Hex Session XXXIII – Actual Play – Mansions of the Dead Pt. II

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.
• Miri, trollblood wizard, plucked from Mount Shudder and raised amongst Hex’s arcane elites. A recent graduate of Fiend’s College.

XP Awarded: 1500 XP

Bleeding and exhausted from their sojourn into the Catacombs of Hex, the party stumbled through the portal they’d created and collapsed in the parlour of Armand’s townhouse, dragging those members hovering at the edge of consciousness through the rift. One of the zombies gifted to them by the Corpsenurse stumbled along behind them, having the survived the brutal traps. Yam and Sister were both critically wounded, their spells depleted, and in need of extended rest. Armand himself, who had remained behind, joined the group preparing to return to the depths. After a brief rest, the adventurers stepped from the well-lit parlour chamber back into the fetid crypts, intent on retrieving the Pneumanomicon before their foes.

Back in the musty darkness, the group moved slowly forward, listening intently. They quickly came to an intersection and heard something moving towards them. Comet flitted ahead, noting several heavy, imposing shapes, tusked and shrouded.

“Trollbloods?” Miri whispered

Armand sniffed. “Not living ones.”

“Probably attracted by the light,” Alabastor said.

A short debated ensued as to what to do about the approaching creatures, even as they drew closer, bringing with them a foul reek like formeldahyde. Making a quick call, the group chose to fend them off, Caulis and Alabastor firing eldritrch blasts, Miri adding a magic missile. One of the shapes crumpled with a groan; its companions hissed and withdrew, dragging the cadaver behind them and leaving a putrid smear of embalming fluid and liquefied flesh.

“Let’s… not go that way,” Comet suggested. The waspkin ranger scouted the nearby tunnels, noting an infestation of woundwort to the south; to the north, a nest of phasebats roosted in a tomb. The party elected to head north, Miri using a spell to distract the phasebats with a conjured smell to move past them. Comet picked the lock of a door to the east, and the group hurried into another corridor. An eerie feeling prickled at their skins – as if they were walking through invisible webs – as they entered another chamber to the east, apparently quite empty. Another tomb adjoined this one, to the south.

This tomb contained four ornate sarcophagi; one had been broken open and thoroughly looted, but the other three were untouched.

Alabastor tentatively approached one of the sarcophagi and examined it for potential traps; finding none, he decided to open it.

“Might as well help ourselves while we’re down here…” he muttered, slipping his fingers under the lid. Suddenly the sarcophagus growled, the stone lid becoming a lip; it burst open, a fanged maw within gnashing its teeth at the gnome. A huge tongue lashed out, smacking Alabastor in the chest and coiling around his arm, the mimic’s digestive juices begnning to burn through his clothes. He cried out and the party turned, weapons in hand and spells at the ready; Miri bombarded it with magic missiles, even as a second sarcophagus lurched into horrid uncanny life, shambling towards Caulis and Comet. The party’s remaining zombie companion chomped down hungrily on the mimic’s tongue and it squealed, loosening its grip; Alabastor drew back, while Armand struck with a bolt of lightning, leaving it a smoking, charred husk.

Illustration by Bronwyn McIvor.

The second mimic attempted to hide itself, reverting to sarcophagus form, though laughably it was no longer in line with the other sarcophagi; the party decided nonetheless to spare it. They quickly searched the remaining sarcophagi, Alabastor discovering a Wand of Daylight, identified after some quick magical examination.

The party hurried from this room lest Armand’s spell attract further attention, and entered what seemed a thoroughly looted tomb. Armand, on a hunch, took a pinch of ghostdust, and was suddenly assailed by the sight of a huge spider hunched in a corner of the room on the Ethereal Plane. The creature’s bloated abdomen was translucent, containing a seething plethora of ghosts, trapped within its body and slowly being digested; within it spectral webbing was trapped a key with a Hand for a bow, and a wand of some kind. Steeling himself, Armand cast Blink and flitted into the Ethereal to snatch the wand and the key; the spider hissed and began moving towards him, but he flickered back into the Material just in time to avoid its chelicerae.

