The Lightbringers' Expedition to Castle Ravenloft - updated 12/19

[Dr Midnight]

The game was super fun tonight... I'm incredibly weary and tired right now, but this was the kind of session you live for, where great things happen just in the nick of time.

Oh man am I groggy.

 

[Dr Midnight]

Epilogue
DISPLEASED ​

Sometime after dawn, Strahd stood in the study. He was staying well clear of the hated sunlight that streamed in through the window. He was studying a painting that hung on the wall. The portrait was of a woman- young, beautiful, wearing an evening gown with her hair tied back in an elegant fashion. Her eyes were dark, heavy-lidded… haunted. Strahd thought he saw something there and leaned in to look more deeply.

“Do not look on her.” Strahd started at the sudden voice and looked around. A short, shadowy figure stood in the doorway. It stepped forward to reveal the dwarf, Crickbourn. “You haven’t the right.”

“I meant nothing,” Strahd said. “Only a curiosity in art.”

“You failed me last night. You should never have mentioned her,” the dwarf said, moving closer.

Strahd shook his head. “No, I… I was in character! It was in keeping with…”

Crickbourn kept walking forward. “You told them your beloved would be grateful of your coming. What, now, will they think as they reach Barovia and find only people that hate and fear you? They’re sure to find a girl whose father has died recently, and to whom your attentions have been devoted. She will claim to despise Strahd, as the rest… but you told them that she would be happy to see you. Does this not strike you as a contradiction?”

“Yes, I see your point. I…”

“I have no use for a Strahd that cannot keep his tale straight. You had one job, and it was simple: provide the details that I wanted them to know. You improvised and now this little added piece of information might cause them to wonder.”

Strahd backed up slowly, spreading his hands as he tried to reason. He stopped at the edge of the window’s sunbeam. “I have erred. I apologize. I only meant that as we know, Ireena will…”

Crickbourn’s eyes flew wide in fury and the whites filled with blood. He lunged forward. “Do not speak her name! Not in this room!” His form melted and elongated, and his hand shot out and grabbed Strahd by the throat, holding him up. Strahd was bodily smashed out of the window and held aloft over the heights of the cliffs. The sun opened small ember-lit sores on Strahd’s face and he grabbed meagerly at the iron arm that held him. Smoke began to rise from his fine clothes.

He tried to choke out a plea for clemency, but the sun’s rays pierced him to his heart and the form of the vampire was turned to ash. The cloud of white flakes swirled lazily in the air, and Strahd Von Zarovich lowered his arm and let them drift over his face. He wore the clothes that the polite elderly imposter at dinner had worn, but his face was harder, younger, pale and dead. His black hair was slicked back and his eyelids, cheeks and temples were a bruised purplish color. His eyes were shut as he felt the sunlight kiss his ash-dusted face.

“…For that is not her name at all.” It was spoken softly, almost a whisper.

The eyes opened, and they were without pupils or irises, entirely red, like large drops of blood. Strahd backed from the window, disappearing into the shadows of the room. The red eyes were all that could be seen there and they glowed fiercely in the darkness.

Next session
BAROVIA ​

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[Dr Midnight]

Session 3 - Chapter 1
BAROVIA
Some text taken or paraphrased from EXPEDITION TO CASTLE RAVENLOFT​

Gerrit was walking up and down the corridors of the castle, following a voice. The voice was whispering his name insistently, but every time he turned another corner there was no one to be seen- only the whisper of his name coming from the next corner. The voice had kept calling him down stairways and down ladders, down, down, further down. No matter how far he descended there was always another staircase or trap door, and there was always the voice whispering to him from beneath.

Gerrit

He woke up suddenly. Was that the distant sound of glass breaking? He rubbed his head and sat up in the bed in Ravenloft’s guest room. He hadn’t slept well at all. He had kept half-waking, thinking he heard horrible things in the darkness… and that nightmare. It hadn’t been especially frightening, but the sense of dread was still soaked into the pores of his mind. He eagerly tried to forget it.

“Morning,” he said groggily.

Arianna came out of her meditation on the chair facing the fireplace. “Good morning. Sleep well?”

“Well enough.”

“Liar,” the elf said with a smile as she stood up and stretched. “You were tossing and turning all night."

Gerrit got out of bed and went about his prayers. The pall of the nightmare still hung on his thoughts- in his mind, his goddess was distant. Cold. She had no face.

Arianna interrupted his morning prayer routine. “Gerrit. Gerrit!”

“What?”

“Crickbourn’s gone.”

