Second Ptolus Campaign Journal, #43
The 3rd of Newyear
Bright and early, we arrive at the old bell tower behind the temple to the Goddess of the Nine Holy Stars. We’re here to put an end to this foul cult of Maleskari and to get back our kidnapped friend Tharn. We cast our preparatory spells and kick in the door to face a spellcasting purple-robed figure in a horned helm and several undead and Forsaken. They jeer that they knew we were coming — ahh, the folly of the overconfident!
A horrid zombielike creature throws globs of decaying flesh at us as we do battle, and the horned sorcerer lays Calista low after she deals him a shocking attack of spellpower. Charnoth and his bear, Krondar, fight side by side to great effect, and Diethan wades in with fervor. Archinemus watches our backs and sling spells from range. After a heated battle, all our foes lay dead. Strangely, when Charnoth dispatched the spellcaster in horned helm, he watched as a wispy spirit-thing rose up out of the corpse and disappeared. Hm. We’ll probably be seeing him again.
Barbatos arrives in good time with a curative wand. Before we can avail ourselves of it, however, strange creatures with four clawed tentacles jump out from the second floor and attack! Hooked horrors, I realize. The one I’m fighting tries to sunder the sword of my ancestors, but I’m not letting it go that easy (it seems like only last week I lost my favorite axe to Swordbreaker).
After disposing of them, we venture upstairs and are taken by surprise by a nausea-inducing rug trap. We find a strange bedchamber with odd tools. They don’t seem to be of use for machinework, but we find them in the bed with a set of handcuffs. We don’t want toa dwell on their function but press on.
The room beyond is empty except for a round stone dais. Could this be the portal to the Shadow of Ptolus? Barbatos braves the dais first, but before he can utter the password, he is engulfed in black energy which disintegrates his crystal chaos skull. He is not happy. As we move into the room, some of us vanish. Those of us who are left behind are litorian, Hu-Charad, bear, and sibeccai. Curious — all the humans faded away as soon as they entered.
Before we can dwell too long on this strange situation, someone drops a bomb down on Charnoth from the level above. Enraged, the litorian rushes up the stairs along with his bear to engage the enemy. I race to follow, but I find myself transported to a strange and shadowy chamber…
There with me are Diethan, Calista, and Barbatos — and a terrifying shadow hound! The Howler in the Dark, Tzebeth, summons more of its pack and in a moment we find ourselves surrounded by shadow wolves! In a shrewd move, Calista blinds the Howler with a blast of light, and we take him apart. And then we proceed to do the same for the remaining shadow wolves.
Meanwhile, Charnoth and Archinemus finish off some cultists upstairs, then Archinemus gets swept into the shadow realm (guess it didn’t just take humans after all). Charnoth answers some cries for help and rescues a fourteen-year-old boy. He’s very grateful and asks Charnoth to come home with him so his mother could thank him for saving him, but the litorian declines. “My friends are lost in a shadow dimension, and I have to go help them,” he says, shaking his head. The boy looks confused but runs off. Charnoth and Krondar join us at last in the shadowy chamber.
Thanks to a divination from Calista, we know that Tharn is being held thirty feet directly above us, so we head up some stairs. At their top, we’re confronted by a soulshade woman who shoots us with a blast of cold. Then she runs from us. Tharn is still above us, but the stairs go no higher. Calista shoots her with her trademark sonic spell — to no effect! “We were warned about you!” the woman crows. Another soulshade joins her (one who escaped from their botched ambush on us), but Archinemus hits him with his wand of light. Shadows swarm to attack Diethan, but he and Charnoth take them out handily.
Our mage foe has blended into the shadows, but we note a strange pair of gargoyle-topped pillars in a room just ahead. Just as we seem to note some fiery magical effect activating between the pillars, we hear whispering up ahead. With all our enchantments still in effect, we move forward to engage. “Lallala, now!” a voice cries, and soulshades close in. Calista sees the mage, Lallala, riding a horse with fiery hooves and mane. Calista delivers a one-two punch of an eldritch web and sorcerous blast of cold that ends the nightmare, but the mage appears unaffected. The soulshades that Charnoth, Barbatos, and I are fighting melt into the shadows before our blows.
