Otto Rahn's Grailquest

=== Sessions 1-2 ===
(Short sessions, with many diversions for conversation,
mopping up spilled drinks, etc.)
Dalgetty was embarrassed by the group’s next Expedition. He
wouldn’t have set it as a priority, but Mrs. Tavistock insisted. It’s a Grail
Quest.
A German named Otto Rahn has been hunting the Holy Grail
since the early ‘20s, and has come to the Foundation’s attention because he
wrote a book about it. He has now been recruited into the SS-Ahnenerbe, so Mrs
Tavistock considers it of the highest priority that the Foundation find the
Grail before the SS. 
Rahn’s investigations looked at the usual evidence, but also
treated folk-songs as an oral history. The song evidence uncovered a plausible
trail which eventually put the Holy Grail into the hands of the Cathars, but
also mixed the Grail up with a sacred rock which fell from heaven. One or both
of these ended up in the last Cathar fortress, Montsegur in the French
Pyrenees, during the great siege of 1244. This was the last act of the last
Crusade against the Cathars, in which Montsegur was besieged by ten thousand
men.
The Grail, or the sacred rock, or both, had the holy power
of ensuring that the holders would never be defeated in battle. Combined with
the impressive stone walls of a state-of-the-art castle on a high rocky
pinnacle, they kept the Crusaders out for ten months. By that time the
defenders were starving, and realised that their spiritual guardian would not
keep them safe from hunger. To avoid its falling into the hands of the
besiegers at the end, they decided to send the great Cathar treasure out with a
few of their most trusted men, to revitalise the sect after the end of the
Crusade. 
Four of their strongest mountain men were assigned to the
task, to climb down, in the dark, an impassable cliff-face hundreds of feet
high – the only side on which the castle was not besieged. Next morning, bereft
of their magical protection, the castle walls were breached and the Cathars
died horrible deaths, either in the storming or on a long Death March after
their capture. 
Of the men carrying out the treasures, and the holy items
themselves, nothing more was ever heard. Rahn’s theory is that the treasure was
hidden in sacred caves in the area, in case the men were caught. The men were
indeed then caught, but just strung up like so many others. Either the
Crusaders did not interrogate them about the missing treasures, or the men
resisted interrogation and took their secret to their graves. Which would leave
those treasures still in the caves…
The Foundation know this because Rahn wrote a book about his
Grail Quest when he ran out of money, hoping to attract new investors. It
seemed he succeeded in interesting Heinrich Himmler, head of the Ahnenerbe.
Dalgetty reluctantly agreed to send the party on this
Expedition because, although he is reasonably sure they are not worthy to find
the Grail, if the treasure is in fact the magic rock it may be less choosy about
its discoverers, and he wouldn’t want the SS to gain an item that makes them
undefeatable. 
After several failures amongst their usual contacts, the
Foundation managed to recruit a consultant diviner for this expedition: an
eccentric Sikh called Gurjat Ahmenan Singh. As a Sikh, he has no feelings about
the Christian Holy Grail and whether or not he is worthy of finding it; he’s
available; and finally, he will work for the budget that the Foundation can
afford since the last Expedition spent all their money on aeroplane and boat
rentals.
The party started reading up on Grail legends and Cathars.
And French gun laws, which meant that Donald had to leave his BAR at home. 
They met Gurjat Singh on the Boat Train. After introducing
himself, Mr Singh promptly lived up to his reputation for eccentricity by
stringing a hammock diagonally across the compartment between the luggage racks
and climbing into it. He immediately fell into a deep sleep and grated on
everyone’s nerves (except for Donald and Mrs. Stanley, who had paid for their
own upgrades to First Class and didn’t have to stay in the same compartment) by
snoring loudly the whole way to Dover. He was barely awake in the transfer to
the ferry, but luckily could not find suitable anchorage points for his hammock
in their compartment aboard so went outside to sling it between two lifeboat
derricks. 
By the time they boarded the Paris train in Calais, Mr Singh
had caught up enough sleep to overcome his initial exhaustion and was able to
apologise for his ill manners in so neglecting his new companions. By way of
explanation, he told them that ever since he had accepted the commission he had
been plagued by spirits telling him, in very fine Received Pronunciation tones,
that he was not suitable for the Quest and that he should pull out immediately.
While awake, he could keep up the mental barriers to keep them out, but in
sleep they could overcome his defences. He had been hoping that the spirits
would not be able to keep up with the train so he could get some sleep, but
when he boarded he found that the air was actually psychically dead and he
could get some solid sleep. Now that he was more aware, he was able to judge
the atmosphere and by walking around on the ferry and train stations he
realised that Kohath and Albert were the sources of the psychic blockade. 
The party then travelled to the Pyrenees (with a couple of
days’ shopping in Paris for Mrs Stanley to obtain some fashionable new clothes
as well as French books on the Cathars) where they registered their guns
(hunting rifles and handguns) with the local gendarmerie and hired a pair of
cars suitable for driving the rough local roads. They were advised by the
Mairie that the metalled road does reach Montsegur village, but the Hotel de
Lavende is a few miles further out, on unimproved tracks. Even the best of the
maps locally available don’t meet the standards they are used to from the
Ordnance Survey, but they do show enough detail of the topography to be useful.
They are published for hunters, since that is the traditional primary reason
for tourists to come here – there are some very fine lynx and ibex to be shot.
In recent years, however, the healthy lifestyle movement has led to more
tourists on walking tours, particularly from Germany. 
They stopped in Monsegur village – really, just a hamlet
with only a dozen houses, one of which is an auberge where they stopped for coffee before tackling the last
stage of the journey and to find out more about the village. Then on up the
cart-tracks to the hotel, where at the end of the peak walking season and
before the hunting season they were the only guests. They were greeted by M
Berthauld du Pointé, whose English is restricted to a smattering of catering
terms and profanity learned from Tommies in the War, but Donald and Mrs Stanley
can muddle through in broken French well enough for their needs.
