There Is No Honor...(part II)
At the start of the session, Ferra is the only one conscious (Pick and Harrack are KO) and Frizzy is dead. Ferra checks out the nearby door, doesn't find anything threatening in the room beyond and then moves everyone into that room to rest. She loots Frizzy's corpse as well.
Harrak wakes after four hours of Ferra tending to he and Pick. After the first hour Ferra hears movement in the room outside that goes on for quite a while, but she remains quiet and doesn't check on it so as not to draw any attention to herself while the boys are both KO. Once Harrak is finally awake, he casts Cure Light Wounds on himself and two Virtues on Pick but it isn't enough to bring him around. Further, he has only 1 hp now anyway, so we're forced to camp out for a while more.
After resting for a full eight hours, with nothing happening upon us to cause us trouble, Harrak casts Cure Light Wound on everyone and we move out of the room at last to see if we can get out of this place. We find that poor Frizzy's body has been gnawed upon in the meantime, with human tracks in her blood leading to the east. We then decide to try our luck to the west for now, hoping to stumble across a healing potion or something else to help before tackling whatever that was. Ferra and Harrak surprised one another by firmly agreeing we must spirit Frizzy's remains from this place for a proper burial elsewhere before we escape. Doesn't stop them from arguing about Ferra looting her corpse, though.
Meeting Ruby
Moving through the western door we're confronted with the shallow water beyond. Everyone moves through the slippery parts easily enough but Pick has to make a second attempt to swim through the deeper parts. As the water gives way to standard tunnel again we meet a dark-haired woman who was sleeping as we approached and who's lit a lantern to shine on us before we can reach her. Threatening dark magics if we approach any further we are forced to dialogue while neck deep in water until she's convinced we don't pose a threat. Once we've approached she introduces herself as Ruby, a sorcerer, claiming to have fled here from the zombies to the east. She claims there's an underground tunnel in the nearby pool (which we verify easily enough) that leads out to the harbor but she hasn't made use of it yet herself. She's been trying to figure a way to break through the nearby door first, or at least makes plans to return and do so once she's left here.
Harrak gets to work on the door immediately and soon has it busted in. There we find the corpse of Penkus (according to the scroll he's clutching) and we make note of the dragon/flower tattoo on one shoulder. Reading over the scroll we can't figure out what kind of undead would have made the guy sick or even if that's what did it. We pocket the note anyway to show to Lavinia when we get back, then talk and decide to clear the area before using the underwater tunnel to leave this place. Pick also notices the secret door right away and we spring it open to find the chests inside. After checking for traps Pick tries to pick the lock and, when he finds them hard to pick, takes 20 on all three chests while the rest of the group hangs out and gets acquainted with Ruby. She seems a reasonable and level headed sort, though she's a shocking propensity to crude language, even to Ferra's standards.
Once Pick has all the chests open and we've looted everything there we move off back to the room where Frizzy died (and take a minute to secure her body and wrap it properly for transport back to town). Checking the second northern door we find it empty and so we try the door northeastern door...sure enough, there they are, three zombies moaning at us.
Zombie Fight
Since we have them potentially bottlenecked with the doorway before us, we let them move in to take them in bits and pieces. Ruby starts popping Magic Missiles into them immediately (staying safely behind everyone else to do so) while Harrak, at the fore, sets to hacking at the zombies that come after us. He even drops the first one with one hit. By then we can hear faints stirrings and moanings from elsewhere around the underground lair but can't tell exactly from which direction, how far away or even accurately how many critters we're hearing. We at least are confident we've covered our backs, having explored this place as west as we could.
The closest we came to trouble in the fight is when a few of the dead popped open the door right at Pick's flank, who'd back off south a ways in case he was able to slip in behind any of the dead. With two dead moaners at his shoulder he was quick to turn his attention to defending himself on that front and we thus found our forces divided again. After the debacle resulting in Frizzy's untimely death, this did not encourage us. Nevertheless I managed to drop another of the zombies with my chain while Harrak's sword and Ruby's Magic Missiles beat up the others a good bit.
