Bruce (Grenville d'Tharashk) is forced to admit that he showed up way late to this session, and then compounded the problem by not doing anything about the session summary until sometime in 2006. As a result, he's got really very little idea who might have been present and who might not have. Bleah.
The characters have been hired by Trusil d'Lyrandar, a somber half-elf of middle years. They are looking for the human artificer Elly, and will soon have the opportunity to talk to a sea-elf Bard named Zabydos who knows her. Kurgash comments, "Hurrgh. He's more capable than Grenville, and he's got a thief sidekick who's better-looking than Grenville's sidekick. Maybe we should have him join the group."
Payment for the job is 5500 gold, with a 1200 gold advance payment. The characters have three days to complete the mission.
The characters head to the Roaring Griffon, a three-story bar and tavern. Elly was supposed to be staying here, in a room on the third floor. The Griffon on the sign is wearing a fedora and carrying a Thompson gun.
Grenville d'Tharashk shows up late to find out that Graf and Varth Lokkur have just walked in to the Roaring Griffon claiming to be friends and needing repairs from Elly the artificer. The innkeep refused to let them up to the third floor, but he did agree to take a note up to her. Grenville walks in and asks to rent a room up on the third floor, room 306. The cost is 60 gold, for three nights. The innkeep gives him a key that will open both the main door to the third floor and the room door.
Grenville is polite to the innkeep, telling him, "Thank you. I think I will go up and take a look at my room. I feel quite peaked, as it has been a long trip from... down the block."
Grenville takes Kurgash and Lungpuncture up to the third floor, then uses Locate Object to find Varth's note to Elly. He finds it in room 302. He pulls Cutter Gerald out of the Bag of Holding and sets him to opening the lock. After a few minutes of trying, Cutter reports that the doors on this floor have "amazing" locks.
The characters determine that the doors can be unlocked from the inside without a key. Kurgash mentions, "I'll go downstairs and get the warlock. Maybe he can turn into a swarm of cockroaches or something." Grenville gives Kurgash his Wand of Invisibility and has him go fetch Varth and Graf. Varth uses the wand to become Invisible and infiltrate his way up.
On the third floor, Varth quickly scans the corridor for invisible and magical things, then adopts Gaseous Form and slips into room 302. He sees a rather mundane hotel room, complete with a window that looks out onto a tower wall. After confirming that there is nothing obviously valuable in the room, he lets the other characters inside.
The characters search the room. Kurgash finds nothing of value. He concludes that most of Elly's common items are still there; she wasn't the tidiest person. Cutter finds a small brass key with a shell-shaped rune on the handle.
Grenville takes a look at the key. He is absolutely certain that it doesn't mean anything beyond that the locksmith liked shells.
Then Cutter finds a small silver shirt button set with slivers of jade. Grenville curses, "But I wanted you to search for secret doors!"
Cutter protests, "But it looks very valuable! And it might be important!"
Grenville tries asking about the button among the tavern staff. He finds nothing. Varth checks the windows, comes back convinced that nobody has used the window recently.
Zabydos returns to the tavern that evening for his normal performance. He is a sea-elf with blue skin and white hair.
Varth proclaims, "It's David Bowie!"
Kurgash asks, "Are sea-elves cannibals too?"
Varth, "I think they just like licking scorpions. It's fat free!"
The characters sit back and watch his performance, then try to corner him like frenzied groupies afterwards. Grenville joins him in a duet. Zabydos plays on the traditional sea-elven mouth-trumpet. Kurgash falls over laughing. But the performance is really quite good. Then Grenville buys him a drink. And thinks of how handsome and well-groomed Zabydos is. The other characters find that they become nauseous when they listen too closely to the conversation.
Grenville quickly learns that Zabydos has been playing at the Roaring Griffon weekly for almost a year, and thinks that this is a very good gig. Then Grenville makes a Diplomacy roll. He ends up as Zabydos' "best friend". The sea-elf buys him lots of drinks because he's such a wonderful person. Grenville suspects that Zabydos is sometimes brushing his ear with his tongue ever so often just because the sea-elf is becoming very drunk, and certainly not because he's trying to hit on him. Grenville asks about Elly. Zabydos claims to have last seen her two days ago, about when she disappeared, but he is very evasive in his answer. Grenville thinks there's something odd about the way Zabydos is acting, and suspects that the elf might be magically dominated.