Gerrit got up and looked to the floor where the dwarf’s bedroll had been lain. His possessions were all gone, but there was a folded note in their place. Gerrit picked it up and read.

Friends-

Thank you for your hospitality. I’m afraid it’s now my time to go on my way… I have to join others in the battle against the undead around Barovia. I have a spell that will open the deadlock on the door for me, and I’m sorry if I woke you up as I cast it. I’ll leave the door unlocked. Perhaps I’ll see you around.

Crickbourn​

​

“That’s bizarre, I didn’t even notice him leaving,” Arianna said, scratching her head. “I’m normally pretty alert in the midst of my meditations.”

“Quiet dwarf,” Gerrit yawned. “Let’s get moving.”

Downstairs, they found no breakfast, no torches lit, and no Count. Only another note, this one written in an elegant hand on a much older piece of yellowed parchment.

Arianna

In these times it can be hard to know the right thing to do. I trust that your dedication to your family will guide your hand. The carriage is waiting outside. It will take you to the gates of Barovia.

I recommend that you act surreptitiously. By this I mean that it would not be wise to announce that you are a Von Zarovich or that we are aligned in a cause. Rather, act as an outsider with good intent. Counter the filthy lies of the witches where you can, fight the undead, and befriend the good people of Barovia. Their hearts will open to you, I know. Don’t forget to work on locating the despicable “Tome of Strahd” and erasing its lies from the world.

My apologies for not attending you this morning, but I have work to do elsewhere… as do you, I think. Good luck today.

Your great-uncle,
Count Strahd Von Zarovich​

​

“Ahh,” Gerrit sighed. “No breakfast. Looks like trail rations in the carriage. Well, let’s go.”

​

In the carriage, Gerrit gnawed unhappily on one of Froffin’s pressed-oat bars. This one was supposedly blueberry flavored. “These things really are unpleasant,” he said through a mouthful of brick-tasting thickness.

The carriage began going through its odd motions… tipping backwards, looping oddly, almost seeming to go backwards at one point.
Gerrit finished his oat bar and grimaced. He crumpled the paper wrapping and dropped it into his haversack. He looked up at Arianna and found her staring off into space, deep in thought. “Something wrong?”

She blinked and smiled, then looked away. “No. I’m just not sure this is what I want. This Strahd gentleman, he seems nice enough but I can’t say I trust him. I get a weird feeling from him, like he’s not who he says he is.”

“What would he be playing at, though?” Gerrit asked. “Why would he be looking to use you? You don’t have much money or political power or anything. Also, if he wants to seduce you, he came at you with the wrong angle for that from the start.” He shuddered and Arianna laughed appreciatively. “I know what you mean, though. This whole thing is weird, and that castle is just outright creepy. We’ve just got to keep our eyes and ears open.”

“Yeah, but beyond that, I’m not even certain I want to be heir to this castle or fortune. Money’s nice enough, but what’s that worth? Plus, this area…” She parted the burgundy curtains and looked out. She very quickly shut them. She’d seen something shapeless and unnatural in the fog as it passed. “I wouldn’t want to live here,” she finished.

After a time, the carriage stopped and the door opened. They got out onto the road, almost exactly where the horses had picked them up the night before. The carriage moved off and they began walking.

Black pools of water stood like dark mirrors about the muddy roadway. A shroud of thick, cold mist spread over the ground. Giant tree trunks stood guard on both sides of the road, their branches clawing at the mists. In every direction the fog grew thicker and the forest seemed more oppressive.

“I will say, though,” Arianna admitted, “that despite the oddness of the customs here, I am a bit enchanted by the quaint old-world architecture and superstitions. The whole region has a… certain flavor that Ortil and the mainland don’t. Does that make sense?”

They arrived at a waypoint. Gray in the fog, high stone pillars loomed up from the impenetrable woods on both sides of the road. Huge iron gates hung from the stonework, dew clinging to their rusting bars. Standing before the pillars were two stone statues of armed guardians with wicked polearms. Their carved heads lay among the weeds at their feet, neatly broken from the stone shoulders. As they walked towards the gate, it opened with the high, keening sound of iron on iron. They walked through the gate and it closed behind them with a scrape-clang.

Gerrit said “That’s not enchanting, that’s just unnerving.” They walked on. Jade stalked at Arianna’s side, keeping her eyes to the mist, not trusting.