Even though we lose our quarry, we find stairs leading up — to Tharn, we hope. We ascend and enter a chamber with a large shadowy statue. Archinemus leads the way with a daylight-illuminated dagger to the spot where Calista’s spell says Tharn is: but he’s not there. Could it be that he’s in this spot in the real world, rather than in the Shadow of Ptolus?
Not waiting to discuss the possibility further, Diethan utters the password “restlare” and walks through a doorway. He disappears!
Well, we can’t just leave him, so we follow, emerging into an exact duplicate of the room in the Shade Tower that we just left. And there’s Tharn! That’s the good news. The bad news is that he’s armed and appears to look upon us as intruders. The worse news is that there are lots of other enemies here who also look upon us as intruders. We seem to have interrupted a conversation. And something about Tharn doesn’t look right….
“Before we get into a big bloody battle,” Diethan announces to the room, “I’d like to know what you’ve done to our friend.” In reply, the “statue” turns its skull-like face upon Diethan. “Nothing that he did not want,” it says. Lies!
And then lots of things happen.
One soulshade approaches Diethan. “Bow before Lord Maleskari!” it says. Nothing daunted, Diethan strikes him a mighty blow and we all follow suit. Sadly, nothing seems to touch the ten-foot-tall Maleskari/statue. And what’s more, Tharn is fighting against us!
Barbatos fries two foes with a well-placed lightning bolt. But Tharn takes two deadly swipes against his brother. Charnoth goes down before our stunned eyes, and our possessed friend takes advantage of the moment to escape with a murmured “restlare” out a door to the shadow tower. Charnoth, newly healed, speeds after him with Krondar. The bear sniffs out their quarry: Tharn has gone over the wall into the shadow beyond. While his brother calls a challenge after him, a serpentine shadowy figure behind him whispers, “Looking for someone?”
Meanwhile, back in the real city, Calista delivers a massive acid attack at our one remaining foe — Maleskari — and then receives equally massive attacks from his enormous sword. Archinemus brings him down with a shot from his dragon pistol. The deity falls to many pieces of broken stone, seeming to revert back to statue form in death.
Or is it death?
Charnoth returns, explaining that Tharn has flown off into shadow. Barbatos tries to make two human guards tell him what happened to turn Tharn to the darkness, but one dies, and the other flees.
We try to regroup and figure out what to do next. Tharn is gone for now, but perhaps we can still destroy the Maleskari cult here. Searching the bodies, we discover that the Maleskari priest was a merchant from Ren Tehoth named Mestin Ladaras (from his identification papers). We know there are many cultists we have not yet encountered: Nostromac, head of the temple; two hags from the Forsaken; and Morund, a soulshade.
We decide to rest up a bit and gather some necessary materials before heading after Tharn. We head down the tower, through rooms festooned with Maleskari symbology. We find no more prisoners on the way down, although we think we find the cell where Tharn was held before they did…whatever they did to him. We have to fight our way down through a few more cultists.
We step into the shadow side again before we leave, just long enough for Diethan to ask Insight, his Sword of Ptolus, what happened to Tharn. The response comes: “Tharn’s soul is being ridden.”
What does that mean?
We remove ourselves to the Temple of Gaen, hoping to discover more about this “soul riding” thing. As we enter the blessed sanctuary, a flash of light explodes around Charnoth. A strange serpentine creature is expelled from his head and ducks into a shadow, screaming. Charnoth recalls nothing about the experience, but if that is what soul riding is all about, he must save Tharn from such a fate. The high priest is glad to hear of our success so far and says that once we break the heart of the temple, we will have fulfilled our obligation to them (we have this deed to do for them in exchange for the Salam, resurrection of the last litorian slave).
The priests here have heard of soul riders, rumored to be formless creatures who can exist only in the bodies of others. The serpentine creature that came from Charnoth is not what they’re supposed to be like. They say it sounds more like a traditional demonic possession, perhaps by a shadow demon. “We have specially prepared secret wards for this sort of attack.” Not so secret now, we suppose.
Session LXXXIII – Still the 3rd of Newyear
We spend the rest of today buying new protective potions and researching the idea of soul riding. I ask my dad for help and he reluctantly agrees, saying he really would prefer me to get into another line of work.
