Session 52: Vampires, Ghosts and Traps

The party deals with vampires, the spirit of a crying baby and a teleport trap.

This write up is based on our Sunday, April 6, 2025 session and was written by our scribe Carl with a few additions from myself. Thanks to our mapper Jimmy for the screen shots.  Since we are scattered around the country, we use Discord for voice communications and the Roll20 online tabletop to connect with each other.

Continued from: The Throne Room and Owlbear

Location: Inside Tegel Manor

 
We had just put down an Owlbear.

Steadfast and Benedar headed back to our shack to do some housekeeping.

We were in a study of sorts, with a rune-covered cupboard. The runes were nearly invisible and Arkhelm said they were explosive runes.

We decided to come back to this after Arkhelm has had a chance to study the proper way to remove magic runes without setting them off.

The next room west had a trapped door going further west... another rune!!!

Discussion of how to deal with the sliding latch offered a few suggestions, such as Dispel Magic (nope, cant do that) or using a rope or magic of some sort to slide the latch while we are in the adjacent room.

The Unseen Servant got the nod, and we heard a big explosion.  The door was gone and the table overturned when we returned to the room.

Satin and silk decor; a severed hand thumping its fingers. Fairly normal furniture, with a nice whip on one of the cabinets (dominatrix??)

Very dark, no windows... another vampire????

Some pretty trashed books on one shelf, but one not so bad.

Dying Spring (Collection of love poems). This book is leafed through, but otherwise good condition. It is written in Common Speech.

As Aefir approached the hand, it leaped to the cabinet and grabbed the whip. OK, Dominatrix for sure.

Hand soon became hand-burger, but the whip was intact and looked valuable.

Reebo put the whip in his pack.

We found one manuscript, detailing a ritual scalping. Very fancy. Nothing else was salvageable.

There were two doors on west wall; the south door opened to a LOT of clothing, just tossed in and pretty messy.

We were interrupted in our search, Arkhelm (one room east) yelled that we had company. A ghost !!!

Shadow ran to intervene, and saw a really tall, really thin spirit.  Dressed in riding clothing and armed with a semi-transparent sabre, it looked upset. Who understands these things...

Paraselene did some clerical stuff and the ghost ran off.

The northern west wall door had a coffin inside. The lid was hinged and Shadow wanted to break the lid off, but the dirt on the floor did not allow them good footing. They kept trying and after great amounts of cursing, Arkhelm said that the ghost had returned.



We had real combat this time, no sending it off.

Aefir and Shadow gave up on the coffin and moved to engage the ghost. Those with firebolt capability let the bolts fly.

This time, with no one making it run away, we put it out of our misery.

Back to the coffin, but this time started with pushing the sand and dirt down the rat hole, allowing better footing.

The coffin top was pretty durable, and in spite of the good footing Aefir slipped and nearly fell.

Eventually, the lid was removed, taken to the bigger room and shattered.

Breaking up the coffin, Shadow found an actual (not rat) tunnel under where the coffin had been... Hmmmmm...

Aefir climbed down, triggering a dust trap of some kind, but was not affected by whatever it was.  A small area with another coffin was below.  It was also full of dirt, but was wooden and broke easily.  The rat hole did not enter the lower room.  Searching, just cause we always do, found a panel on one wall with the rat hole behind it. They could look up and see the rest of us.  The tunnel turned south a couple feet down.

We took the time to take some gems and adornments off the clothing in the southern closet, and headed back to the shack.

Beneddar was there and he said that Steadfast had headed out to do some scrying by the temple. He had been working on trying to figure out where Lenral's parents had been killed. He had narrowed it down to the area between the Temple of Frigga and Goblin Valley.

May 14
Morning dawned.  Back to work...

We went back inside the Manor though the secret door. While we searched rooms that had not been completely searched before, we found another friend (it found us, but  meh). 

Another ghost: Roderik.

He looked like an armored knight with a stern expression. He asked for our strongest, and Reebo pointed at the group. Roderik challenged Aefir to one on one combat, for armor.

Aefir accepted his challenge and they began to duel.