Tall shapes loomed from the dense fog, and the muddy ground underfoot gave way to slick, wet cobblestones. A dilapidated wooden sign read “Welcome to the Village of Barovia.” As they grew closer, the shapes resolved into tenements whose windows were boarded, broken, and lightless. Nothing moved nearby, though the fog limited visibility. Faint sounds, as of something groaning, echoed hollowly from somewhere deeper in the settlement.

“Oh, I don’t like that,” Arianna said. “Zombie?”

“Sounds like it. We’d best be ready.”

They walked forward slowly. The streets were choked with mist, limiting vision to only a few dozen feet. The buildings here at the edge of town looked abandoned, burned out, or barricaded. Garbage littered the ground, and a carrion stench assaulted their noses. Ahead, an overturned haycart blocked the street.

Gerrit held up his hand, motioning for them to stop. They peered into the mist ahead. Were those shapes, bobbing slowly? The sound of clumsy shuffling could be distantly heard. Arianna clutched at his arm suddenly and gestured down a thin alleyway to their right that ended in a wall. At that wall, a man was facing away from them, swaying on his feet.

“Should we talk to him?” Arianna asked.

“I’d rather find out of he’s alive, first,” Gerrit said.

The man raised his arm. There was a bite on his wrist that had turned black, and yellowish, jaundiced veins ran from it. The wound leaked clear stuff. He slowly slapped the wall as if looking for a way through. The shapes ahead of them, beyond the haycart, were groaning and walking with stiff limbs. The heads jerked with each step and their was no fluidity to their movement.

“Right,” Gerrit whispered. “I’m going to cast a spell on us… I think it would be best, for now, if we weren’t seen. We need to learn more before we just start attacking these things. Do some investigating first.” He began to cast the spell, speaking the words of prayer.

The man at the end of the alley slowly turned around. His eyes were glazed and dead, and his lower jaw had been ripped off. His tongue looped and curled stupidly beneath the roof of his mouth and his tunic was stained with old blood and pus. He looked toward where the noise had come from, and saw nothing. He turned back to the wall and kept trying to find a way into it, where the soft pink food was hiding.

Invisible to undead, Gerrit, Arianna and Jade slipped up the street.

Coming up
PAINT THE TOWN DEAD ​

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[Numion]

Good stuff!

The links to your pdf's at lulu.com were great, it's been a while since I read those storyhours back here. Now I'll have something to read, thanks!

 

[Dr Midnight]

Session 3 - Chapter 2
DEAD CITY​

The two adventurers and the black leopard carefully wove their way up the street, taking the time to avoid touching zombies as they passed. “Remember,” Gerrit said. “If we attack, the spell that hides us is canceled.” Arianna nodded.

The scenery was horrific. Groaning zombies melted into and out of view on a desolate street. Doors or windows that weren’t barricaded were smashed in, and the grisly details seen within suggested tales of terror, hopeless fighting and screaming death. Looking in on the gore was weighing on the minds of the halfling and the elf, bowing them from the strain, so after a time they did their best not to look.

The everpresent mists cleared slightly, revealing a human body lying face down in the street amid the garbage. One of the buildings facing the street had its door smashed in. It looked like this poor fellow had been dragged from him home and partially devoured. His face had been gnawed off and the skull gleamed white where it peeked out from the black-red mess of his uneaten musculature.

Gerrit made a motion that he would go and scout ahead… there was a fork in the road coming, and he wanted to pick the least populated direction to move in. He walked off, leaving the elf and her panther to stand near the eaten man.

The corpse’s shoulder twitched.

In a flash, Arianna had her bow drawn and an arrow nocked. She and Jade stepped back from the corpse and watched it. Its chest began to jerk. Its neck wriggled, slightly.

Arianna watched its head for any movement, fully expecting the corpse to rise as a zombie. That’s why she was so surprised when its ribcage burst open with a moist cracking sound. Coagulated blood misted up around the wound as an immense, fat, pulsating worm rose up from the chest cavity like a cobra. It was a maggot, clearly, but it was maybe a foot in diameter. Its black mandibles clicked and it seemed to be looking to Jade. It chittered and hissed.

Arianna’s lip curled up out of disgust. At least it’s living or it couldn’t see us, she thought. Not undead…which means it’s okay to put it out of my misery. She aimed her bow at it.

Gerrit, maybe twenty feet away, had gauged that he wanted to take the right path. A zombie emerged from a door and the halfling had to jump back to avoid being brushed by it as it passed. Pressed against a wall as he was, he saw Arianna with her bow drawn against the maggot. He extended an arm and said “Arianna, no!!”

