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.

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