ADVENTURE 1: THE TOMB OF FUNKE VON WEISSWURST
PC Roster:
Ageratum Purslane, halfling rogue 1
Alistair Mandelberen Pastlethwaite, human sorcerer 1
Chaevaris Noarunal, elf archer 1
Harlan Starblade, half-elf paladin 1
Game Session Date: 15 June 2022
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The Riverside Market in Greyhawk City's Old Town was filled with all kinds of people, and Ageratum Purslane leaned against the wall and watched them all. Many were old, familiar faces, mostly those behind the stalls hawking their wares, whether they be fish or vegetables or costume jewelry. Others she'd seen before now and again, frequent visitors to the marketplace, most of whom she'd already sorted into the appropriate category of "potential target" or "not worth the bother." A halfling fully trained in the fine arts of pickpocketing, it was her job to keep a lookout for suitable marks and then sneak in, snatching what she could before the theft was even noticed - and in the few times she failed to walk away from a victim with the gullible mark not even having noticed his purse was a lot lighter (or even missing entirely), her smaller size made it easier for her to disappear in a crowd.
Now, however, she saw a few new faces she hadn't seen before. There was a good-looking blond half-elf, the holy sun symbol of Pelor emblazoned on the tabard covering his armor, no doubt one of the new paladins having completed his temple training and being sent out into the world as a journeyman. Ageratum vowed to stay far away from him; paladins were usually trouble, not willing to bend at all on issues of morality like petty theft. This one was talking to a street urchin who had approached him; Ageratum's sharp hearing picked up a tale of scary monsters in a crypt where the boy's daddy was buried and the little halfling was glad to hear the paladin promise to look into it, as it meant he'd soon be going on his way and away from the marketplace where she did her best business.
Another strange face was a dainty-looking elf wearing comfortable-looking leathers and carrying a bow, with a well-stocked quiver of arrows hanging by a strap over one shoulder. Having just finished the sale of a half-dozen or so squirrels to one of the meat vendors, the elf was passing through the crowd, headed for the
Elver, a local watering hole, no doubt to grab a drink before heading back to the forest or wherever it was elven archers hung about.
But then another stranger walked into Ageratum's field of vision, and this one had "POTENTIAL TARGET" practically stamped on his forehead. To say he didn't look like he belonged in the Old Town marketplace was an understatement - he didn't look like he belonged in Old Town at all. He wore fancy clothing of the type favored by the nobility: knee-length pantaloons, high stockings, and polished shoes with prominent buckles; a vest and twin-tailed waistcoat over a frilly white shirt; with a black ribbon neatly tying his light brown hair into a fashionable ponytail. He wore a rapier in a scabbard at his hip and dragged along a carpetbag, looking this way and that in puzzlement as if never having been to market before in his life -
Likely the very truth of the matter, Ageratum thought to herself. She saw he wore a silver signet ring on his hand but had turned it around so its emblem faced inward, no doubt thinking that would shield the fact of his nobility from those around him (and not without good reason, as kidnapping the well-to-do was a fairly profitable occupation in this part of the city). Still, the halfling smirked at the thought of him thinking he blended in by doing so, and she vowed to go see what all was in that bag he carried in case there was anything worth pinching to be had.
Unfortunately, the aristocratic young man - not yet having seen twenty summers, if Ageratum was any judge of humans - looked straight at her and headed her way. She immediately broke eye contact and looked away, seemingly disinterested, and tried mentally shooing him away, to no avail.
"I say," the young nobleman said, "are you lost, little girl? Did you get separated from your mother or father?"
Ageratum glared up at him, not at all appreciating being mistaken for a human child. And then the nobleman realized his mistake, as he blurted out, "You--have a bosom! How--? Where did you get--?"
"Beat it, loser!" she snarled. "I'm a halfling, not some damned human brat!"
But this seemed equally as shocking to the young nobleman. "A halfling? You're
real?" He reached and touched her shoulder to verify her physicality; Ageratum angrily slapped his hand away. "But--I always thought halflings were mythical beings from fairy stories!" Then, as an afterthought, he murmured to himself, "Perhaps that's why Father wouldn't let me play with that little boy with the sideburns!" But by then the halfling had stormed away, no longer interested in the contents of the carpetbag he clutched tightly in his left hand. There were other, less irritating marks to be had.
"Hey - you!" called over one of the merchants. Alistair looked over at him in surprise, shocked that someone had singled him out to talk to. "Yeah, you - you looking for anything in particular? You seem kinda lost."
Alistair stepped over to the merchant, a seller of some sort of meat pastry, it looked like. The nobleman's stomach churned; he'd never seen anything so inedible in all his life. "I suppose so - a means of earning money, for one thing." Alistair knew on an intellectual level that the lower classes performed various types of work in order to earn their coin and he supposed that was something he was going to have to do now, but he had no idea of how to go about it. Was there a place one went to be assigned employment?
