Second Ptolus Campaign Journal, #45
Still the 24th of Newyear
Following the departure of the Hussar, we seem to have Pythoness House mostly to ourselves. There are still a few unwelcome spirits that we need to oust if anyone other than the Cobbled Man is ever going to live here.
After a rereading of Maquent’s journal, we decide to start with the ghost in the gatehouse, a dead cleric known as Taunell. He’s supposed to be dangerous, but he can see anywhere in the house. Maybe he can tell us what’s going on in the lower level where we once found those chaos items.
We hear heavy footfalls on the floor above us. Soon, a voice whispers near me. Following the sound leads us to a door into the gatehouse. Archinemus picks the lock and we enter, seeking the resident ghost. Something invisibly picks up a barrel and tosses it onto Barbatos’ head. “Get out!” a voice says — a different voice than the whispers I’ve been hearing.
Barbatos exhorts the ghost to ally with him as the new owner of the house. “I must defend the manor house,” the ghost says in reply. Barbatos agrees that it can continue to reside in the gatehouse as a guardian. Ignoring the wizard, the ghost continues, “We’re under attack. Quickly! Bring bows!”
The ghost of Taunell leads us into the section of the gatehouse directly over the gate. A young man with sandy brown hair wearing robes appears before us suddenly. He has a mace at his side and looks out an arrow slit. Taunell! “We’ve got to protect the Lord’s manor!” he said. Archinemus glances out the arrow slit and for a moment glimpses a grassy plain with an army of brigands and orcs rushing the castle before the vision turns back to the snow-covered cityscape. Taunell is living in the past, it seems. His vestments show that he’s a priest of Lothian. We watch him reliving his final battle: He races about the top of the gatehouse, casting cure light wounds on people we can’t see, only to be shot down and “killed” by the brigand enemy. He disappears.
Archinemus says a few words of praise for the valiant Taunell, exhorting Lothian to bring his faithful servant to rest. “I must protect the tower,” the cleric’s voice reiterates softly. “I must do it by the book.”
Book?
When our ghost friend does not return, we keep looking around the place. In the gatehouse, Calista comes upon a crystal flask, a silver symbol of Lothian, and a yellowed book. Aha! It appears to be a very old Lothian prayerbook. Calista restores it with a spell and reads a bit of it — just a bunch of prayers, it seems, no real instructions for guarding a manor house. Archinemus wonders if we move the three items, will Taunell move with them? Barbatos attempts to read aloud a prayer for a location. The ghost appears and is looking right at Barbatos, who continues to pray. Just as he’s about to finish, Taunell turns and uses magic to close the wizard’s mouth so he cannot speak the final words.
Archinemus manages to draw out Taunell by telling him that time has moved on and that he has protected the manor well. When we ask him about the statue, he says, “The spirit is as much chaos as it is man and it is tied to the statue. There was a young woman here that I spoke with — where is she?” He means Urieth, one of the prophetesses who lived here when the place was a brothel.
He tells us that he serves Lord Vespian. “Are the crown jewels all right?” Barbatos’ eyes light up for a moment.
Calista thinks she has a spell that can release Taunell from his undead state. But whenever we point out to him that he is undead, he vanishes again. The only thing that brings him back is a reading of the protection prayer again. Every time he comes to look through the arrow slits, he sees the attack beginning again. Nothing we can think of to say will convince him to help us destroy the chaos spirit… until Calista pipes up. “You have protected the manor house nobly for seven hundred years. Now it’s our turn. Tell us how to defeat the chaos spirit.” But at the same moment that we finally finish the prayer of protection, he says “Destroy the–” and then disappears with the prayerbook.
Argh! Destroy the what? The statue? Something else that we need to find? What terrible timing!
We decide to visit Mand Scheben at the Temple of Asche. Mand seems happy to see us. He recalls that Lord Vespian was the first commander of Dalenguard. Wow, Barbatos has managed to stumble into quite a historic property! Mand doesn’t have any sure-fire ideas for exorcising the spirit, although he warns that it might be more of a force of nature than an actual ghost. We decide to spend the night at the house in order to perhaps come face to face with this spirit.
Barbatos, of course, has a new featherbed delivered to Pythoness House, while the rest of us bed down on the filthy floor. During the night we hear some vague creaks and whispers, and for a moment I see something invisibly shaking the wizard’s new bed. It was bitterly cold in there, as Barbatos neglected to get any firewood or coal.