The party now headed back west, completing a loop in the Catacombs. They catiously headed south, towards where the embalmed trollbloods they’d encountered earlier had fled. Armand flickered back into the Ethereal and poked his head into the adjacent chamber, discerning a huge shape in a massive tomb beyond, hunched in the darkness. He phased back into the Material and described the potential foe, but Caulis suggested they might at least attempt to converse with the creature. After some debate – Miri eagerly suggesting a sneak attack, Caulis and Alabastor arguing for a more diplomatic approach – the party decided to try and speak to the being, whatever it was.

They eased the door open and stepped into a massive tomb with soaring ceilings and a gigantic sarcophagus at its centre. Hanging on the walls were the skulls of huge beasts and gigantic weapons, including a battleaxe with a haft like a tree-trunk.

The being that hunkered in the gloom was unsettling, to say the least. A towering creature, easily thirty feet tall, it hunched beneath the vaulted ceiling, neck and head bent to avoid scraping the stone, a reek of embalming fluid emanating from its vast, mummified bulk. Yellowed tusks protruded from a skull-like visage, the eyes replaced with glittering black gemstones. Down the mummified giant’s body, snaking and zigzagging, was a crooked seam, presumably where the giant’s organs were removed from his body. Something squirmed within, pressing against its dead flesh.

The thing sprawled in the darkness, claws tapping the stones; in one massive hand it grasped an entire barrel of embalming fluid from which it swigged, as if from a tankard of ale. A huge set of stone double doors was visible behind the mummified giant.

Illustration by Bronwyn McIvor.

Realizing the creature was a giant, Miri’s combative tone shifted.

“Greetings, ah, grandfather,” the trollblood wizard said in Giantish, bowing slightly and approaching.

“A troll-child!” the mummified giant said, regarding Miri with its black jewel eyes. “I am Yowl, former Guardian of Hex. What brings you to my humble hall, little one?”

“We seek passage to the lower levels, grandfather,” Miri said. “If we might pass, we would be very grateful.”

“Passage, is it?” the desiccated hulk rasped. “Very well. I will grant you passage, treasure-seeker, but you must perform for me a boon. In these Mansions of the Dead, I have many rivals – enemies who slay my subjects, usurpers and scavengers. These halls grow crowded. Slay one of these rivals for me, and I will grant you safe passage to the level below.”

“And who are your rivals, grandfather?”

“There is Dahlia Deadeye of the Graveyard Girls, thieves and scavengers who seek to plunder my treasures; Vermillion Bill of the Blighted Brotherhood, a stinking cutthroat who clots these halls with the reek of his festering mushrooms; the Corpsenurse, who kidnaps my precious children and makes them her own; and the Empress of Rats, a bastard vampiress who stalks the halls west and south of here, feeding on those she catches.”

Miri translated for the group.

“Children?” Caulis said, unable to help itself.

“Yes of course,” Yowl said. “One was killed earlier… doubtless those meddlesome Blighted Brothers… Should be nearly rejuvenated by now, actually…” He groaned, shifted, and, with a grunt of pain, pulled at the seam along his abdomen. A hole opened in his stomach, and out poured a great glug of embalming fluid. A hideous waft of pickle-reek flooded everyone’s nostrils, and they gaped in revulsion as something stirred within the pool of gloop that had gushed from the undead giant’s guts: none other than the mummified trollblood the party had killed earlier. The creature looked at the party in terror and cringed backwards, crawling towards its “father.”

“Ah, that might have been us that killed your ‘child,’ grandfather,” Miri said. “Our greatest apologies.”

Yowl laughed uproariously as he cinched his stitches tight again. “Well fought, then, little troll-child! No permanent harm done…”

The group discussed their options, and resolved to help the friendly-seeming giant – specifically by destroying the Empress of Rats, since, if Yowl spoke truly, she was a multiple murderer, preying on the people of Hex.

After resting briefly in the stinking Tomb of Yowl, the party headed towards the den of the Empress of Rats according to the undead Giant’s directions.