The hotel has a good family feel – in fact, they even see a
distinct family resemblance between the children of the proprietor M. du Pointé and his wife, and those of the housekeeper
Mme Lesoult. Donald has heard that similar ‘arrangements’ are quite common in
France in the aftermath of the great loss of young men in the War. The two
eldest boys in the ménage, Gerard du Pointé and Guillaume Lesoult are trainee
mountain guides, and M. du Pointé is confident that they are competent to take
the party to the Castle and exploring the local area, though they would need a
more experienced guide if they plan to do any serious climbing. The boys will
take it in turns to guide them.
=== Session 3 ===
Guillaume took the first day’s duty, to hire mules from
local farmers and show them the route up to the castle. His retelling of the
local stories of the great siege lost a lot in Mrs. Stanley’s lack of fluency,
but she didn’t pick up on any local rumours that hadn’t been covered in the
books she had read so far. 
He also told them that the castle was rebuilt in the
fifteenth century, the noble family who owned it had all been killed in the
Revolution, and it now belongs to the local Commune. (Mrs Stanley managed to
work out that’s about the equivalent of the Parish Council.) It is unguarded,
and unused except that the priest from the nearest town holds occasional
services in the castle’s small chapel. There are saints’ days for which the
priest feels the duty to do the service in the castle because they are the days
on which the former noble family endowed the Church with a fund to celebrate
Masses in perpetuity. The chapel is therefore the only place which is kept in
good repair. Everywhere else there are signs of decay, though in many places
the older vegetation has been removed for archaeological excavations of places
of possible interest in the last ten years or so. It looks like the work of
Otto Rahn. 
Examined archaeologically, the rebuilt castle used the basic
floorplan of the older one, though with higher and thicker curtain walls. The
old keep was taken down and used for building-blocks for a new one at least
twice the size, judging from the older blocks visible in the walls (some of
which still had Cathar graffiti either sideways or upside down). In the cellars
of the keep, they found a single well dropping down further than the range of
their lights. Dropping a stone left them with a long wait – they reckon that
the water level is down at the base of the cliff, some 1200’ below. Though
there was speculation that the Cathars may have constructed a hiding-place in
the side of the well somewhere down its length, there was no real appetite for
being lowered down to investigate the possibility, and everyone moved smartly
on to the next point of interest. 
Also in the cellars was a huge cistern lined with fired clay
tiles to contain the water. Rainwater gullies and drainpipes channel the rain
that falls on the castle into the cistern, and an ancient channel from the edge
of the well to the entrance to the cistern shows that water raised from the
well would flow into the cistern. The mechanism by which they raised the water
1200’ is gone now, along with the floors inside the keep which might have given
them a clue. 
From the battlements, Albert spent hours with his binoculars
scouring the surrounding countryside for signs of caves, without success. Most
of the river valleys in which the caves would be located are covered in the
forest that makes such good hunting conditions, and that blocked his line of
sight. 
On Day 2 they followed Gerard to the scared cave discovered
by Rahn. As in the photograph in his book, there is a pentagram carved into the
rock some four feet off the ground, five feet behind a carved altar block. It
wasn’t neatly aligned, the lowest section being at about a 30° angle from the horizontal. Close
examination showed that some of the sides used apparently natural cracks in the
wall as the start-line for their carving, which probably explained the odd
angle. 
Being on the wall was odd too, as was its height above the
ground. Pentagrams are normally drawn, painted, or carved to act as the focus
for protective magic. Either the caster or a summoned creature stands inside
it, and cannot get out unless it is broken from the protected side or the spell
expires. A magic gate was suggested – if the wall behind the altar was a Gate,
would a suitably charged pentagram prevent evil things coming through it?
Though it’s not his area of magic, Kohath thought it probably would. There was
much speculation about where the magic gate might have gone – the answer being
‘anywhere’, and Donald told the tale of his grandfather’s African adventure
(see The Beresford Travellers) which
found a network of gates which currently has gates across Africa but formerly
extended to Rome, the Arctic (though that may have been a disastrous mistake)
and, judging from the scenery carved in a defunct one, Scandinavia. 
They examined the altar closely, and agreed with Rahn’s
judgement that it may well have been carved by the Cathars. There was a gap of
around five feet between altar and the wall with the pentagram, plenty of room
for a priest to stand behind it to celebrate services. This puzzled the group,
as they visualised travellers coming through the gate and promptly tumbling to
the ground, unless they knew to leap through strongly enough to reach the altar
and then not tumble off the other side. They checked the natural floor levels,
and realised that the current floor has been hollowed out, leaving the altar in
situ, and the original floor level would have been at about the base of the
pentagram. This convinced them that the two parts of the mystery had been
constructed separately. Close examination showed that the excavated floor and
walls had really smooth surfaces – characteristic of digging with Rock to Mud spells – while the pentagram
had toolmarks. Gurjat Singh even detected tiny scrapes of iron in the toolmarks
which dated them to the Iron Age or later. 
Outside the cave, Mrs Stanley’s archaeological eye detected
the spoil heap from this, where the resulting mud had been shovelled out. She
considered digging the heap to look for evidence of the period it happened,
before realising that any pottery shards on the floor at the time would have
been turned to mud as well and be indistinguishable from the surrounding
matrix. 
Speaking of archaeological digging – the last seven or eight
hundred years of debris and soil accumulation in the cave had clearly been turned
over thoroughly, much of it tossed out onto a smaller ‘new’ spoil heap outside,
in the last ten years or so – Rahn’s work again. 
