Beholder Group - "HOW many arms??!!" - Devon's Mission Session 13
16th Sep 2019, 8:00 – 12:15pm
In-game timeline: Start of session, 1489DR, Eleasis 2nd. End of session, Eleasis 2nd.
Our Heroes stand beneath a trapdoor leading up from the sewers into Chadstone Manor, in the hope of finding the source of apparent ‘evil’ in the town, as well as to escape from the Stockade.
They head up and find themselves in a larder, which leads into a large kitchen. All the windows are shuttered from the outside, and only a small part of the kitchen seems to be used – the rest, like much of the remainder of the manor, is in a state of disrepair. As they enter the manor itself, a wave of despair, loneliness and hunger sweeps over the group. Devon, Ripley and Drogan all succumb to this and feel a sense of misery that seems to affect them in quite a negative manner.
The group decide to leave Erky tied up in the larder when they caught him trying to sneak out of the window that Drogan had opened.
Heading into the main hallway, it is obvious that this manor belongs to a mining family – the Chadstone crest is emblazoned on an old rug beneath the grand staircase, as well as in the balustrade above, on the first floor, and there is a pick axe, a hammer, a shovel and a mattock on display on pedestals around the hallway. Dwarrow decides to look under the rug – a sensible option, except where the rug is an enchanted Rug of Smothering, which immediately rises up and grapples Dwarrowsteel, holding him fast and blinding him. As the rest of the group rush in to help, Devon lands a good hit on the rug, only to find that half the damage is transferred to Dwarrowsteel! Drogan grapples the rug and pulls it off of Dwarrow, though not before it manages to strangle Dwarrow a bit more, and just as the others notice the pick axe and hammer flying towards them, joining the fray! They go for Alwaith, who was holding back from the vicious rug, and land a hefty hit on him, though he gets his own back immediately with a reaction, followed by an attack.
With an unexpected battle ahead of them, and strange combatants, Dwarrow casts Bless on three of the party, which helps Devon and Drogan attack the rug, which fails to land another grapple. The pick and hammer luckily both miss Alwaith, and he makes the most of his opportunity and takes down the pick axe. In the following round Ripley destroys the last of the rug, and Devon ensures the hammer will not fly again.
Opening the main door of the manor into the night air, Drogan throws out the ‘corpses’ of the animated objects, and the other items in the hallway which didn’t animate, just in case, before the group cautiously explore the ground floor of the manor.
They look in every room and find no one about, but do discover a dining room with four dwarven statues wearing different mining outfits – Drogan knocks the head off of one of them, just in case – a library full of books that they don’t have time to explore, a study, that does look to be used recently, and contains a drawer with some receipts from some 40 years ago from the Neverwinter Arcane Arts guild for a number of parts to some form of contraption or other. Again, the party don’t have time to look around the books in the study either. Moving swiftly on from the relatively plush lavatory beneath the stairs, the last room is a drawing room of sorts, complete with a made up but unlit fire in the grate – the room looks like it hasn’t been used in a long time.
They head upstairs, slowly and carefully. Devon checks out the larger-than-life statue of a mining dwarf on the landing, and, using his Prestidigitation, cleans up the three portrait pictures on the landing walls. These three, together with the already cleaned fourth portrait picture, seem to represent different generations of a mining family.
The group approach the first door on the landing – it is heavily bolted with a metal bar, and has repair patches all over the door. They decide to leave this for now! Heading round the landing they check out the other doors, first finding an almost empty room with a wooden pedestal on the floor, a large, concave mirror on the ceiling, a mysterious dark patch that seems to be in a rough circle on the wooden floor, and strange graffiti all over the walls – strange combinations of letters and numbers. They don’t approach anything at this time – the group are convinced this room contains a portal to another realm, and they leave well alone.
The next couple of rooms also appear empty – the first being some sort of laboratory with vials of red liquid and other lab equipment around. Dwarrow finds a lab journal which seems to list a lot of blood extractions from different races and genders etc – probably around 100 entries or so. It talks about injecting things into wretched, and injecting, or ingesting by Goldie. Most entries show complete failure, though there is the odd line indicating a different result. The next room contains various cages – large and small, open and shut, one of which contains another wretched, which Drogan quickly despatches through the bars of the cage, and a table with more cages and a large mirror on it. The party are in a rush, and spend no time looking further in this room.