Grenville uses Message to tell Varth about his suspicions. Kurgash jokes, "How'd you like to be physically dominated..." and falls under the table laughing. But Varth verifies that there is a spell on him, and confirms that it is an enchantment, similar to Dominate Person.
Kurgash heads over to the bar to see if anyone is especially intent upon Grenville's conversation with Zabydos.
Lungpuncture offers the suggestion that he could put Magic Circle Against Evil on himself then walk up nearby to see if the compulsion vanishes. He heads into the bathroom to cast the spell. Kurgash and Graf provide a distraction by stepping up to the stage and singing: "It's not easy being gree-ee-eeen!" Lungpuncture walks over with four mugs of beer. Suddenly, Zabydos is free of compulsion. He seems confused, so Lungpuncture tells him, "The evil enchantment is suppressed. But it'll come back if I walk away."
Zabydos replies, "Then don't walk away!" The characters respond by interrogating him:
By the end of the conversation, the entire group has drifted over to sit at the table.
Varth does a couple of Voracious Dispellings on Zabydos to get rid of the dominate on him. He warns the elf that the process might hurt a bit.
The plan is to start out the next morning, once Lungpuncture has had a chance to memorize some Magic Circles Against Evil to keep the characters out of the mermaid's clutches and a couple of Water Breathing spells to prevent unnecessary drownings.
The characters bag up Grenville and hail a skycab. The goal? Find out where another silver-and-jade button is, because if you can find the buttons then you can find the hostage. And once you have found the hostage, you know where the villains are! Dah-dah-DAH-DAH-daaa-dah-dah-DAH-DAH-doo-di-dahh...
The characters tell the skycab driver to head down to the waterline and fly slowly. Grenville turns on Locate Object and concentrates, searching for another silver-and-jade button. He locates a button, but has a hard time of it: there is a Nondetection spell interfering with his magic. The others tell the cabbie to go wherever Grenville points.
The characters' destination is a mansion down at the waterline, in a district that was once upscale but which is now all burned out and abandoned. The structure is partially tunneled into the cliff, right over a sheer drop down into the water. Grenville reports that the button seems to be underwater.
The characters decide that this situation calls for some advance preparation. They aren't too eager to take on a crazy mermaid and her loyal shark battalions without some special equipment. They take the skycab back to the city, where Grenville searches for an all-night scroll vendor. He finds a shifty-looking goblin in a storefront in a questionable little alley. He brings out coins and tells the creature, "Water Breathing, Magic Circle Against Evil, 325 each. Here's the cash, gimme the paper."
The goblin is dubious, "Shouldn't that be 375?"
Grenville looks exasperated. He tells the goblin, "I'm bargaining, man." The goblin remains inflexible, so Grenville pays the higher price and walks off to give the scrolls to Lungpuncture.
With scrolls in hand, it is time to hit the mansion!
The first step is to put a Magic Circle Against Evil on Kurgash, and then into the mansion. The whole place is ruined and overgrown with vines. Everything on the inner side has been barred over and secured to keep people out. Or keep whatever is inside in. Grenville admires the bars on the windows; Cutter admires the signs of rat infestation.
Lungpuncture looks for tracks and reports to the others that there is no sign that anyone has been here in a long time. Grenville tries Locate Creature to find anything big and alive. He reports that there is something incredibly huge straight down, deep under the water. Kurgash grumbles, "Thanks for clearing that up for us, Grenville."
Everyone except Cutter makes a very unimpressive Spot check. The mansion might be old, but it is well secured. Cutter Gerald tells the others, "I'm not getting in that water. But there' a sea cave entrance over there."
Kurgash bellows, "I knew we gave you thousands of gold pieces worth of magic items for a reason!" He gives Cutter a hearty slap on the back. Cutter flies twenty feet through the air into the cave wall. His impact tears away a tangle of overhanging vines revealing a brick archway and a passage beyond.
Kurgash leaps out of the skycab, Navy SEAL style. Sploosh!
The characters assemble in front of the sea-cave. Varth reports that there is a spell on the archway. He can tell that it is some kind of compulsion enchantment. He launches at it with a pile of Voracious Dispellings until he kills it. Lungpuncture takes note of the fact that there is water between the skycab and the archway, so he casts Fly and drifts in, undrowned.
Varth and Lungpuncture fly. Graf walks on the bottom. Everyone else swims, or dogpaddles.
Varth drifts down the corridor until Lungpuncture yells, "Stop! You're about to fly into a cluster of assassin vines!"
