The characters in this session were:
- Alabastor Quan, a gnome rogue-turned-illusionist and failed circus ringmaster; wielder of a cursed dagger and member of the Ravenswing Thieves’ Guild.
- Armand Percival Reginald Francois Eustace de la Marche III, a suspiciously pale, apparently human noble and sorcerer, and certainly not a ghoul (how dare such a thing be suggested).
- Caulis, a homunculus warlock liberated from its master; has made a pact with certain Faerie Powers.
- Cephalus T. Murkwater, a dagonian barrister and monk, specializing in martial arts and magical labour law.
- Comet the Unlucky, waspkin ranger, a dreamer and an idealist, longing for the restoration of the Elder Trees and the liberation of his people. Loathes the Harvester’s Guild, parasites and destroyers.
- An ancient and enigmatic Lengian cleric of the Mother of Spiders, name unknown. She wears bulky ecclesiastical garments covering an uncertain number of limbs and goes by “Sister.”
XP Awarded: 1200 XP
As the last sepia vapour cleared, the coughing, flabbergasted party realized they had been well and truly robbed. The precious obejcts they’d auctioned off at the Queen of Lost Souls were gone – stolen, according to Captain Nodus, by the “Cuttlethieves.”
Both Miri and Garvin had been poisoned, knocked unconscious by darts used by the thieves before they made their escape.
Cephalus, meanwhile, had tackled one of the thieves, subduing him. The thief – a wiry young man clad in shifting, chameleonic armour made from some sort of squid-skin, was partially transfroming, his limbs spasming into tentacles, eyes bloating into cephalopodic orbs before receding.
“Don’t struggle,” Cephalus urged, tightening his grip. “You’re surrounded.”
The thief thrashed a moment longer, then was still. The conscious party-members, dazed by uninjured, gathered round the captive burglar. Guests, meanwhile, were picking themselves up and making demands for the items they’d purchased. Alabastor calmly reassured them the items would be recovered, darting nervous glances back at the party.
“Where have you taken our belongings?” Armand demanded imperiously, staring down at the captive burglar.
The thief remained stubbornly silent.
“I don’t have time for this nonesense,” Armand proclaimed. “Hold him down.”
Cephalus obliged, and Armand uncapped a mysterious phial of liquid – some alchemical extraction from the sorcerer’s greenhouse. As the dagonian held open the thief’s mouth, Armand poured the contents in. The thief spluttered and coughed, and suddenly his ear swelled up to three times its normal size.
“Gods above and below!” the man shrieked. “What have you done to me?”
“Ear-swelling is the first symptom of a very fatal poison,” Armand lied. “Cooperate, and I will give you the antidote.” He nodded to Sister, who quietly invoked a Zone of Truth.
“Fine! Fine!” the thief blubbered. “I’ll help you, damn you.”
“Your name?” Sister asked.
“Wickham,” the thief replied. “Of the Cuttlethieves. Fry rank – I’m a new initiate.”
“Once again,” Armand repeated. “Where are our belongings?”
“I can take you to your stuff… it’ll be at the headquarters. It’s hidden in Finfolkaheem.”
Captain John “Deathtail” Winters, one of the auctioneers, hissed. “That den of horrors?” the ratfolk Captain chirped. “An ill-favouered labyrinth, infested with scum of the vilest sort.”
“Why, what’s wrong with this place?” Caulis asked.
“Finfolkaheem is all that remains of the underwater homeland of the finfolk,” Nodus explained. “Swallowed by Genial Jack to end their slaving depredations.”
“The Whaleguard have raided Finfolkaheem on multiple occasions,” Deathtail proclaimed. “The finfolk have their flippers in everything – illegal smuggling, humanoid-trafficking operations, murder-for-hire. No surprise they’d harbour the Cuttlethieves.”
“Perhaps you’d care to join us?” Alabastor suggested to the ratfolk privateer. “You serve Jack – you could help us rid him of these brigands.”
“It would be my honour,” Deathtail chittered.
“Should we just wait for the Whaleguard?” Sister asked.
“Your belongings will be gone by then,” Wickham said, still under magical compulsion and threat of death. “We have a fence lined up. If you want them back… we’d best go now.”
“Captain Nodus, I trust you will alert the Whaleguard of this information,” Deathtail said. “I shall accompany the party to the hideout and retrieve the stolen goods.”
Nodus assented, and the party made haste; Comet noticed a trail of blood from one of the burglars, struck by one of Miri’s magic missiles, and followed this surreptitiously, to make sure that Wickham was leading them truthfully. After Sister scrawled a door using Portal Chalk, the group hurried through several of Jack’s smaller stomachs before arriving at Finfolkaheem.