The next room seems to be a bedroom, kept in very good and clean condition. The four poster bed has a clean and laid-out wedding dress on it – Drogan, without stopping to investigate, immediately cleaves it in two with his axe. There is also a cot in the room, which has a name engraved on it – “Goldie”. Inside the cot are a number of dolls, and a dead raven, which seems to be recently dead. Alwaith, being a bit weird like that, decides to remove the raven. When someone later looks in the cot again, they see another dead raven has mysteriously taken its place. Strange.
On the mantelpiece in this room, which the group spends a long time avoiding and doing other things, they eventually find it contains a sealed urn, with the inscription “My beloved Cerise” at the base, and a framed poem – “My Promise to my Beloved”.
With only one room left to look at, other than the barred room, the group are even more cautious. Devon manages to pick the lock on this locked room, and creep in quietly. He finds a sleeping dwarf on the bed in this room. The group manage to pin down the dwarf well enough to stop him attacking them when he inevitably wakes up, and the group question him in a very disorderly fashion.
Brace Chadstone, for it is he, is a pale, but very strong, dwarf. He believes the group are intruders, come to rob him. However, when the group tell him what they know about Goldie, Cerise and the experiments, Brace is confused, and wonders who they are and what they are doing there. Being pinned to the bed, he can do very little, and does cautiously answer their questions, filling in the gaps in the groups knowledge about what is going on.
It seems that Goldie was born greatly deformed, mentally and physically, possibly due to a bite Cerise had got from a Wretched while she was pregnant – it seems Brace had been dabbling in portals to other planes for some time and a Wretched had got through at one time. Cerise thought that the best thing for Goldie was to be killed, but could not bring herself to do the deed, and so called upon the Raven Queen for the mental strength to do this, and to look after Goldie’s soul on the other side. A pact was made with the Raven Queen for Goldie’s soul, but before Cerise could carry out the infanticide, Brace found them, and wrestled with Cerise, killing her in the process. Distraught, he vowed to look after their daughter from then on.
Goldie however did not get better. She developed a blood lust which Brace had to keep sated for Goldie to survive. He had vowed to do no harm, but felt this did not apply to bad people, so, after many years of trying other things (his own blood, animal blood etc), he resorted to killing local banditry and feeding them to Goldie. In the meantime he also used their blood to see if he could cure Goldie of what he thought was a disease – if he could find someone who’s blood managed to ‘cure’ a Wretched, maybe their blood would also cure Goldie. He hasn’t had much success.
The group discuss, in front of Brace, how to go about killing Goldie. This understandably somewhat riled Brace, and he struggled to stop them. Drogan tied him up with rope and the party made the decision to maybe try to talk to Goldie and see if she would willingly go (back?) to the Shadowfell, or they would kill her. Some choice. She’s never even BEEN to the Shadowfell! The group also discussed killing Brace there and then, for his crimes of killing local banditry. The irony of a group of adventurers, fresh from wiping out a goblin fortress of all its warrior inhabitants, passing judgement on someone killing bandits seemed to be lost on certain members of the party.
Leaving Brace tied up for now, they head to the barred room – Devon managed to get some keys from Brace’s bedside table (and maybe a few other items while no one was looking – you never know with Devon! Actually, correction, you ALWAYS know with Devon!). They unlock the room using one of the keys, and remove the bar. Opening the room they hold a lantern in to take a better look – the lantern is immediately extinguished by a strange gust of wind blowing across the doorway. Sending Nige in instead, he spots a metal trough under a heavily shuttered window, but the room itself bends round, so lots of the room is hidden from the doorway. As Nige lands on the trough to take a good look round, his talons scrape loudly on the metal and he hears the noise of someone, or something waking up! Ripley lit a torch, so she could see.
In a movement quicker than the group has taken in some hours, Devon dismisses Nige and Drogan closes the door, and runs off to Braces bedroom to gather some bedclothes. Why he did this was a mystery that we will never have answered, as a short while later the door is somewhat ‘snatched’ open, and standing before the group (except Drogan, who was off on the other side of the landing at this point) was Goldie Chadstone, a tall creature with many arms, all of which ended in what looked like sharp blades made of bone. Standing beneath her were three Wretched creatures. They all attacked!
