Tag: dungeon crawls Page 2 of 4

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.

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…