Like Rahn, the party now feel that the ‘sacred cave’ is a
red herring – there doesn’t seem to be any hiding place in there, the exit (or
technically entrance, since it is the way water ran into the cave to excavate
it) is too small for anyone to pass, and there is no residual magic. They have
decided that it is time for Mrs Stanley to shut herself up with the new books
and a good French-English dictionary, while the rest of the party follow Rahn’s
theory and look for caves. However, he searched for at least eight years in the
area and didn’t find anything, so if it is in a cave it might be well beyond
the immediate area of the hotel. A new approach is necessary…
=== Session 4 ===
The session opened with a lot of intelligence analysis –
looking at all they had found out about the Romans in the area, local ley
lines, etc. None of which seemed to produce any new leads. They followed
Albert’s idea of checking out the nearest ancient stone circle, which is in a
nearby village. It is a site of ancient spiritual power so it was subsequently
used by Christians. The stones are now built into the wall of the graveyard of
the village church. 
The party approached the village priest and gained
permission to explore his church. Which was very interesting – including the
crypts with their neat ossuary – but didn’t seem to have any Cathar
connections.
They questioned their guides Gerard and Guillaume about
where Rahm had been searching. Apart from the cave with the altar and possible
Gate (which is one valley over to the north of the Castle), his search mainly
concentrated to the south. Rahm told the boys that he believed that the men carrying
the treasures would have run to the south, because the besieging Crusaders were
to the north, well spread out in foraging parties, billets, etc. Thinking about
their possible destinations, the party agreed with Rahm that they were not
likely to go back into France immediately. Having been chased out of there
already by the Crusade, there was a positive threat to their safety. By
contrast, at the time Spain was involved in a struggle between the Christians
and the Moors so newly-arrived Christians who didn’t make too much noise about
their heresy might be able to slip the treasures through unnoticed. 
They thought about the possible Gate in the cave and decided
that even if the Cathars had known that it was a Gate, it would not have been
their escape route. Firstly, it would involve penetrating the besieging army,
secondly if they had a Gate magician, which they’d need to open it, they
wouldn’t need to go there. Although a well-prepared Gate makes the spellcasting
easier, they would still have been able to open one from within the Castle and
get the treasures and their bearers out without the risks of the long climb and
enemy patrols. They eventually wrote the altar cave off as a red herring.
When questioned about how Rahm decided where to search, the boys
didn’t know. They were too young to have been involved when Rahm started (about
eight years ago). They know he searched all the nearby caves that the guides
knew about. He hired several different guides to make sure that he checked out
all the caves they knew, because everyone has particular areas which they know
better than the others. Thereafter he stopped using guides and worked on his
own probing rockfalls and scree slopes to find out whether any of them had been
used to cover up a cave hundreds of years ago. He had set a limit of 35
kilometres on his search – he didn’t believe that the semi-starved Cathars
could have managed more than that before hiding the treasure for safe-keeping,
especially if it was heavy.
Since the players were obviously floundering for a new
approach, Guillaume had a suggestion to make. He swore the party to secrecy
(from his mother) before telling them what he’d love to do. Guillaume is a
climber, though he’s been forbidden to do it by his mother, and he really
admires the ability of the mountain men who climbed down that cliff in the
darkness. He’d love to be able to do that…
If he was searching for where the mountain men went with the
treasure, he’d start with the way they had to come down the cliff. Assuming
they didn’t know the area, they’d use the terrain to make their way away as
fast as possible. When he found the place they landed, he would look out at the
hillsides and forest edge to choose a route based on nothing but the terrain. 
Gurjat Singh considered this suggestion, then improved on
it. The psychic spoor of the treasure-carriers had been well buried over the
centuries by all the traffic through the Montsegur valley. He couldn’t hope to
pick up on it. But the boy’s suggestion would put him in a place where no-one
but the mountain men had ever been. If the party could put him onto the trail
of their descent, there was a slim chance that he could pick up on their auras
and therefore follow the trail. It was unlikely, but the high state of
agitation they would have been in under the circumstances might leave a strong
enough psychic residue…
Willie and Donald are the party’s climbers, and together
they went to the bottom of the cliff and surveyed it through binoculars,
looking for a practical climbing route. Together, they picked out a very severe
climb which looked possible to experienced climbers, though they would hate to
do it by moonlight with a heavy load. It also had to have a space where they
could let Gurjat Singh sit and meditate to reach communion with the spirits.
They realised that climbing down the whole 400m cliff-face was not necessary –
if they only climbed up 30m or so they would be above the psychic confusion of
the ground, and still intercept where the Cathars had passed so laboriously. 
At about that height they picked out a point in a chimney
where a split in the rock gave a relatively wide, secure place to sit. They
drove off to Toulouse to acquire enough rope to make climbing harnesses and
safety-lines for the full length of the cliff, and also brought back pitons and
hammers to fix them. 
This started them thinking about the question of whether
they would be able to find remnants of the Cathars’ anchor points as they went,
to use as a guide. Would they have used steel pitons, like the party? Or wood,
because steel was too expensive for peasant mountain men? How would they anchor
the ropes when they couldn’t hammer in pitons for fear of Crusaders hearing
their descent and coming to wait for them below?
Once they started looking at it and talking to the local
climbing guides about what was done in ‘the old days’, they realised that they
had been thinking too much like modern people. Before Victorian thrill-seekers
started climbing stuff for the fun of it, nobody climbed up cliff faces. Mountain men would take birds’ eggs and chicks from
the nests and mountain goats who’d been shot as they bounded around, but they
would always walk the easy way round and be lowered to their target from the
top. Their skills would not include the use of anchor points, they had no fancy
climbing gear. And, they realised, it would take superhuman endurance to
free-climb down a 400m cliff by moonlight, before dawn in one summer night, and
then have enough energy to carry a significant load several miles away to
safety before they could afford to rest. Their climb had to be simplified to
being lowered down the cliff on a rope. 
