Are you a new reader of the Asheraven Play Report? Consider reading from the beginning with part 0.
Good morning, and welcome to part 7 of the Asheraven Play Report. In part 6, the party made little headway into the investigation of the guards, so they made a delve into the abandoned Castle Octavius that brought both fortune and misfortune. Gingledoof, who had been in service to the party since the first or second session, met his end to a giant crab spider. The party gained some tangible treasure from the castle, but their real reward came in the form of a magic item salesman named Swank Skill, who had some misfortunes of his own in the castle before the party rescued him from the impending consequence of them. The PCs also finally took care of Aldo’s compound and revealed that his famous steaks came from giant shrews rather than proper cattle. Domino rewarded them with a note for 10,000 gold pieces for their fruitful effort, which was exchanged for coin and taxed at the same time. They made the acquaintance of the remaining hill giants from the tribe that Tag belonged to. Rag, the other hill giant the players liberated from Gandolfo’s circus troupe, would make Aldo’s vacated compound into a home for himself. The party did not have much time to celebrate their victories, however, because the latest news broke that a significant portion of the Narwellian guardsmen had fallen ill.
Yes, most of the guards in Narwell, including Sergeant Renault and Secretariat Jude, had suddenly been overcome with great illness. Whatever the affliction was, it certainly did not seem to be contagious, as no new cases of illness broke out in the town. Yet, it was great enough that the Amviaran clerics could not dispel the infestation. The players went immediately to the temple, where the sick guards were being taken care of, to speak with the clerics and the guards about the illness. The clerics were utterly stumped, and the guards were not a great help either. One complaint that stood out is that they all mentioned multiple areas of intense burning and discomfort in their flesh that seemed to move about their bodies. They were able to speak briefly with Sergeant Renault, who, in addition to describing a similar sensation in himself, requested that the PCs keep an eye on the affairs of the barracks. Renault was suspicious that the illness was purposefully released onto them, and he believed that any guards who were not currently ill must have had nefarious intentions. The party ordered Stinky to handle the task, since he needed rest anyway after being wounded at Castle Octavius. The party visited Lindel’s laundry service yet again, believing that the illness may have been delivered on the guards’ tabards, but, even after following Ernest, who was the sole handler of the garments, no evidence that the tabards were weaponized surfaced. (This was the third time that the party had disrupted Lindel’s operation and yielded nothing that would aid them. In further interactions with Lindel or anyone who works for him, the party will suffer a -1 penalty on the reaction roll for deciding in what sort of a disposition the NPC is. This may be remedied in the future, but time alone will not improve the relationship between the party and the launderer).
Again at a loss, the party made another attempt into Octavius’ abandoned castle. They re-opened the secret door with the false book upstairs, and went back to the room that had the table with the dials on it. Laurana managed to open the door that they had not opened before and saw at least three zombies close by in the room beyond. She shut the door again before the zombies crossed into the party’s room. The party decided to use the barrels and any other wood scraps in the room to make a barrier in front of the sliding wall-door, so that the zombies would be slowed and exposed as they try to overcome the wall. Once they had done that, Laurana opened the same door, and the party won initiative in the ensuing encounter. Immediately, Figlar tossed one of his trademarked oil bombs, which not only set the zombies on fire, but also the room the undead were in and the barrels that comprised the barrier built by the party. The zombies were instantly dealt with, although the party had to exit the room to avoid the smoke from the fire. They went into the door next to the one with the table and dials, entering a room that contained sheaves of paper and parchment, as well as books and scrolls, arranged haphazardly on a circular card table. There were posters depicting crude anatomical diagrams and a desk against on wall. The literature on the table was plainly related to reanimating the dead, but nothing in the ways of spells or rituals were discovered in detail among them. The desk had only one drawer, and it was empty. There was another door in this room, which the party followed through. The room they entered had two doors to the left and one on the right; a small amount of smoke came from the right, so the party immediately considered that direction off the table. Ahead of them, carved into the wall just above eye level was a question, “Why look’st upon dedication with grief so, ye of toil?”, which the party recognized as a commonly-referenced passage in the holy text of Amviar. The party chose to enter the door on the left closer to the inscription and found that it did not seem able to either push or pull it. They did seem fixed on entering it, so they tried again and it did open. (The trick was that they had to push then pull the door in sequence twice, hence the inscription).