"Lookin' fer work? I hear tell there's a couple of clerics in town, lookin' to hire on a wagon-lackey or two. You could see if they'd hire you."
"Ah, yes, excellent," agreed Alistair. "And what, pray tell, is a wagon-lackey?" The merchant just smirked at the young man's ignorance and pointed him to the
Elver, telling him the clerics could be found in there and that they'd be better able to explain. Alistair thanked him and turned about, heading over to the tavern. The merchant just shook his head in disbelief. But Ageratum, who had remained within earshot and overheard the brief conversation, decided to head over to the
Elver herself and watch the upcoming spectacle unfold. If nothing else, observing this spoiled-brat fop try to get a job should be interesting.
It was dark inside the
Elver, whose main claim to fame was the quality of their eel pies, served either "wet" (the eels still barely alive and wriggling about) or "dry" (the eels having given up and succumbed to their fates). But sure enough, there were four people standing around a table in one corner, two of them wearing the holy symbol of Saint Cuthbert. Of these two, one was much older and rather hideous, with an angled, bald head sporting a few remaining tufts of hair, while the other was a younger man. The man and woman standing with them looked enough alike to likely be siblings, and Alistair was pleased to see they wore respectable clothing, not the rags that seemed to pass for appropriate garb among the rabble of Old Town. Still, Alistair wanted there to be no possibility of being seen by any of his friends or acquaintances and it was highly unlikely he'd run into any of them here, which was how he found himself in Old Town in the first place.
Alistair waited beside the siblings for a break in their conversation and then looked over at the uglier of the clerics, assuming his greater age made him the one in charge. "Excuse me," he said. "I understand you're looking for a wagon-lacker." Across the room, Ageratum nearly choked on the ale she'd just been delivered and of which she had only now taken her first sip.
"You do, do you?" sneered the elder cleric. "That's what you understand, is it? Well, yes, I'm puttin' together a wagon train that'll be heading to the boomtown in Ghourmand Vale and I'm looking to hire on some guard-folk. You think you're up to the task?"
"I should say so," affirmed Alistair with all the bravado of someone who had no idea what he was getting himself into. He had no idea where Ghourmand Vale was or what a boomtown might be, but he knew wagons were much like carriages so he figured he was halfway qualified already.
"Great," replied
Father Barbados. "Only I'm in a discussion with these two folks right now, so come back later and we can talk about it. We'll leave in two to three days."
"Two or three days. Ah. Yes," stammered Alistair, wondering where he could sleep in the meantime.
But now the two siblings were sizing up Alistair. "You wouldn't happen to be an adventurer, would you?" the man asked, introducing himself as
Carlton Thorpe and his sister as
Maya Thorpe.
Alistair turned the thought over in his mind and liked what he saw. "Why, yes!" he agreed. "I can be an adventurer!" He had been a big fan of adventurers since his early days, although his father had disapproved of him wasting his time reading the exploits of such lower-class rabble. But his father no longer had any say in his life, now that he'd cast him out of the family - Alistair was free to make of his life whatever he liked and "Alistair Mandelberen Pastlethwaite, Adventurer" had a rather nice ring to it.
"Are you handy with that sword?" asked Maya.
"I have been trained in classical fencing since I was a young lad," Alistair assured her.
"Well, we have a job for a group of adventurers, but I don't think you could handle it by yourself," admitted Carlton. "Would you happen to have any friends willing to join you?"
Alistair gave it some thought, but of course all of his friends were members of the lesser nobility like himself - or like he had been up until this morning, in any case. Alistair was still a little fuzzy on the mechanics of the class system; if Father denounced him and kicked him out of the family, was he still a member of the nobility? He wasn't entirely sure - but he did know he was now
persona non grata among his former friends, as nobody was willing to go against the edicts of
Lord Ambrose Pastlethwaite. Not even his older brother,
Atherton Wilford Pastlethwaite to whom Alistair had tried to appeal to put in a good word for his reinstatement. But Atherton, as the eldest son, was the heir to the Pastlethwaite estate and would not go against Father's wishes, not that Alistair could blame him. "I fear not," he answered Carlton Thorpe.
"Well, if we can wrangle up a suitable group, I have a quick mission I'd like to hire you for: fetching our grandfather's crest, buried with him in the family crypt."
"I say," replied Alistair, blanching slightly. "Surely you don't mean...grave-robbing?"