That changed their route: now the party were looking for the
steepest, smoothest drop from castle to valley floor. But in the absence of
foot- and hand-holds they had to rely on a rope dropped from the cliff – and
400m of rope with a man on the end requires a much greater strength than they
had been thinking of. They didn’t have three hundred Perfect to belay the rope,
so the Expedition returned to their modern thinking and went off to hire a
windlass and mules. The mules carried the windlass, fittings, and ropes up to
the castle. By this time they were the centre of attention in the village – the
Englishmen were thought to be even crazier than Rahm, and there were plenty of
people watching as they set things up. 
Willie decided that for Mr Singh to be secure and stable to
meditate, he needed more support than just a rope harness. As a sailor, of
course he knew about bosun’s chairs though he had never actually handled one on
a modern ship. So he tried several times to construct one out of rope and
canvas. Without success. Eventually, he ditched the idea of complex ropework
and made something like a child’s swing out of a length of plank. With Donald’s
help, it was completed as a secure, safe harness. 
They dropped the rope from the windlass down the cliff-face,
secured the ‘swing’ to it, and hoisted Gurjat Singh a hundred feet above the
ground. Despite his best efforts, he could feel nothing as he hung there.
Defeated, they retreated to the hotel, after letting Guillaume climb down the
cliff on the end of the windlass rope for the fun of it. 
After meditating and communing with the spirits, Gurjat came
to a conclusion. He hadn’t been able to link to the right spirits as he was in
a completely different atmosphere. Instead of a daylight ride in pleasant
sunshine and quiet mountain sounds, they were in the dark, probably with a
ceremony going on at the cliff-top to cover any noise they made. So he was
willing to try again at night, with the party singing hymns and holding a
religious service to give the right atmosphere. 
Guillaume suggested that to get God’s help they should
really involve the parish priest. The party, thinking along the grounds of ‘the
more the holier’ agreed and they paid the priest to hold a Catholic service up
in the castle, with many of the curious villagers attending for free, while the
party would sing Anglican hymns down below. Donald and Willie would be up in
the castle manning the windlass and checking the ropes in case of trouble.
Albert and Kohath would absent themselves to avoid their psi-blocking
interfering with Gurjat’s maximum sensitivity, and Mrs Stanley quietly
confessed to Gurjat that she was an atheist – should she join in the hymns as
she did in normal society just to avoid being a social outcast? Gurjat was
shocked by the idea that anyone in this world could not believe in a Divine
Creator, but agree that her hypocrisy could impair the effect, so she should
also make herself scarce. 
This left just Haggart belting out the hymns of his obscure
Scots free kirk at the base of the cliff…
Fortunately, the Catholic service at the top of the cliff
was loud and devout, and brought Gurjat Singh the atmosphere he needed. He
managed to make a connection to the spirits of the mountain men which he
studied enough that he was confident that he could trace it next day. But in
the interest of getting through the area of most psychic interference while the
connection was still fresh, he had himself lowered away and followed it across
the valley to the hill saddle where the Cathars had left Montsegur valley,
heading south-westerly. 
After a day’s rest to recover from the exertions of the
night, they picked up the trail. Faint though it was, Gurjat Singh was up to
the challenge. By nightfall they found a cave, which Gerard told them Rahm had
already investigated and ruled out, where the mountain men had rested. The
party also rested, Kohath and Albert camping some distance off so as not to
interfere with any helpful dreams Mr Singh may have, but he slept without
disturbance from the spirits.
As they ate breakfast next morning on the top of a hillock
to take advantage of the sunshine, they noticed a small forest of wind turbines
on a mountainside ahead. “Gnomes.” Guillaume informed them, “They have a small
town in the caves below the mountain over there.”
=== Session 5 ===
They started the day by trying to visit the gnomes. Though
they found a blank stone wall in an archway at the end of a worked cave that
was clearly their entrance gate, there was no visible means of attracting
attention. They tried knocking – Haggart with his knuckles, which hurt for no
audible result, and Albert with the butt of his pen-knife, a little louder but
no more successful at drawing attention. 
Rather than antagonise the gnomes by using greater force and
possibly damaging something, they withdrew, though Mrs Stanley left her
visiting card with their hotel details written on the back. 
Gurjat Singh went back into his trance and picked up the
trail of the Cathar mountain men. They followed it for about half a day before
finding it leading to a cave entrance. They approached with care, stopping when
the smell indicated that it was probably an animal’s lair. Haggart cast around
and from the hairs, pawprints, and scratchmarks around deduced that it was the
lair of a black bear, with first-year cubs. They withdrew into hiding and
waited till the bears emerged: mother and two cubs. As the cubs played in the
sunshine the party decided that if they could get the bears away from the cave
without risking attack that would let them search the cave. 
Kohath approached from the side of the cave slowly till the
mother saw him and watched warily. He stopped at about thirty yards, then
magically conjured a fire in the leaf-litter at the cave entrance. Startled,
mother and cubs retreated from the fire and further away from the cave, into
the woods. The party stepped forward, stamped out the fire, and went into the
cave, leaving Guillaume outside with the mule and a shotgun. If the bear
returned, Guillaume was to fire into the air to scare her away and warn the
party. 
Inside the cave was clearly an animal lair, two side-caves
converging on the cave entrance, fed by lesser fissures which were too small
for people to pass through. There was a surprisingly deep pool in one cave, the
bottom full of collapse rubble. Oddly, Mrs Stanley noted that the rubble hadn’t
come from the roof, which had no sign of a corresponding void, and when Willie
stripped and rooted around in the chest-deep pool he discovered that the rubble
was sharp-edged: it hadn’t been rolled there by flowing water. 