It was too late… She’d released her grip on the string and it thrummed. The arrow shot into the maggot with a wet spluck sound.

The zombies all around turned to them and started opening their jaws, walking forward.

“I thought you said don’t attack any undead and we’ll be safe,” Arianna cried.

“No, I said don’t attack! Anything! At all!”

“Arrgh… well, I don’t know these things!” The elf pulled two arrows and plugged them into the zombie behind Gerrit, sinking them to the fletching. It kept coming and made a grab at him. The exposed finger-bones of the zombie scraped small cuts in Gerrit’s skin and immediately he felt something flush into his bloodstream. He kicked the zombie in the leg and spun away.

The corpse on the ground writhed again as another maggot burst from the abdominal area, trailing intestines down its length. The maggot that had been shot was still very much alive, and together, they lunged for Jade. They bit at her and a quick paralysis overtook the large cat’s nervous system. Meowing slightly, she fell over on her side with a thud. The maggots clicked their mandibles together, anticipating their meal. Viscous drool oozed from their maws.

Arianna reacted by feathering the maggots with arrows at a blinding speed. Try as she could to pin them down, their shapeless jelly-bodies didn’t die and the maggots lurched for her cat.

Zombies were emerging from buildings and coming from the mists. They tried to overwhelm Gerrit but the halfling moved quickly, ducking and dodging among them.

The maggots sank their jaws into Jade and began gorging. Arianna panicked… try as she might, she couldn’t seem to kill the things. It was clear that a few more moments and the cat would be dead.

“Hold on!” Gerrit said. He began preparing a spell that would heal the cat, and he moved towards them. The spell glowed in his hand, ready to be cast. “I’m coming! I won’t let them… agh!!” A zombie had come from behind and sank its teeth into the firm meat of Gerrit’s shoulder. The halfling grunted from the pain and his arm whipped up to punch the zombie with a snap-backhand. “Get… off!” He discharged the healing spell as his fist-connected, and the zombie’s head rocked back from the blow. Holy energy coursed within its head, making war with the unholy forces that made the dead walk. The zombie fell down dead.

Arianna planted two more arrows into one of the maggots, then two more, then two more. The pudding-skin of the thing burst and foul-smelling white jelly spread from it. It was down, but its brother survived.

Gerrit called upon the power of Vennia to turn the undead. His holy symbol flared to brilliant greenish-white life and the majority of the zombies around them shielded their eyes, lurching away.

Arianna planted both hands on her dying panther’s body, releasing healing energies into it. At the same time, her foot shot out and ground the remaining maggot into paste. It popped as the other had and died in a splash of pearlescent, clotted yellow-white.

Gerrit was fighting zombies in hand-to-hand combat. It wasn’t working tremendously well, and Arianna’s own attacks weren’t having much success either. The halfling yelled an explanation as he ducked a clumsy swipe. “The zombies don’t respond well to arrows or blunt damage… which, I’m afraid, is all we have. Slashing weapons work best!”

Arianna thought on that for a second, then went to the side of the road and pulled a plank off of one of the barricaded windows. With her druidic power she shaped the wood, running a hand up and down it, forming a handle, forming a blade.

Jade got shakily to her feet, hissing at the maggot-corpses. She ran and leaped, tackling a zombie that had been approaching Gerrit. Her jaws bit and her claws raked, tearing off grayish bits of meat with each attack. The zombie pushed at her fruitlessly, and then got a grip on her neck, then leaned forward to bite.

A shadow fell over the zombie, and it looked up to see Arianna holding aloft her rudimentary wooden sword. “Hands off my kitty,” she growled as she swung. The zombie was killed.

The zombies were retreating or dead, but more were approaching through the mists, as Gerrit could hear. “Come on,” he called. Together they ducked into the building with the smashed-in door, and ran up the stairs. Once there, they gathered beds, bureaus, anything they could find and pushed them down the stairs to form a barricade at the staircase’s bottom. They hid in one of the rooms, healing, as the undead milled about downstairs.

Coming up
HORROR IN TOWN SQUARE​

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[Mycanid]

Ohhhhh boy oh boy oh boy oh BOY!

ANOTHER Dr. Midnight storytime thread! And this time a DnD one! Excellent!

[Patiently waiting for the next installment]

 

[Squash Cop]

This last session was the best one yet, I really felt the desperation of a zombie infestation.

Richards; I've been gaming for 20 years and I do know the Ravenloft story pretty well. It's been fun trying to play dumb.

Arianna's player has only been gaming on and off for the last six or seven years.