"Not a bit of it!" reassured Carlton. "The old man's lying in state in a tomb that belongs to my family. You need only enter the tomb and bring back the crest. We'd like to take it with us when we depart Greyhawk for Ghourmand Vale. It's no great secret our family's hit upon some hard times..." - and indeed, Alistair could see the cuffs of Carlton's jacket were somewhat frayed and the collar of the dress worn by his sister Maya was the height of fashion...two years ago - "but we'd be able to pay 200 pieces of gold for the successful completion of the task."
"Forgive me," said the blond paladin Ageratum had seen talking to the orphan out in the marketplace. "My name is Harlan Starblade. I couldn't help but overhear your conversation. May I ask the name and location of this tomb?"
"It's the Von Weisswurst tomb," Carlton relied, pronouncing the W's as V's, "and it's about three leagues out of the city."
"Extraordinary," exclaimed the half-elf. "I have already agreed to look into the very same tomb by a young lad who says his father is buried there. I would be happy to aid in your own quest, as I will be there in any case on another matter."
"Very well," agreed Carlton. "That's two, then." Father Barbados grumbled silently into his tankard of ale, not the least bit pleased to have had his own conversation with the Thorpes - who were paying him to join his caravan - sidelined by this tomb business. Beside him, the other cleric,
Brother Scrimshaw, busied himself with his own tankard of ale.
"I would be pleased to join both your quest and your caravan," said Chaevaris, stepping up to the table and looking first at Carlton Thorpe and then at Father Barbados. "You leave in two to three days, correct?" the elf asked the elderly cleric. Upon receiving a nod of assent, Chaevaris added, "Then I wish to hire on as security. My archery skills will prove useful not only in fighting off bandits but also in hunting down game along the road."
And I wish to depart this city as soon as I can, was the thought left unvoiced.
"If you're going into a tomb, you'll want someone able to overcome locks," pointed out a voice from below the table, which eventually revealed itself as the halfling woman Alistair had mistaken for a "little girl" out in the marketplace as she climbed up onto a chair. "I'm Ageratum Purslane, and did I hear 200 pieces of gold?" Carlton agreed it was indeed and, satisfied the four adventurers would be up to the task he desired done, he gave them directions to the Von Weisswurst tomb.
"Do you have a carriage?" inquired Alistair.
"Perhaps you have forgotten the part about our family having fallen upon hard times," reminded Carlton.
"Ah. So, walking. Yes. Quite."
The four made their way out of the city and down the road towards the tomb, Alistair continually falling behind even the little halfling as he kept picking rocks out of his shoes. But they eventually made their way to the tomb where
Funke Von Weisswurst lay in state. The tomb, as had been explained by Carlton Thorpe before their departure, was underground and carved from inside a cave, the entry to said cave being a squat, stone structure in a field bounded by four disused lampposts. As Chaevaris watched, a small, black bird landed on one of the lampposts and squawked loudly. The marble vault held a rusty, iron gate barring entry, but it wasn't much of an impediment as it wasn't even locked, as Harlan discovered when he pulled upon it. With a rusty squeak denoting years since its last oiling, the iron gate swung outward, revealing a sloping ramp leading down into darkness. Both Chaevalis and Harlan could see far enough into the darkness to notice the path branched out into a "Y" shape, the left tunnel being slightly narrower than the right passageway.
"That matches what Carlton said," pointed out the paladin. "One side of the tomb is for the commoners, the other side for the nobility."
"We going in?" asked Ageratum, pulling a sunrod out of her backpack and activating it. She looked at each of the men in turn. "What, none of you brought any means of illumination?" She snorted in disbelief and entered the tomb, the others following behind her. She then tossed the sunrod before her, so it bounced down the slope and ended up alongside the point of the "Y," where the tunnels veered off in two separate directions. Then there was a sudden gasp of air, followed immediately by high-pitched giggling. Chaevaris frowned, unsure if the giggling was a response to the sudden illumination in the darkened tomb. Harlan drew his longsword, peering into the darkness ahead and attuning his senses to the presence of evil. "There is evil ahead," he informed the group.
Eager to show the others he wasn't afraid, Alistair stepped briskly down the ramp until he reached the fork. He, too, had drawn his weapon - a rapier - and held it in his right hand while his left still clung to his carpetbag containing his only possessions in this world. And then, another little girl came speeding down the tunnel from the leftmost branch, skirting past Alistair and rushing down the other path. "There's bad things in the pit!" she screamed as she ran past.
"I say!" declared Alistair, looking to where the girl had run off to, but she was already past the radius of illumination of the sunrod. Ageratum advanced, picked up her light source, and tossed it down the narrower of the two passageways, the way the little girl had come from. This was likely the half of the tomb devoted to commoners. "Anybody hear anything?" she asked the others, straining her ears. There was a hushed voice, saying something in a language very similar to Dwarven - Gnomish, perhaps? - that sounded like, "You have got to be kidding me!" The voice was filled with exasperation.