They left the cave and continued to follow Gurjat on the
trail of the Cathars, camping at the end of the day. Next morning, a couple of
gnomes arrived for breakfast. Other travellers arriving at the cave – a back
entrance not used much – had found Mrs Stanley’s card. The gate warden had made
enquiries at the hotel and asked a couple of the town’s rangers to follow them
and apologise for not hearing them. The doorbell is concealed because there are
some races the gnomes would rather not receive, but they tell their friends how
to find it. 
The party invited the gnomes to share their breakfast and
they chatted about what they were doing in the area. Since they were very open
about their being a group of people who travelled around investigating
mysteries, and were clearly heavily armed, the gnomes decided that they had
been sent by Garl Glittergold, whose Holy Day this is the eve of. 
The gnomes have a problem. (Of course they do – they are
someone who has been met by adventurers!) Six weeks ago, a group  of Deep Gnomes (a related but generally evil
race) had burst into the gnome town from the uninhabited parts of the natural
cave-system, fought their way though through to the town’s Temple, and holed up
in there. The gnomes organised their militia and tried to retake the temple,
but were rudely surprised by the Deep Gnomes shooting back with tommy-guns.
(They only used picks and swords on their initial assault.)
They sent for help from a couple of nearby towns, which took
a few days to organise, but then rushed in in strength, behind portable
barriers. Though they thought they had an overwhelming firepower advantage,
they discovered a twist – the Deep Gnomes were now a kind of undead known as
knockers: intelligent but with the same resistance to bodily wounds as zombies.
Only massive head trauma can kill them. Furthermore, each was linked to an area
of magical darkness around the altar by tendrils of darkness, about two inches
in diameter, going into their heads. 
Shooting round the corner of stone walls and pillars,
indifferent to most wounds, and using tommy-guns intelligently, the knockers
were more than a match for the gnome militia. The militia’s first assault was
short, pulling back as soon as they realised that the opponents were not quite
what they had expected, but they went back a day later more thoroughly
prepared. It wasn’t enough, and they pulled back, taking their dead and wounded
with them. 
Mediums had already told them the bad news: the 26 gnomes
caught in the temple by the Deep Gnomes’ attack had been held at gunpoint, tied
up, then lined up in front of the altar and sacrificed. 
The altar holds a precious
gnomish saint’s relic: the Mighty Pick of Honar Obsidian. It is a major
attraction for pilgrims and a source of holy power for the clerics’ spells.
They fear that one of the nine Deep Gnomes who charged into the place was a sorcerer
or Dark Priest who intended to use that power for fell purposes. But Deep
Gnomes aren’t the self-sacrificing types who would volunteer to give themselves
up to be undead, and whatever the spellcaster was planning shouldn’t have taken
six weeks because living Deep Gnomes would not have been able to hold off the
militia that long – something had clearly gone wrong with the spell. The gnomes
speculated that the spell involved summoning a demon of some kind, but the
sorcerer had lost control of it. It had taken over the sorcerer and possessed
his Deep Gnomes, but was still tied to the place of its summoning. 
The players recognised the
similarities to their Dominican Republic adventure, where a voodoo priestess
lost control of her spell which then brought giant spiders through from another
dimension and turned all the locals into zombies. They agreed to help the
gnomes with their problem. 
First they needed to know about
the firepower used. Talking with the militia gnomes, they analysed the previous
firefights. The Deep Gnomes, both alive and later undead, had used good fire
discipline, using different burst lengths to ensure that magazines ran out at
different times and there was never a time when all of them were reloading.
They had also used cover and movement well. They estimated that the enemy had
so far used around 180 rounds per tommy-gun. That much ammunition is heavy:
they must be running low by now. 
The temple is dedicated to Honar
Obsidian, a warrior-saint, and like all his temples it is designed to be
defensible. The only entrance is an imposing foyer to impress worshippers and
visitors, but also an excellent killing-zone. The players identified two
requirements for a successful assault: another entrance, and a mobile fort.
Gnome rangers were sent to scout through the natural passageways to find a
place where a wall into a temple may be thin and easily broken through, while
Kohath designed a mobile fort and Donald advised on its engineering. They also
realised that they’d need light in a temple dominated by a demon that needed
darkness, and possibly fire. Gnomes were dispatched from the town to drive to a
coastal town to buy some signal flares, and also bring back a lot of petrol. 
They considered flamethrowers,
but the problem would be obtaining tanks that could contain the fuel under
enough pressure to give a decent cast. The gnome fireworks enthusiast they
called on for magnesium for high-intensity lighting suggested a lower-tech
alternative: a barrel of petrol with a stick of dynamite in one end. Rolled
into the temple with the fuse burning it should make a nice, but brief, burst
of light. 
Meanwhile the gnomes exploring
the caves discovered that there was a new back entrance to the temple, broken
through from natural caves into one of the vestries. Two undead Deep Gnomes
were guarding it. This was a puzzle – if they weren’t trapped, why hadn’t the
sorcerer already escaped with the Mighty Pick? The gnomes speculated that the
Deep Gnomes couldn’t initially break through at the back of the temple because
the noise of tunnelling would give them away, but they could plan on that being
their escape route. Having taken the temple, the deep gnomes could tunnel
without worrying about the noise, so they broke through before the demon spell
went wrong. 
After an intense night of design
and construction, the mobile fort – and a couple of smaller mobile barriers for
gnomes to follow up in support – was ready for noon on Glittergold Day. The
gnomes were asked to make a diversionary attack through the new back entrance
to draw the demon’s attention away from the main door. Gleefully, the firework
gnome trotted off with his barrel of fuel and dynamite and Willie, Albert,
Haggart and Mrs Stanley sealed themselves in their ‘fort’ – a septagonal
structure of three-inch-thick planks (hopefully tommy-gun proof) with firing
loops at shoulder and waist levels so that two people at a time could fire in
any particular direction. Heavy, it was wheeled and came down to a couple of
inches off the floor – as close to the ground as the gnomes dared build it in
case of irregular floors. 