Entering the pyloric stomach, the air changed, becoming colder, sharper. The smell of ancient dust and a strong waft of stomach acid rose to meet the party. The district was built atop and around a series of pallid stone monoliths that loomed like many-eyes ghosts staring up from below, twisting ramps and walkways linking them. The newer structures accreted to these cyclopean towers were made from the same flotsam and jetsam as the rest of Inner Jackburg, but here something about their construction was different, the angles subtly off, the bridges too crooked, the doors and windows askew. Therewere snarls of shantytown that the adventurers’ eyes slide off, making them dizzy.
“This way,” Wickham indicated, clutching his ear.
“So who are you Cuttlethieves, anyway?” Alabastor asked, using theives’ cant to communicate surreptitiously.
“We’re the elite of the elite here in Jackburg,” Wickham said, pride creeping into his voice. “Not like the Mischief or the Pincers or the Entrail Gangs. We steal only prized objects for discerning collectors.”
“What’s with the squid stuff?”
“When we’re initiated we’re… injected,” Wickham explained, using a series of subtle hand gestures. “Weremollusc blood. It manifests differently for each person. The Soft One has many forms…”
“Soft One?” Alabastor made the signs carefully.
“The Progenitor. An ancient god – some say the eldest god. A god of secrets and origins. All living things are its descendents.”
“Interesting… I’m also a member of a thieves’ guild, as you might imagine from the cant…”
“Is there no honour among thieves? Perhaps some arrangement can be made…”
“We’ll see. No promises. Stick with us for now and I’ll speak to my companions.”
The party came to what seemed a dead-end alleyway, lined with gigantic barnacles.
“It’s there,” Wickham said, pointing to one of the barnacles. Cephalus jumped up to it, prying open the scuta to reveal a passage beyond. As the party prepared to enter the tunnel, noise at the alley’s mouth made them turn.
A cluster of scaly, serpentine creatures like monstrous eels blocked the alley’s exit, their puckered mouths drooling, piscine eyes wide and hungry.
“Finfolk!” Deathtail snarled. “Back, you scoundrels. I am a privateer in the service of the Whaleguard, authorized to wield deadly force in Jackburg’s defense.”
The hissing, slithering things made a rasping sound like a wet chuckle and advanced, hefting nets and tridents.
“These fools look like they have strong backs,” one of the finfolk hissed in the Aklo tongue. “They will command a hgh price.”
“I think not,” Armand asserted, freeing his hands from his sleeves.
Captain Deathtail. Illustration by Caulis’ player, Bronwyn McIvor.
Cephalus, meanwhile, was already moving, Captain Deathtail beside him with sword drawn. The two warriors struck with fists, staff, and rapier at the finfolk, driving them back; Alabastor hurled an agonizing blast, producing a chorus of anguished hissing. The finfolk counterattacked, prodding those at the front lines with javelins and trindents, their barbs glistening with poison; the two warriors fell unconscious as the powerful poison began its work, and nets were hurled atop the pair. Comet set his dancing sword, possessed by Mademoiselle Sanguinaire, upon the eel-creatures, and it slashed a bloody swathe. Sister, stepping forward, spoke a prayer to the Mother of Spiders and struck with an open hand, touching one of the finfolk. Instantly the creature began dissolving, spider venom liquefying its flesh and organs to leave behind a fishy-smelling stain. Caulis, rifling through its pack, produced a runic stone from Troll Country, containing a bound thunder elemental. This the homunculus called upon, and the entity manifested with a rumbling groan, making dust shift and eardrums bleed. The finfolk, terrified, scattered in panic as the being of sound and puissance tore into them, crumpling skulls and pulverizing brains.
Sister’s Strike. Illustration by Caulis’ player, Bronwyn McIvor.
Battered but alive, the party took stock, Sister quickly administering healing spiders from her sleeves to sew up the party’s wounds. It was only after they had recovered that they realized Wickham had fled in the chaos.
“Damn. There goes our guide,” Cephalus muttered as a curative spider sewed up a cut on his forehead, courtesy of a finfolk trident.
Crawling through the secret door in the hollowed-out barnacle, the party entered the hideout of the Cuttlethieves.
A long stone corridor stretched ahead, its walls bristling with spiky masses of coral like vibrant pink and purple antlers. Part way along the corridor the tunnel appeared to be flooded, a sheer wall of water blocking the path forward.
“Most intriguing,” Armand said, eyeing the water. “I suspect it’s an undine – a water elemental. Bound to service as a kind of guardian.”