Harlan continued concentrating on the emanations of evil inside the tomb. "There's evil coming from this direction," he said, indicating the way the girl had gone. "And also from this direction," he added, pointing the way the girl had come from.
"Well, let's go see what we can see," decided Alistair, stepping boldly forward to the left where the sunrod lay upon the carved stone floor - and immediately spilling forward in a heap, having struck his foot on a hidden tripwire. From his new vantage point upon the floor he saw the wall was not all solid - there was a section which moved slightly by his nearby motion. Regaining his footing and poking with the tip of his blade at what ended up being a painted curtain of canvas hanging over a narrow crevice in the stone wall, he was surprised when a dark face popped out at him from the crack - and another, similar face approached from the way the girl had gone. Both beings were small, barely taller than Ageratum, with coal-black skin and white hair.
Drow, thought the halfling, before realizing these creatures were more the size of svirfneblin. Some sort of hybrid race between the two, then?
"You're no fun!" announced
Smidge, stomping over from the rightmost tunnel.
"No fun at all!" agreed
Smudge. "You're supposed to drop whatever you're carrying and run screaming from the vault! Didn't you hear the scary, crazed giggling?" He demonstrated the sound again for the benefit of the four adventurers, then spat out, "Bah!" when they continued to refuse to run away screaming in fear.
"I say," said Alistair, confused at what all was going on here. He turned to the female svirfdrowlin, for lack of a better term. "Did you happen to see a little girl come running by you?"
"She
was the little girl," sighed Ageratum, surprised at the thick-headedness of this rich-boy fop. "Illusion magic or something, I'd wager."
"I say!" sputtered Alistair. "That's rather dastardly! To engage in such trickery...." His sentence ended abruptly, as the young nobleman was unsure how to express the full extent of his moral outrage.
"Fat lotta good it did us!" griped Smudge, stomping back into his hidey hole. Smidge followed, unable to slam the canvas curtain behind her but wishing fervently there was a way to do so. Still, they were confident of the four adventurers, only the halfling woman had any chance of squeezing into the narrow entrance of their burrow - perhaps if she were greased down with butter, or something - and they were sure they could fend her off in a two-against-one fight if it came to that.
"Let's go," said Ageratum, picking up her sunrod again and handing it to Harlan. "Maybe you should hold on to this, as you're the one who can sense the sources of evil."
"Were those...people...evil?" Alistair demanded.
"Oh, quite," agreed Harlan, which elicited a quiet "I knew it!" from the still-outraged Alistair.
"Hey, isn't the nobleman section this way?" asked Chaevaris, pointing towards the wider tunnel to the right as the others were heading left. "The crest we're here to collect should be over this way, correct?"
"We must also deal with the 'scary monsters' the boy in the marketplace mentioned," Harlan pointed out, and when it was suggested they were likely no more than the result of the sounds made by the mischievous hybrids the paladin insisted upon checking the whole tomb out just to be sure. Shrugging, Chaevaris notched arrow to bow and followed the others.
"It must be nice to be an elf adventurer," Alistair pointed out to Chaevaris as a means of making conversation. "Rather like
Elfy Danger Silverleaf, I imagine."
"
What?" demanded Chaevaris, not sure at all what this irritating human child was blathering on about.
"Elfy Danger Silverleaf," repeated Alistair in earnest. "He's a fictional character in a series of children's books. He's an elf adventurer - and you know he's a good one, because 'Danger' is literally his middle name!"
"Did your mother read these books to you?" asked the archer, voice dripping with condescension that went right over the young nobleman's head.
"No, not my mother,
Nanny Rogers. Well, at least until I was old enough to read them for myself."
"That must have been a very proud moment for you," Chaevaris admitted dryly. "When was that, last year?"
The passageway to the left widened out into a larger area, basically a square with parallel grooves going from side to side, each groove filled with burial niches and most of the niches containing piles of crumbling bones. However, along the entire eastern wall, three fully intact and animated skeletons were up and about, clawing at the stone wall rather ineffectually, as their attempts at tunneling was wearing down their finger-bones at a much greater rate than it was having any effect upon the stone surface of the wall before them. "Evil," confirmed Harlan, examining them with his enhanced paladin senses. Then he charged forward, pulling a mace from his belt - for he knew from his paladin training that a blunt-headed weapon dealt the most damage against skeletal undead. However, the skeleton he had targeted - the closest - was too intent upon its digging to even notice the attack, even more so when it suddenly shifted to try its luck against a different section of wall and the paladin's mace missed the undead creature entirely. (Ironically, the mace-strike did more damage to the stone wall than the skeleton had been able to do with its feeble clawing.)