They first picked their way through a series of mouldering stone chambers, writhing with swarms of rats oozing across the floor in a hairy, slimy tide, like putrid liquid; these they dispersed with flame and spells, Alabastor and Caulis deploying eldritch blasts till the echoing tombs were spattered crimson, vaulted ceilings dripping with rat guts. The commotion, however, soon alerted something else deep in the tomb. It stirred, its chittering echoing through the darkness of a yawning pipe that trickled a thin stream of sewage into the tomb. The party hunched and crept down the narrow tunnel, fingertips sill sizzling with puissance. They squeezed through a long, crooked passage that seemed to go on forever, until at last it opened into a chamber beyond.

Countless rats scuttleed through the brick-lined expanse, once a cesspit  which had been adorned with treasures looted from the catacombs and from the streets above – paintings and tapestries hang on the walls, and dozens of cups, coins, and articles of jewellery were strewn about, some embedded in mounds of feculence. The thing which seethed and thrashed and squeaked in the midst of this finery and rat-flesh was a confusion of fur, teeth, and tails – thousands of rats with their tales tangled together, become a writhing ball of rodent flesh. The amorphous form moulded itself into a roughly humanoid shape, resolving sharply to become a bone-pale woman clad in a regal robes of living rats, her yellow fangs glinting, eyes black.

Illustration by Bronwyn McIvor.

“Who tresspasses in my domain?!” The Empress of Rats hissed. “You will pay for your transgression!”

Bottlenecked in the tunnel, the party beat a hasty retreat, scrambling backwards out of the broken pipe and back into the tomb, the Empress of Rats prowling ominously after them. Thinking quickly, Caulis inscribed a hasty magic circle at the base of the pipe, carefully scattering powdered silver over the indentations, and gestured for the party to stand back. As the Empress of Rats crawled from the pipe on all fours and scuttled into the circle, the homunculus activated its magic and the vampire was trapped, penned within the eldritch ward. She shrieked in fury and dissolved once more into a swarm of rats, but these too were unable to leave the circle and thus formed a kind of grotesque column of gibbering rat-flesh, bones breaking and flesh pulping as the individual rats she had become tore at one another, their furry bodies crushed by the magical prison.

“Now!” Caulis said, and the party unleased their full fury, Comet firing into the column of rats with arrows, the others laying into it with spells. Despite their assault, the vampire seemed to regenerate at a preternatural rate, shifting from rat-form and back to humanoid form, her wounds closing. Then Alabastor remembered the wand he had discovered back in the mimics’ lair.

“Stand back!” he said. “And cover your eyes!” He activated the wand, filling the tomb with a blinding flash of sunlight. Armand groaned, throwing up an arm to protect his sensitive eyes, his pale skin scorching slightly in as pure solar radiation filled the room. Instantly the Empress of Rats burst into flame, her swarm-shape incandescent, filling the air with smoke and the revolting smell of burning fur.

Alabastor picked up a necklace from the ashes that remained – a simple cord strung with rat-teeth. He would later learn that these were the Fangs of Retching – if swallowed, one of the teeth would cause the necklace’s wearer to vomit up a swarm of obedient rats.

“Those should be proof she’s dead,” Miri said, nodding at the necklace.

The party returned to Yowl’s tomb. The Giant acknowledged the Fangs of Retching as proof of the Empress’ death and bade the Variegated Company pass into the fourth level of the Catacombs.

This level the party managed to navigate with relative ease – though Caulis ran afoul of a trap near the entrance, a pit lined with poison-smeared spikes at the base of the stair, concealed by a decaying rug. The homunculis was impaled and nearly died, its life saved by an emergency potion.

Beyond the trap, after a few lucky turns, the party discovered a 150-foot-long hall lit with flickering candles of black tallow behind iron grills which cast a criss-cross lattice of black shadows across the floor. Comet took a hunk of vermihydra leftover from the fight several levels up and threw it into the shadows; it was instantly bisected, as if the shadows had become razor-sharp.