The explosion went off as
planned, and the party gave the undead time to react before bursting through
the main entrance. As they rushed forwards, two undead stepped out wielding
picks. Willie managed to shoot the one on his side in the head, but Mrs.
Stanley’s target dodged her shot and attacked the fort. His pick dug in and
splintered the wood, the knocker trying to use it to lever off the planking. 
The scary part though was on the
other side: the black tendril no longer attached to the knocker’s shattered
head began questing towards the rifle-slit. Willie hastily ordered the fort
into retreat, not wanting one of them to be possessed. They backed off and
modified the fort with shutters for the rifle loops to block the tendrils.
While that was going on, the news came back from the back entrance. The
explosion in such a small space had smashed the undead’s bones and set fire to
the remains. The fire had ‘cooked off’ the ammunition in their tommy-guns, exploding
the magazines and ruining the guns. The follow-up assault cut the broken
knockers’ heads off and grabbed the shattered guns, but they too ran before the
black tendrils could attach to them. 
The party thought that the
meaning of the gnomes closest to the entrance coming into hand-to-hand combat
was clear: the knockers were short on ammunition and were concentrating it into
fewer guns. This was a good sign. 
Once shutters had been fitted to
their loopholes, they tried again. This time they left Haggart behind in favour
of taking a gnome priest into the fort to cast protective magic to help them
keep out or resist the tendrils. This time the knockers’ tactics had changed:
two tommy-gunners charged out from shelter as soon as the fort came through the
entrance passageway and attempted to ram their gun muzzles through the firing
loops. The people inside reacted quickly enough to slam the shutters closed,
tried to get their own weapons out of the upper firing slits but realised that
the gnomes’ tommy-guns could reach those too, and slammed them closed. Blinded
by their own defences, they retreated quickly. The knockers made the mistake of
coming with them and as soon as a gap opened up the people and militia waiting
outside and the knockers saw each other. Guns blazed, but the automatic fire of
the tommy-guns had the advantage. In the first brief exchange, five attackers
(two PCs and three gnome militia) were wounded in exchange for one dead
knocker. The second knocker ran away after the first round of fire and escaped
around the corner. The fort advanced again and was lifted onto the body of the
dead knocker so that his tommy-gun could be confiscated. The priest recognised
the stinking corpse as one of the junior priests sacrificed on the first day –
clearly the demon was able to replace his losses from the 26 available corpses.
He had no spare ammunition, and after firing one burst had only ten rounds left
in his magazine.
As soon as Kohath and the gnome
priests had healed the wounded, the party decided that they would give the
knockers no time to come up with another change of tactics, but blaze straight
through this time. They re-entered the fort and rushed it in quickly, getting
past the waiting knocker before he could react. He came forward to try to reach
the firing loop, but massed fire from the outside corridor finished him before
he reached it. 
And so the mobile fort burst into
the main temple… 
=== Session 6 ===
And screeched to a halt, and hurried into reverse, having
second thoughts about going into the temple unsupported. They retreated back
outside the temple and pondered how they could be supported. 
After much thought and planning, they settled for ensuring
there would be plenty of light in the main temple by sending the rest of the party
and some gnome warrior volunteers, running for the stairs to the balcony armed
with fire-bombs and flares. Petrol was decanted into bottles and flaming flares
carried to light them, along with guns. Once they had set fire to any of the
tentacle-controlled gnomes, everyone up there would support the fort with
gunfire. Preparing the fire-bombs was complicated by adding a package of
accelerants in each which would bring the temperature high enough to ignite the
magnesium which they hoped would burn through the darkness  around the altar, so the assault was delayed
till next morning. 
The fort charged again, this time with a howling mass of
supporting fighters behind them. There were no undead at the first doorway so
the charge through the foyer was uneventful. While the support troops ran for
the stairs, the fort stopped in the doorway so that it would not be caught in
the splashes from burning fire-bombs. To each side, they caught glimpses of
Knockers flinging themselves down at the base of the fort so that their heads
were too close to the bottom for guns inside to aim down at them. 
The Knockers blasted away with their tommy-guns, which they
had laid flat on the floor so that the bullets went through the two-inch gap
between the sides of the fort and the floor. One managed brilliantly, scoring a
critical hit on Willie’s left foot and a normal hit on his right, crippling
both of them. The other fumbled his roll and the recoil from the tommy-gun
kicked it out of his control. Unknown to the people inside the fort, a couple
of supporting gnomes in the foyer blew this second Knocker’s head off while he
scrabbled for control of his gun. 
Those in the fort hurriedly pulled themselves up to stand on
the internal framework to get their feet off the ground and out of the
tommy-guns’ arc of fire. Willie had to hang by his arms from the push-handles
as his smashed feet wouldn’t bear his weight. Then there was an almighty crash
on their roof. Two Knockers up on the balcony had pushed a statue off. The
frame was solid, but the impact snapped the fort’s front axle, leaving it
grounded and immobile – far too heavy for two men and a gnome priest to lift
and move.
The supporters ran up to the upper level, to discover the
two knockers picking up their tommy-guns after pushing the statue off the edge.
The knockers’ tommy-gun fire crossed with flying fire-bombs, wounding Donald
and a couple of gnome fighters. Enough firebombs hit their targets that in the
second round the knockers were burning brightly, but still standing and
shooting as Donald took cover behind the low pews and one gnome slumped
unconscious. The second wave emerging from the stairs shot the knockers in the
head and they collapsed, continuing to burn till their remaining ammunition
exploded. As the tentacles left the dead knockers and sought new undead bodies,
Mrs Stanley led Haggart and the supporting gnome fighters in destroying all the
pre-placed corpses with more firebombs and head-shots. Firebombs to the altar
caused the darkness to flick out briefly – the first time that happened they
got a burst of fire into the demon and sorcerer, on the second they were down
behind the altar so immune to gunfire. 
