The characters in this session were:
- Alabastor Quan, a gnome rogue-turned-warlock and failed circus ringmaster; wielder of a cursed dagger and member of the Ravenswing Thieves’ Guild.
- Caulis, a homunculus warlock liberated from its master; has made a pact with certain Faerie Powers.
- 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.
- Miri, trollblood wizard, plucked from Mount Shudder and raised amongst Hex’s arcane elites. A recent graduate of Fiend’s College.
- 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.”
- Yam, an eccentric gnome illusionist and local graduate student at Umbral University. Yam cares little for money. Yam is curious. Yam is Yam.
XP Awarded: 1000 XP
The party reeled in the wake of the revelations the demonic assassin they’d subdued had exposed, combined with the intelligence gleaned from the withered lips of the head of Granny Midnight. It seemed possible that Silas Thamiel himself, a member of the Hexad Council, might have dispatched Gobble and Slake to kill the party, directly after seeming to support their efforts to uncover whatever sinister conspiracy was seeking Hex’s destruction. All was not what it seemed.
Comet and Alabastor suggested that the Variegated Company speak to Master Melchior, their frequent employer. After much discussion, it was so resolved, though Armand remained behind to rest and recuperate his spells. Sister scrawled a chalk portal on the wall in case they needed a swift escape, and the group headed east from Armand’s townhouse to the school. They talked their way past the griffin guards and headed up to Melchior’s study; the archwizard and brain-in-a-jar was busy performing various arcane calculations, telepathically scrawling formulae on a chalkboard and considering them with his mechanical eyes.
“Ah, my Organon-hunters… how goes the search?” The ancient enchanter asked, conjuring an illusory version of himself to converse with the party.
The group explained the situation carefully. Melchior tapped his illusory fingers against his illusory lips, pondering.
“If we are speaking of some kind of mind control – someone affecting Silas magically – they must be operating at a fairly close range,” he said. “On the other hand, we might be dealing with something else: a case of demoniac or spectral possession.”
“Ghosts?” Alabastor said, quizzically.
“Uh, there’s no such thing as ghosts,” Yam said.
“What are you talking about?” Miri interjected. “Haven’t you met ghosts before? They’re all over the place.”
“Nah. Those are just complicated illusions.”
Melchior chuckled. “Yam, your eccentricity is charming, as ever. Whatever you call them, the entities that some have described as ‘ghosts’ might well be responsible…”
Caulis frowned. It had sent its familiar, the pseudodragon Eleyin, to keep a watch around the school, in case some other assailant approached; something had flown past Eleyin in the darkness.
Suddenly, there was a scratching at the window. Alabastor went to investigate, to discover a tiny owl pecking and clawing at the pane, as if trying to get in. Curious, the gnome complied.
“Snuff.” Illustration by Bronwyn McIvor.
The owl hopped into the study and onto Melchior’s brain-tank. Its body was, upon closer inspection, stuffed – it was embalmed, a taxidermy creature. Abruptly, the creature chirped in a girlish voice which everyone recognized as that of the lich Valentina Nettlecrave:
“Ah, here you are. This little fellow is Snuff, my familiar. I wanted the opportunity to talk to you privately, but for someone in my position, that can be difficult.” Snuff bowed to Melchior’s illusion. “Good evening, Melchior.”
“A pleasure as always, Valentina,” Melchior said, his illusion nodding. “I believe you are acquainted with the Variegated Company?”
“Indeed. It was them I am seeking – my movements are watched. Were I to meet with you physically, it would attract undue attention. But Snuff here can act as a line of communication.”
“Has Silas been acting… strangely?” Sister asked. “We have some reason to suspect he may have been behind an attempt on our lives.” She quickly explained the circumstances of the attack, while remaining vague as to their use of the head of Granny Midnight to spy on the Council.
“I have lived in Hex for eight centuries,” Snuff chirped in Valentina’s voice. “Many believe me addled. Senile. Paranoid. But your news only confirms my worst suspicions. After the meeting of the Council, I was greatly disturbed. It is unlike Arabella to make an argument for religious persecution, however rational. Perhaps more worrisome, Silas’ reluctance to involve the Warders directly strikes me as deeply out of character. No offense, but they are trained professionals, and you are merely gifted amateurs. Why then would he entrust this task to you? I suspect he knows that if he alerted the Warders to the conspiracy, they would find out something he does not want them to. Even so, the Warders are in in Silas’s pocket, not mine. I do not know who else on the Council can be trusted. But I do know that whoever is behind these attacks on Hex is cunning. I am sure they have other plans in motion. So far we have been able to defuse each attack before it became cataclysmic. We have been lucky. But if we are to stop these attacks, we must act, rather than simply reacting.”
