H&Y Infinite Open Table Session 15 (The River Fort 2)
Characters:
Flamagio (Reeves) + Vincent
Alcyone (Nero)
Ronby (Duress)
Starting Date: Summer 32, 6023
All present buy rations and adventuring supplies and head east on the river, along the Puddlegrass. At the edge of the Puddlegrass, Flamagio trades 2 steel mirrors and 2 iron files to the Purple Heron goblins to watch his boat while the party heads inland for a few days.
Summer 33, 6023
Party walks inland to the River Fort south of the Tower At Sedgemarl. They notice that the ballistae on the bridge that were there last time are gone now, no longer visible from the outside. They also do not see any of the glowing red jellyfish that they saw previously. They do see a couple of water wheels and a long axle bringing rotational power up to the eastern part of the fort complex.
The River Fort
Alcyone leads the way into the northern gatehouse, immediately being greeted by a wall of stink. The two butched muskipede carcasses from the party's previous venture here had not been cleaned. Alcyone drags both piles of rotting flesh to the bridge and tosses them over the side into the river. The party continues on over the bridge, stopping briefly at the middle gatehouse to confirm that the ballistae had indeed been dumped over the side and lay in the river below.
Alcyone peeked the door into the central courtyard, hoping that the giant muskipede that the party had seen there before was not still there. The giant muskipede was indeed not present, but there was a party of ghouls dressed for travel leaving out of the southern gates. Alcyone watched them leave then the party carefully entered the courtyard.
The party checked the two doors to the east and found one room containing a mill apparatus and the giant muskipede wrapped around it, and another room containing a spiral staircase that looked like it went down to the river water level. The party decided to head down the stairs and see if they could find an alternate entrance to the fort to aid in looting / clearing the place.
What they found at the bottom of the stairs were 4 ghouls sleeping at guard duty over 6 canoes and a door to the outside. Ronby used Duplicate Stone to create a copy of one of the stone steps to fall on their head, Flamagio cast Web to fill the room with sticky webs and make it impossible for them to escape, and Alcyone proceeded to shoot the survivors with her crossbow. Having satisfied themselves with finding a way to the outdoors, the party returned back to the central courtyard to begin looking for more loot.
Knives in the Dark
Back in the central courtyard, the party starts looking through the western doors. Alcyone finds a large dining hall with some ghouls inside, the party quickly backs away from those doors and bars them with billhooks from the outside. The last door looks like a storeroom of some kind, which they duck into to avoid remaining in the courtyard.
Unfortunately for them, the ghouls from the dining hall had circled around to the storeroom and were waiting in ambush deeper in the storeroom. The ghouls launched a volley of crossbow bolts and charged just as Alcyone startled a muskipede sleeping inside a well in the corner of the room, an inauspicious start to a chaotic fight.
Flamagio cast Putrescent Avalanche down the well (a spell from his Chaos Tome) to deal with the muskipede, burying it under a horrific torrent of liquid decay. Ronby entreats their deities of Aluminum George and Yegorov for assistance and is answered with a mountain of overdue paperwork to form a crude barricade and a weapon coating of holy acid for their knife. Alcyone and Vincent trade blows with the ghouls through the shelves at the edge of the lantern light, trying to prevent the party from being encircled.
The ghouls close in and climb the paperwork barricades, downing several of the party with their paralytic claws. Eventually only Vincent remains, fighting off the remaining 2 ghouls with only Ronby's acid-coated knife for a weapon. Vincent barely scrapes out a win after several rounds of dodges from both sides, eliminating the final ghoul. He washes out the wounds of his party members to clear their paralysis and everyone splits up in the room to loot it for all its worth.
The PCs end up finding 6 electrum ingots, a coin minting machine and a ton of mundane armor and weapons. They load up Ronby's hauling beetle with as much as they can and start heading out, fearing that the ghouls they saw previously were not totally eliminated.
A Fighting Retreat
Getting back to the central courtyard, the PCs are just in time to see a ghoul across the courtyard freeing the giant muskipede from the mill complex. The party sprints out onto the bridge as fast as possible, running to try and get out the front gatehouse before the giant muskipede closes.
Vincent fires an arrow coated in paralytic poison at the creature as they run, stopping just long enough for the giant creature to reply with a spike volley to pin him to the bridge, mortally wounded. Ronby fires off a Spell Decay from their Tome of Rot, hoping that there's some spell on the giant muskipede that could be interfered with. The creature falls to the bridge and writhes, it's fur and spikes and skin starting to peel off as the party looks on in horror.
Flamagio takes advantage of the brief pause from everyone involved to run back to Vincent, pull the spikes out of his friend, and leap from the bridge to the water below, escaping downstream. The rest of the party quickly follow, running into the woods away from any pursuers. Though they need to run through the night, the party eventually meets back up at the S.S. Eggbert sometime after midnight.
Aftermath
Still on that same night, Vincent downs a potion of healing and uses his Comrade's Cloak spell from his Tome of Cloaking to sneak back into the fort, choosing to disguise himself as one of the ghouls. He grabs the gear that he dropped on the bridge and flees once more back to the safety of the dark.
Summer 34, 6023
The party heads back to Circlebrook.
Ronby meets up with a nephew of Rolof Redmountain named Malcolm. Malcolm is a smith's apprentice, he's able to fix up Kobot 757 from its prior damage and incorporate the semi-ferrous manticore spikes to the outside as additional armor. In return, Malcolm requests Ronby guide him to a posting for a smith out east of Croakpool (A reference to my J3H Week 1 entry).
XP: 1275 per share, 2250 per PC
Coins: 478 per share, 957 per PC
500 Electrum coins were minted using the coin press, 166 distributed to each player