The Wretched all make for Ripley, but the first, instead of launching at her, grabs her torch and extinguishes it, leaving the group in darkness, and Ripley fighting blind (Devon manages to get his magic sunglasses on). The two other wretched miss Ripley, while Devon blinds them with his Color Spray. Goldie wraps her arms around Alwaith in a gesture of seeking affection, though Alwaith doesn’t appreciate the hug, as he take significant damage, both from the blade-like arms, and a wave of fear washes over him, causing him psychic damage too. Alwaith doesn’t manage to escape before more damage is done, taking Alwaith into unconsciousness.
While Ripley is left to deal with the Wretched, two of which attach themselves to her, draining her life. She blindly fights back, but many of her blows went wide. The rest of the group focus on Goldie, damaging her, but not as much as they hoped. Goldie turned to face Devon, who had just stabbed her with a dagger, and she wraps her arms around Devon, squeezing his life slowly from him. Dwarrow heals Alwaith so he can enter the fray, and Alwaith helps out Ripley, his leaping green flame blade ensuring more then one of the creatures took damage when he hit.
As Goldie keeps Devon wrapped in her arms, she strikes out with other arms, hitting Drogan with a blade-like appendage. With the group focussed on Goldie, she takes many hits and is eventually brought down just before Devon could receive another bought of psychic damage which could have knocked him out – Dwarrow managing to smash through Goldie’s neck with his axe.
Meanwhile Ripley is suffering – one of the Wretched is dead, taken out by Dwarrow’s magical, floating dwarven axe that he manages to cast after taking down Goldie, but the other two are still attached to her, and draining her life-force, even with Dwarrow’s channel divinity managing to keep her alive for a short time. She falls, unconscious, and starts to bleed out rapidly. The Wretched remain attached, and are about to completely snuff out her life when Alwaith manages to land a hit on one, and flames leap to the other, taking both out in one blow and saving Ripley, who is brought back to consciousness by Dwarrow.
And so we leave out Heroes, exhausted from a short but tough fight in which two of them fell, and another was close to falling. Goldie Chadstone lies dead at their feet, and Drogan is in the process of cutting off all her limbs – “just in case”. The others sit, exhausted, on the bloody floor.
In-game timeline: Start of session, 1489DR, Eleasis 2nd. End of session, Eleasis 2nd.
Our Heroes stand beneath a trapdoor leading up from the sewers into Chadstone Manor, in the hope of finding the source of apparent ‘evil’ in the town, as well as to escape from the Stockade.
They head up and find themselves in a larder, which leads into a large kitchen. All the windows are shuttered from the outside, and only a small part of the kitchen seems to be used – the rest, like much of the remainder of the manor, is in a state of disrepair. As they enter the manor itself, a wave of despair, loneliness and hunger sweeps over the group. Devon, Ripley and Drogan all succumb to this and feel a sense of misery that seems to affect them in quite a negative manner.
The group decide to leave Erky tied up in the larder when they caught him trying to sneak out of the window that Drogan had opened.
Heading into the main hallway, it is obvious that this manor belongs to a mining family – the Chadstone crest is emblazoned on an old rug beneath the grand staircase, as well as in the balustrade above, on the first floor, and there is a pick axe, a hammer, a shovel and a mattock on display on pedestals around the hallway. Dwarrow decides to look under the rug – a sensible option, except where the rug is an enchanted Rug of Smothering, which immediately rises up and grapples Dwarrowsteel, holding him fast and blinding him. As the rest of the group rush in to help, Devon lands a good hit on the rug, only to find that half the damage is transferred to Dwarrowsteel! Drogan grapples the rug and pulls it off of Dwarrow, though not before it manages to strangle Dwarrow a bit more, and just as the others notice the pick axe and hammer flying towards them, joining the fray! They go for Alwaith, who was holding back from the vicious rug, and land a hefty hit on him, though he gets his own back immediately with a reaction, followed by an attack.
With an unexpected battle ahead of them, and strange combatants, Dwarrow casts Bless on three of the party, which helps Devon and Drogan attack the rug, which fails to land another grapple. The pick and hammer luckily both miss Alwaith, and he makes the most of his opportunity and takes down the pick axe. In the following round Ripley destroys the last of the rug, and Devon ensures the hammer will not fly again.
