Episode 02 - Recap

Kyra and Coraline were still in the
dining room standing over the battered remains of the animated armors. Urthal
and Tannin, dispatched by Morwen with two more of the Duke’s white steeds, were
still about an hour away. Krya and Coraline found a snifter of Brandy and
decided to spend the time resting at the table in some of the unbroken chairs.
Kyra noted that the fire in the fireplace was not making any noise.

When Urthal and Tannin rode up, the saw the remains of the
work that Kyra and Coraline had done last session. Tannin picked up one of the
dead guards’ poisoned shortswords, and then the hulking 9’2” Urthal smashed his
way through the already broken doors into the foyer of the Rivermen’s Manor.
Hearing the commotion, Kyra and Coraline came out from the dining room and met
their reinforcements.

After everybody sized each other up, Coraline cast detect
magic and saw two interesting magical areas one in the dining room and one
below the office. The team investigated a rotten smell Tannin noted coming from
the kitchen. Urthal kicked the door across the room. Upon investigating they
found some lightly used kitchen tools and an icebox stuffed full of hacked up
animal carcasses. In the pantry Coraline picked up a container of Assam tea, a
tin of cooking oil and some other basic goods.

They left the kitchen and investigated the office, with
Urthal tearing another door off of its hinges, where they found two nice desks
with writing materials, ledgers, a bookshelf full of books about working ships,
and 12 wooden filing cabinets full of reports detailing the activity of the
boats of the Rivermen’s guild. One particular cabinet had been torn apart and
the reports scattered, but the name of the boat was missing from the cabinet.

The team also saw a hastily closed trap door leading down
some well constructed stone steps to a room that didn’t lead anywhere. There
was an odd portion of wall in front of them that was as smooth as a chalkboard.
When Coraline touched her hand to the wall, red light began to swirl and formed
into a riddle: “Use your head to paint me red, inside of thee resides your key,
but beware of what you spurn, for what you give shall be returned.”

The team worked out that this wall required a blood
offering. Kyra pricked her finger on a knife and pushed the wound to the wall.
The wall responded by sucking the blood out of Kyra’s wound, doing mild damage.
The smooth wall filled blood red, and then the blood lifted off the wall and
coalesced into a blood colored clone of Kyra. The team quickly dispatched of
the blood clone, and the wall before them vanished and stood open.

Inside they found what looked like a storage area, with a
lot of debris, a heavy footlocker, and a necklace stand. Tannin noted that it
seemed that there were the impressions of multiple heavy boxes left in the dust
of the vault. Coraline, very carefully picking through the wooden debris, found
black scales and the shell fragments from large black eggs, enough fragments
for two potential creatures to be birthed. Tannin checked the footlocker for
traps and found one, but it had already been disarmed, and the footlocker was
empty.

The team went back upstairs to investigate the soundless
fire in the dining room fireplace. They noted that the fire gave off no heat.
Urthal stuck his hand into the fire to see if it would burn but awkwardly
overshot, but instead of his hand meeting a solid wall in the back of the
fireplace he uncovered an illusion. Ducking into a narrow, hastily carved out
stone passageway, the team encountered a long hallway with a statue of a black
dragon in an alcove at the end, overlooking an exit to the left.

Carefully moving down the hallway with Tannin in the lead,
they moved towards the dragon statue. The hulking Urthal had difficulty fitting
his large frame in this passageway. Kyra was following close behind Tannin. As
she reached a certain point in the hallway the statue let off a blast of fire
that extended out several feet, but swiftly Tannin dodged out of the way and no
one was damaged. The flame burned on for a full minute. Coraline cast detect
magic, and with her connection to the arcane discovered a magical glyph on the
wall that was focusing magical energy into a beam crossing the hallway four
feet high. Tannin, at 3’2” managed to cross under this beam without triggering
the statue, but Kyra was not so lucky.

Coraline blasted the statue to smithereens with forceful
eldritch blasts, and then damaged the wall upon which the arcane glyph was set,
destroying the magical tripwire. The team continued down the rough-hewn passage
and encountered another, larger room. In this room was set two more dragon
statues, on the left and right. They saw a rickety door set at the end of this
room, and they could hear muffled shouts coming from behind it. Tannin checked
the room for mechanical traps, but did not discern any.

Kyra (I think?) threw some shards of plate towards the
statues, and as it crossed more tripwires (that Coraline could discern but did
not point out) the statues on either side were triggered, creating a wall of
flame that denied them passage.

While the team talked about how to get past these statues,
with Coraline ready to blast these two to pieces as well, Tannin moved further
into the room and stepped on a pressure plate. Two concealed doors in the
passage behind them slid open to reveal two penned black Guard Drakes, who were
left in ambush.

The team was pinned between the dragon statue trap and this
new threat. Whirling around, Coraline successfully cast Crown of Madness on one
of the drakes, who turned and attacked his partner. The other drake, confused,
retaliated. Tannin hit with a crossbow shot. Urthal moved in with his huge
hammer and battleaxe and beheaded one of the drakes. The team ganged up on the
last remaining drake, making some key shots and utilizing Kyra’s spiritual
weapon, and soon this second drake lay beheaded as well.