25th of Newyear
After a lovely (warm) breakfast, we head down to the ground level with sledgehammers and start pounding away at the naked statue. I lop off its head and Archinemus forms a network of cracks in it as he bashes away. Each time a new crack opens up, we see a blast of violet light stream out from it. Finally there’s nothing left but rubble and the statue’s legs where it’s attached to its stone base. It was hollow. In the depression left in the statue is a grey and violet goo that quickly dissolves the statue’s remaining legs and forms into a bipedal shape. Holy Mother of all Machines! Chaos embodied!
It continues growing new masses of “flesh” and appendages as we watch. Calista is not able to contain it in one of her spheres. Barbatos nails it with a magic missile, but it strikes him with a terrible blow as he tries to scramble away. A tentacle slams into the wizard’s chest, and part of it sticks to him and dissolves into him; he slowly sinks to the floor and it looks as though he’s suddenly made of jelly. His face contorts in terrible pain, as though this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to him.
Meanwhile I manage to lop off much of the creature, each piece falling to the ground with an oozy plop and disappearing into the floor. Same thing happens when Archinemus shoots it with his pistol and when Calista fires magical force at it. We’ve got to act fast, because the gurgling Barbatos appears to be fading away with every passing second. As Calista manages to make a good portion of the thing explode, I suffer the same fate as Barbatos: Pain lances through my body as my bones seem to turn to mush. A mouth forms at the end of one of the chaos creature’s appendages and it begins to laugh. But that’s its last laugh, because a final spell from Calista splits it in two. Both pieces twitch a moment then collapse into nothingness.
The “death” of the chaos goo-being sadly does not alleviate the malady Barbatos and I suffer from. We manage to stave off the effects sporadically with sheer strength of will, but they always return, and we start once again to form into amorphous blobs. Luckily Barbatos hits on an idea and casts stoneskin on himself. This halts the effect, but the sad thing is that he only can cast the spell once. Calista begins singing a strange magical song that we’ve never heard before, but it’s taking a while, so Barbatos rushes out and buys a scroll of stoneskin that sustains me. Calista casts her song magic and successfully removes our maladies. Thank the Mother of All Machines. Let’s hope we never have to become living chaos ever again.
The Next Three Days
We spend a few days cleaning up Pythoness House while Calista magically restores our wounds. I build Barbatos a new front gate and get the hearths operating again. Archinemus even hires a cleaning crew.
29th of Newyear
Amid our cleaning and fixing up, we’re surprised to hear a familiar voice in the air around us. No, it’s not the purged ghosts of this house — it’s our Legacy friend and companion spirit. “I can’t help but notice, as I’ve joined you on your adventures, that some of your biggest problems have come upon you because of this dark elf, Shilukar. Why haven’t you done away with him as you have done away with other enemies?”
Good question. Our bonds with Castle Shard prevent us from doing so, we explain. “Why don’t you come up with a way around that?” he asks. We don’t know of any, we say. Does he?
“Well, yes,” the Legacy replies. “I do.”
Session LXXXVII – Still the 29th of Newyear
Wow, a way to get at Shilukar? The Legacy doesn’t joke, so he must be serious.
While most of our foes we deal with by slaying, Shilukar can’t be slain by us when he’s in Castle Shard, due to our friendship with the Lords of Castle Shard and the protection \ the castle offers its residents. The Legacy explains that sometimes Shilukar ventures out of the castle’s protection, however, and into a place outside the castle accessible only by magic. He says that sometimes Shilukar goes there with others. He says we’d need a specific kind of magic to get there, and that he would look into it more for us.
An argument ensues over whether it was okay to do more than hate Shilukar: What has he done that should make him deserve death?
- First, he’s a dark elf, and that alone is enough to merit death in Ptolus.
- He held Lord Abbercombe hostage (and cursed him to be immobile) in exchange for residence at Castle Shard.
- He was somehow behind Spyncer Coil and the ku making the Swords of Ptolus.
- He stole from House Abanar and others to raise money for his other unsavory ventures.
- He manipulated us into getting noticed by Mand Scheben, which led us to the job finding Linech’s daughter Linele (so we’d notice Lord Abbercombe at Linech’s house).
- He lied to the followers of Ravvan and made them serve him.
- He told the Hussar to go Pythoness House for their ritual, then betrayed them to the Balacazars so that it would fail.
- He’s turned us into puppets, and no champion of freedom can tolerate that!
So, clearly he’s not a good guy, but we can’t agree that he should be killed.
The Rest of the Week
I rest up from my draining experience and catch up on some work at the Delver’s Guild. My friends do some training, meanwhile, and we await more information from the Legacy.
