesser restoration spell and Lark felt much better, only just bruised from the impact. Parahelia used cure wounds on him, bringing him back up to normal and even the bruises were gone.

Lark handed Parahelia the jeweled holy symbol of Solanus that the zombie had been wearing.

While Breena guarded the room at the hallway, Lark went back into the 3^rd room, opened a door to an empty closet and tapped on the walls. The first two walls on the west and south sounded hollow; the east wall was solid stone.

Door 4: another small priest’s cell, nothing of value there.

Door 5: opened easily into a priest’s cell, that looked tossed and looted, with a table.

Door 6: Lark opened the door easily; it opened into another priest’s cell. The door had been opened recently.

Door 7: another priest’s cell like the others.

Elron went back into the main passageway and moved north to a western passageway that ended in an open room with a large table with broken chairs, and a wall carving/bas-relief of a fat leering face with goat horns. Three large tables and chairs were smashed, and broken crockery littered the floor. Entering the room, he could see two zombies in the northeast corner both with no left hands; one huge giant rat; and 12 normal-sized giant rats; all the rats looked diseased.

Continued in Session 30: Still Rats and Zombies