Opening the main door of the manor into the night air, Drogan throws out the ‘corpses’ of the animated objects, and the other items in the hallway which didn’t animate, just in case, before the group cautiously explore the ground floor of the manor.
They look in every room and find no one about, but do discover a dining room with four dwarven statues wearing different mining outfits – Drogan knocks the head off of one of them, just in case – a library full of books that they don’t have time to explore, a study, that does look to be used recently, and contains a drawer with some receipts from some 40 years ago from the Neverwinter Arcane Arts guild for a number of parts to some form of contraption or other. Again, the party don’t have time to look around the books in the study either. Moving swiftly on from the relatively plush lavatory beneath the stairs, the last room is a drawing room of sorts, complete with a made up but unlit fire in the grate – the room looks like it hasn’t been used in a long time.
They head upstairs, slowly and carefully. Devon checks out the larger-than-life statue of a mining dwarf on the landing, and, using his Prestidigitation, cleans up the three portrait pictures on the landing walls. These three, together with the already cleaned fourth portrait picture, seem to represent different generations of a mining family.
The group approach the first door on the landing – it is heavily bolted with a metal bar, and has repair patches all over the door. They decide to leave this for now! Heading round the landing they check out the other doors, first finding an almost empty room with a wooden pedestal on the floor, a large, concave mirror on the ceiling, a mysterious dark patch that seems to be in a rough circle on the wooden floor, and strange graffiti all over the walls – strange combinations of letters and numbers. They don’t approach anything at this time – the group are convinced this room contains a portal to another realm, and they leave well alone.
The next couple of rooms also appear empty – the first being some sort of laboratory with vials of red liquid and other lab equipment around. Dwarrow finds a lab journal which seems to list a lot of blood extractions from different races and genders etc – probably around 100 entries or so. It talks about injecting things into wretched, and injecting, or ingesting by Goldie. Most entries show complete failure, though there is the odd line indicating a different result. The next room contains various cages – large and small, open and shut, one of which contains another wretched, which Drogan quickly despatches through the bars of the cage, and a table with more cages and a large mirror on it. The party are in a rush, and spend no time looking further in this room.
The next room seems to be a bedroom, kept in very good and clean condition. The four poster bed has a clean and laid-out wedding dress on it – Drogan, without stopping to investigate, immediately cleaves it in two with his axe. There is also a cot in the room, which has a name engraved on it – “Goldie”. Inside the cot are a number of dolls, and a dead raven, which seems to be recently dead. Alwaith, being a bit weird like that, decides to remove the raven. When someone later looks in the cot again, they see another dead raven has mysteriously taken its place. Strange.
On the mantelpiece in this room, which the group spends a long time avoiding and doing other things, they eventually find it contains a sealed urn, with the inscription “My beloved Cerise” at the base, and a framed poem – “My Promise to my Beloved”.
With only one room left to look at, other than the barred room, the group are even more cautious. Devon manages to pick the lock on this locked room, and creep in quietly. He finds a sleeping dwarf on the bed in this room. The group manage to pin down the dwarf well enough to stop him attacking them when he inevitably wakes up, and the group question him in a very disorderly fashion.
Brace Chadstone, for it is he, is a pale, but very strong, dwarf. He believes the group are intruders, come to rob him. However, when the group tell him what they know about Goldie, Cerise and the experiments, Brace is confused, and wonders who they are and what they are doing there. Being pinned to the bed, he can do very little, and does cautiously answer their questions, filling in the gaps in the groups knowledge about what is going on.
It seems that Goldie was born greatly deformed, mentally and physically, possibly due to a bite Cerise had got from a Wretched while she was pregnant – it seems Brace had been dabbling in portals to other planes for some time and a Wretched had got through at one time. Cerise thought that the best thing for Goldie was to be killed, but could not bring herself to do the deed, and so called upon the Raven Queen for the mental strength to do this, and to look after Goldie’s soul on the other side. A pact was made with the Raven Queen for Goldie’s soul, but before Cerise could carry out the infanticide, Brace found them, and wrestled with Cerise, killing her in the process. Distraught, he vowed to look after their daughter from then on.