4th of Newyear
Back we go into the Temple of Maleskari. All seems just as we left it, but as we arrive at the chamber where Barbatos’ crystal skull was destroyed yesterday, we find an ogre on guard. Thankfully, we make quick work of him, although he harms Diethan severely. The ogre has a tattoo of a mailed fist on his arm. He carried a bag of gold and some fresh pears that are not local. Weird. Where’d he get them? Barbatos says this fruit is from far to the east, in Ren Tehoth. Where was this ogre from? He must have arrived very recently. “Perhaps they called for reinforcements,” Charnoth speculates. But to have arrived so soon? Are distances different in the Shadow of Ptolus? Perhaps they used the portal that brought the nightmare yesterday.
We continue upstairs, past more corpses from yesterday’s adventure here. We discover a room that must be the twin of the one we saw in the shadow side yesterday — the one with the twin pillars that surrounded a portal. As we watch, four shadowy skeletal foes arrive in between the pillars. They look like skeleton-soulshades. Meanwhile, a shadowy serpent sneaks up behind Barbatos and bites him; our wizard hits the ground. Archinemus, Calista, and Charnoth rush to his defense and become targets of a lightning bolt attack from a flick of its tail. Meanwhile, I push one of the columns over onto a couple of the shadow-skeletons, and Archinemus and I wade in.
Together the others take care of the viper (and check out its torture-chamber lair), and Diethan and I (with his wolf, Lunes), finish off the last of the skeleton-shadows. I knock over the second pillar as well for good measure. This chamber contains a lot of new equipment, such as rope and tools. The torture implements in the other room look new too. It seems that the cultists are moving in and stocking up.
When we return to the room where we had our confrontation with Tharn, the statue of Maleskari is whole again, and all the bodies are gone. There’s no sign of our recent conflict here. To hopefully prevent the god from gaining control of the statue again, we topple and crush it. A side bedchamber holds robes but nothing of value, so we continue up higher in the tower. We reach a small study with a shelf of books about arcane matters and religions (Barbatos takes some). Other rooms up here have normal gear, nothing impressive till we reach a room with lots of jars with runes carved on them. The jars seem to hold swirling shadow! Weird. The spellcasters among us think that the jars are the result of a containment spell. Could they all hold shadow demons? When I pick up a jar, the shadowy substance inside moves away from my daylight-enspelled brooch. We decide to come back later and remove them all to the Temple of Gaen to be neutralized.
We find a secret door that leads us up farther still — but we can only climb the stairs when we have our daylight effects covered, Archinemus discovers. Stealthily we reach the top of the tower. Oddly, there’s no bell in this bell tower. We conceive a plan for Barbatos to approach our foes in the shadow realm from above and the rest of us to approach them from below. The wizard fails to give us a head start, though, so the plan becomes confused even as it begins.
Barbatos emerges in the shadow realm to witness an unexpected spectacle on the roof of the tower: a giant humanoid man seated on a throne and flanked by an enormous shadow dragon. Two figures stand to one side of the throne: one man and an identical shadow version of the man. “Lord Nostromac, they are coming,” one of the figures says, to which the dragon replies, “Excellent.” (Aha! Nostromac was the name of the cult leader, we learned.) “Morund, I think one is already here,” the dragon says to the nonshadowy man, pointing to the (invisible, like it matters) Barbatos. That must make the figure in the throne (gulp) Maleskari. When he realizes that the dragon has pinpointed him despite his magical protection, Barbatos wisely utters the magic word restlare and returns to the regular tower.
Meanwhile, not knowing of his retreat, we all restlare our way into the shadow tower. Rushing up the stairs, Charnoth becomes the target of thin beams of shadow from the staves of the two Morunds (we learn that this is the shadowstaff); the attack drains him of life energy and stuns him. Diethan taunts Morund, threatening to tell House Sadar where to find the staff. Morund only laughs.
Thinking that our foes are merely the two Morunds, we’re horrified when Nostromac the dragon appears to attack us. “Your pillaging of our temple stops here,” he declares. We’re inclined to agree with him.
But Barbatos manages to get off some super-powerful magic missiles at the dragon and Calista showers our enemies with a sorcerous blast. We do battle valiantly, but we suffer greatly. As Archinemus enters the scene, the dragon warns Morund. “Enough of this charade,” the figure says. “Call me by my real name.”
“Very well, Lord Sadar.”