The party had to retreat to get their wounded seen to, avoid
questing tentacles now looking for living victims, and to get out of the
choking smoke of burning gnome-flesh, leaving the fort crippled in place in the
inner doorway. 
They were now sure that they’d stripped the demon and
sorcerer of their outer defences. Without bodies, they could not fight. The
next problem was that from the way the tentacles searched towards living
people, it looked likely that they could possess the living too. The gnomes
certainly thought that likely – after all, the knockers had been living Deep
Gnomes when they arrived. 
They asked the gnomes for a way of cutting the tentacles.
The gnomes’ speciality turns out to be just that: blades with a magic edge for
cutting through anything. They could make up a batch of shortswords/machetes to
do that on a temporary basis. The party came up with a plan. The gnome warriors
would attack through the front door of the temple as a diversion. Their job was
to attract the demon’s attention and get its control tentacles out that way – they
don’t seem to move with lightning speed, so once they’re all engaged the party
would then rush in through the back door with light-bombs and guns. Since that
didn’t seem likely to do the demon much, if any, damage, they realised that
they might need a magic weapon. They asked for a volunteer to rush in and grab
Honar’s Mighty Pick and use it. A gnome champion stepped forward. 
They carefully distributed the remaining ammunition between
the two tommy-guns they had captured, and waited for the sounds of battle to
reach them. The gnomes were under instructions to blow loud whistles once the
tentacles were all engaged in the fight, then the party would go into action. 
The advance was slow – they were coming in through an escape
tunnel cut for gnomes, so they were coming through one at a time on hands and
knees, as stealthily as they could. Willie, Albert, and Mrs Stanley were first
through, along with the gnome champion, gathering in the vestry till all four
of them were through. They charged through with firebombs and flares, following
up with a storm of tommy-gun fire aimed at the knocker sorcerer who was holding
the Mighty Pick. 
Being undead and controlled by a tentacle from the
impenetrable demon, being smashed to bloody pulp didn’t put the sorcerer down, but
a critical hit from Willie blowing his right hand off did the job: hand and
Mighty Pick crashed to the floor for a moment before the gnome reached them,
snatched up the pick, and buried it in the unholy flesh of the demon, which
deflated like a pricked balloon into the pick, and vanished leaving nothing but
a smell of brimstone. 
The gnome volunteers came in and reported that they had
managed to cut the tentacles as they reached for victims, but cutting them off
just resulted in a rubbery chunk of tentacle flopping to the ground – the
tentacles could continue to extend and reach for people. They found it more
effective to defend each other than to try to protect themselves. 
One memorable party later, the gnomes rewarded the
Expeditioners in two ways. Firstly, as promised, they provided the information
that they were looking for. The Cathar mountain men had indeed come to the
gnomes looking for refuge, but they had been turned away. The Cathars hadn’t
been good neighbours to the ‘pagan’ gnomes, so they weren’t going to annoy the
massed Crusaders to help them. But they did direct them to a well-hidden cave
they could hide in for a while – and yes, it was the bear-cave the party had
already searched. The stone they were carrying was the size of ‘a gnome’s torso’
and an item of power, so they were heavily burdened as they also carried large
and heavy backpacks. 
And the extra reward: each of the party received a
pen-knife. When power is put into them, they can cut through just about
anything. The party were taught an invocation to Garl Glittergold which opens
up a channel through which they can funnel their power – some things will take
more power to cut than others. Kohath reported that the invocation was similar
to using his fatigue to power spells, and to the congregation taking part in
any religious ceremony designed to have a holy magical effect.
=== Session 7 ===
The gnomes’ information that the Cathars had been directed
to the ‘bear cave’ sent the party back there to take a closer look. Under Mrs
Stanley’s direction, they scraped test pits through the accumulated soil and
debris to get back to rock to check for signs of tool marks or other clues.
They found some around the edge of the pool: old chisel marks showing where the
rock had been fractured away from it. 
They deduced that the pool had been created by collapsing
the cave floor into a void underneath it. Though the pool was only chest-deep,
the space was so confined that they wouldn’t be able to lift the rocks out –
there were big chunks of rock and no space to use a lever to get them out. 
They went back to the gnomes and asked to borrow a mining
expert, and some more lanterns. The gnome advised that in the limited space
inside the cave, what they needed would be an electric winch, a tripod to mount
it on, and generator for the power. The gnomes didn’t have that kit to hand,
they’d have to hire it from a human source. 
Albert & Kohath stayed in the cave to keep the bears out
while the rest of the party returned to the village. The spent their time
making one light barrier to deter animals just inside the cave entrance, then a
more substantial defensible one a little further in to defend against human
intruders. Haggart, Willie, and Mr Singh stayed in the village, with Haggart
and Willie hiring mules and building three travois (I don’t know the correct
plural of travois!) as they couldn’t get a vehicle over the trails to the
bear-cave. Donald and Mrs Stanley went off to Toulouse to hire the right kit,
which took a couple of days. 
Taking one of his many breaks (the party have noted his
short attention span), Haggart found himself behind the auberge in the village and found two large black Mercedes saloons
parked discreetly behind the building. They sent Guillaume to enquire amongst
his mates in the village, and he confirmed that there are eight fit young
German men staying there, having arrived a couple of days ago without a
booking. Half of them are out walking in the hills each day, the others stay
around the village watching the goings-on and making friends. 
Convinced that these Germans were SS-Ahnenerbe Willie & Haggart decided that they didn’t want
them to know that they were bringing heavy equipment for the cave. They drafted
Gurjat Singh in to sit on the road into the village so that he could stop
Donald and Mrs Stanley before they and the hired kit could be seen from the auberge. The kit was unloaded on a
forest trail well clear of the village and the delivery driver sent back before
the mules and their new travois were brought up. 