The puzzle door opened into an elevator with a lever to operate it, which the party pulled. They descended slowly a great distance before coming to a landing at the top of some stairs going down. The room they were in had two levels to it; on the elevator’s level was a door, or they could go down the stairs which had a door in front of them as well as more of the room on either side of the stairs. They decided to go through the door level with the elevator, and came into a long, dark, foul-smelling, and wet corridor. They followed it, and, as they did so, they noticed there was water accumulating at their feet. They reached its end, where the water was at a full twelve-inch depth. There was a grate in the ceiling, but the space above seemed no different than the regular construction of the dungeon. The party turned back, making the long, slippery crawl back to the elevator room. They chanced the stairs going down, and explored the lower part of the room, ignoring the door at that time. The party discovered that the platform the elevator rested on, which was about five feet tall, had a thin gap that formed a rectangular outline in its side. They could not find any means of activating any mechanisms except for the lever on the elevator. They pulled it, sending the elevator back up, which then revealed a pull-lever recessed into the floor that the elevator had hidden. The party pulled that lever, which opened the space in the side of the platform, and they were able to recover some gems and spell research components in a sling bag there. They pulled the lever again, which closed the secret space and sent the elevator back down. Satisfied that they were able to leave the way they came, the party went through the lower door. There was a larger space on the other side, greater than ten feet across and at least as far ahead of them. Suspiciously, there were many coins in copper, silver, and gold stacked with a machine-like precision just ahead of the party on a stone table. The table also had a silvery chain bracelet on it, and a bardiche leaned against it. There were two hallways exiting the room, and one door was visible in one of the halls. Besides the obvious treasure bait, the room had several small piles of scrap iron, and each pile had an old lantern in it.
Ignoring the fact that treasure doesn’t simply pile itself up, the party began filling their packs with the treasure. It wasn’t until Vlad picked up the bardiche, however, that the lanterns lit up, and the iron scraps came to life and assembled themselves to look like cast iron skeletons with lantern heads. (These creatures are my interpretation of Mörk Borg’s “wickheads”, and, while I call them wickheads in my game, they are probably very different to what their host game makes of them. I’ve never played MB, but I remember seeing artwork of these creatures and knew I had to implement them somehow in my setting. They are essentially undead souls bound to their cast iron bodies with candle lantern heads, and there’s a chance for each one to have a flamethrower as well as be accompanied by a gaggle of grease zombies, which were first seen in the previous report. The idea is that the wickheads will allow the grease zombies to shamble forward before igniting them and causing them to explode. Wickheads can be Turned by a cleric or paladin as ghouls are, are immune to fire, and can be subdued without being killed by extinguishing the candle inside their lantern head. Otherwise, they have damage resistances comparable to skeletons). As it turned out, a few of these wickheads did have flamethrowers, but that did not deter the party from trying to fight them anyway. The party lost initiative, and Vlad caught the worst of the flames but managed to survive at least this first round. The party thought about fighting, but, with Vlad being nearly dead already as well as being outnumbered by the wickheads, the party instead retreated back into the elevator room and rushed to the elevator itself. The wickheads got some parting shots in, but everybody was able to get to the elevator and successfully flee the encounter. From the top of the elevator, the ground floor of the castle, the party made their retreat back to Narwell with the riches they recovered. Vlad also discovered the hard way that his bardiche was cursed when he found himself unwilling to relinquish it for a different weapon. Most of everything was sold except for the spell components, which Figlar kept to reduce the cost of future magical research endeavors he had planned.
We came to the end of a session at this point, and Vlad and Aileen had to exit the campaign due to scheduling constraints, which made the current party just Figlar and Laurana. Two more players were able to take their place, and they were a half-elf fighter named Asora and a half-orc druid named Logar. There was also more news being shared in town, namely that Aldo’s steaks were made with vermin, which made his restaurant become barren as it had been before he began selling the steaks, and that a mercenary guard force was hired by Lord Tarban to operate alongside what remained of the official guard until the sick ones are fully recovered. There was also an increase in the reward for anyone who aided the missing Asheravian knights in returning to Asheraven, and those who returned deceased knights would also be rewarded. With a druid now present, the party wanted to revisit the guards at the temple to see if he could determine what ailed them, since the clerics had so far failed to come up with a diagnosis. Logar took a knife to one of the guardsmen in one of the areas that was causing particular discomfort. Burrowing through the guard’s flesh was some kind of worm, a rot grub. Figlar connected the dots from the parasite in the guard to the bag of them that had been found in Aldo’s compound. Just knowing this, however, did not reveal how to rid the guardsmen of the infestation. The party thought about shrinking down and fighting the rot grubs á la Magic School Bus, but decided instead to ask Terrence the Sage if he could tell them anything about the worms. It would require a few days’ of time, but the wizened man would not charge the party for this labor, since it would be in service to the Narwellian guard and Lord Tarban.