“I have an idea,” Cephalus said, thinking to his weeks of study at the underwater monastery at the river-bottom along the banks of Croakmarsh, where squamous martial artists taught him methods of manipulating water in all its forms. The dagonian barrister-monk stepped forwards, and the water flowed to meet him; with a muscular gesture and a focusing of his energy, Cephalus lashed out, and instantly the animate wave was frozen, crystallizing into the semblance of a shark.
Ice Shark. Illustration by Caulis’ player, Bronwyn McIvor.
The outer defense disarmed, the party carefully threaded their way past the shark-sculpture – the undine, frozen, seemed to eye them angrily – and the coral spikes, passing into a chamber beyond.
The entire floor of the room was covered in an ancient-looking mosaic depicting a many-tentacled sea-monster somewhat resembling a cuttlefish, though monstrous and twisted, dwarfing a representation of an underwater city whose towers were snared in some of its tendrils. On the walls, ornate sculpted tentacles held orbs containing luminous jellyfish. Several doors adjoined the room.
Armand looked suspiciously at the floor, and took a tentative step. Instantly, the mosaic began to move, the image shifting, the sea-monster reaching out with a tentacle towards Armand’s shadow. The sorcerer hastily retreated.
“I know what to do!” Caulis said excitedly, and cast a cantrip to create the image of a painted chef on the mural, as gigantic as the sea-monster, followed by the spell Marjorie’s Marvelous Mural, learned from the hedge-witch and artist outside Delirium Castle. Instantly, the chef came alive, and began menacing the sea-monster with his cleaver, hacking at the tentacles as if to prepare calimari; the painted horror thrashed and darted deeper into the “sea,” releasing a cloud of black ink that covered the mosaic with darkness.
Chef’s Special. Illustration by Caulis’ player, Bronwyn McIvor.
“That takes care of that,” the homunculus said. The party proceeded to carefully check the various rooms, moving stealthily to avoid alerting the thieves of their infiltration. They first found a storeroom of equipment: thieves’ tools, caltrops, rope, grappling hooks, and, perhaps most intriguingly, a series of grenade-like orbs filled with sepia vapour. These they absconded with, next discovering an arsenal jam-packed with blowguns, darts, hand-crossbows, and whips. Caulis also found a multi-thonged whip, the Tentacular Scourge, with suckered tendrils for thongs; this magical weapon could restrain those it attacked. Another chamber proved to be an armoury containing colour-shifting Chromatophore Cloaks to avoid detection, which the party donned.
At a momentary loss as to where to go next, they returned to the anteroom. Alabastor searched the room carefully and discovered that one of the sculpted tentacles containing light-orbs also functioned as a lever. Instantly, the room began moving – it was an elevator, conveying them to a deeper level of the complex. As they descended, the mosiac altered, as if they were getting deeper into the sea. At the bottom, they discovered the wounded sea-monster, huddled in a corner, quite terrified. Passing through a door, the party found a plain stone corridor with a pit halfway along its length. This Comet swiftly circumvented with flight – only to discover, on attempting to land on the other side, that the pit was an illusion, and that a true pit lay concealed by a second illusion on the other side of the false pit, a monstrous sea-slug at its bottom prowling hungrily. The clever trap discerned, the party passed over the true pit with blink or misty step; Cephalus, ever the acrobat, simply leapt across.
At the end of the hall, the party discovered an alcove with numerous rags. Puzzled, they peered into the next room, and saw that its walls, floors, and ceiling were all of polished nacre, forming a shimmering mother-of-pearl mirror.
“Hmm. I have a suspicion…” Alabastor said, and blindfolded himself with one of the rags. He entered the room and then, for a brief moment, slipped the blindfold down to look at his reflection. Distorted by the twisted mirror, he saw himself made crooked and bent, contorted unnaturally; instantly he was filled with terrible pain as his bones and flesh began to strain, reconfiguring themselves to fit the terrible mirror image. Gritting his teeth, the gnome slipped the blindfold back on and returned; Sister healed him carefully.
The party heard a noise, and ducked out of sight while a Cuttlethief, blindfolded, crossed the nacre-mirrored room with practiced ease.
“We need to find our stuff,” Sister said. “Alabastor, how about that dowsing rod of yours?”
“Good idea,” the gnome replied, taking out the magical object he’d found back in the Caverns of Fear. This directed them downwards and ahead. Taking precautions, the party crossed the nacreous chamber to a door on the other side, Chromatophore Cloaks donned.
A small shrine occupied this chamber, adorned with statuettes to various sea-gods – the Sharkfather, Dagon, Jörmungandr, Tiamat, the Queen of Crabs, and many others. The largest of these idols was an unfamiliar being like a gigantic molluscoid hybrid, a grotesque combination of snail, oyster, cephalopod, and benthic sea-worm. The idol was tumoured with clumps of seaweed, barnacles, and mussels. An engraving in Aklo was set at the gastropod foot of the idol, next to a deep, black pool of water.