On hearing that the Germans had arrived, Kohath and Haggart
left the cave to set up an overwatch position. Sure enough, it wasn’t long
before two lederhosen-clad ‘tourists’ came following the travois’ unmistakeable
trail and stopped to ‘birdwatch’ from a position that gave them a view of the
cave entrance. 
While Haggart took the mules back to their owners, the rest
the party got on with setting up the generator, frame, and winch. Drawing the
rocks out of the pool took several days, but as it deepened the water began
draining away more quickly, till they were working in an almost-dry pit with
just a rivulet running through it. 
Eventually, a void appeared, a gap to an almost-horizontal
natural cave passage. The slim members of the party – Albert, Willie, and
Gurjat Singh, stripped off excess kit (but kept their tweeds on to protect
their skin from scraping on the rocks) and slipped into the passage, while the
others kept watch outside. They didn’t get far before Gurjat Singh bottled out
– although he had never been claustrophobic before, the tightness of the
passage was too much for him and he rushed outside. 
Albert and Willie attached ropes to themselves in case they
needed to be dragged backwards when they got stuck, and Donald came back into
the cave and went down in the pit, ready to do the dragging. 
Thirty yards along the tunnel, the main passage dropped down
a sink-hole, but beyond the sinkhole was a space where the floods used to swirl
around before draining down it. Since the floor collapse stopped peak-flow
floods from coming through the passage, the water trickling though hadn’t
affected what had been deposited in that swirly-space. The expeditioners
discovered the remains of four long-decayed backpacks, containing bags of
silver and gold currency, Church plate, three reliquaries (two containing human
bones, one with a piece of the True Cross which obviously wasn’t genuine: it
wasn’t incorruptible since it had rotted to a murky stain on the equally rotted
silk lining). There were also three chips of a rock which wasn’t the local
limestone, and had been discovered deep in the rotting backpacks. Gurjat Singh
confirmed that these were part of the Holy Rock…
The silver was badly corroded but the gold and gems of
course were pristine, as were two large (18” x 15” x 5”) lead boxes which had
been soldered closed, one with the Nativity engraved into its top, the other
with the Ascension. Cue a huge row about how to get them out and whether to
open the boxes immediately or wait to get them back to the hotel. Mrs. Stanley,
despite her archaeological expertise, wanted to open them now! to find out what was in them, and was reluctant to wait even
till they got back to the hotel. Kohath and the others were more concerned with
not letting the Germans know that they had found anything, and discussed the
various options. There was, shall we say, a heated discussion…
The eventual plan was to send Haggart and Donald back to the
village to get the mules for the heavy gear again, and while in town Donald
would send a telegram to the Foundation saying that they hadn’t found anything
yet so they needed more money to extend the expedition, but included in it a
codeword that they had agreed after the last expedition. The word reversed the
meaning of the message, so the Foundation should reply that they were not
prepared for any more spending, and the party should return home. 
This was for the benefit of the Germans – if they were at
all capable as agents, they should have bribed the local postmistress to get
copies of their cables and listen in to their phone calls. As long as they
don’t think the expedition has found anything yet, they shouldn’t make any
aggressive moves. Though Albert was in favour of taking a ‘robust’ approach,
Kohath pointed out that they were outnumbered, out-macho’d, and almost certainly
outgunned by the SS – though the only weapons they’ve seen so far on the
Germans were hunting rifles much like most player-character’s choices. 
While this was going on, back in the cave the winch was
being used to replace the boulders and debris into the pool and Mrs Stanley was
making more test-pits and trying to clean off centuries of soot from hunters’
fires off the cave-roofs. The group then loaded up the heavy equipment back on
the travois and did their best to look despondent when they found a telegram
waiting for them saying, as expected, pack up and go home. 
Next day, the party telephoned the hire company and asked
them to come and pick up the equipment the next day, and made other
arrangements that made it seem as if they were staying – but then paid off
their hotel bill (deliberately scraping around between themselves to raise the
money, to reinforce the ‘we’re too broke to continue’ message), then suddenly
loaded up their cars and left in a hurry. Not stopping till they reached Paris,
they wrong-footed the German watchers. 
Gurjat Singh meditated on the fragments of the rock whenever
he had the time. From Toulouse, he detected the stone slightly east of north.
From Paris, it was west of north. From their London hotel, it was south of north.
Triangulation put the Holy Stone somewhere in London… 
But their first priority was the lead boxes, which the party
had persuaded Mrs Stanley not to open till the contents could immediately be
put into a conservation environment. So she took them to the British Museum and
used the Foundation’s name, and their contacts from the Sorcerer’s Mummy
episode, to get the necessary conservation technicians on hand. The contents of
the boxes proved to be two books: to Mrs. Stanley’s disappointment (but no-one else’s
surprise) the combination of medieval handwriting and medieval Latin made them
incomprehensible to her. However, a specialist in medieval manuscripts was
easily found elsewhere in the Museum, and he reported that the books were a
copy of the Cathar’s Holy Book, and a monastery journal written by a monk who
saw the anti-Cathar Crusade from the other side. Both hugely valuable to
medieval scholarship, but not really to the Foundation. 
The Church plate and gold and silver were much better. They
could be the exhibits in an exhibition designed to bring in paying visitors and
to publicise the Foundation’s membership and magazine. Prof Dalgetty is very
pleased with the result, though it will have to be designed carefully and there
will need to be delicate negotiations with the French Government over the
ownership of the items. 
Finally, the Holy Stone. They took Gurjat Singh on a
tour of Central London, standing around him to stop people interfering with his
trance while he triangulated closer and closer to… Westminster Abbey. The Holy
Stone turned out to be the Stone of Scone, resting in the Coronation Chair
after its centuries of travels.
Category:Campaign Log
Category:Tavistock Expeditions