In the end Pick was able to lay low the two that had come through the door and fall back behind Harrak and I before the others down that hall could reach him. We were then able as a group to keep the dead coming at us in a more manageable fashion. Which would have likely come off like clockwork had the last zombie through the door not proved a bit unusual. When it attempted some kind of evilly hissed spell in Harrak's direction (which he thankfully seemed to shake off) we turn all our attention to it straight away and laid it low before it could make another such attempt. After that the few remaining zombies were good enough to shuffle right into some skillfully exploited Attacks of Opportunity and line up nicely before our formation. We eventually finished the fight with hardly a scratch on our side.
Leaving Parrot Island
Having killed the zombies we loot the corpses for what we can then check out the rest of the place. After a thorough search we figure we've found all we're going to and head back to the west to make our escape. Though Harrak has to make three attempts before he can overcome the currents working against him, we escape the place and pop up out in the harbor. From there we surface and simply swim for the (relatively) nearby shore.
Once up out of the water we headed straight for Lavinia's place to show her what we've picked up and to report what we've seen of Vanthus. She's shocked and pretty brokenhearted at it all but eventually tasks us with tracking down Vanthus and bringing him to justice. Barring that, to bring justice to him ourselves. She suggests checking out this "Lady of the Lotus" and the Taxidermist's hall mentioned in Penkus' note.
The Taxidermist's Shop
Arriving there we look the place over for a while, then decide that Pick will attempt to enter through the alley while everyone else distracts whoever's inside by posing as customers. Ruby immediately fails her first Bluff attempt on Nemien the proprietor and only buys us perhaps a minute of distraction before he's running us out of the store. Pick meanwhile fails to pick the lock and the rest of us join him in the alley before he can Take 10 on it. We decide to put it off until later that night, then simply break in and search the place after all.
Later that night we return and Pick Takes 20 on the lock, springing it after about fifteen minutes while the rest of the team watch the street. Surprisingly there seems to be little traffic in the area at night and no one happens by during all that time. Slipping inside the rest of the team waits just inside the door while Pick scouts the place out, taking his time so as to avoid getting caught if the proprietor is still around. He doesn't spot anything that might look like a way down beneath the building but does locate Nemien sleeping in his bedroom without waking him.
After consulting again we decide we'll just rouse Nemien and get the information out of him instead. Simply walking into the room and waking the man up in the process, Ruby gets to work right off and has him Intimidated. He reveals the secret door leading to the entrance to the guildhall below, informs us that guild members come and go through his shop often and tells us about the "boss lady" and her pet dragon. We bind and gag him for now, leaving him in his bed until we return, and loot the place before heading down the secret entrance.
Underground Guildhall
Pick checks the large pool with the red urchins growing in it and can see there's no getting across without swimming so he doubles back and checks outside the door. He can hear men carousing down the hall around the corner, so he checks the door to the north and hears nothing beyond. After scouting around a bit, leading the team and checking doors, Pick discovers what appears to be a barracks with at least two or three men sleeping inside. We decide to stir up some trouble right here and use the hallway to bottleneck our foes. Once the others are in place down the hall, Pick enters and performs a coup de grace on one of the sleeping thieves, then yells out to wake the others. Harrak isn't particularly happy with that, having apparently misunderstood that our plan didn't involve cutting someone's throat in their sleep. But once Pick's seen and dashes out and down the hall to join the rest of the group, with the now woken thieves in pursuit, he pitches in with the fight (while loudly castigating everyone anyway).
The fight with the thieves was a bit tricky but not as much as we expected. Two of the men did break off to run around the complex and come at us from behind but by the time they reached us we'd already sniped the others dead and were waiting for them. It was a long, drawn out fight mainly because we seemed to have alerted the other group of men carousing down the hall and had to jump straight from one fight to the other before they could come after us properly. In the end we charged that room as well and laid them low with only moderate damage to our side. Harrak managed to stay everyone's hand and spare the two that surrendered, so we bound and gagged them, tossed them in a nearby room and carried on.
After at least taking a glance at most of the complex we focus in on the locked door we came across southward. Considering the layout we'd seen so far, this was most likely the direction of whatever leadership we'd find in this place (and thus perhaps some answers). Through the door we found, of all things, a reanimated Bugbear. Not exactly one's first choice for a fight but we put it down pretty quickly. We were forced to pass around some of the healing potions we'd picked up along the way though, since Harrak was already running low on divine spells and such. So it was the perfect time to have tracked down the boss and put an end to this incursion of ours.