Shadow taunted him, but the ghost ignored him.

This ghost had MUCH better armor and reflexes than the ones we had met in the past.

Rather than have him kill our Paladin, Nattie started the addons, but in short order everyone who wanted to got in the fight. He was TOUGH to hit, but not invincible.

Roderik disappeared...probably gone for good, but unfortunately his armor went too.

The search for a 'dead area' on our map continued.

We went in to a new area that we had only seen through a window up until then.

A rathole and a lot of stuff we couldn't see clearly. One door going out, so in the window we went.  Maybe a game room?

Searching turned up... oops, while Reebo was checking out the door it opened and a mummy was on the other side. This looked a little familiar, sort of. We thought maybe we saw this one outside our first night, heading toward the pirate base?

Fortunately, Aefir was right by Reebo, and interceded. Between him and Reebo's super good firebolt, the mummy was seriously burned right off and then finished off for good.

An unusually shaped room with three doors was next.

A pie shaped room to the north, a little strange here too. Two wooden walls that ended in the middle in some sort of shaft.

The walls moved when someone pushed on them like a turnstile.

With limited room in the turning area, we decided to check out the rest of our unknowns before moving forward. We confirmed that it could rotate in BOTH directions before proceeding.  Shadow and Aefir pushed it all the way around to be sure we had decent options, and the Reebo came in to check things out iteratively

Shadow wanted to put holes in the walls, so we could support each other more readily, but when he hit the wall there was an immediate 'push-back' that damaged him equivalently. Aefir got the same result, so maybe this was not gonna work. Reebo, proximate to Aefir, also took damage.

So we went around a couple at a time, and got to the next room area. We could hear, faintly, a baby crying somewhere. We had heard that before but never found the source.

A difficult to open door finally gave way for Aefir, revealing a pile of furniture on the inside of the room, as if it were a barricade against entry. Aefir saw another ghost, this time a young nanny pacing back and forth. She kept looking into a child's room to the north, which seemed to be where the crying was coming from

As Shadow followed Aefir into the room, a pair of ghostly butlers appeared and put all the furniture back in place and re-blocked the door.

Aefir checked out what looked like a child's room for sure. He could hear the crying off and on. On the wall was a painting of a woman holding a dead baby.

With the butlers doing the blocking, the rest of us went out a window and in through another that Aefir told us about.

After we cleared the furniture from the nanny room south door to access the rotating area, Shadow, then Reebo went through. The  vanished as they stepped in.

Shadow found himself in a room with hanging dead women and a vampire. She attacked him but missed.

Reebo wound up in the baby room.

Aefir stepped through afterward and disappeared too, and we concluded when Reebo walked back from the baby room there was a random teleport in the hall outside the rotating area.

The rest of us decided to go out a window, walk the outside and hope to find one or both of the others in some room.  Clearly we were dealing with a random teleport trap.

Shadow backed away from the vampire and try to open the drapes. She grappled him as he tried, but he was able to expose at least some sunlight.  She tried to bite him but it interrupted her grapple and the fight went on.

As most of us looked for the teleported, Reebo tossed furniture out the nanny's room window and Shadow fought on, thumping the vampire soundly.

Aefir had teleported to a different room where he hopped out the window and ran back toward where we had been.

Arkhelm led us around the corner and we could see Aefir running toward us. He asked if we had seen Reebo or Shadow. We told him that Reebo had teleported into the baby room, but no one had seen Shadow.

Checking windows, Arkhelm found the room where Shadow was fighting the vampire. By this time, Shadow was out of Ki and was near death from his fight with the vampire, who was retreating toward a rat hole on the far side of the room. She was beat up and unable to transform or regenerated due to the sunlight.

Arkhelm looked in through the open window but could not see a target because of the lighting. Shadow pointed into the darkness to where she was and Arkhelm cast a lightning bolt.

Not a great shot but good enough... Higher level spell casting ROCKS!!!

She turned to dust inches from escape.

We decided to call it a day and pick it up tomorrow.



Continued in Meeting Ridwik of the Relic.