Beyond the GLoG - Session 8
Eugène Ciceri. Design for a Stage Set. 1828-90.
While we haven't quite found a regular cadence for our fantasy GLoG campaign using characters and a setting generated using Beyond the Wall, we did come to a bit of a climax last week. You can find the details of our previous session here.
A Funeral
The party gathered outside of Swanholm's mausoleum with a more somber task than usual. They were:
- Nagina Setimir - gifted dilettante, fifth in line to the Setimir seat
- Rold von Dietmar - would-be knight, newly elevated by the late Mergen Setimir
- Adele Setimir-Strauss - sister of Berlynn and accomplished mourner
- Sabine Setimir - court sorcerer and Nagina's older step-sister (who would join a little later).
They had hired two locals, Bruce and Flora, to carry the body of Berlynn, recently slain by skeletons in the dungeon below. The plan was to find a suitable place to inter her remains in the mausoleum complex.
The party descended, finding the halls eerily quiet. They moved quickly to the trapped sarcophagus room on the first floor. The chamber was still flooded with explosive tunnel gas, but Nagina had concocted a plan. She produced a smith's bellows and commanded Rold and the hirelings to start pumping air, while she adjusted the doors around the room to trap the gas in a side chamber for a while. Hazy gas physics aside, this plan worked well enough and the funeral could proceed.
They placed Berlynn's body in the sarcophagus and took turns saying a few words on her behalf. Much was made of how she was or was not "like the other girls." They had the feeling that Berlynn was looking down on them favorably. Their impromptu ceremony concluded, the party sealed the coffin and hastened away. The two hirelings hurried back to the surface, unwilling to risk any actual danger.
Beneath the Well
Sabine caught up with the rest of the party as they made their way down to the second level and the flooded wing in the west of the mausoleum. They passed through the gallery of discarded masonry tools and unfinished statues and found themselves overlooking a room flooded up to chest level. Stone sarcophagi leaned against the wall, their heads poking above the waterline. A single waterlogged door to the west suggested more unexplored area in that direction.
After much discussion, Rold waded down into the water, which immediately flooded his antique plate armor. Still, he set his lance and rushed at the door, punching a neat peephole just above the waterline. Through it he glimpsed a beam of light shining down into a damp room at the end of a rough 30-foot tunnel. As he watched, a thin ooze like the ones the party had encountered before squirmed into the light, seemingly unaware.
The party decided this light probably corresponded to the village well, but wondered why it was dry. Had draining the rooms on this floor impacted the water level? They decided to investigate and, before anyone could stop him, Rold had torn the waterlogged door from the wall.
As water drained from the flooded chamber into the exposed hallway, the party fought the ooze. At one point, Rold grabbed the hellhound heart from his pouch and hucked it at the ooze, anticipating that the fiery briquette would ignite the thing. It steamed and sputtered. As they watched, the burning heart began to grow into an adolescent hellhound.
Adele tried to command the creature to heel but it ignored her, vomiting forth a gout of flames that lightly singed the whole party. Fortunately, a splash of water tossed from Sabine's helmet and a thrown holy water flask quenched the hound before it could fully materialize.
Sabine scooped up the hellhound heart for safekeeping as the party explored the end of the tunnel. It definitely was the town well, but was mostly dry. Narrow, barred sluices ran to the north and south, and the sound of the underground river could be heard through the latter.
The party was somewhat disgusted to find a broken sarcophagus here beneath the well. The oozes had devoured most of its contents long ago, but left behind a byrnie of glittering mail. Nagina put it on.
A Final Confrontation
Satisfied that they had seen the entire complex except for one room on the third sublevel, the party hastened down into the depths. They quickly navigated to an intersection just southwest of the armory and training grounds where Berlynn, Nagina, and Rold had encountered the giant chickpea-like insects.
Impetuously, Rold scouted ahead and discovered the insects were still there. Sabine conjured an illusory feast of iron ingots in the far corner, distracting them long enough for the party to slip by unmolested.