Rowyn and the Pet Lizard
Through the next room we found none other than Rowyn herself, apparently the "Lady of the Lotus" Penkus had spoken of in his letter. Astonishingly, she actually had the gall to try to recruit us after we'd probably cut our way through her whole guild. Harrak and I promptly harrumphed at that idea, demanding her surrender. Since she wasn't having any of that, we went to it.
After Harrak, Ferra and Pick all managed to hit Rowyn in the first round and Ruby followed up by hitting her with her Wand of Enfeeblement, Rowyn turned tail, drank a potion and turned to mist, escaping through the drainage pipes before she even hit anyone. Her little pet dragon (or whatever that odd lizard thing was) proved a good bit tougher to deal with. After a couple of rounds of fighting I finally decided to try out my chain with a trip against a four-legged opponent. When I actually managed to pull if off, having come higher in Initiative than anyone else, the rest of them pretty much cut the thing to shreds and ended the fight right off.
After looting Guttugger and Rowyn's room we move on to the treasury, which Pick manages to find. Pick takes 20 on the lock and springs it but is hit by the dart trap from inside Rowyn's little treasure chamber. He's KO'd. He makes his save against the poison, thankfully, and Harrak is able to heal him. Roused, he searches the room for more traps, eventually figures out the foot spearing trap and disarms it. We finish up looting the place and head back out the way we came.
Reaching Nemien we untie him, allow him to pack a bag and flee. After searching the house again to be sure we've looted everything of value, we depart for Lavinia's. There we report to her and when she reviews the letters we found she discovers Vanthus murdered their parents. We all then report the guild to the Dawn Council the next morning and they're soon swarming the place, mopping up whatever bits of nasty we missed.
Lavinia rewards us for returning the treasure Vanthus stole from the vault by gifting us with a hefty bonus and then another after we are awarded the Spire of Sasserine at a Dawn Council banquet a couple of days later. She asks that we continue to search for Vanthus but is now aware he is responsible for the death of her parents. Again, she insists on bringing him to justice...or having justice brought to him. By now she's clearly more in favor of the latter.
At the start of the session, Ferra is the only one conscious (Pick and Harrack are KO) and Frizzy is dead. Ferra checks out the nearby door, doesn't find anything threatening in the room beyond and then moves everyone into that room to rest. She loots Frizzy's corpse as well.
Harrak wakes after four hours of Ferra tending to he and Pick. After the first hour Ferra hears movement in the room outside that goes on for quite a while, but she remains quiet and doesn't check on it so as not to draw any attention to herself while the boys are both KO. Once Harrak is finally awake, he casts Cure Light Wounds on himself and two Virtues on Pick but it isn't enough to bring him around. Further, he has only 1 hp now anyway, so we're forced to camp out for a while more.
After resting for a full eight hours, with nothing happening upon us to cause us trouble, Harrak casts Cure Light Wound on everyone and we move out of the room at last to see if we can get out of this place. We find that poor Frizzy's body has been gnawed upon in the meantime, with human tracks in her blood leading to the east. We then decide to try our luck to the west for now, hoping to stumble across a healing potion or something else to help before tackling whatever that was. Ferra and Harrak surprised one another by firmly agreeing we must spirit Frizzy's remains from this place for a proper burial elsewhere before we escape. Doesn't stop them from arguing about Ferra looting her corpse, though.
Meeting Ruby
Moving through the western door we're confronted with the shallow water beyond. Everyone moves through the slippery parts easily enough but Pick has to make a second attempt to swim through the deeper parts. As the water gives way to standard tunnel again we meet a dark-haired woman who was sleeping as we approached and who's lit a lantern to shine on us before we can reach her. Threatening dark magics if we approach any further we are forced to dialogue while neck deep in water until she's convinced we don't pose a threat. Once we've approached she introduces herself as Ruby, a sorcerer, claiming to have fled here from the zombies to the east. She claims there's an underground tunnel in the nearby pool (which we verify easily enough) that leads out to the harbor but she hasn't made use of it yet herself. She's been trying to figure a way to break through the nearby door first, or at least makes plans to return and do so once she's left here.
