Moon's Haunted/Session 11

The session opened on the party overlooking the Nocturnals’ city from across a great chasm, watching as strange tall, lanky figures appeared to brutalize the population. Gaston knew what they were—a type of demon, rarely spoken of and perhaps never seen by any who had lived to tell of it: a Doorman. Doormen waited at the edge of the partition for individuals across reality to botch a summoning ritual for one of their gods. A misspoken word, the wrong offerings, an incorrect number of worshippers: any of these may part the veil—not enough to bring forth what they wanted, but enough for Doormen to slip into the liminal space and slaughter the summoners, harvesting their souls and taking trophies. Doormen stood about eight feet tall, sporting elephant guns the length of a man with swordlike bayonets and wearing iron masks fashioned from the vessels of captured offerings. Perhaps most disturbing, the Doormen appeared to constantly emit a garbled mixture of all the spoken rites they had ever interrupted, in all their languages—like slowly turning the dial of a radio, tuning into each for a few seconds.

Gaston intuited that communication with the Doormen below could be possible if the party followed the pattern of their repetition of the rites, using only words that would be found in rituals. Willing to give it a try, de Vranne fired his sonic gun to get the attention of a figure who seemed to be the chief of the Doormen in the city. Standing atop one of the taller stone-hewn structures on the edge of the chasm, the Doorman chief heard the blast, and watched as de Vranne sniped a Nocturnal in the streets in solidarity. Impressed, the chief shot another; seeming to understand each other, the party resolved to meet below and set out to cross the chasm.

The path along the cave wall kept a few more challenges for true believers, as de Vranne alone while taking point caught sight of a few web tripwires along the path. He directed Abbey where to fire her flamethrower, and the sane members of the party watched as the air seemed to burn where the otherwise-invisible web caught fire. This attracted the web’s spinners—white spiders which only de Vranne, Gaston, and Dozir could see. De Vranne again directed Abbey to launch fire into the convenient line of spiders, catching all of them and disorienting them enough to roll off the edge to their doom. During the fray, however, one of the spiders crept behind the party and tried to grapple Le Fou off the ledge with it. In a display of strength, however, Le Fou fought off the mass, invisible as it was to him, and kicked it into the abyss. The party continued its trek to street level.

The Doorman chief strode to meet the party, comically taller than all except maybe Abbey. De Vranne and Lockheart worked together, devising questions for the chief by using words in Vedlys commonly found in rituals. This worked in getting the party’s points across, and allowed the chief to answer a few questions. Most salient, the Doormen were there not to feed on the Nocturnals, but to bind and indefinitely feed on the spider god itself—they knew where the spider god was located and intended to hunt it there. They had been summoned apparently by a botched ritual by Evriksen in the immediate aftermath of the spider god’s loss of power from the bombing of Nocturne.

Even more interesting, the Doorman cryptically hinted that the spider god existed “between worlds,” implying that it had influence over more than just Kamens and Nocturne. This was somehow related to the river which the party had found in Bata’s village. However, the Doormen were not interested in closing the gateways into these other worlds, and apparently could not anyways without a great amount of power. Satisfied that for the moment it had found a kindred spirit, the party joined forces with the Doormen and headed towards the city’s church, where the two hundred-ish civilians still alive after the Doormen assault were all fleeing and gathering.

The group came under withering sniper fire from the church windows as it approached; an initial drive by de Vranne’s hunters successfully saw fourteen of them make it inside thanks to his flashbangs, but an off-target rake of MG fire by Kesdis exposed another eight, getting them killed. The shooters left their posts to deal with the intrusion, leaving the way open to the party—de Vranne set off to tank the attacks against his hunters, singlehandedly cleaving through the small cave people with his shotgun. The remainder of the party blasted through the church vestibule, finding a grand cathedral with vaunted ceilings and obsidian carvings all around of varied spider carnage. Concentric circles—but this time, four instead of three—covered the floor. In the main hall, the party found the unarmed, cowering remainder of the Nocturnals all hudded together. The bloodthirsty Doorman chief bayonet charged straight into it, skewering rows of the cave people before unsheathing her blade from chests and firing indiscriminately into the crowd.

As she did so, the furthest back of the Nocturnals began a last-ditch chant; hearing this, the rest of the party began to fire into the crowd of civilians as well, hoping to kill enough of them to disrupt whatever mass ritual was surely about to take place. They were unsuccessful however, and the party watched in horror as the Nocturnals at first appeared to simply dogpile onto each other, but then with the vibration of the concentric circles below them start to congeal into a single mass. After a few moments, the thirty-odd Nocturnals remaining had formed into a flesh monster, sporting dozens of arms and legs in a vague arachnid shape. The creature charged the Doorman chief, its closest target, but unused to its limbs it missed and rolled onto its back.

The chief, in answer, skewered the beast’s belly with her occult bayonet and followed up with a shot into the wound, killing many of the Nocturnals making up the beast’s core and paralyzing one side of its limbs. Unable now to roll over off its back, with a flourish the chief leapt into the air and impaled the flesh monster once more, executing it as the bayonet appeared to absorb its power. The creature slain, the party realized that most, if not all, of the city was now dead. A low moan rumbled across the city, reminiscent of the roar after the bombing of Nocturne and signaling the spider god’s deeper injuries after this assault. Hopefully, this was sufficient reward for the party’s second genocide against civilians this campaign.

The party took a moment to explore the church, and realized that one of the reliefs on the walls looked suspiciously like a map to a ley line, with multiple likely etheric gates on it—but rather than planets, each unit was four concentric circles. The line cut off unceremoniously, but room was on the wall for the relief to continue, as though it was unfinished or ongoing. The party realized for certain that the spider god must somehow have access to the gates of other planets, and that it was probably an ongoing process to gain access to them. The circles’ layers now made more sense: the outermost was the planet, then the circular chamber into the spider’s abyss, then the abyss—and the new, innermost fourth layer, probably an etheric gate within. Likely, this format was the same on each planet on the ley line, the same story but told elsewhere.

Passing through a hallway of Nocturnal bodies mummified by webbing into prostrate positions, the party exited out the back of the church and came upon a spiraling rock ledge down into the chasm. Gaston and the Doorman chief knew that at its end must be the chamber of the spider god. The party prepared itself for (possibly?) its final battle on Kamens, and whatever consequences would come with...