Goldie however did not get better. She developed a blood lust which Brace had to keep sated for Goldie to survive. He had vowed to do no harm, but felt this did not apply to bad people, so, after many years of trying other things (his own blood, animal blood etc), he resorted to killing local banditry and feeding them to Goldie. In the meantime he also used their blood to see if he could cure Goldie of what he thought was a disease – if he could find someone who’s blood managed to ‘cure’ a Wretched, maybe their blood would also cure Goldie. He hasn’t had much success.
The group discuss, in front of Brace, how to go about killing Goldie. This understandably somewhat riled Brace, and he struggled to stop them. Drogan tied him up with rope and the party made the decision to maybe try to talk to Goldie and see if she would willingly go (back?) to the Shadowfell, or they would kill her. Some choice. She’s never even BEEN to the Shadowfell! The group also discussed killing Brace there and then, for his crimes of killing local banditry. The irony of a group of adventurers, fresh from wiping out a goblin fortress of all its warrior inhabitants, passing judgement on someone killing bandits seemed to be lost on certain members of the party.
Leaving Brace tied up for now, they head to the barred room – Devon managed to get some keys from Brace’s bedside table (and maybe a few other items while no one was looking – you never know with Devon! Actually, correction, you ALWAYS know with Devon!). They unlock the room using one of the keys, and remove the bar. Opening the room they hold a lantern in to take a better look – the lantern is immediately extinguished by a strange gust of wind blowing across the doorway. Sending Nige in instead, he spots a metal trough under a heavily shuttered window, but the room itself bends round, so lots of the room is hidden from the doorway. As Nige lands on the trough to take a good look round, his talons scrape loudly on the metal and he hears the noise of someone, or something waking up! Ripley lit a torch, so she could see.
In a movement quicker than the group has taken in some hours, Devon dismisses Nige and Drogan closes the door, and runs off to Braces bedroom to gather some bedclothes. Why he did this was a mystery that we will never have answered, as a short while later the door is somewhat ‘snatched’ open, and standing before the group (except Drogan, who was off on the other side of the landing at this point) was Goldie Chadstone, a tall creature with many arms, all of which ended in what looked like sharp blades made of bone. Standing beneath her were three Wretched creatures. They all attacked!
The Wretched all make for Ripley, but the first, instead of launching at her, grabs her torch and extinguishes it, leaving the group in darkness, and Ripley fighting blind (Devon manages to get his magic sunglasses on). The two other wretched miss Ripley, while Devon blinds them with his Color Spray. Goldie wraps her arms around Alwaith in a gesture of seeking affection, though Alwaith doesn’t appreciate the hug, as he take significant damage, both from the blade-like arms, and a wave of fear washes over him, causing him psychic damage too. Alwaith doesn’t manage to escape before more damage is done, taking Alwaith into unconsciousness.
While Ripley is left to deal with the Wretched, two of which attach themselves to her, draining her life. She blindly fights back, but many of her blows went wide. The rest of the group focus on Goldie, damaging her, but not as much as they hoped. Goldie turned to face Devon, who had just stabbed her with a dagger, and she wraps her arms around Devon, squeezing his life slowly from him. Dwarrow heals Alwaith so he can enter the fray, and Alwaith helps out Ripley, his leaping green flame blade ensuring more then one of the creatures took damage when he hit.
As Goldie keeps Devon wrapped in her arms, she strikes out with other arms, hitting Drogan with a blade-like appendage. With the group focussed on Goldie, she takes many hits and is eventually brought down just before Devon could receive another bought of psychic damage which could have knocked him out – Dwarrow managing to smash through Goldie’s neck with his axe.
Meanwhile Ripley is suffering – one of the Wretched is dead, taken out by Dwarrow’s magical, floating dwarven axe that he manages to cast after taking down Goldie, but the other two are still attached to her, and draining her life-force, even with Dwarrow’s channel divinity managing to keep her alive for a short time. She falls, unconscious, and starts to bleed out rapidly. The Wretched remain attached, and are about to completely snuff out her life when Alwaith manages to land a hit on one, and flames leap to the other, taking both out in one blow and saving Ripley, who is brought back to consciousness by Dwarrow.
And so we leave out Heroes, exhausted from a short but tough fight in which two of them fell, and another was close to falling. Goldie Chadstone lies dead at their feet, and Drogan is in the process of cutting off all her limbs – “just in case”. The others sit, exhausted, on the bloody floor.