“There was that note,” Sister said. “That Eleyin intercepted. It might tell us their next move.”
“Right,” Caulis replied. “It said they were searching for the Pneumanomicon.”
Melchior looked up. “The Book of Ghosts… yes.” He said. “As my notes indicate, it should be located in the Catacombs beneath the Gilded Graveyard, in the tomb of Genevieve Chancel.”
“I suggest you head to the Catacombs at once,” Valentina said through Snuff. “With the conspiracy unraveling, they may renew their search for the book. I will send Snuff with you, to act as my eyes and ears – I knew Genevieve while she lived, though we fell out before her death. Still, I may be able to assist you.”
“I can provide transportation,” Melchior said, and went to the window. He proceeded to whistle intricately.
“This may also be helpful,” Valentina said through her familiar. Snuff began making horrid retching noises, and proceeded to vomit up a small phial of silvery liquid. Alabastor caught it and stowed it in his waistcoat. “It’s a potion of animate dead – pour this on the remains of any creature you find and they’ll reanimate.”
Moments later, there was a sound of commotion below. The griffin gate-guards had assembled in the courtyard with a large skycarriage, ready to convey the party by air to the Gilded Graveyard on the other side of the city. The party made haste, bustling into the vehicle, which was magically enlarged extradimensionally within, to provide ample space for all six, plus Snuff and Eleyin.
The district of Grey Hook was the most luxurious of south Hex: an ornate neighbourhood, all greys and whites and blacks and vivid reds, its buildings of marble and obsidian and polished stone, some sculpted to look like bone, others actually fashioned in part from the skeletons of giant beasts. Neo-Cranialist structures resembling gigantic gloomy faces glowered down at passersby. The Gilded Graveyard sprawled in the extreme south corner of the district and of the cityitself: a rambling cemetery with thousands of graves. The eastern parts were a bit better tended than the west, which were on the shabby side. Time was that the Gilded Graveyard was the preferred burial place for the city’s rich elites, but the decay of the surrounding districts – the Midden, Suckletown, Shambleside – had scared many away, leading to a craze for private plots outside the city and “domestic tombs” in the homes of the wealthy. Now, the Graveyard was often the haunt of tomb-robbers and petty crooks.
The party departed the carriage and sought out an entrance to the Catacombs, noting graffiti on nearby gravetstones. They settled on the western entrance of the crypts. Down a flight of stone steps was a small antechamber with three branching hallways. Ornaments fashioned from human bones adorned the walls, morbid decorations from Hex’s barbaric past. Graffiti had been scrawled beside the doorways. One had a skull with pigtails, the words “GRAVEYARD GIRLS RULE, BLIGHTBOYS DROOL” painted beneath it. Another had a beetle-like symbol painted beside it. A third had pictograms of what look like toadstools or fungus. In the centre of the room was a black, bubbling fountain in the shape of a serpent, dark water spilling from its stony jaws.
“Genevieve’s tomb is on the sixth level,” Valentina said through Snuff. “Best look for a way down.”
Comet scouted to the south, discovering a locked stone door. He picked it and listened, hearing a chittering noise within. He opened the door and crack and looked within to see a pile of corpses exhumed from the catacombs and graveyard, heaped in a chamber like discarded dolls. Laid within their exposed chest cavities were glistening white eggs; some had hatched, and voracious larvae – fat, yellow creatures the length of a human arm – were busy devouring them. Three huge black and yellow beetles tended to the gruesome brood, occasionally picking off one of their own young and devouring it.
Shuddering, Comet crept stealthily back to the party. They resolved to head east instead, only to discover a ghoul slumped against one wall, his throat cut, his clothes stripped, blood drying beneath him. Feasting upon one of the ghoul’s hands – chewing at its dead fingers – was a swollen yellow-black beetle the size of a large dog.
Disgusted, the party let loose with a blaze of spellcraft, wands and fingertips blazing. The creature barely had time to register their presence before it was reduced to a yellowish smear on the flagstone floor.
The ghoul’s corpse proved to have a key with a spiked skull symbol – one that Yam recognized as the symbol of a famous gnome bard, Damien Bloodsun.
They proceeded further into the tunnels, heading south to discover the reason for the fungus symbol they’d glimpsed earlier, entering a chamber whose walls were covered in a thin layer of red fungus, spreading out from a morass of bones strewn across the floor in a crimson heap. Caulis identified this as Woundwort – a hideous parasitic growth that enters the body through open wounds and spreads beneath the skin, causing limbs, organs, and other extremities to detach and spread the fungus to other surfaces, moving with an uncanny life of their own.