Harrak gets to work on the door immediately and soon has it busted in. There we find the corpse of Penkus (according to the scroll he's clutching) and we make note of the dragon/flower tattoo on one shoulder. Reading over the scroll we can't figure out what kind of undead would have made the guy sick or even if that's what did it. We pocket the note anyway to show to Lavinia when we get back, then talk and decide to clear the area before using the underwater tunnel to leave this place. Pick also notices the secret door right away and we spring it open to find the chests inside. After checking for traps Pick tries to pick the lock and, when he finds them hard to pick, takes 20 on all three chests while the rest of the group hangs out and gets acquainted with Ruby. She seems a reasonable and level headed sort, though she's a shocking propensity to crude language, even to Ferra's standards.
Once Pick has all the chests open and we've looted everything there we move off back to the room where Frizzy died (and take a minute to secure her body and wrap it properly for transport back to town). Checking the second northern door we find it empty and so we try the door northeastern door...sure enough, there they are, three zombies moaning at us.
Zombie Fight
Since we have them potentially bottlenecked with the doorway before us, we let them move in to take them in bits and pieces. Ruby starts popping Magic Missiles into them immediately (staying safely behind everyone else to do so) while Harrak, at the fore, sets to hacking at the zombies that come after us. He even drops the first one with one hit. By then we can hear faints stirrings and moanings from elsewhere around the underground lair but can't tell exactly from which direction, how far away or even accurately how many critters we're hearing. We at least are confident we've covered our backs, having explored this place as west as we could.
The closest we came to trouble in the fight is when a few of the dead popped open the door right at Pick's flank, who'd back off south a ways in case he was able to slip in behind any of the dead. With two dead moaners at his shoulder he was quick to turn his attention to defending himself on that front and we thus found our forces divided again. After the debacle resulting in Frizzy's untimely death, this did not encourage us. Nevertheless I managed to drop another of the zombies with my chain while Harrak's sword and Ruby's Magic Missiles beat up the others a good bit.
In the end Pick was able to lay low the two that had come through the door and fall back behind Harrak and I before the others down that hall could reach him. We were then able as a group to keep the dead coming at us in a more manageable fashion. Which would have likely come off like clockwork had the last zombie through the door not proved a bit unusual. When it attempted some kind of evilly hissed spell in Harrak's direction (which he thankfully seemed to shake off) we turn all our attention to it straight away and laid it low before it could make another such attempt. After that the few remaining zombies were good enough to shuffle right into some skillfully exploited Attacks of Opportunity and line up nicely before our formation. We eventually finished the fight with hardly a scratch on our side.
Leaving Parrot Island
Having killed the zombies we loot the corpses for what we can then check out the rest of the place. After a thorough search we figure we've found all we're going to and head back to the west to make our escape. Though Harrak has to make three attempts before he can overcome the currents working against him, we escape the place and pop up out in the harbor. From there we surface and simply swim for the (relatively) nearby shore.
Once up out of the water we headed straight for Lavinia's place to show her what we've picked up and to report what we've seen of Vanthus. She's shocked and pretty brokenhearted at it all but eventually tasks us with tracking down Vanthus and bringing him to justice. Barring that, to bring justice to him ourselves. She suggests checking out this "Lady of the Lotus" and the Taxidermist's hall mentioned in Penkus' note.
The Taxidermist's Shop
Arriving there we look the place over for a while, then decide that Pick will attempt to enter through the alley while everyone else distracts whoever's inside by posing as customers. Ruby immediately fails her first Bluff attempt on Nemien the proprietor and only buys us perhaps a minute of distraction before he's running us out of the store. Pick meanwhile fails to pick the lock and the rest of us join him in the alley before he can Take 10 on it. We decide to put it off until later that night, then simply break in and search the place after all.
Later that night we return and Pick Takes 20 on the lock, springing it after about fifteen minutes while the rest of the team watch the street. Surprisingly there seems to be little traffic in the area at night and no one happens by during all that time. Slipping inside the rest of the team waits just inside the door while Pick scouts the place out, taking his time so as to avoid getting caught if the proprietor is still around. He doesn't spot anything that might look like a way down beneath the building but does locate Nemien sleeping in his bedroom without waking him.