Cutter squeaks out, "I can't look! I can't look!"
The plants in the area all come alive, but Graf manages to evade them. The characters are amazed, because they've still got residual memories of everyone getting crushed to death by assassin vines in the last campaign.
Varth backs up and blasts away, screaming "Die, freakin' plant critter! Die!" He zaps a vine. Grenville helps out by adding on a Scorching Ray, learning in the process that the assassin vines are surprisingly fire-resistant.
Kurgash helpfully explains, "They're succulent!"
Lungpuncture flies right in among the assassin vines. Kurgash exults, "Watch! Now they're going to draw and quarter Doc!" Sadly, he's wrong. The vines are harmless to Lungpuncture. They're harmless to Kurgash, too. But Kurgash is not harmless to the vines: he severs two of them. It doesn't take long before the assassin vine has been converted into foul-smelling mulch.
The characters enter a huge chamber, flooded ten feet deep. Cracked buttresses support the ceiling. Graf sees a giant monstrosity swimming around in the water. The thing looks like a floating mass of carrion, shark-shaped but apparently sewn together from all kinds of other things.
Grenville asks, "Whaddaya think about me turning Cutter into a large shark?"
Graf points out, "Did I forget to mention that this thing is covered in toothy mouths?"
Grenville gets out his wand and announces, "Cutter! You're Invisible!" Cutter becomes Invisible. Grenville turns himself Invisible as well.
Graf thunders forward to engage the creature. It's teeth graze across his armored hide. He stabs back. Kurgash joins him, and together they stab and chop at the thing's undead bits.
Varth can see the thing only as a shadow under the water, but that's enough for him. He lashes out with an Eldritch Blast, singeing the critter.
The creature lashes out with tentacles, but Kurgash, Graf and Lungpuncture evade. Varth sends two more Maximized Eldritch Blasts its way. He reminds the others, "I'm the only one who has been doing consistent damage to this thing!"
Kurgash cannot allow a comment like that to stand. He flings himself at the creature, chopping bits of decaying flesh and corroded bone away from its carcass. Varth looks down into the cloudy water and asks, "Is anyone else hungry for hot dogs?"
Lungpuncture manages to hack the thing into its final pieces.
Cutter walks the floor, looking for loot. He finds none. Nobody is surprised: patchwork zombie fish-things have little use for currency.
Going further into the tunnel, the ceiling drops further so there is only five feet of air above the water. And then the tunnel is blocked by a rusted iron gate. Kurgash proceeds to smash it to pieces. Graf points out, "Well, I bet everything within two miles heard that."
Kurgash responds, "What, and they didn't hear Grenville's whale-song a moment ago?"
Varth asks, "By the way, does anyone need healing?"
Kurgash replies, "Pain don't hurt none."
Varth tells the big orc, "Then you're a fucking idiot."
Kurgash growls, "Your mouth keeps movin', boy, but the sounds doan' mean anything to me."
Lungpuncture theorizes, "I guess when he's in barbarian mode he goes from orc to redneck."
The corridor splits into two ways. The characters take the left fork. They find a chamber set out with a series of piers and a landing. The sounds of metalwork emerge from an archway beyond the landing.
The characters move inside and look around. The whole place is lousy with zombies: four working in the north under the direction of two other types of undead and eight more moving things from the workroom towards three boats tied up at the piers.
Kurgash and Graf advance under the water while Varth flies overhead. Grenville and Cutter walk along the bottom after them. Lungpuncture goes Invisible care of Grenville, then flies in with the plan of using his Undead to Death scroll to obliterate everything undead within a forty-foot radius.
Halfway in, Cutter spots more undead under the piers. Grenville uses a Message to warn the others. Lungpuncture indicates that this does nothing to make his plan unworkable.
WHOOM! Lungpuncture launches his spell and practically depopulates the docks. One of the more sophisticated surviving undead goggles, "What the fuck just happened, man? And where did he come from?"
Varth speaks for the various victims of Lungpuncture's spell when he notes, "I was supposed to be some kind of cool undead, but I got fucked anyway."
Lungpuncture stacks onto the effect by turning the remaining zombies. Three more zombies crumble to the ground, returning to the dust.
It is at this point that the submerged undead swim out with their webbed hands and their open shark-like mouths. Grenville gasps, "Damn, they're fast. Thank goodness I'm still Invisible or I would have just been gang-rushed like Kurgash."