“I’m glad Armand isn’t here,” Yam quipped. “He’d be scraping this stuff up, I’m sure.”
Venturing carefully past the Woundwort – the party was uninjured, and thus safe – they found a strangely stained corridor. Beneath the blackish smears could be seen an ornate series of tiles bearing pictograms of snakes, wolves, spiders, spotted frogs, octopi, bears, owls, scorpions, fish, and lions.
“A puzzle,” Miri said. “I’d bet anything some of these are trapped.”
“It must be something to do with the order we depress them…” Sister said.
“Could it be a food chain?” Alabastor mused. “Lions and bears near the top, spiders near the bottom?”
“Hmm. Some of these animals are poisonous,” Comet said. “It could be we should avoid those.”
“Miri, see if you can throw me across,” Yam said. “Let’s just skip this stupid trap.”
“Alright, if you’re sure,” the brawny trollblood wizard said, and tossed the gnome down the corridor. Yam landed on an octopus-tile, released a cloud of vapour, but the gnome managed to avoid breathing in any of the fume.
“Well, that didn’t work,” they said. “What now?”
“Stay there, Yam, I’m going to try something,” Sister said, donning her gasmask and stepped onto a spider-tile. Instantly, there was another puff of gas which flooded the corridor, and now both Yam and Sister were poisoned, coughing and spluttering as their lungs and skin burned. Miri stepped onto a scorpion-tile, to indentical results.
“Alright, let’s try Comet’s way,” she said, between ragged coughs. The party now crossed the corridor by stepping only on the non-poisonous animals: wolves, bears, lions, owls. There was some argument about fish, so these were also avoided, but the group managed to bypass the rest of the traps.
Pressing on, the party found themselves in a long hall lined with niches, each containing a stone pedestal on which was displayed a plaster mask taken from the face of famous archwizards of Hex, including Vincent Nettlecrave (Valentina’s father), Phillipa Grimgrove, Zenobia Soulswell (mother of Emperor Xavier Souslwell), Numerian the Narcomancer, Morbus the Sickened, and Esmerelda Prawnsdaughter.
Turning down a side-passage, the party discovered a door engraved with the name “Damien Bloodsun.” This they opened with the spiked-skull key they’d found earlier. Within, the tomb was dressed stone, black marble, and porphyry. At the far end of the chamber presided a statue of a gnome standing atop a heap of skulls, his hair wild, his face contorted into a bloodthirsty howl, his hands clasping a guitar adorned with necromantic sigils. A sarcophagus lay beneath the statue. Carved faces cover the walls of the tomb, contorted into expressions of mania, ecstasy, despair, rage, and hatred. The stone floor was littered with bones and rotting corpses – perhaps twenty in all, some putrid and bloated, others picked clean. The bodies were twisted and distorted, wrenched into monstrous shapes and riddled with strange growths – extra limbs or heads or tentacles. Some near the far end of the hall looked as if they had literally exploded. As the party entered, torches lit themselves in sconces on the walls made from bony hands.
Alert to potential traps, Alabastor tested for the presence of magic with his dowsing rod, discovering massive amounts of it at the sarcophagus and in the walls. He and Sister attempted to dispel any magical traps, but their efforts failed. Miri and Sister disfigured some of the faces carved into the walls with Acid Splash, but realized it would take hours to disfigure all of them, and so the party resolved to leave the tomb for the time being, instead backtracking to the hall of death masks
They discovered a stair leading downward, progressing deeper into the crypts. Along the way, Sister found a carved skull, upon which she used her Gargoyle Lamp. The skull yawned and cracked its stony jaw.
“Have you seen anyone come this way?” Sister asked.
The skull swivelled in its socket. “Aye,” it said. “A band of strange folk… a Watch officer, a vagabond, a girl dressed in a funeral shroud. An odd collection…”
“Maybe they’re possessed,” Alabastor reasoned.
“Could be,” Sister said, extinguishing the lamp; the statue became inert once more. The party pressed on.
Down on the second level, the party was crepeing along a dark tunnel when they heard a strange, unsettling sound – as of scissors opening and closing.
“Good. Nice. Awesome,” Yam said nervously. Some of the party recalled the creature Abjectus, formed from the castoff reanimated limbs of the Corpse Factories in Shambleside.
