shifty louts

Arduin Arcade Session #2 - The Howling Tower

Players

Summary

Qwain the 30th. The Month of the Bison 5202

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The group enters the Howling Tower. The ternion moons, red, blue, and silver, hang in the sky overhead as the bio-robotic Tower of Sorven of the Seven Lights raises skyward.

On the chessboard floor, dragon guano and the nose-burning uric smell. The room has been walked through many times. The north door was bare and charred. A wooden pole bars it.

An iron door eastward. Runes speak of those seeking entrance to pay 1 gold sovereign for the “Broken Door Fund”. Krug the Caveman pays the toll, and they find more piles of dragon guano, some fresh, others ossified. Tuncay prods the piles. Makatza, leading up the rear, hears the eastern wooden door break as six 7’ tall ebon skeletons, four-armed each, wielding broadswords, trundle into the room.

battlebones

The group is forced into the western room as Makatza takes the brunt of their blows. Tuncay attempts to push his way through only to slip on the guano and slice part of his butt, entering a shock-induced coma as Makatza aPistola falls beneath the blades.

Krug’s knife finds purchase as a Centaur and a star-faring Black Elf enter the fray. Snik’s axes cleave one’s head in twain, and soon the group rallies as Tuncay is awakened.

The group enters once more into the first room, and the black elf, the Deodanth Dreven Daryth, attempts to dispel whatever accursed incantation exists. He forms a pentagram, the same sigil seen on the skeleton's armor, and takes a piece of Tuncay’s butt meal. The magi of Gennigore and Krug feel no such evil ward broken.

deodanth

The group heads through the eastward door and finds the checkered stone floor turning to a prismatic pattern: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. The sound of metal scraping as they see a yellow, desiccated body of a former adventurer and caustic trails upon the walls that had been burned into the stone. Graffiti was once here, but it's been smudged beyond recognition.

They continue eastward into a similar rainbow checkered hallway and smell burning oil, and that's another door. A large “doggie-door” sits at its bottom. Grennigore the Centaur Magus can hear insectoid buzzing and notifies the others. Tuncay is worried the floor is a trap, and begins to prod with a 10’ pole.

The group finds the hallway turns 90 degrees eastward and terminates in another iron door that has similar runes about payment to enter. Dreven Daryth uses his crowbar and pries open the coin tray as they find 400g. However, a 5” black beetle emerges from the other side of the door as more and more loud buzzing sounds fill the opening, seeking the light of the group's lantern.

The strange insects swarm their lantern, and the group retreats using another torch as the light is cut, chiaroscuro upon the walls. The group retreats back to the north and lights another lantern. They see westward a group of thirteen skeletons standing in a regimental parade rest, adorned in similar pentagram helms behind the first room’s north door.

The group heads eastward, finding a passage that leads north. The group is surprised to hear childlike cooing and giggling. A moldering child’s crib sits in the hallway. The smell of rosewater and honey fills their nostrils. Krug pushes forward as the group sees three cotton-candy colored “bears” play-fight. They seem to phase in and out of reality and attempt to ensorcel the Caveman and the group for fruit pastries, but are rebuffed.

Snik makes disgusting goblin faces at them. They ask for shiny things and are given daggers, spears, and a mace, but the three warn that “the ones with green apple skin that eat hair” like Snik, but bigger. One teases Tuncay about his missing butt after it appears on his shoulder; another phases out of a wall, turns the spear into a pike, then into the size of a thimble, and gives it back to the group. They are warned once again. Dreven Daryth gives them his gold tooth and teases them for being “mischievous” as the three creatures finally phase out of reality.

They find some silver coins amongst the crib’s mouldy linens. The group continues north and finds a door on the eastern wall. Its hinges face them, presumably opening towards them. Tuncay peers through the keyhole and sees arm-like roots extend outward from the walls.

The group finds the hallway terminates at an ornate wooden door carved into the shape of a cat eating a mouse on the western wall. Chirring can be heard. The caveman believes there to be felines behind the door. The door opens without resistance, and pale violet grass grows along the floor in tufts as ants infiltrate through the tiniest of cracks in the walls.

The group continues mapping this hallway, as the pale grasses eventually subside. Snik can discern a group of orcs eating and talking shop about a tentacle-faced man, and that things called “vroats” are being aggressive, since they laid their eggs.

The group decides to follow a southward passage, hoping to find that it connects with a prior hallway, only to find it terminates in great mats of hair-like moss that grow from the ceiling. Passing through them, they quietly “burp”. Snik identifies this flora as sludgewort, a delicious delicacy amongst the goblinoids and greedily stuffs his face with the hair-like fungi, much to the disgust of the party.

map

Once more, the Centaur hears simian hooting from behind and sees ape-like figures. Muscles taut. Skin like a sour green apple. They each hold a bloodied mace. Snik understands them as they bark about the group stealing their food, and the orcs charge, swinging wildly with their maces. Both sides surge; however, the party is able to slay five as two retreat back to where they came from.

The group doesn’t pursue as the hallway seems to bloom and blossom where the orcs fall. The hallway seems to feed upon the blood of the orcs, as now the sludgewort, the strange violet grasses and another fungi that looks like waxy, dripping candles have grown into a thick “forest” of sorts. The group finds more money amongst the orcs, and that the sludgewort is something like a chewing tobacco, flavored with spearmint, albeit still possessing a hair-like texture.

The group decides to exfil, but upon their way out, a trap is sprung, a crossbow bolt shoots from a hidden murder hole near the cat door, and punctures into Abarran the Armsman. The poison courses through his blood veins, first bright orange, then a rainbow hue. He drops dead. Dreven Daryth decapitates him to prevent him from rising once more, and the group takes Abarran’s headless body out of the dungeon.

Aftermath

Treasure Found:

Foes Encountered:

Rumors:

Deaths:

XP Awarded:

Notes