Forgotten Realms Recap #3: (B2.5) The Keep on the Shadowlands

22nd of Eleint, 1372
North of Adzo, in the shadow-y keep
Attending: All

The Keep

As described last week, the company decides that restocking the spell-casters is critically important to surviving this accidental expedition, and so barricades are erected on both entrances to the room using the cauldrons that were already here; nothing spooky about them, nossir! Setting a rough watch rotation, everyone does the best they can to rest in this most disquieting of locations. Shockingly, we have nightmares. Actually shockingly, the nightmares seem to be related to one another. Much to the chagrin of the DM (I’m betting), we don’t actually dig all the way to the bottom of this particular strangeness, so eager are we to get out of the keep before (we fear) it dissolves into nothing, taking us with it.

[You gotta hand it to us, we've put ourselves on a clock that may not even exist. We're the easiest party to entertain ever.]

We ponder which direction to go, and quickly decide that we want elevation to get a better view of our surroundings - thus, we want to head around to the tower at one end of the keep. We listen to the appropriate door, through which Grapthar had heard scraping noises hours ago, but nothing now stirred. “Let’s go then,” said Lu Tse, and the door was opened. Stepping in with a torch, a series of combat practice dummies are revealed, along with several dead bodies on the floor. “I’ve seen this movie before,” thinks every single member of the company as the bodies rise up with a series of rattles and hisses.
FIGHT! Grapthar, Rayhil, and Lu Tse move in to engage, while Anniel stays back to provide cover fire and Stripeyface McScaredycat stands protectively over Seydlitz MacGuffin. For his troubles, Lu Tse gets hit as hard as he could ever remember being hit; a zombie seemed to hit him in *ahem* a critically-sensitive spot on his head. The blow dazed and dizzied him. When an opportunity came to return fire, his hands suddenly burst into flame. With a wild, almost startled swing Lu Tse hit the zombie back and it fell, broken apart and on fire. “That’s… new,” thought Lu Tse. [note to readers: on a lark, LT was retconned into a monk/fistsage (née swordsage); this was the first manifestation of such.] Rayhil flashed out with positive energy, sending a couple of them fleeing, and then Grapthar and the rest cleaned up.

Investigation of the large-ish room revealed that double-doors led back to the Courtyard of Unending Skeletons, and a gigantic door that geography dictated would lead into the keep’s tower. That door was patently creepy and, more important at the moment, locked. Sephora took a long look at the lock before saying “I’m not even going to bother, this thing’s too complicated for me. We’re going to need the actual key.” After a brief discussion the company made to double back to the room they’d started in; there was a door in the opposite direction, from which noise had been overheard earlier that evening and, sadly, from which a skittering noise could still be heard. “How bad could skittering be? Rats, right?” said Lu Tse, opening the door. Yep… it was rats. Skeletal. Rats. A Swarm. Of Skeletal. Rats.

Creepy, right? Now imagine all the flesh stripped off. . .

FIGHT! Keeping with the theme of the company’s time in the keep, the worst thing about the encounter was how freaking creepy it was. At one point, Lu Tse was paralyzed with sharp disgust as rats crawled all over him. “If this isn’t the grossest thing that ever happened to me, I’m glad I lost my memory,” he said to no one in particular. The swarm was particularly tricky to deal with since, despite it being composed of hundreds of teeny critters, it seemed to act with one mind. Among other things, this meant that area-affect attacks like the positive-energy bursts of Rayhil and Grapthar only dinged the swarm once. Eventually, the swarm is subdued and dispersed, and a thorough search of the room revealed a sack stuffed full of copper coins. They’re the lowliest coin, but a lot of anything can be worth something, right? Unfortunately, no key turned up. The room had another door aside from the one the company came in from, and there was also a spiral staircase going up.

*flip* Heads! We tried the door, which yielded uber-creepiness: a room swathed in black iron from floor to ceiling. All along the walls were inch-deep etchings of glyphs and such; there’s a magic-y circle in the floor, and perhaps a pile of something in the far corner. Facing a surfeit of volunteers, Lu Tse moves into the room to investigate. Grapthar’s detect magic guides Lu Tse away from a patch of strong enchantment, and without further difficulty the corner is reached. There, Lu Tse discovers a corpse, with most of his belongings long since eroded but for one length of cloth. Passing it to the casters when he returns, they discover that it is in fact a scroll containing spells which may later be cast. L00t! It is noted by several that the room seems to resonate with imagery from our shared nightmares, but again we’re on a tight deadline and so ruminations are shelved.

To the bat stairs! We ascend to the second story, into a library of ancient scrolls. I have to pause here and point out that, in my other campaign, a room full of scrolls would signal the effective end of the evening, as each one would be lavished with attention until no more secrets could be weaseled out of it. This bunch, thankfully, is willing to accept the DM’s overall assessment more-or-less at face value - to wit, the scrolls describe wicked, evil stuff. Grapthar and Lu Tse, however, not being readers, decide to investigate sundry doors and openings, and it is thus that Lu Tse happens upon a ghost, trapped in a room for who knows how long, singing a forlorn song. Enrapt (or ensorceled), he is drawn to the ghost, and when his companions discover this and try to free him all heck breaks loose.

Boo.

FIGHT! The ghost, who covets an audience, seems drawn to the most forceful personalities in the company; ironically, that 7 in Lu Tse’s CHA is a free Protection from Ghost Siren.  Many others, however, present themselves as tasty-looking morsels - “dance with me,” the ghost keens to Anniel as it drains away some of her inner forcefulness. (”Killing me softly with her song/draining my ch’risma awaaaaaaayyy…“)  We’re all in real danger of succumbing before Rayhil’s blast of positive energy sends the ghost fleeing into the night. Left behind, perched precariously on a crumbling wall, is a strange looking doo-dad. Fortunately Sephora has a keen mind for devices and recognizes this unlikely trinket as the key we’re looking for. Down periscope!

We back-track to the giant doors that previously denied us and, sure enough, the key fits the lock securely, putting unseen mechanisms into motion with a distant cacophony. Opening the doors, a gaping darkness greets the company. Lu Tse takes the torch he’s holding forward, and as soon as he crosses the threshhold he’s met by lumbering shadowy shapes and a rasping voice, proclaiming the residents of the tower to be “the last that remain.”  A brief attempt to offer peace (”we mean no harm, only escape from here”) is met with menace and a call for initiative.

CLIFFHANGER! LEVELS! Tune in next time, which will actually be tomorrow because I’ve been sick and this is incredibly late. :p