The undeads tear into Kurgash, who finds himself called upon to make several Fortitude saves. He shrieks in rage and grows huge! HUGE! The undeads feel his wrath.
Graf slashes at a nearby undead with his blade. Heroic though he might be, he still seems half-hearted compared to Kurgash.
Lungpuncture flies out over the water and attempts another turning. He manages to chase one undead away; it flees along a path that lets Kurgash take an attack of opportunity as it swims past.
Varth notices that there's nothing left alive up on the pier, so he submerges and punches an Eldritch Blast-sized hole through the undead Kurgash just chopped at. The creature flops, then ceases moving.
Kurgash and Graf keep on working the crowd, lopping bits and pieces off sharky undeads. Lungpuncture helps out by finishing off one of them. Kurgash finishes the last.
The characters investigate the crates the zombies were moving. They turn out to contain bodies, skeletons and various body parts. Grenville complains, "Why is it that we always seem to break up the lamest smuggling operations?"
The characters examine their options. There is the big gateway to the east, a five-foot high platform on the south quay, and a door in a nearby wall. Kurgash howls, "I still got some rage going! I smash that down!"
The shattered door leads into a room walled in polished marble and furnished with various pieces of stylish and expensive furniture. Various nice bits of clothing and fashion are tastefully displayed upon mannequins around the room, but all of the mannequins are missing body parts. The whole place screams "serial killer hideout".
The characters' gaze travels quickly to the locked chest against the wall, except for Kurgash, who has eyes only for the undead creature and his two shark-tooth ghast bodyguards. Kurgash gets surprise. He howls, "You!" and storms in to open up the lead undead thing's breastbone.
Graf piles in after Kurgash, exulting, "Woohoo! No more half damage!" He swings his armblade. Grenville, Cutter, Varth and Lungpuncture pile in afterwards. Kurgash executes the lead undead; body parts fly over the nice décor. And then his rage runs out. He flops to the floor and gasps, "Ahhh... I feel tired..."
Varth takes out the last ghast with his Eldritch Blast, then starts asking important questions like, "Is this place full of valuables?" It turns out that one of the jackets has silver and jade buttons, and one of them is missing.
Cutter is able to open the locked chest. Varth is able to see various magical objects on the lead undead's body. The undead leader was carrying:
The chest contains a collection of really expensive outfits. Grenville and Varth are in heaven: most of them are designed for a royal court. Varth picks out the ones in silver and black. Grenville only has eyes for the valuable collection of masks and wigs. Everyone else admires the furniture.
Grenville and Varth quickly confer on the question of how much a Type II Bag of Holding can hold. The answer is five hundred pounds, enough to accommodate the entire wardrobe. They stuff everything inside.
Cutter sneaks up the right path. He finds a room dominated by a long U-shaped table. A dozen workers hunched over papers, quills and ink. Some of them are sewing leaves together. All of them are undead. The foreman makes a 27 Spot roll and sees Cutter. He yells, "There's a human! Go get it!" The undead workers shamble after him.
Cutter runs for it with twelve zombie scriveners shambling after him.
Varth is more amazed by what the zombies had been doing a moment before than by the fact that Cutter is in mortal danger. He exclaims, "You can get zombies to transcribe texts? Wait, no you can't! They must be doing something different!"
Kurgash notices Cutter coming down the corridor and grins. He brings out his axe. "These guys must be breaking some kind of labor laws. House Sivis must be avenged!" He storms through the zombie scriveners like a knife through snot. Everyone else helps. Graf demonstrates that his armblade is more than sufficient to cut a zombie in two.
Varth flies up and evaporates a ghoul with a Maximized Eldritch Blast.
Kurgash starts to sing as he works through the zombies, "I've been working on the raaaail-road!" He cuts down three more zombies.
Grenville manages to burn down another ghoul with a Scorching Ray scroll. He feels very proud of himself.
Cutter Gerald manages to shoot down the last, heavily-wounded zombie with his crossbow. He feels indescribably proud of himself.
Kurgash boasts, "I offed almost eight zombies. Why's nobody congratulating me?"
Varth checks out the scrivening room. He finds nothing worth the name of treasure: the zombie scriveners were producing serviceable work, but nothing artistic or really valuable.
The session ends with the characters lumbering back up from the flooded mansion. Experience awards for this session will be given out next time, as the adventure isn't quite done yet.