After consulting again we decide we'll just rouse Nemien and get the information out of him instead. Simply walking into the room and waking the man up in the process, Ruby gets to work right off and has him Intimidated. He reveals the secret door leading to the entrance to the guildhall below, informs us that guild members come and go through his shop often and tells us about the "boss lady" and her pet dragon. We bind and gag him for now, leaving him in his bed until we return, and loot the place before heading down the secret entrance.
Underground Guildhall
Pick checks the large pool with the red urchins growing in it and can see there's no getting across without swimming so he doubles back and checks outside the door. He can hear men carousing down the hall around the corner, so he checks the door to the north and hears nothing beyond. After scouting around a bit, leading the team and checking doors, Pick discovers what appears to be a barracks with at least two or three men sleeping inside. We decide to stir up some trouble right here and use the hallway to bottleneck our foes. Once the others are in place down the hall, Pick enters and performs a coup de grace on one of the sleeping thieves, then yells out to wake the others. Harrak isn't particularly happy with that, having apparently misunderstood that our plan didn't involve cutting someone's throat in their sleep. But once Pick's seen and dashes out and down the hall to join the rest of the group, with the now woken thieves in pursuit, he pitches in with the fight (while loudly castigating everyone anyway).
The fight with the thieves was a bit tricky but not as much as we expected. Two of the men did break off to run around the complex and come at us from behind but by the time they reached us we'd already sniped the others dead and were waiting for them. It was a long, drawn out fight mainly because we seemed to have alerted the other group of men carousing down the hall and had to jump straight from one fight to the other before they could come after us properly. In the end we charged that room as well and laid them low with only moderate damage to our side. Harrak managed to stay everyone's hand and spare the two that surrendered, so we bound and gagged them, tossed them in a nearby room and carried on.
After at least taking a glance at most of the complex we focus in on the locked door we came across southward. Considering the layout we'd seen so far, this was most likely the direction of whatever leadership we'd find in this place (and thus perhaps some answers). Through the door we found, of all things, a reanimated Bugbear. Not exactly one's first choice for a fight but we put it down pretty quickly. We were forced to pass around some of the healing potions we'd picked up along the way though, since Harrak was already running low on divine spells and such. So it was the perfect time to have tracked down the boss and put an end to this incursion of ours.
Rowyn and the Pet Lizard
Through the next room we found none other than Rowyn herself, apparently the "Lady of the Lotus" Penkus had spoken of in his letter. Astonishingly, she actually had the gall to try to recruit us after we'd probably cut our way through her whole guild. Harrak and I promptly harrumphed at that idea, demanding her surrender. Since she wasn't having any of that, we went to it.
After Harrak, Ferra and Pick all managed to hit Rowyn in the first round and Ruby followed up by hitting her with her Wand of Enfeeblement, Rowyn turned tail, drank a potion and turned to mist, escaping through the drainage pipes before she even hit anyone. Her little pet dragon (or whatever that odd lizard thing was) proved a good bit tougher to deal with. After a couple of rounds of fighting I finally decided to try out my chain with a trip against a four-legged opponent. When I actually managed to pull if off, having come higher in Initiative than anyone else, the rest of them pretty much cut the thing to shreds and ended the fight right off.
After looting Guttugger and Rowyn's room we move on to the treasury, which Pick manages to find. Pick takes 20 on the lock and springs it but is hit by the dart trap from inside Rowyn's little treasure chamber. He's KO'd. He makes his save against the poison, thankfully, and Harrak is able to heal him. Roused, he searches the room for more traps, eventually figures out the foot spearing trap and disarms it. We finish up looting the place and head back out the way we came.
Reaching Nemien we untie him, allow him to pack a bag and flee. After searching the house again to be sure we've looted everything of value, we depart for Lavinia's. There we report to her and when she reviews the letters we found she discovers Vanthus murdered their parents. We all then report the guild to the Dawn Council the next morning and they're soon swarming the place, mopping up whatever bits of nasty we missed.
Lavinia rewards us for returning the treasure Vanthus stole from the vault by gifting us with a hefty bonus and then another after we are awarded the Spire of Sasserine at a Dawn Council banquet a couple of days later. She asks that we continue to search for Vanthus but is now aware he is responsible for the death of her parents. Again, she insists on bringing him to justice...or having justice brought to him. By now she's clearly more in favor of the latter.