I still feel bad about what happened to the poor Hussar. Diethan asks around and can’t find anyone who’s seen them more recently than us. He also learns a bit more about the Balacazar manor house on the coast north of the city — that’s the place we emerged beneath when we were tracking Linele. Perhaps the Hussar are there. In fact, Diethan asks that question of Insight, his magic Sword of Ptolus, and it says they are.
Meanwhile, Shilukar sends a note renewing his offer to speak to Menon Balacazar about reinforcing Barbatos’ claim to Pythoness House. It’s signed, “Your ally, Shilukar.”
At the end of the week, the Legacy pipes up again. “I’ve been thinking about how to get to this place Shilukar visits that can be reached only by magic, and I’ve concluded that the only means available to you is a magical item called the Dresden Door, sometimes called the Longest Door.” He says the door is owned by two halflings named Testain and Bereet. “I believe these two only recently acquired it.
“You can reach this place by passing through the Longest Door, and once through, in order to find the one called Shilukar, you must find another that is in his company there called Nicodemus.” Nicodemus! That’s the sibeccai in charge of the Perfect Ones; the image of my mother at Ar-Nampur told us he was going to steal the Shard. The Legacy says that he is important to Shilukar, and that Shilukar remains very focused on him while they are there.
When we learn this, Archinemus immediately uses his magical helmet to notify Lord Zavere of Shilukar’s association with the future Shard-thief. Zavere invites us to come talk to him about it immediately at the castle.
When we arrive, Kadmus ushers us up to a tower room to meet with Zavere and Rill. We explain the whole story, but Rill doesn’t think the dark elf’s leaving Castle Shard.
“If someone is a guest, within Castle Shard, they are under our protection and that of the Shard,” Zavere explains. He says that outside these walls, of course, they could not extend that protection. He also relates that it’s no secret that Shilukar only enjoys this protection because he used a hostage to coerce his way in.
Rill explains a little more about the Dresden Door, saying that the wizard Dresden long ago created teleportation portals all over the world for his own use. She presumes that the Longest Door is a portable version.
As we discuss other recent events with the Lords of Castle Shard, Zavere cautions us against trying to help the Hussar unless we’re fully committed and powerful enough to take on the mighty Balacazars. Sigh. I wish there was something we could do to aid them.
Before leaving the castle, Barbatos decides to stop off and see Shilukar and respond to his letter. I go along to make sure he doesn’t promise the dark elf anything else. Barbatos is on the verge of agreeing to allow Shilukar to straighten the whole thing out with Pythoness House when I ask what Barbatos would then have to do to make them even. That’s when I learn that Barbatos had entertained the idea of taking on a mission for Shilukar involving stealing a big chaositech item from some independent criminal (who inherited it from a lich named Aggah-Shan).
The Crimson Coil cult used to operate out of Pythoness House, Shilukar points out, and they were allied with the Balacazars. They knew its benefits for magical summoning back then, he says, so the family is unlikely to want to give it up now.
Back in the carriage when we debrief the others, they are as outraged as I am. It’s become easier than ever to decide to do in the dark elf. Only Barbatos seems dismayed — he can already feel the iron grip of the Balacazar crime family closing around his precious castle.
Our first stop is to visit Fairbriar and Catterwood seeking more info about the halflings named Testain and Bereet. After making inquiries, Diethan learns that they are brother and sister delvers whose last name is Molloth. They recently came into a large cache of magical goods, including a powerful tome of understanding. They’re reportedly trying to sell off some of these goods, but no one has heard from them in a while.
The 3rd of Birth
After a couple days spent gathering information, we discover that a masked elf named Shoth was asking about these same halflings about a week ago. This fellow, who may be a Harrow elf sorcerer, is brusque and not well liked. He has a reputation for reneging on deals. It sounds as though he may have done in Testain and Bereet.
We find Shoth’s residence in the South Market. It seems to be an old store converted into living space. After a very rude reception from the helmeted elf who answered the door, we bust our way in looking for the elf in question. After subduing a couple others there (things get a little out of control), we confront Shoth alone. After some intimidation, we get him to admit that he bought some items from Testain and Bereet: a ring, potions, and the tome. He denies knowing anything about other items, but he lies. “But they attacked me first, you gotta understand that! They were crazy, they wanted to steal my magic items!”
During this interrogation, Archinemus searches Shoth’s rooms and finds the tome of understanding and a set of halfling-sized studded leather armor. We were right, this elf did kill Testain and Bereet! Archinemus finds a ring upstairs that is not really a ring. He stretches it open to portal size.
“We’ll be taking this, and you’ll be forgetting you ever saw us,” says Diethan. “If you do, maybe we’ll forget we saw that halfling equipment upstairs.” Shoth quickly agrees, and we depart (with the tome, too).