Alistair was right behind Harlan, charging in with his rapier drawn. He, however, had not attended any paladin school and had no idea the blade of his weapon was a poor choice of attack against an animated skeleton. He swung his blade across the back of the middle skeleton's ribs, where it made a harmless tune but did not seem to seriously affect the undead creature in any meaningful way.
Chaevaris took careful aim and released the notched arrow, sending it errorlessly striking its target: the skull of the farthest skeleton. However, while the arrow plinked off the bony cranium of the third skeleton it did not even begin to distract it from its digging attempts, so the elf doubted it had dealt the undead thing any great harm.
But then the middle skeleton ceased its digging efforts, as if belatedly realizing it was under attack. It spun about and sent a stone-sharpened pair of claws striking out at Alistair, ripping the lace at his throat and drawing a few parallel lines of blood across his neck. Alistair staggered back with a startled cry of pain, tripping over a loose bone strewn upon the floor and landing on his bottom, while Harlan stepped forward to engage the skeletal attacker with his mace. And then Alistair, heart pumping furiously, called out a few words that caused only puzzlement on the faces of his new-found companions: "
Ogilvy, if you please...."
The effect was immediate. A skull, one of the loose bones from one of the nearest niches, rose up in the air and dangled above the skeleton Harlan was fighting, the one who had harmed Alistair. Once directly overhead, gravity kicked back in and it plummeted down upon the skeleton, but struck a merely glancing blow on its shoulder as the undead thing tried clawing at Harlan. Then, as Harlan backed defensively away, the skeleton did something quite surprising: it turned its back on the elf paladin and returned to its clawing at the stone wall. Harlan surmised that for whatever reason, if you didn't attack the skeletons they soon either forgot you were there or were overcome by some mystical compulsion to try to dig their way through the wall.
Chaevaris advanced cautiously forward, with the sudden idea of unstringing the bow so it could be wielded much like a quarterstaff, the canny archer having realized blunt weapons seemed to be the way to go against creatures made up of animated bone. Ageratum had come to the same realization and picked up a human thighbone, wielding it like a club. She slammed it against the skeleton in the middle and it collapsed into a pile of unconnected bones itself. And, somewhat surprising to the halfling rogue, the other two skeletons completely ignored her attack upon their cohort, keeping their single-minded focus upon clawing ineffectually at the stone wall.
Harlan realized these strange undead beings were going to have to be destroyed even if attacking them provoked counterattacks on their part, and stepped forward again to bring his mace swinging in at the first skeleton. He grazed it, just as another skull - or perhaps the same one, as the paladin hadn't been paying that much attention - rose up from the floor, hovered over the skeleton he was fighting, and then plonked down upon it, skull landing upon skull and sending the skeleton falling apart like the other had. That left just the one, and the other three managed to take it down while Alistair was swabbing at his neck with a handkerchief, unconsciously applying a
prestidigitation spell to clean off his neck, the lace frills of his shirt, and the handkerchief itself. When he had completed his attentions, there was no blood to be found anywhere.
With the skeletal threat dealt with, Chaevaris turned to Alistair and made an accusation. "You didn't tell us you were a wizard!" the archer complained.
"Wizard?" asked Alistair, his brows lowered in puzzlement. "I'm no wizard - I'm a swordsman!" He staggered to his feet and brandished his rapier as evidence of his claims.
"You cast a spell - I saw it! Or how else do you explain that floating skull?"
"Oh, that - that was Ogilvy, I fear. He was a family servant when my brother and I were young boys, but he died years ago. For whatever reason, his spirit seems to have come back to me recently, mostly to fetch me things and see to my comfort. In fact, it was Ogilvy's presence, I am sure, that caused Father to accuse me of having made a bargain with a demon or devil from the Lower Planes. He seems convinced I was trafficking with demons and sold my soul to learn how to cast spells and he tossed me out of the family, lest I drag down the proud name of Pastlethwaite. Not that I can really blame poor old Ogilvy, though - he was just doing his best to look after me, as he did when he was alive." Alistair looked to the others and saw only expressions ranging from slight disbelief (on the part of Ageratum and Harlan) to outright scoffing (in the case of Chaevaris). "What?" demanded the young nobleman. "It's true!"
"Let's check out the other half of the tomb," suggested Harlan diplomatically. "It seems this half has been cleared of evil." His senses told him the wall the skeletons had been clawing at was still emanating waves of evil, but after several minutes the collapsed skeletons did not seem able to rise back up, so the paladin deemed it safe to move on.