 

[Richards]

Wow -- all kinds of maggoty goodness!

Johnathan

 

[Dr Midnight]

Session 3 - Chapter 3
MEAT IN THE GRAVE​

In the second story of the abandoned house, Gerrit was healed to full strength and Arianna refined her wooden sword. Jade licked her fur clean.

“Those aren’t normal zombies,” Gerrit said, shuddering. “Those things were tough.” He could feel the queasiness in him; whatever had made the things undead had begun to molder and poison him inside. His insides trembled and he broke out in a cold sweat. His skin was yellowish. He got up and moved to the window, looking over the town.

Down on the street, zombies walked aimlessly, looking for food. The roofs were all of similar height, as almost every building in town was two stories tall. Over the roofs, dimly in the distance, a shoddy church steeple could be seen.

The rooftops were lined with crows. The birds watched the streets eagerly, looking for carrion. They numbered in the hundreds, and that was just the number of them that Gerrit could see from his window.

Down the stairs, the zombies were banging feebly at the barricade and moaning. They weren’t making progress, but the sound was too unsettling to allow the adventurers to relax.

Gerrit kept sitting then standing again, pacing, leaning on something and repositioning. The situation had him unnerved. Arianna herself seemed only somewhat less disturbed by the zombie infestation… her eyes kept darting to the door with every thunk from below, but her face appeared calm.

“I can’t stay here,” Gerrit said. “I’m going to get out, move over the buildings and get a lay of the land. See if I can’t find any survivors or trouble spots.”

“Good idea,” Arianna said, relieved to have some conversation drowning out the sounds from the first floor. “I’ll go too. We can cover more ground if we split up. I can turn to a bird and fly… how will you move?”

“I can cast air walk. It’s effectively flying. What about Jade?”

Arianna looked to the cat, who looked back. After the maggot attack, the normally fierce panther seemed kittenlike in her eyes… she might not be able to fend for herself should she be caught with Gerrit and Arianna gone. After a moment’s consideration, Arianna said “I think she’ll be alright. The barricade should hold. It’ll only take us ten minutes to do a sweep of the city anyway, I imagine.”

“You’re probably right. Okay, you take the south of the main road and I’ll take the north. Move out and cling to the border of town, then loop back in and fill the remaining area. Meet back here in ten.” Gerrit perched on the windowsill and leaped up to the roof of the next building over. He grabbed the lip of the building’s roof and vaulted up to a kneeling position, then cast a spell on one of the roof’s tiles. The tile lit up bright white. It would be a beacon to them in a sea of foggy, similar roofs… to help them to find Jade again. He then spoke holy words to Vennia and felt her fill him with the ability to walk on air. He took a step off the roof, then another, and he was strolling out over the infested streets of Barovia toward the church steeple in the distance.

Arianna petted her animal companion soothingly, then straightened and faced the window. Her face went blank with concentration, then grew a quick fur of feathers. Her body contorted and shrank and she spread her wings and flew to the south as a crow.

To Gerrit’s left, a mass of the black birds rose up and flew off, startled. The halfling changed course and walked in that direction to see what might have caused the disturbance. As he crested the roofs’ edges, he saw down into the town square.

Rough barricades blocked most of the access to the square; however, the eastern barricade had been breached, and zombies were swarming through the opening. A woman in half-plate near the center of the town square valiantly fought the creatures, but she was heavily outnumbered and the zombies were closing in quickly.

Gerrit thought quickly and saw a sign hanging over one of the buildings in the square. It read Bildrath’s Mercantile. He ran downwards to a window on the second story and climbed in.

“Gahh!” A fat man who’d been watching the battle from the window almost fell over backing away as Gerrit stepped into the building. “Parriwimple, they’re flyin’ now!”

Gerrit held his hands out, palms up, in a gesture of desperate sincerity. “Please, I need lamp oil and lots of it. Right now.”

The fat man sneered as he saw that the halfling wasn’t a flying zombie… he was a customer. “We’re closed, get out.”

“That woman below, I can help her! Just give me some lamp oil!”

The man rubbed his lower lip and thought. “Fifty gold. Each.”

Gerrit wasn’t phased. “Done.” He grabbed a sack of coins and dumped it out onto the floor. He was handed two bottles of lamp oil and he was out of the window in a flash, leaving the fat man inside to gather his gold and continue to watch the show.