Comet, again scouting behind to try and discover the source of the sound, discovered a looted tomb, its floor heaped with bones and body-parts, many of them embalmed. The carved niches in the walls which once would have held corpses now held what looked like the tools of a tailor: many pairs of scissors and a great quantity of thread. A quantity of embalming fluid was kept in the chamber as well, stored in one of several violated sarcophagi. Something moved in the darkness…
“We don’t want this thing sneaking up on us,” Sister said.
“Hey Miri,” Yam said. “Toss me again. It’ll work this time.
Miri shrugged, and once again hurled the little gnome – who fired off a Lightning Bolt into the tomb, striking the horror within. There was a hideous shrieking, a smell of burning flesh and hair. The party braced themselves as Abjectus emerged. The thing which squirmed and crawled and lurched through the tunnels nearly filled them with its twisted, decomposing bulk: a hideous amalgam of twitching, grasping, groping limbs, straining torsos, and dangling, slack-jawed heads with roving, dead white eyes, dull as the eyes of dolls. Its teeth clacked; its joints creaked; its muscles bunched and strained as it pulled itself like a cadaverous inchworm through the darkness. Stained with formaldehyde, it was held together with forever-fraying stitchwork. A clutch of delicate arms sprouting from its back and sides constantly tended to these stitches, holding the awful patchwork together through continuous activity with ever-unspooling thread, rusting needles, and rasping scissors.
“Abjectus.” Illustration by Bronwyn McIvor.
Comet hurled a javelin and attacking with his haunted rapier, Madame Sanguinaire, further wounding the horror, while the rest of the party struck with spells. It lashed out as best it could, but soon found itself badly hurt, and began retreating into the depths of its den, trailing blood and thread and stray limbs whihc crept away into dim corners. The Company followed, only to discover the horror had fled through a hole in the floor.
This they investigated carefully, slowly lowering themselves into the cave shaft. They entered a dank burrow filled with worm-castings and the partially eaten corpses of several carrion beetles; Abjectus, it seemed, had fled down one of several side-tunnels winding off from the central burrow. They had not progressed far in pursuit,, however, when something else writhed and scuttled through the gloom. In the magical light illuminating the shaft, they glimpsed a slihuouette with lashing tendrils extending from some grotesque central bulk.
Retreating rapidly back up the shaft, the party lay in wait for whatever came through the hole. The monstrosity which emerged from below made their blood run cold. Its lower body resembled that of an enormous maggot, while its upper body appeared as a swarm of fanged, writhing worms. Several recognized the beast from bestiaries as a vermihydra, a species of subterannean hydra distantly kin to the famous reptillian swamp-monsters.
“Vermihydra.” Illustration by Bronwyn McIvor.
The party let loose with spells and weapons, including a conjured Cloud of Daggers. Heads were severed, but not only did the monster regrow two writhing worms in place of those removed, the haads themselves promptly sprouted legs and began scuttling towards their attackers! A vicious melee was joined, the voracious horrors savaging the party with fangs and lashing tendrils. They counterattacked with fire and acid, cauterizing the stumps where the vermihydra’s heads struggled to regrow. Eventually, the beast lay dead, its remaining “young” – severed heads – scuttling back into the burrow below. Sister scorched the remains with a Sacred Flame to ensure they did not decide to sprout legs.
Exhausted, the party decided to avoid the vermihydra lair for the time being, after Comet, using his enhanced ranger’s senses, deduced the presence of more of the monsters below. Alabastor added some of the vermihydra heads to his Snatcher’s Sack.
Instead, the party sought for another way down. They returned to the tunnels, this time heading west. They discovered a massive tomb that seemed to have been converted into some kind of horrid nursery. A brood of zombies whined in the violated sarcophagi like babies screaming for food; other sarcophagi contained inert corpses. Lumbering amongst these mewling charges and cooing to them was an enormous toad-like thing with mottled grey-green skin, webbed, gangling limbs, and a huge hump-back, swollen massively, which threatened to crush her under its enormous weight. This hump was pocked with disgusting holes like gigantic sores, into which the creature occasionally placed an inert dead body. The holes sealed with a membranous coating and some process began within – evidently one which revived the corpse, to judge from the numerous zombies bursting forth from her amphibious flesh, pulling themselves from her slimy bulk in a putrescent second birth. She hopped and waddled about the room, feeding little charges rotting brains as they screamed hungrily in their sarcophagus-cradles.
“The Corpsenurse.” Illustration by Bronwyn McIvor.
The party stood slack-jawed in horror, but Yam walked up to the toad-thing as bold as brass.
