Just the essentials:
The heroes ventured into the lower level of the moathouse and began discovering some of Caerwyn’s experiments and notes. They found a giant ant-like monster in a room and avoided it (for now), as well as 7 more vine-ridden human thralls that they left in the cells (for now). They paid off some orcs that Caerwyn had hired as guards, and confronted Caerwyn, ending the session in the middle of combat against him.
The Long Story:
The heroes followed their Wode Elf captive’s directions and descended into the dungeon of the Moathouse. They found a giant ant-like monster in a room and avoided it (for now), then found a room where someone had basically dissected a human and had woven vines and roots throughout their muscles and joints across their entire body. Next door they found a small study with a bunch of research notes as well as Caerwyn’s journal, which had the following passages. It should be noted that in a Wode (an elf-haunted forest) time works quite non-linearly, and the way elf memory works in general is (possibly?) more like reliving than remembering an event, so the journal of a Wode Elf like Caerwyn tends to have a very tenuous relationship with linear time and with grammatical tenses. You’ll see what I mean.
“The patchwork men take Lynwen. They take my entire family. I cannot stop reliving it. I cannot stop the patchwork men. I cannot stop Ajax. They are all beyond my reach.”
“I wander. I wander through the woods until the woods turn to swamp. I find a structure. It is human. It stinks with the evil all men stink with.”
“The swamp turns to grassland. I see a human hovel. I smell its stench. I feel the hate seeping out of it. Hate for my people and for me. Love for Ajax and for his patchwork men. I end it. I let the forest swallow the hovel. The hovel and the humans and my family never return.”
Allora, the Wode Elf Shadow of the party, is the only one who can read the journal, and she relays the contents to the party. She concludes that the vine infested creatures they’ve seen so far might be related to the War Dogs, but Light of an Autumn Dawn Refracted by a Kaleidoscope thinks that they’re probably Caerwyn’s creations.
They move on and find a row of cells holding 7 more humans infested with vines. They don’t react to anything the party does, and the party starts thinking about what they should do about them. Allora and Light of an Autumn Dawn Refracted by a Kaleidoscope both think they should kill them before they have a chance to hurt anyone, but Paarthanoxx is strongly against that. He is first off worried that these aren’t just mindless husks and that they could be cured somehow, and even if they’re not, he is opposed to just putting them down in this dungeon and thinks something more dignified should be done with them. His ideal solution, I think, would be to stop Caerwyn, see what happens to them after he’s defeated, and then either rescue them if they become living humans again or take their corpses back to town and give them proper burials. Allora and Light of an Autumn Dawn Refracted by a Kaleidoscope, on the other hand, think that these guys are basically just plant zombies and they are worried about them being released and attacking the party from behind later. They go back and forth until Scarn gets bored of the debate and decides to open one of the cells to see what this creature even does.
And it attacks them. Scarn and Paarthanoxx manage to get it pushed back into the cell and trapped again, and the party decides to just leave them in the cells until later. Allora and Light of an Autumn Dawn Refracted by a Kaleidoscope still don’t like this, but Paarthanoxx is a lot more passionate on the subject so they go along with him for now. Also I’m pretty sure they want to get to say “I told you so” when they later get ambushed from behind.
Moving on, they find a secret passage that leads down to a T, and Light of an Autumn Dawn Refracted by a Kaleidoscope notices that there’s also a hidden alcove here with a winch in it. This winch also sparks some debate. No one wants to turn it, but they’re all worried about what it might do. Some of them want to destroy it entirely but Paarthanoxx points out that might trigger whatever it does without any way of undoing it, and some of them think about just making it unusable by removing the handles but there’s no obvious way to do that without removing the handles permanently. Ultimately, Allora uses a rope to tie the winch down so that anyone who wants to use it will have to spend a long time untying it.
They move on and come to a large, empty room with a single door on the other side. Something about this immediately makes them suspicious. Paarthanoxx searches the room for traps while everyone else ponders what sinister things lie in wait for them in this room. Possibly monsters. Perhaps poison gas. Maybe spikes. Paarthanoxx finds nothing. Allora goes to open the door, feels a mechanism trigger as she turns the handle, and finds a wall behind the door. The whole party then hears a brief faint scraping or squealing sound from back where they came from.
They return and find that a metal grate has partially swung down from the ceiling, and the winch has shifted slightly. Had they not tied up the winch, the grate would have swung down all the way, trapping the party until they could winch it back up. This, they decide, would be unacceptable, and Paarthanoxx busts out his expert carpentry skills to hammer nails into the winch until it cannot be turned.
The party leaves the alcove and finds four orcs standing there and watching them, having been drawn by the sound of 5 minutes of constant hammering. Light of an Autumn Dawn Refracted by a Kaleidoscope quickly starts giving them a made-up excuse for why they’re down there and just as quickly fails to come up with anything halfway believable and gives up. He admits that they’re down there looking for Caerwyn, and the orcs tell him that Caerwyn has hired them to stand guard. Luckily for the party, the orcs do not hold Caerwyn in terribly high esteem, and the party offers to buy them out. For twice what the Caerwyn is paying them, the orcs agree to help them take him down. One of the party members does note that if the orcs were this quick to betray Caerwyn, they might be quick to betray the party if Caerwyn offers them even more gold. There’s some talking about the orcs possibly just leaving, but eventually the arrangement is made that once Caerwyn is beaten, the orcs and the party will split anything of value that Caerwyn has as an incentive for everyone to stay honest. They shake on it, and the orcs lead them to Caerwyn’s ritual room.
They find Caerwyn in the middle of the reanimation of a vine-ridden human and combat quickly begins. Caerwyn’s ritual room has had the ceiling torn off, exposing a thick covering of plant life that has overgrown about a third of the room. When the fighting begins, two ogres, almost entirely taken over by vines, reveal themselves from the overgrowth. The orcs, led by Tulxan Alderberry, take on one ogre, while the rest of the party takes on Caerwyn and the second ogre. The party thinks there’s a chance that if Caerwyn is incapacitated, the ogres might die as well, so they focus heavily on him. He is quite quickly close to being killed or knocked unconscious, so he commands the ogre to grab him and put him on top of the roots and vines covering the ritual room so he could make his escape. Light of an Autumn Dawn Refracted by a Kaleidoscope wasn’t a fan of this, but he doesn’t have any abilities that can restrain Caerwyn, so instead he knocked him a frankly ridiculous distance away and dealt quite a lot of damage to him. The session ended with Allora and Light of an Autumn Dawn Refracted by a Kaleidoscope both teleporting up to follow Caerwyn while Paarthanoxx and Scarn continued to fight the ogre.
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