Good!Party: The True Name of the Dark One, and the Assault on the King in the North

Having found little of use at the party, we head on to Vrist with Rin Stonehammer. Once he’s pounded his steel for as long as he can and passed out on the floor, we go out into the hallway and sneak down the hallway towards the school. There’s a bit of a commotion coming from up ahead. 

It sounds like a teacher is giving someone a stern talking-to. The boy is sad about his dead rat. The teacher is pointing out that the rat is dead and needs to be buried. The boy is almost certainly Vecna Orlok. After a moment the teacher slams out of the room, and then just as we’re about to go inside, another door opens and there’s some whispering. A moment later a rat squeezes out under the door, and a moment after that a young boy and girl come pelting out after it yelling, “Catch it! If the Headmistress sees it we’ll both get kicked out of here.” 

We follow them, but they spot us and whip around and try to act innocent. Vecna: “Um… can you help us find our rat?” We agree to help, and the kids slip away to distract the Headmistress before we can ask the Dark One’s name. 

Eva sniffs out the undead rat; Martini pulls on gloves, then hits it with Power Word Stun. 

Dark One: “Did you do that? How did you do that?”

Martini: “I’ll tell you if you’ll tell me your name.”

Her name is Galvera. She is so interested in Martini’s magic. We talk to the kids for a bit, and then we get the hell out of there. 

We return to the Temple of Amun, where Tavros is getting breakfast when someone drops from the chandelier and stabs him in the back. The assassin stops because Tavros is not dead. Tavros throws him across the room, breaks his arms and takes him off to Vigo. Vigo comes back in the afternoon and reports that this one is not from Bouvier; he’s from Lamont. 

Martini takes Ruin and Marshall off to murder the would-be king, Duke Lamont, while Tavros, Geddy, Eva, and Leira will get smuggled into Wellfort by The Silver Fox. 

Martini, Ruin, and Marshall arrive at the rebel base a little southwest of the High Grove. Lamont is holed up in a well-fortified keep. So, we’re not going to be able to just teleport in. However, there are certain ways in and out. The Antechamber before the throne room does allow Teleportation, but you can’t teleport out from there. There is a teleportation room with a circle keyed to strategic locations; but the rebel wizards think they can intercept the link and insert us into that room. The third option – many gnomes died to bring us this information -- the keep was built on some old ruins, and it might be possible to use them to get in and out. 

The elven mages teleport us into one corner of the very, very ancient catacombs. Ruin can see bones scattered around, and we can hear something moving. Martini throws False Life on herself, then makes herself invisible, and we prepare to move into the dungeon. Martini draws her weapons. Ruin draws his weapons and says, “We need Light.” (Also, how the hell is Darkvision not on the Assassin spell list???)

Marshall casts Holy Aura and then casts a quickened Light spell. The light draws the attention of some sort of troll abomination, which immediately comes around the corner towards us. It moves remarkably fast, and slaps Ruin with a tentacle and grabs him, pulling him into the spikes on his body. Martini begins studying the thing, and moves in to attack it while it’s flat-footed. Martini attacks with her dagger but fails to get through its ridiculously thick skin. Martini heads up the wall and over the thing and comes down on the far side of it. Ruin uses Dimension Door to get out of the grapple, and hides. Marshall tags it with firestorm and injures it a lot. It starts flailing around, cracking the walls, and then charges down to the far end of the hall. Martini fires Disintegrate at it, but doesn’t get through its spell resistance. Ruin stays hidden, and Marshall finishes it off with another Firestorm. 

There’s a sort of black ichor oozing off the corpse; this was clearly some sort of primeval creature. We take some samples. Martini thinks this might be worth hundreds of golds a vial; we fill about ten vials. We head back to the one available door, which is at the end of a short side-passage. Martini checks the door over, and it is locked but not apparently trapped. 

She tries picking the lock, and Ruin – after a massive effort – manages to haul the door open. Ahead of us, there’s the corpse of some sort of undead creature which has -- have?-- been thoroughly gnawed upon. There’s also a massive Black Pudding in an intersection up ahead. 

Martini casts Disintegrate again, and disintegrates it. Ruin heaves a HUGE sigh of relief. He’s seen enough Hentai to know where this was going.

We sneak up and survey the intersection, listening. Looking to the right, we see the ruins of some sort of vampire nest: splintered coffins, disassembled undead. Marshall slips off to search the coffins and returns with a sack of 100 GP wrapped in his tail. We turn left and find our way to the troll abomination’s nest. We continue exploring and find the bodies of four guards; this looks a little fresher. Each has 10,000 GP worth of equipment; we manage to pick up a tabard that hasn’t been completely destroyed. The tabard has a device; a tree on the left, twin lakes on the right, and a crown over the whole thing. Presumably this is Lamont’s new coat of arms. After a bit of looking around we find a secret door – not trapped – that goes to the stairs. 

We find another secret door over by the vampire nest; Martini checks it for traps, and finds one. She promptly disables it, and claims it for her own: she now has a Wail of the Banshee trap. She then turns her attention to the lock. She opens the door, finds a chest, and checks that for a trap; it’s trapped, of course. She removes the trap and unlocks the chest. We find 3,000 Platinum and a luck blade with 1 wish. Martini tosses it to Ruin, who tucks it into his belt. (+2 Shortsword; possessor can reroll one roll each day.