Gerrit walked over the breached barricade, stuffing the bottles with ripped pieces of the coin sack. He lit them on fire and hurled them below to smash onto the barricade and the zombies rushing over it. With a thirty-foot high fireball, the barricade was ablaze. Fiery zombies thrashed about and died twitching like insects. The zombies that hadn’t yet reached the barricade hissed and retreated… leaving a problem area within the town square that he and the armored woman might just be able to work with.

He could walk down and carry her off to safety, but the town square looked to be the only area of town where people still hadn’t hammered the doors and windows shut. The zombies would break in and slaughter anyone remaining. It would have to be a fight.

Arianna, flying as a crow some distance off, noticed the rush of sound and the bloom of orange light to the north and came winging over as fast as she could muster.

Gerrit was running down to the ground to join the armored woman. She looked up to him and caught his eyes. “Are you a warrior? Can you help-“ She didn’t have time to finish the thought. A dirt-caked skeleton that both she and Gerrit had mistaken for a zombie came from behind, raising its arms high, and brought them down on her shoulders. In a great blast of dirt and dust, the woman was gone, leaving only a lump of earth where she had stood on cobblestones only a moment before.

Gerrit gasped and noticed the dirt moving slightly. The woman was still alive, but buried in a shallow grave by the creature. Gerrit would have to move quickly. As he reached ground level, several rapid-fire thunking sounds came from behind him. He looked behind to see the zombies peppered with well-placed arrows, then looked up and nodded.

Arianna, standing on the roof’s edge, nodded back with a smile and kept covering him from above.

Gerrit called upon the power of Vennia once more to drive the undead from him. Several of them croaked and covered their faces, fleeing from him as best they could.

The dirt pile trembled and a hand shot up from it. It grasped about for something, anything, as its owner suffocated beneath the earth. Gerrit grabbed the hand with his own and attempted to pull. The woman budged a bit but didn’t come free.

Arianna’s arrows rained down on the dirt-thing that had entombed the woman. Arrows jutted from its entire right side like brush bristles. Without her cover fire on the other zombies, they were closing in on Gerrit, who was taking damage from all sides.

The halfling held his arms out to his sides and a concentric wave of low frequency vibrations rippled out from him and through the crowd of undead. Several toppled over and more yet died on their feet as their heads caved inward from the holy pressure.

With a crushing blow, Gerrit was knocked to the cobbles. The entomber had finally landed a hit, its hands beating all but the last life from the cleric monk. Gerrit looked up and raised a hand as if to ward off the coming strike. The entomber reared back and even as Arianna continued to fill it with arrows, it smashed him into the dirt. Gerrit felt the dirt surrounding him, packing him in tight. As he tried to draw a feeble choke of breath, dirt filled his nostrils. He couldn’t breathe, and what was left of his blood ran out into the dirt.

“No!” Arianna jumped off the roof, turning back to a crow in mid-fall, then flew the rest of the way to Gerrit’s grave. She changed back into herself and landed, digging into the dirt with her hands. She’d seen the damage her friend had taken, and she knew that he’d had the zombie infection put into him in the earlier battle. It might already be too late… what she dug up might only look like her friend, biting hungrily at her as she pulled him free.

She was so concerned that she failed to notice the entomber shamble forward. It raised its arms, ready to pound yet another warrior into the dust.

The ground parted beside them both, and a filthy figure rose from the earth with dirt falling from her shoulders. It was the woman the zombies had been fighting… Gerrit had loosened the soil around her just enough. She raised her sword as the entomber lowered its arms to strike, and the arms were severed just before the elbows.

The woman then raised her sword to the sky and it glowed, a great sphere of light blooming from her. The few remaining undead clawed at their eyes and ran away, even through the flames… and died blazing within a few more steps.

“Fear not,” the woman said. “Urso is kind.” She and Arianna pulled Gerrit from the earth. He wasn’t breathing. He shuddered slightly. “Heal him, if you have the means,” the woman said. “I must tend to his direr needs.”

Arianna’s hands sent healing energies into him as the other woman cleansed him of all disease. The yellowish tinge went from his skin and he coughed forth a clod of earth. He continued to cough and wheeze for some moments as Arianna filled him with healing.

Gerrit had come within a hair’s breadth of becoming undead. He would later tell that the most terrifying part was that even as his brain starved for air, he had begun to hunger for meat.

The thought of meat had caused him to drool ravenously in his own grave.

Next session
INCIDENT IN THE TAVERN​

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[Dr Midnight]

Had a kinda half-session tonight because I was out all weekend and wanted to get some game in. We're still not up to "the reading" as promised. Cool stuff happened though, interesting character points and all that.