The party wanted to spend the meantime getting a grasp of the problem that the hill giants were facing west of Narwell. They understood that there were multiple kinds of giants involved, namely hill giants and cyclopes at least, but the particulars were not yet known. They knew the hill giants were staying close by to their village, so the party went that way in search for them. They were leaving the rolling plains around Narwell and entering the hills set before an untamed mountain range. They found their big friends in a temporary-looking camp set at the bottom of a depression that was well-shielded by the surrounding hills. They spoke more with the hill giants to learn some important information about their oppressors. They gathered that the giants occupying their village were indeed cyclopes, and they’d come from a land far to the southeast that the hill giants had previously fled from themselves. In fact, the party learned that hill giants and cyclopes, at least these ones, are technically the same creature and having one or two eyes, as well as the separate abilities of the giants, was a difference in gene expression, to put it in more scientific terms than they did. Both kinds of giants lived in the southeastern land, when the two-eyed hill giants left to find a new home; even in those lands, the hill giants were treated as inferiors to the cyclopes, and, any time a hill giant was born, the only life that awaited was one of servitude to the cyclopes. The cyclopes believed having two eyes was a sign of intrinsic dissatisfaction and greed, that having two eyes meant one eye to behold the world’s beauty was not good enough and your soul demanded more than it deserved. These beliefs were arbitrary on the cyclopes’ part, but it was explained by the cyclopes’ heavy belief in superstitions of many sorts. They leaned so much on it that, if they did not already have a superstition assigned to a behavior or situation, they would invent one and apply it thenceforth. This made a cyclopes’ life one of near-robotic ritual, albeit also one that they valued greatly. When the hill giants left the original homeland, the cyclopes’ routine was completely upended, and they were forced to adapt much more suddenly than their nature would have allowed. Moreover, the lushness of their land had passed into barrenness, triggering their hyper-superstitious trait. Thus, many of their number came into the hills west of Narwell to reclaim the hill giants, and their livelihood, from their perspective, with them.
Then there were the “rockies”, which were obviously stone giants. They would have preferred to remain in their slumber-like meditative state in the mountains, but the commotion caused by the cyclopes attacking the hill giants disturbed the stone giants and moved them to action. Ever since the first attack on the hill giants’ village was made, the stone giants have come down from the mountains nearly every day from morning until night to throw rocks at the village. They don’t care whether cyclopes or hill giants occupy the village. They just want peace and quiet, which the cyclopes won’t give until they have the hill giants. The cyclopes, therefore, must not only defend themselves from the stone giants, but they must also seek out and subdue hill giants. The hill giants can’t catch a break anywhere, so they must constantly avoid both of the other types of giants. They refuse to leave their new home, since they had already taken the high road by running from the cyclopes in the first place rather than acting out some form of a coup. The party, already having favor of and toward the hill giants, chose to take their side on the situation. It was clear to them that if they can get the cyclopes dealt with, then that will stop the nuisance from reaching the stone giants, and that will all allow the hill giants to take back what’s left of their village. It would definitely be a task easier said than done, but that was the gist of it. The party sent Stinky back to Narwell to tell Terrence how to tell a courier to find them and to purchase more rations, so the party would not have to rely on hunting and foraging for sustenance.
The PCs at this point were well on their way to getting the guards diagnosed, hopefully with the possibility of a cure. The situation with the giants is what my ongoing brainstorm on the idea of a giants-centric adventure had culminated into, and, maybe, hopefully, I’ll be able sustain the adventure into the higher levels of play as it slowly builds tension and history with the players. Besides those two major quest lines, the guards and the giants, there are two others that need to be published before I’m level with current events. I won’t spoil too much, but Castle Octavius is actually not one of those quest lines, and the wickheads, while surely doing something behind the scenes, mostly go unseen and unbothered even at present. I do think it’s interesting that they seem to always go there when they need a break from doing other quests. Also, this and last report were published on this weird bi-weekly schedule. My personal goal is to put letters out weekly, but the last four have been really wibbly wobbly, busy one week and not so busy the next. I’m hoping that pattern breaks, but it is what it is. God bless, and enjoy your Thursday.
Next: Play Report #8