The engraving read: “The Soft One demands something Secret and something Stolen.”
Next to the engraving is an inkwell, quills, and parchment.
Sister, eager to try out her Gargoyle Lamp, shone the magical lantern on the statue. It stirred and shifted, animated by the lamplight.
“Who comes before me?” it rasped, its voice ancient and stony. Did the statue think itself a god?
“We are, ah, new initiates…” Sister fibbed. “What is this ritual for, exactly?”
“Write a secret upon the parchment,” the Soft One statue intoned. “Wrap a stolen object in the parchment, and place both in the pool. Then the way to the inner sanctum will be opened…”
“Seems simple enough,” Armand said.
The party hastily began scribbling down various secrets and placing objects looted from the Cuttlethieves’ own arsenal into the pool. Each time one of them performed this ritual, they saw the pool shimmer and seem to become a tunnel leading downwards, while those who had not performed it still perceived only a pool. As they finished the ritual, the door to the shrine opened, and several Cuttlethieves entered, half-transformed into their weremollusc shapes, their arms tentacular, heads those of vampire squid. One strained under the weight of a huge shell.
“Shit!” Alabastor said, firing off an agonizing blast as the party hastily began retreating down the secret shaft. Caulis hastily whipped out the runestone again, once more conjuring the thunder elemental. It growled and crackled, deafening the Cuttlethieves as the party made their escape, Armand taking care to knock the parchment and ink into the pool to slow any pursuit.
“Alright, we better move,” Alabastor said after they had descended a long ladder to a deeper tunnel. Comet went first, and soon found yet another pit trap, this one leading down a slippery chute to an oubliette filled with bones; the waspkin, fortunately, could simply fly back out. The party hopped over the triggered pit and entered an antechamber with walls lined with thick, mucilaginous slime. This Armand froze with spells, and the party swiftly investigated several doors adjoining the room. One was a map room containing a huge map of Genial Jack, along with maps of various structures within Jackburg, including the four Queens, the Mysterium Tremendum, the Fomorian Palace, the Finfolk Dungeons, several mansions in Mawtown, and, additionally, maps of Hex, Erubescence, Verdigris, Tetractys, Teratopolis, Nornhold, Hypogeum, New Ulthar, Xell, and Skein. These maps were either displayed on the walls or carefully rolled and stored in cubbyholes. Finally, there were two maps spread on a table, displaying Hex’s Museum of Magical Arts and Master Melchior’s School of Thaumaturgy & Enchantment.
With little time to spare, Alabastor again used his dowsing rod, which led them to a hatch in the floor, leading to a vertical shaft filled with water. Sister hastily cast Water Breathing on the party, furnishing them with gills (save for the already-amphibious Cephalus) – a spell courtesy of her temporary patronage of Genial Jack himself. They climbed into the shaft and began their descent, illuminating the way by magical light. At the bottom, glimmering phosphorescently in the dark, a spined, zanily coloured nudibranch squirmed, massive in size.
Comet, approaching the beast cautiously, managed to temporarily distract it while the party swam past to a chamber below. The waspkin dodged round the poisonous creature and into the chamber – an airlock.
They hurriedly activated the chamber and entered the room beyond: the Cuttlethief treasury, piled high with coins from a thousand realms and multifarious treasures, including all of the objects stolen from the party.
As the party began recovering these treasures, Sister scrawled another Portal Chalk door on the wall, and they began transporting the auctioned goods back into the Queen of Lost Souls, to the amazement and delight of those still lingering in the auction house. Meanwhile, Comet, in a desperate dash back through the previous corridors, circumvented the nudibranch once more and returned stealthily to the shrine, where he found the crumpled, broken forms of the Cuttlethieves, slain by the thunder elemental. This he returned to its runestone before returning to the treasury.
The treasures secured, the party stepped through back into the Queen of Lost Souls and erased the door behind them. The robbers had been robbed, and the party surveyed its new treasures: a deck of cards producing illusions, a wand that could detect secret doors, a trident capable of controlling fish, a cloak made from manta hide enabling tranformation into a manta ray, a snake which, when worn about the neck like a necklace, hissed translations of unknown languages into the ear of the wearer, and – as they learned upon magical examination and consultation with one of the artefact specialists at the auction house – the legendary head of Granny Midnight, a powerful item which, if a name was whispered into its ear, would utter whatever words that person was speaking, even if they were many leagues hence.
Not bad for an evening’s work.