Fortunately, a simple solution presented itself: charges remained on the wand of Daylight, and so Alabastor was able to banish the shadows long enough for the party to pass through and into a chamber beyond, whose door was opened by the Hand Key found earlier.

Here, Alabastor’s conjured daylight, centred on the Fangs of Retching, dimmed dramatically. The chamber seemed preternaurally black; within its centre, only dimly visble, could be found an ornate black marble sarcophagus inscribed with the name “Raoul the Obscure.” Six black stone gargoyles squatted round the sarcophagus, faintly visible in the muted sunlight. A spiralling stone stair led down to the fifth level.

“I don’t like the look of those statues,” Comet said, eyeing them suspiciously. The party kept a careful eye on the gargoyles to ensure they didn’t suddenly animate, and descended rapidly, leaving the sarcophagus undisturbed. They crept down the stairs, the waspkin going first; his foot touched a crumbling brick that might have led another party-member to stumble down into the blacknes below, but the cunning ranger simply took to the air on his delicate wings.

The fifth level of the catacombs was flooded with near-impenetrable darkness; Alabastor’s Daylight spell cast barely as much light as a fitful torch. Carved niches lined the walls containing corpses, some of them disturbed – hideously deflated, as if something removed all of their bones. Only a few shards remain, and the bodies are riddled with wounds where something sharp pierced the skin.

The party passed into another grand hall, this one impossibly vast. The architecture here looked older than the rest of the Catacombs – iridescent metal glistened in the gloom. They were entering the Old City, part of the ancient Librarian ruins deep below Hex. Thousands of small, black pods lined the walls, row after row of sleek, opaque ovoids. Inspection revealed that within was a dense black liquid. Another deflated corpse slumped on the floor, now little more than a skeleton. On another hunch – the hairs on the back of his neck stirring slightly – Armand took a pinch of ghostdust, peering into the Ethereal, and discovered a spirit, floating in the gloom: that of a Graveyard Girl who wandered too deep.

Illustration by Bronwyn McIvor.

“Penelope Greycheek,” she introduced herself.

“Pleased to meet you,” Armand said, while the rest of the party watched in confusion.

“Glad to see some new faces down here. Say – if you agree to bury my body properly, I can give you something you’ll need.”

“And what is that?” Armand asked.

Penelope held up a glowing key with a sunburst design. “I assume you’re heading to the sixth level. That’s where I was headed.”

Armand nodded. “Take her bones,” the aristocrat instructed to no one in particular. Miri sighed and scooped up the body.

Fat, white shapes like gigantic albino bats roosted on the ceiling: huge white moths with delicate, crimson-veined wings and juddering mosquito-like proboscises.

“Marrowmoths,” Caulis whispered. “Don’t disturb them or we’re done for.”

They passed into an adjoining room, discovering a massive machine of back, iridescent metal churning and thruming, pouring out inky blackness in an atramentous torrent. They watched as light streamed from Alabastor’s necklace into the machine, sucked in by some arcane mechanism. Two openings at the base of the generator were evident, one big enough to crawl into, the other narrow and spout-like, giving the machine the semblance of a monstrous black kettle. Below the spout was an empty ovoid like a large vase. After some experimentation, Armand discovered the machine was a kind of Librarian crematorium – any physical matter placed in the larger opening would be converted into a sort of concentrated darkness, pure liquid entropy.

“Fascinating,” the sorcerer said absently. “I’ll have to come back down here at some point…”

This also provided the party a helpful means of disposing of Penelope Greycheek’s corpse. After her organic remains were compressed into darkness and into the ovoid vessel, the Light Key materialized, and Penelope herself melted into restful shadow. Armand now deactivated the crematorium.

With the device powered off, daylight flared from Alabastor’s bewitched necklace – the darkness no longer was quite so thick. Alabastor ended the spell so as not to disturb the marrowmoths as they passed stealthily back through the grand hall. This time they entered a hall filled with flickering statues of peculiar metal – Guardians of Gloom, activated only by light. Relying on darkvision, the party crept past them and into an empty chamber, furnished only by a series of featureless, oddly-shaped structures like tables or basins.