Chaevaris was more than happy to go fetch the Thorpe crest and get out of the tomb and was likewise more than happy to voice that view. They followed the archer back to the "Y" - and noticed neither Smidge nor Smudge had made a reappearance, apparently sulking in their hidey-hole - and heard a series of angry caws coming from the direction of the rusty gate, where a small, black-feathered bird was venting some sort of avian frustration. The group ignored it and followed the elf through a doorway into a wider hall with doors on either side. Approaching the first of these doors, Chaevaris saw a sculpture of a boar's head and the caption, "Von Weisswurst" carved above in fancy calligraphy. "Here we go!" enthused the archer, ready to pull open the door.
"Hold up!" commanded Harlan, looking down the hallway. "There is evil throughout this passageway, but something seems to be blocking it just past the doorway."
"Weird," admitted Chaevaris, who then opened the door, eager to fetch the crest so they could all be on their way.
The chamber behind the door was mostly open, with an uncovered stone coffin surrounded by ropes hanging from the tops of four poles, as if the coffin were some sort of bizarre museum exhibit. Inside the coffin rested the desiccated corpse of an elderly woman. Or mostly desiccated, in any case, for while the rest of her skin was pulled tightly to her bones, her hands seemed almost lifelike, as if blood still coursed through the veins in those appendages. Even more odd was what she held in her hands: a plump, white sausage.
Alistair was oddly captivated by the sausage the dead woman was holding, and not only because during the long trek to the tomb he had finished off the paltry bread and cheese Nanny Rogers had packed in his carpetbag when she hastily gathered together a few of his things after Lord Ambrose Pastlethwaite threw his youngest son out of the family's manor house. Despite there being no illumination in the chamber, Alistair could almost swear the sausage was glowing in the light of Ageratum's sunrod, currently being held by Harlan as he stepped into the room to ensure the corpse in the coffin wasn't about to animate. After the paladin was convinced there was neither danger nor evil here (and Chaevaris was likewise convinced the crest they sought was not present), they turned to exit the room and check out the next door across the hall. But Alistair approached the coffin, reaching a hand out to tentatively touch the sausage.
"What are you doing, you idiot?" hissed Ageratum, as if afraid to talk too loudly in case it awoke the dead woman. Alistair ignored her and pulled the sausage from her hands, lifting it to his nose and smelling it as if it were a fine vintage cigar. It felt plump and juicy in his hands and he opened his mouth to take a bite.
"Are you
seriously going to eat something you took from a
corpse in a
tomb?" hissed the astonished halfling. But Alistair gave no response; he was busy chewing the white sausage that tasted so good in his mouth - he was apparently much hungrier than he had been aware. And the meat not only tasted wonderful, it spread a warm feeling of contentment throughout his body. He wasn't consciously aware of it, but the healing power of the magical sausage closed up the scratches he had received at the sharp claws of the skeleton. He finished the sausage and licked the grease from his fingers, not even paying heed to the uncharacteristic crassness of his actions. "That was good," was all he had to say.
In the meantime, Harlan and Chaevaris had opened both of the doors on the right side of the hallway, in each case finding a solid wall of stone; those "future crypts" had yet to be carved out yet, apparently. That left only one final set of double doors along the same wall as the crypt holding the woman's remains, and Harlan could tell it was emanating a strong aura of evil. The doors also held the boar's-head emblem of the Von Weisswurst family and the name carved in fancy letters above. "The chamber we're about to open should be roughly on the other side of the wall the skeletons were trying to get through," he warned the others before yanking the doors open.
With the light from the sunrod (which the paladin had tucked into the top of his armor, so he could have a hand free and still wield his mace) spilling inside the crypt chamber, Harlan could see another open stone coffin surrounded by ropes, although one of the poles had been tipped over and the rope at the front of the coffin lay upon the ground. The coffin, however, was quite empty - for the body of what could only be Funke Von Weisswurst himself was shambling against the back wall, the same wall the skeletons had been attacking from the other side. As Funke spun around, the newly-minted adventurers could see he wore a family crest around his neck like a necklace, dangling from a heavy, black chain. Funke made a low, groaning sound as he turned to face the light spilling into his tomb.
The light only got brighter as Harlan ran across the room, switching weapons to his longsword as he charged the zombie. His blade went slashing across the undead body's chest, cutting open his garment and his rotting flesh but spilling no blood, for it had been many years since the blood flowed freely in Funke's now-undead body. Alistair followed at the paladin's side, stabbing the tip of his rapier deep into the zombie's stomach and pulling it back out, with little to no wound to show for his efforts. Then Ageratum charged in between the two, slashing at the zombie's lower abdomen with a dagger but failing to hit him, mostly from a desire not to hit either of her new compadres. (She wasn't yet willing to stretch the definition to "friends" - especially with the fop.) Chaevaris stayed in the doorway, firing an arrow at Funke, which pierced the top of his skull but seemed to deal it no particular harm; from that point on the zombie fought with a feathered shaft sticking out of his head like some bizarre, humanoid unicorn.
