Freeport Campaign

Rewards Earned

• Experience Points: 800
• Treasure: 400 gp, silver serving tray (100 gp), black leather scroll tube with arcane scroll (command undead, false life, CL 3rd)
• Unidentified magic items: potion, ring

The party decided to rest up before taking on the tendriculos. When they returned, they hacked their way through the overgrown garden outside the house to a stuck door that opened into the manor’s pantry. Spike and Isaac smashed the door open on the first try, thereby earning Spike a beer at Chow’s expense the next time they hit one of their favorite dives.

The opened door revealed a dozen flour-covered halfling-sized humanoids with white flames where their eyes should be. Each creature wielded a wicked looking razor knife that turned into a puddle of blood when its owner inevitably fell. The party mowed through the demons with very little trouble.

After clearing the pantry and the adjacent kitchen, the group discussed whether to take on the tendriculos or to explore the cellar at the bottom of the stairs in the pantry. Given their previous encounters in nasty basement temples and other underground locales, the party reasoned that they’d be more likely to find the cause of the children’s disappearances in the cellar, so Chow scouted the way down the stairs.

The group saw a brief flash of blue light in the corner of the storeroom as they entered, and were surprised to see a young man emerge from the shadows. He shared his story with the party – he didn’t remember how long ago he’d been caught at the house; he’d been trapped in a black void for a long time, and had somehow come out of the darkness when he heard the party in the storeroom. Chow provided the naked boy a cloak, and the group decided to take him to the Scriptorium of Tinel for healing and to Will Teach for magical investigation into his background.

When the boy emerged from the hired rickshaw in the Temple District, he turned invisible, cackled, and ran away. Grumbling, Spike, Chow, and Richard composed quick notes to Will and Stannis, conversed briefly with High Priest Egil at the Scriptorium, and returned to Cresh Manor.

A thorough search of the storeroom turned up a secret door behind a stack of barrels. Chow once again led the way into the tunnel behind the door, and was first to discover a disgusting heap of rotting flesh in the middle of a four-way intersection twenty feet into the tunnel. Avoiding the swarm of flies buzzing around the corpse, the party investigated the remaining passages leading away from the interection, discovering a collapsed tunnel to the north, a series of cells to the east, and a water-filled cavern to the south.

Aside from some disturbing scratches, fingernails, and piles of broken bones in the cells, neither the north or east passage held much of interest. The waters to the south, however, hid a sentient mass of mouths and tentacles that set upon Chow when he got too close to the shore. Chasing him back up the tunnel, the creature began a maddening babble that caused some of the party to act in manners that were wildly out of character – Balama attacked Lumineaux with a series of spells, while some of the others fled upstairs.

Amid blinding streams of acid spittle from the mouther, Richard managed to place a zone of silence on the wall near the creature, negating the effects of the gibbering. Thus able to regroup, the party drove the creature back into the water and finished it off with volleys of mundane and magic missiles, with some help from a summoned shark.

Tossing a sunrod into the water to help verify that the creature was dead, the group noticed a stone plug at the base of the cavern wall beneath the water. After a bit of a strain, the party removed the plug and watched the water level move only an inch or so. Richard sent the shark into the watery tunnel, but it returned without incident.

After collecting their breath, the group gathered in the hallway with the cells and prepared to open the door at the end of the hall.

Rewards Earned

• Experience Points: 2000
• Treasure: Masterwork dagger, 4 normal daggers, wand of summon monster II (36 charges, CL 3rd), bracers of armor +2, brooch of shielding, periapt of wisdom +2, Yellow Sign pendant, pink and yellow robes (slightly used), various books and papers

Spike charged past the demon and ended the older man’s insane ramblings in short order. He then joined Richard, Isaac, and Lumineaux in convincing the vespertiliac to leave the room with its prehensile tail intact (Balama and Chow having fled the house in a panic when the thing emitted a terrifying shriek of hatred and fury).

With the eastern half of the first floor cleared, the group moved on to the west wing after Balama and Chow returned. Richard dispatched another group of ghost children who were playing kickball in a hallway, and the party elected not to investigate a blood- and excement-filled claw-footed bathtub in an adjacent room.

When the group entered Cresh’s nearby game room, they were attacked by fat blobs of oozy, leaking flesh that various written sources speculated were living tumors plucked from the Unspeakable One’s skin and flicked into the Material Plane. Disgusted by the remnants of that battle, the party paused uneasily at the entrance to Cresh’s indoor conservatory. Spike and Balama recognized the large living plant in the center of the room as similar to the vegetative creature that had nearly digested them in the canal outside Rana Mor several months ago. Grumbling about the noisome denizens and horrifying decor of the manor house, the group discussed their options.

Rewards Earned

• Experience Points: 1000
• Treasure: 180 pp, 462 gp, 350 sp, 600 cp, ring of protection +1, arcane scroll (bull’s strength, invisibility, rope trick, all caster level 3rd), oil of invisibility, ring of counterspells (banishment), periapt of wisdom +2

Based on Will’s advice regarding devils, Spike armed himself with a matched cold iron rapier and dagger after the group left the house. After another restless night, the party assembled in the Eastern District and headed back into Cresh Manor. Checking the remains of the chain devil a little more closely, they discovered a trio of magical trinkets they had overlooked in the post-battle sweep the previous day.