The shouts from beyond the door continued, and Coraline blew
the rickety door off its hinges with another wave of eldritch force. Through
the doorway they saw the same hooded figure they had chased through the streets
of Daggerford standing behind a stone altar and shouting commands in a panicked
female voice at several hooded figures.
Two of the figures were moving down a passageway behind the altar, roughly
dragging some humanoids in manacles. Urthal rushed in and threw two handaxes
into the back of the hooded figure, The hooded figure, interrupted, turned
around and began raving about how Victor was long gone, and that they had
outsmarted the team.

Combat ensued. Urthal was viciously attacked by two cloaked
figures who sliced at him with fanatic energy with poisoned scimitars, but the
team quickly dispatched one, with a massive hammer hit from Urthal smashing one
of their heads flat down into its neck, Tannin firing bolts with sneak attack
damage, and Kyra using her spiritual weapon, a pumpkin shaped ball of radiant
energy. The hooded figure let down her cloak to reveal a woman with shoulder
length silvery hair and crazed blue eyes. She continued to rave at the
party…then pointed her wand and unleashed a devastating fireball. Amazingly,
none of the team went down, though Urthal was badly hurt. Some clutch saves
were rolled. The woman, with a magically amplified voice, shouted behind her to
set off the charges, and a massive explosion could be heard from down the
passageway, which partially collapsed.

Soon the second cloaked figure was dispatched, and Tannin
“shot that bitch in the face.” Kyra attempted to heal the badly wounded Urthal,
but with a quick reaction the crazed woman cast a counterspell with a mocking
retort.

She wouldn’t be laughing long. After another round of the
team doing damage, Urthal made a heroic leap over the stone altar and landed
vicious attacks on this wizardly foe. Putting all his effort in, he used an
action surge and brought the woman down to one hit point. Before the team could
render her unconscious, the woman pulled a dagger out from beneath her cloak
and said “You don’t even know what you’re up against. You have no chance, you’ll
never stop us,” before slitting her own throat.

With the threats gone and the passageway blocked, the team
investigated the room. They found a pile of pickaxes stacked in a corner, a
large brazier full of ash and human bone. Investigating the corpse of the
woman, they discovered a wand of mislead and a shortsword coated in a different
poison than what they had seen before.

Investigating the right hand door that led off this room the
team discovered two slaves in hastily built wooden cells. There was a blue
tiefling man, and a frail looking human woman. Both of them were in bad shape,
worn from work and starved. Urthal ripped the cell door apart, Kyra gave these
two some good healz, and they were grateful and seemed to gain more strength,
while Tannin freed them from their manacles.

The tiefling man and woman recounted how they came to be
there. The Tiefling told the team that they had been taken from the nation of
Rodaro. The woman worked in the castle as a servant, but upon speaking out at
the harsh treatment of the servants under Ilothar she was shackled and given
over to the slavers.

The tiefling told the team that ever since Ilothar’s rule
began, he had declared all tieflings in the land to be hunted down and
captured. He had fled his home and his adoptive parents to try to find a
rumored resistance group, which were supposedly meeting to try to contest the
brutal reign of Ilothar. He had managed to meet up with a group of these
people, but their hideout was raided and after a brief fight for which they
were unprepared, they were captured and loaded onto a ship. The group which
assaulted them was led by a tall, strong, brutal half-orc wielding a crackling,
magical axe who called himself Tosk. They had sailed on this ship for many
days, then transferred to another boat, and were led into this manor house
where they worked on tunneling out the passageways below the house. There were
many slaves brought to the house, and the tiefling had counted fourteen. All
were taken from Rodaro.

When the tiefling mentioned Tosk, Coraline’s tome began to
radiate heat. Coraline unstrapped the tome from her back and leafed through the
pages of unknown symbols until she came to a blank page. As she looked on the
page began to fill with ink, and a large symbol filled the page. As she gazed
on this symbol a vision of Tosk’s cruel face came to her, and a strong feeling
of hatred swelled up inside of her.

The tiefling went on to say that every now and then one of
them would be taken from the cells, and amidst the sounds of ritual chanting
they could hear the screams as their brethren were murdered, and smell the
stink as the corpses were burned in the brazier.  He suggested the team search the other cell
block to see if there were any more slaves.

In the other cell block they found a heap of a man in the
corner. He had many cuts on his arms and hands and face, and he was very weak.
They learned that this man was in fact the prior master of the Rivermen’s
Guild, Wally Windrunner. They had been keeping Wally here to get into and out
of the blood vault, as it was magically keyed to allow free passage with his
blood. Victor had been keeping an amulet in there, but Wally noted that he had
seen Victor remove the amulet the last time they were in the vault. He told
them how they had ransacked the treasure reserve of the Rivermen’s guild, and
killed his wife and child. Wally asked about the state of his mansion.

As they led Wally back out through this makeshift dungeon,
he did a double take at the corpse of the woman on the floor, and revealed that
the woman was Sybill, his wife.

That was the end of the session!