A third time, a hunch struck Armand, and he took another pinch of ghostdust, to peer into the Ethereal. The drug revealed the chamber to be a teeming ghostly greenhouse, filled with succulent immaterial vines and strange, pallid blooms, long-cultured by the Librarians and now growing wild. Armand’s normal detachment was banished at the prospect of botany.

“Hold on, I’ll be back momentarily,” he said, casting Blink again to flit into the Ethereal. Madly, he began taking cuttings of the immaterial plants. He snipped a bloom here, a sprig there, a vine…

As he cut into the tendril, a mass of plants moved and shifted. It groaned. Spectral vegetation unfurled, took a squelching step. A twisted assemblage of vines and matted muck rose from the garden; embedded in its body were the spirits of others who journeyed into the depths, now intertwined in its parasitic vines, imprisoned and slowly fading as it fed on their essence. One, Armand noted, clutched a key of black, iridescent metal.

“I’ll take that!” the sorcerer said, telekinetically snatching it with a spell before flitting back to the Material mere moments before the monster engulfed the spot where he had stood.

The party returned once more to the hall of marrowmoths and crept through the sole remaining corridor, down a coiled ramp, and into the sixth level of the Catacombs. A massive obsidian door loomed at the base of the stair, a door with two locks. Above the door, coiled and repugnant, a taxidermy dragon stirred, its wings fluttering.

“Who would disturb the tomb of Genevieve Chancel?” it demanded.

“Her former mentor!” Snuff answered, Valentina’s voice chirping through her undead familiar. “We are on a mission of great importance – we come not to use the book within, but to keep the Pneumanomicon from falling into the wrong hands!”

The dragon considered. “A likely tale,” it said. “Is this not precisely what a theif would say?”

As they argued, the paryt became aware of movement in the passage behind them. A ragged train of figures approached – some looked like vagrants, others walking corpses. One was a City Guard, tattered and pale.

“We have them now” it said, in a cold, feminine voice. “The Book of Ghosts will be ours! Forward!”

“Now do you believe us?!” Snuff demanded. The zombie dragon flapped its wings and spat forth a gob of green flame at the approaching figures; meanwhile, Armand placed both the Shadow and Light Key into the locks. They pushed the door open.

Within ws a suprisingly plain tomb, with little within it save a spare sarcophagus and a lectern of bone… a lectern upon which there seemed to be no book.

“Where’s the damn book?!” Miri asked, casting around.

Comet began flying high and lo in search of the text.

Meanwhile, the thieves behind them had made their way past the dragon, badly scorched but still considerable in number. The party was cornered. Caulis groped for the Portal Chalk and prepared to make a quick escape… but where was the Pneumanomicon?

“Hex will fall!” The leader of the intruders declared in the same weird, echoing voice as its warriors advanced, weapons drawn. “Penumbra will have its revenge! The world of the living will crumble and the Thanatocracy will reign forever!”

It was Alabastor who realized it.

“The Book… the Book is a ghost,” he said. “I know what I have to do!”

The gnome unsheathed the dagger of Queen Mab, the one by which he swore himself to his secret Faerie patron – and thrust the blade deep into his own heart. He dropped dead almost instantly.

“Alabastor!” Comet cried out. Miri, one wand drawn, sent a magic missile at one of their attackers and scooped up Alabastor over her shoulder, while Caulis activated the portal back to Armand’s parlour.

“We have to go now!” Armand declared, firing a spell.

Alabastor, meanwhile, looking about himself with fresh eyes, as his newly formed spectral body coalesced over his own freshly-made corpse. His gambit had worked – the Pneumanomicon, as he had guessed, prevented the spirits of the dead from crosing over, hence the proliferation of ghosts near to it. And there it was – sitting on the lectern, in the Ethereal Plane.

With a smile, the gnomish spectre grabbed the tome, and fled with his companions through the portal.