As they investigated the former play room next door, Balama seemed abruptly puzzled when she heard a child’s voice whisper, “Mommy?” in her ear. When she picked up a toy and held it out in front of her, a ghostly apparition of a child rose from the floor and grabbed her hand, while seven other ghost children emerged and struck at the rest of the party. Richard informed the children that their parents (not to mention Harrimast) were probably severely disappointed with them, to which the kids gave a screech before disappearing.

The party collected their breath and checked out the remaining rooms in the east wing before approaching the fire-dancing devils. Chow approached the shattered tea room with some trepidation, fearing that the slowly oscillating chandelier overhead and broken glass on the floor implied a trap or creature that he couldn’t detect, so the party avoided the room. Instead, they positioned themselves around the door to the living room and prepared to face the devils.

The next few moments were a blur of combat, seeing Spike’s nice cold iron weapons dissolved by contact with one babau’s skin, Richard banishing one devil to what appeared to be a plane of water, and the other devil teleporting away from the melee. Once again the party caught their breath and searched the room. Chow spotted some strange holes in the western wall that further investigation revealed to open into a narrow secret tunnel, presumably used in Cresh’s day to spy on guests in the living room.

The group next moved on to the great room where Richard had been accosted by the allip. This time around, they formulated a plan and took out the undead apparition with minimal fuss. With that room cleared, they turned to the only unopened doors on the east side of the first floor. The first revealed a storage room containing a mass of gore that may have been a corpse at one point, and the second opened on a man in pink and yellow robes rifling through piles of books and papers among the toppled bookcases on the floor. As the door opened, the man’s demonic companion leapt at the party.

Rewards Earned

• Experience Points: 1250
• Treasure: 3 masterwork breastplates, 2 masterwork falchions, masterwork composite longbow (+3 STR rating), 20 arrows, 83 gp, 60 pp, white opal (1100 gp), +1 greatsword, wand of cat’s grace (22 charges, 3rd caster level)

The group went to the temple of Harrimast to get their wounds healed, and then checked with Will and the Wizards’ Guild to verify that the things they had seen dancing around a fire in the former dining room were in fact babau demons. Spike went off in search of weapons to exploit one of the demons’ suspected weaknesses. That done, the party holed up to recover for their next foray into Cresh Manor.

After a restless night, the party reassembled at dawn in the Eastern District. This time around, Richard brought along one of his crewmates, a tall cloaked figure named Lumineaux, for backup and additional muscle.

Chow led the way back into the house. The group discussed their options and decided to clear the first floor before moving upstairs. Chow was set upon immediately when he opened one of the interior doors off the entry hall.

(More flavor text later…)

Rewards Earned

• Experience Points: 1250
• Treasure: 500 gp each (reward from Countess Matilda)

After a good night’s rest, the group had audiences with deposed King Albigensius IV of Avalon and Countess Matilda.

Following the events at the Last Resort, Spike, Chow, and Richard spent a few quiet months seeing to their various business and personal interests. A couple of weeks into the dry season, Chow received a message from Finn, requesting his assistance in a disturbing matter in the Eastern District. After an initial meeting, Chow brought in Spike and Richard to discuss the matter with Finn.

Apparently, many children had gone missing over the last few months in the District and elsewhere in the city, and Finn’s “constituents” wanted them back. The Syndicate’s questioning pointed to Cresh Manor, an abandoned house at the edge of the city with a dark reputation.

The group agreed to investigate and set off to talk to the families that lived nearest the manor. The families and friends of the missing children told similar stories – little Paitr or Jenny had gone to the manor wall on a dare, or been playing stickball near the house, and just didn’t come home. After cataloging these unfortunate tales, the party grabbed a few hours of sleep, and met up to stake out the manor to verify the reports of strange lights and noxious odors emanating from the house.

Shortly after dawn, the group entered the front gate of Cresh Manor. Rather than follow the path to the front door, they bushwhacked through the overgrown vegetation to a clearing around back. While investigating a disturbing fountain in a clearing behind the house, the party was surprised when a massive hedge sprang up out of nowhere to separate Chow from the rest of the group. Spike, Richard, Balama, and Isaac heard Chow engaged in a fight on the other side of the hedge, but their efforts to hack and burn through the vegetation were largely unsuccessful. Frustrated, they turned their attentions to the barred back door of the manor and crashed through it in half a minute or so. Spike, Balama, and Isaac charged through the front door and back around the house in time to fight off a small, strangely resilient lizard that was trying to drag Chow’s unconscious body through the hedge.

Meanwhile, Richard was distracted by a babbling apparition that coalesced in one of the fireplaces in the main hall of the house. He huddled fearfully in a corner for the duration of the fight with the devil lizard, but used a brief moment of lucidity to wrap himself in silence and escape the allip. He quickly joined the rest of the party outside the house and entreated Harrimast to bring Chow back to consciousness. That done, the group exited the manor grounds to rest and regroup.