We take the stairs and emerge into Lamont’s treasure room. This is probably the remains of the treasury from Janbridge; it’s wall to wall, shin deep. It’s not all coins, either; there’s a bunch of valuable tomes, clothing, goblets, etc. Coffers, sacks, chests, paintings… 

We take everything in the room, and in the process locate a secret door. There are traps on the other side, but we can’t get at the mechanisms and we can’t tell what they do. Marshall uses Shape Stone to create a giant statue of a middle finger that will block the door from opening. We also find a cube of force along with the 260,000 GP worth of stuff; we scoop it all into our bag of holding. 

Then we head back downstairs and teleport back to the resistance like Santa Claus. 

We wait a day, restore our spells, and apply Death Ward to ourselves. 

Getting out of the treasure room is too risky; we go back down, plot our way over to the next room, and stone shape a hole in our ceiling/the nobleman’s floor. There’s a nobleman standing there looking at the hole in the floor as an invisible Martini emerges. She stabs him. He’s wearing Lamont’s emblem on his chest. 

She stabs him and he goes down and begins bleeding out. Ruin climbs out and delivers the coup de grâce. We look over the corpse, but while the clothes are fancy the jewelry is fake. We’ve killed a body double. We check the medallion, and it’s equipped with an alarm spell. Martini disables it, but keeps the medallion. We also take some keys off the body.

We dump the body downstairs and cover the hole with a rug. The bookshelf only has a single book on it. There’s a spiked pit trap on the book case; it fits between the lower-level walls. The book triggers the trap, but the mechanism is intricately linked to the mechanism to open the secret passage. There seems to be a way to open the secret door by manipulating the book. Ruin looks at the Very Ceremonial Sword on the table. It’s jeweled enough that Ruin grabs it and drops it in our treasure; ditto the shield, which has the new coat of arms. 

We find some royal-level clothing, which we set aside for Tavros. The bed is made of pure rubywood, so it’s probably worth thousands of gold. (It’s a 10,000 GP bed.) Marshall transforms into a colossal snake and eats the bed for us; that's how we're going to steal it. He now has twenty-four hours to get it back out. Nightstands have lots of perfumes and oils and combs and brandy, for a total of about 10,000 GP worth of stuff. 

We move to the door out of the room, which is both locked and trapped. Martini is now the proud owner of an Energy Drain trap. We do not hear anything the next room, but we can now hear things happening in a room beyond – and it sounds like quite a few people, and probably in the throne room. Martini gets it open and we’re now in some sort of office. 

There’s nobody here, so we start searching the desk. It’s… rubywood, worth at least as much as the bed, maybe more. Martini disables another Energy Drain trap and claims it for her own. She then opens the drawer, and we find some notes about the teleportation circle and the teleportation room, and eight stylized keys. Each key corresponds to a location, and there’s a safehouse; the safehouse can only be accessed if you possess the scepter. If it’s lost, you’ll need to obtain samples of all three creatures again and throw them on the three braziers. 

This only works from the teleportation circle in this castle. We did not find the scepter on Fake Lamont; it’s probably with Lamont, and they’re probably both in the safehouse. 

We have Marshall eat the 11,000 GP desk as well. 

We continue searching, finding gold and platinum scales worth 4,000 gp. Martini checks the bookcases for traps. The first one has a trap on the cabinet on the bottom, but not on the stuff on the top; the stuff on the top is loose-leaf record. Ruin dumps it into the bag on Lamont, and Martini disables and claims the trap from the bottom, and pulls out this carefully-wrapped, tied stack of three books. They were a prize from one of Lamont’s generals; +4 con, +5 cha, +5 Str stat books, taken from the mages. We claim them. 

Bookcase the Second is also trapped, and she disables it but doesn’t manage to keep the trap. The top is a bunch of scrolls, some magical and some non-magical, worth 2,000 GP. The bottom contains a set of ledgers outlining the duke’s accounts. All his shadow accounts, etc. So we could have the thieves’ guild folks help us, and with Geddy to gather information from the account books. We could give him the +5 Cha stat book and turn him loose on this, and (later, when we actually do this) we lift 270,000 out of Lamont’s accounts. We’re about to move on when Martini kicks the table over to reveal a trap door. She disables the trap on it, unlocks it; it contains a small coffer with another 26,000 in gold and gems. Rainy Day Fund, we decide. 

As we listen, an elvish voice says “But please, Master Silas, we cannot pay; we have no money!”

A gravely voice says, “That is unfortunate. Very well... Then we will hold your wife in our dungeon until you can find it.”

The throne room is most likely filled with a permanent Zone of Truth and Invisibility Purge, which is going to affect our planning on this. We check over the next door, and step through it into a little waiting area which is equipped, among other things, with a fancy cask. The crystal beside it is worth 3,000 GP. Both of these barrels bear the marks of really fine wine. We think the big one could be worth 10-20,000 GP; the smaller one could 20-60,000 GP. They’re heavy, though. Still, we can stick them in the bag of holding, so we do. Geddy will auction them later for 15,000 and 40,000. 

We stop and listen. 

Cardinal Silas is holding court on behalf of King Lamont; he has bishops with him at the front of the room; he also has some devils in there. There are also some more… human-sized devils in there. There are also a bunch of petitioners in there; they are innocent, and will need to be protected as best we can from becoming accidental casualties. (Ruin will hate it if any of them get hurt.) Among the devils, the big ones are horn devils, and the regular-sized ones are barbed devils. The whole place is dimensionally locked, and invisibility isn’t going to work either. Also, we won’t be able to lie. 

We've basically spent several hours stripping the chamber that should belong to Duke Lamont, the would-be King in the North. We’ll begin the attack on the throne room next week.