Funke swung an arm at Harlan but the half-elf easily managed to lean back out of harm's way; zombies, he was learning, were nowhere near as fast as skeletons. But Harlan likewise missed with his own follow-on attack, for the same reason as Ageratum had missed: the adventurers were too bunched up and they feared accidentally catching each other in their own weapon-strikes.
Having seen how ineffectual poking a zombie with a rapier had been, noticing Ageratum had entered battle wielding a pair of daggers, and assuming the halfling knew more about down-and-dirty fighting of undead than his own experience had thus far taught him, Alistair pulled the dagger from his own belt and slashed at Funke's midsection, with both good and bad results. On the plus side, Funke's garment and undead flesh parted before the dagger's blade, scoring a deep gash that unloosened a coil of intestines from the zombie's lower gut; on the down side, an undead zombie's inner guts smelled simply
horrible and some of the dripping ichor almost landed on the young nobleman's shoes!
Ageratum stepped to the right so she was flanking the zombie with Harlan, attacking from the opposite side as the paladin. She slashed with both daggers in opposite directions, but her short stature worked against her and she didn't connect with the shambling corpse's gut in the same was as Alistair just had, catching instead nothing but the cloth of the zombie's pants. Another arrow came flying in from the doorway, only to shatter against the stone wall when it missed.
Funke shambled forward, allowing those surrounding it to lash out with their weapons. Alistair got in another lucky hit with his dagger, while Harlan and Ageratum's blades missed as the zombie made a staggering dash forward, seeking exit from his tomb. Right as he was about to run into Chaevaris - who had not expected the shambling thing to have moved so quickly and was scrambling to unsheathe a rapier from its scabbard - Harlan charged it from behind, practically slicing through Funke's spine. The undead nobleman fell to one knee, then toppled over, its lifeless body now bereft of whatever animating spirit had given it movement. Without a word, Chaevaris pulled the necklace containing the crest from around the zombie's neck. "Good job, everyone," said the elf. "Anyone opposed to getting out of here and turning this in to the Thorpes so we can cash in our reward?"
Nobody was opposed to the archer's plan.
However, upon retracing their steps back to the creaking gate, they found themselves facing a pair of dirt-smeared humans wielding short swords. "We'll take that crest," said
Bargle.
"Awful friendly of you to fetch it for us," added
Margus, "but we'll go ahead and take it back to Mr. Thorpe. But you all get to live, so take that for what it's worth. Now hand it over."
As one, the other three adventurers turned and looked at Harlan Starblade. He anticipated their questions and replied with a single word, the result of his examining the auras emanating from each: "Evil." That was all they needed to hear; they readied their weapons, assumed defensive postures, and Chaevaris taunted, "Come and get it, humans!" while firing off an arrow that just missed Bargle's head - but passed close enough to part his hair.
Roaring in defiance, the two sword-wielding commoners charged into the group, thinking they'd turn and flee before their onslaught and they could easily stab them in the backs. But the fledgling adventurers had determined these two bumpkins posed no real threat and stood their ground. Ageratum slashed at Margus's knee with her dagger, cutting through his raggedy pants leg and causing a stream of blood to soak down his leg and into his worn boot. He tried decapitating the halfling, but she easily ducked beneath his blade and it passed harmlessly over her head.
Harlan swung his longsword and cut right through Bargle's midsection, causing him to topple forward and collapse in a heap at the paladin's feet, the life having already fled his body. Chaevaris backed up enough to be able to shoot another arrow at Margus, but this one also missed, as did the next few attacks from Ageratum and Alistair, the inexperienced heroes once again bunching up too close together and getting in each other's way. It was Harlan, again, who struck the killing blow, this time channeling Pelor's power through his blade in a smiting attack that took the would-be thief's life.
"Obviously no Guild training," scoffed Ageratum quietly to herself. Everyone seemed to think you could just up and decide to be a thief, that it was as easy as just wishing to have the skills needed to make a successful living at the more morally questionable ways of earning coin. For these two, it was a mistake that had cost them everything, but Ageratum had no pity for the stupid fools. Blinded by greed, no doubt.
Chaevaris picked up the two short swords dropped by the pair of thugs and looked them over. Then, having decided, the archer stated, "I'll take this one" and slid it behind the belt holding the rapier's scabbard. They decided to leave the bodies where they lay, a feast for the crows. And speaking of crows, a black crow - or a bird very much like a crow, in any case - had regained its perch on one of the unused lampposts and was cawing away in irritation. "Stupid bird," scoffed Alistair as the quartet made their way out of the burial field and back the way they had come. "I wonder what his deal is?"
