Hex Sessions XXXVI – Actual Play – “Shadows Lengthen”

Various writing projects – D&D-related and otherwise – have kept me from keeping the detailed actual play posts for the Hex campaign. I had thought I might catch up on them during the summer, but by now even with notes I’m not sure I can do the logs true justice in the blow-by-blow fashion I did in previous sessions. I’m going to be resuming the Hex campaign shortly after a hiatus due to quarantine (I also have Elfhame actual play reports to post), so to catch up blog-readers, I’m going to be writing up some briefer accounts of several old sessions – these won’t be quite as detailed as some of the previous write-ups, but they’ll contain the most important story information.

All illustrations apart from the map and character portraits are from Bronwyn McIvor.

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.
• 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.
• 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.”
• 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 undertook a reconaissance mission to Mount Shudder, having ascertained that the spectral city of Penumbra – seeking revenge on Hex for its destruction in centuries past – had manifested on that fell peak. Equipped by the lich Valentina Nettlecrave with a musical Exorcism Box which would cause ghosts to depart from possessed creatures when wound up and played and freshly supplied with ghostdust from a dealer in the Memento Mori tavern, the party headed west from Hex, traveling through several nearby towns and villages. These included the penal settlement of Beastbury, where prisoners from Hex were “reformed” by being polymorphed into beasts of burden; Greenheart, a lumber-town run by a family of dryads and humans; Zephyr, an industrial outpost of greenhouses and windmills, run on elemental labour; and the twin settlements of Soothwick and Knavesville, the former shrouded in a permanent Zone of Truth. Along the way the party encountered a number of Penumbral ghosts possessing polymorphed prisoners, sacred trees, and striking labourers, and used the Exorcism Box to dispel these malignant shades. They also encountered the merchant Hearthbrag, trading various items (Comet also tried to steal a dragon’s egg, but ended up grabbing a display replica).

The party pressed on into the Unquiet Mountains, encountering the trollblood clan known as the Spineskulls, a group of “toll-collectors” little better than brigands. Rather than fight, the party chose to negotiate, hiring the trollbloods on as guides. They investigated the abandoned spa-town of Snugging, discovering through judicious use of ghostdust that Penumbra had transformed the town into a forward operating base in the Ethereal plane. They sojourned on to Hog’s Hollow, suffering a truffle shortage due to the over-long winter the Variegated Company previously helped avert, and discovered further evidence of Penumbral activity. Traveling further to the Giant’s Head Inn, the party performed a ritual from the Book of Ghosts that allowed them to assume spectral form. They proceeded in ghostly form up the slopes of Mount Shudder.

The trees thinned, and they could hear the sound of rushing water – a river, tumbling down the mountain in waterfalls. The forest continued to clear, giving way to bleak, frost-bitten stone. Snow blurred theirvison, but something was evident up ahead, emerging as if carved from the mountainside. Walls, towers, bridges – a formidable edifice of stone, glimmering and phantasmal, rising up the mountainside in seven tiers. A waterfall gushed from an enormous demoniac face at the city’s heights, falling down the tiers to a harbour below. A prodigious fortress guarded the entrance, a castle that looked as if it were hewn from a massive boulder. The city itself had a look of impossible age and forgotten grandeur. It was crowned by an enormous spire like a cyclopean torch, blazing with a ghastly blue effulgence that cast eerie black shadows across the city and the pristine white snow beyond. This was Penumbra, the City of Shadows, returned from out of the depths of the past to menace the world once again, and avenge itself upon its destroyers.

The party infiltrated the city using ghostly uniforms purloined from soldiers, claiming to be Penumbral forces. They explored the Moongate and the docklands of Fellwater, then ascended through the slum of the Dogsprawl, where spectral cynocephali howled and scratched ghost-fleas from their fur; up through the Circus Tenebrosus and into the market of the Wheel. After gathering what evidence they could of the numbers and composition of Penumbral forces, the party escaped the city, letting loose a flock of ghostly griffins shortly before the dawn, when their ghostly forms returned to their bodies.