“Hello, there,” the gnome said. “What’s your name? I’m Yam.”
The creature croaked hideously and turned to look down at Yam.
“Oh hello little dearie,” it said, its voice quite feminine. “You can called me the Corpsenurse.”
“Nice to meet you. We’re, ah, on a bit of a quest down here.”
“Oh yes?” She cast a glance over the party. “Not here to loot the tombs of the little dead ones, are we? To steal from the mansions of the dead.”
“Oh no no no,” Yam said. “In fact we’re here to stop some thieves from robbing from the dead.”
“Indeed?” The Corpsenurse seemed inestimably pleased by this.
“That’s right!” Yam said. “Maybe you could help?”
“Hmm. I have an idea,” the Corpsenurse said. She plucked one of the corpses struggling to be “born” from her back, plopping it down in front of Yam. It was covered in mucilaginous fluid. She repeated this process with several more. They groaned and dripped and whined to be fed; she gave them each a morsel of brians. “My little babies will help you. Take them with you – and watch out for the rats!”
“Thank you very much!” Yam said. After chatting for a bit longer with the creature to get a sense of some of the geography of the Catacombs, the party left the Nursery, all but Yam shuddering.
They quickly discovered what the Corpsenurse meant about rats as they discovered a hall whose walls were fashioned from thousands of humanoid skulls of every shape and size, fitted meticulously together like stones. The ossuary was also utterly infested with rats, whose burrows could be seen within the walls, rats scurrying in and out of the mouths of the skulls in slithering, furry torrents. Alabastor emptied the vermihydra heads onto the floor, distracting the hungry swarms long enough for the party to move past.
They came now to a heavy door, locked; this time they did not possess the key. Instead of searching for it, the party chose to force their way through, weakening the stone with Acid Splash. Miri thrust her weight against it to no avail – but their newly acquired zombie companions were able, through their combined efforts, to shift it. Instantly, a thin, clawed hand burst through, clawing at one of the zombies and dragging it within. The party followed, squeezing through the door to discover a pack of pallid, feral ghouls, already feasting on the zombie. Spells and javelins flew, slaying two of the creatures; the remainder fled before the Variegated Company.
The party pressed on down a long passage and into a gigantic columbarium holding the remains of dead soldiers by the thousand – innumerable carved niches holding tiny boxes of ashes, each with a name and dates of birth and death. Unlike the rest of the Catacombs, this area seemed wholly clear of rats. Pikes and banners decorated the walls, along with various statues of fallen soldiers. Sister also briefly spoke with one of these, Albertus Greendale, a veteran of the Second Patchwork War, slain by the vampiric forces of Erubescence. He confirmed the presence of a ragtag group of rival delvers.
The party at last came to a chamber with a stair leading down to the third level. A massive creature lounged before the stair; it had the body of an overlarge hyena, the wings of enormous carrion crow, the tail of a gigantic rat, and a skull-like, disturbingly human head with flesh stretched thinly over a gaunt, bony face.
“The thanatosphinx,” Alabastor said, recognizing the creature from legend. “Escaped from the menagerie of Xavier Soulswell.”
“Indeed,” the creature said. “My reputation proceeds me. I imagine, then that you know what I’m about. I’m bored down here. I like to play a little game. I ask you a riddle. If you answer correctly, you proceed. If you answer incorrectly… you die.” It flexed its enormous claws. “Who is up to the challenge?”
Comet stepped forward. “I’ll give it a try,” the waspkin said.
“Very well. Here is the riddle. If I drink, I die. If I eat, I am fine. What am I?”
Comet thought for several long moments. “Uh. Fire!” he said.
The thanatosphinx smiled. “Correct!” it said. “You and your friends may proceed. I’ll see you on your way back up…”
Relieved, the party began descending the stairway to the third level. As they made their way down, however, one of the zombies stepped on a stone which suddenly depressed. The entire stairway abruptly shifted to become a smooth ramp, oil spurting from hidden mechanical nozzles to make the ramp slippery. This, in turn, kindled to flame. The party tumbled helter-skelter over one another to land at the bottom of the stairs badly burned, some unconscious, their zombie helpers from the Corpsenurse all skewered on a series of spikes at the bottom of the stairs.
“Mother of Spiders preserve us,” Sister groaned. “Time for a quick retreat.” She scrawled a portal on the wall using the Portal Chalk, then muttered a spell to summon spiders to stitch up the wounds of her companions with their webs. The party limped back into Armand’s townhouse parlour from the Catacombs, injured and exhausted, but intent on returning to the depths as soon as they had recovered from their ordeal…