Upon returning to the
Elver and meeting back up with Carlton and his sister Maya - who had taken rooms upstairs in the meantime - Chaevaris turned over the family crest and the heavy black necklace it hung from. "Any trouble retrieving it?" Carlton asked.
"Nothing we couldn't handle," answered the archer smugly. Carlton passed over a single amethyst as payment, causing Chaevaris to balk. "And how are we to split this evenly among us?" the elf demanded. Carlton Thorpe directed the group to a gem-cutter, where the amethyst was indeed valuated at 200 pieces of gold and sold for the same amount. Chaevaris counted out 50 pieces of gold for each of the four adventurers.
"The caravan leaves for Ghourmand Vale in a couple of days," Harlan reminded the group. "I have been sent out into the greater world to perform good deeds, and that seems as likely a destination as any. I intend to sign on as a member of the security forces."
"I plan on doing the same," announced Alistair. At least if he was out of Greyhawk City he'd have less of a chance of running into any of the noblemen who knew him in what he must now consider his previous life as a member of their upper-class society. "What about you, Elfy?"
Chaevaris glared at the idiot nobleman, mentally repeating,
He's only a child, he's only a child.... "I was planning on doing the same." It was as good a way of escaping the general area as any other, and the archer was more than eager to be some distance away as quickly as possible.
"What about you, Miss Purslane?" asked Alistair, surprising the halfling not only in the silly fop having actually remembered her name, but treating her as if she were of a higher station in society than she truly belonged in.
"I haven't decided," she said, figuring she still had a couple of days to see if it was okay with her Guildmaster. After all, she'd been to a few cities and town out west in the areas they'd likely be passing on the trail to Ghourmand Vale; it was possible she could perform some Guild business if she joined the caravan. "We'll have to see."
- - -
Well, this was the first game session in our brand new campaign, and we all had fun trying out our new characters. I did hit a bit of a snag, though: right at the end of the fight with Funke the zombie, I got a phone call and had to go back into work, as I was on call that week and there was an emergency that needed attending to by someone from my office. So I didn't actually get to finish out the adventure with everyone else; I had my son Logan run Alistair along with Chaevaris and he also picked up another duty of mine: jotting down quick notes on what happened during the adventure so I could take that skeletal outline and flesh it into this Story Hour post.
With the exception of my nephew Harry, who doesn't like to put a whole lot of effort into a backstory for his PCs, we've all got some secrets known only to ourselves and the DM, Dan. I provided a bunch of family background and explained how I intended to run Alistair as a sorcerer who wasn't even aware he was casting spells (at least at first); Logan gave Dan extensive details about his archer PC's family and apparently there's a reason Chaevaris wants to get out of the local area pretty quickly; Vicki wanted Ageratum to belong to a thieves guild somewhat like that of the Gentlemen Bastards in the Scott Lynch "Locke Lamora" series of novels, and her halfling PC has apparently been to a few of the cities and towns we'll be stopping at (or at least passing by), providing plenty of opportunities for plot hooks along the way. And Dan has been loving all of the details we've given him, stating he has plenty of material just in that stuff alone to power a dozen or more adventures.
I should probably also explain the white sausage. Personally, I'm with Vicki: eating anything you found being cradled by a dead body in a tomb is probably not a good idea. But I had Alistair do so for two main reasons: I was down from 6 hp to 1 hp from a single hit from that skeleton and I knew none of us had, in this very first adventure, any source of healing whatsoever. (Dan had provided two NPC clerics for the excursion to Ghourmand Vale so we'll have some healing available during the trip, but neither of them came along on this side-quest for the Thorpes.) Putting in a
sausage of cure light wounds seemed to me - having known Dan for several decades now - to be something he'd be likely to do. At work the next day I asked him whether the
sausage of cure light wounds had been an original part of his adventure or if he'd just added it in once he saw it was needed, and he admitted it was very much the latter - he didn't want another stray hit from a monster to slay my sorcerer before the campaign really even got off the ground. However, we now have 50 gp each - the exact cost of a
potion of cure light wounds - so if we end up without a source of healing next adventure, then it's entirely on us. (That said, it sounds like we'll be jumping ahead next game session to the beginning of the caravan's journey, so we'll have Father Barbados and Brother Scrimshaw with us.)
Finally, Dan held off on the meeting between Alistair and his grackle familiar, given I wasn't present there when the event would have unfolded. (By the time I got back from the emergency at the office, the game session had been finished for over an hour - I missed the last 30 minutes of the night's adventure.) We'll probably have that meeting occur at the beginning of next session.