Snaking through the training grounds, they came to a pair of double doors under an inscription in Classical - THE KING WHO TAMES THE RIVERS. They threw open the doors to reveal a large circular chamber filled with rushing water. The water raced around some kind of rubble or debris beneath the surface. "Perhaps another fork of the underground river?" offered Nagina.
At the center of the room was a stone outcropping crowned by a worn stone throne. Before the rest of the party could say otherwise, Rold walked out and sat on the throne. As he did, a black revenant emerged from the water behind him, clanking in sodden mail. It strode up a short flight of steps to stand beside the throne. It declared itself to be Artur Viera Setimir and demanded to know who they were.
The party variously taunted and tried to reason with the Setimir wight, but the creature would only accept total submission to its claim over the Setimir lands. It asked after Sir Branveig (a line of questioning the party sidestepped) and confirmed that there were no true Setimir heirs. His line ended with him.
Sabine stepped forward and pretended to bow low in supplication. As she did, she cracked her lantern over the hellhound heart before scrambling away. As the new pup emerged, Rold tossed the skull he had been wearing on his belt at the wight, hoping to draw its attention.
The wight drew its black blade from its sheath and drove it into the ground. As it did, the water began to surge upwards, filling the chamber. Then the hellhound leapt onto the wight and chomped at his neck.
All this distraction was enough time for Sabine to ready her vials of holy water. She tossed a flask and managed a critical blow, detonating the creature in a shower of white sparks. His iron crown went careening into the water, leaving nothing but the black blade and a smoldering pair of boots.
The Aftermath
Before the party could celebrate, they needed to do something about the water. Nagina rushed forward and pulled the wight's sword free from the stone. The water abated.
With a little practice, she discovered she could use the sword to control nearby bodies of water, sending the water fleeing or rushing towards her at will by planting the sword. She used the power to drain the room.
Beneath the water was a horde of grave goods. Some were long rotten away, but the party found stacks of silver bars, chains of tarnished coins, and a few precious pieces of jewelry and statuary. All told, this haul would be worth 4000 silver pieces if carted back to the surface.
That just left getting past the metal-eating monsters outside. Sabine cast Flash of Brilliance to blind and distract the insects as the party scampered back to high ground. There Nagina used the black blade to reroute the underground river, causing it to surge through the barracks. After waiting a healthy while, the party returned to find one insect drowned and the other missing, presumably returning to the giant cavern to the south.
The party hauled the treasure back to the surface. In the days that followed, they each considered their next steps:
- Nagina used the sword to reroute the underground river back into the village well. She decided that she would press a claim to the Setimir house.
- Sabine and Adele committed themselves to supporting her cause. They both began planning to help negotiate the tricky political climate as the surrounding counties and duchies began to react.
- Rold considered all that had transpired in the half-built skeleton of his new manor. He decided he would seek new routes to power, even supernatural ones.
GM Notes
So ends our run of Beyond the GLoG, at least at this scale. I've been tinkering with a domain-level system that I'm excited to kick the tires on in our next session.
Since we transitioned to GLoG, I had been using a roster-style encounter table for the dungeon's inhabitants. There were a fixed number of skeletons, oozes, and whatnot scattered throughout the complex that might wander into any given level. At this point, they were all but exhausted. I had ruled that the skeletons had been routed by the rust monsters off-screen, perhaps to reemerge in the future.
Adele was already one of our NPCs from Beyond the Wall, but Berlynn's player took up their mantle for a new PC. They pulled another GLoG class from some of their own work and rolled them up using our house rules. Nice to see the GLoG modularity allowing this kind of thing to be seamless.
For the funeral, we used Mazirian's Garden's Remembering the Dead rules. I pruned some of the downtime activity-related results and had one roll count for the entire party, but otherwise ran it as described. The players sprung this on me as a goal, so I more or less winged it. I think this was a nice beat, though!
The actual battle against Artur Viera Setimir proved a bit of a mechanical anti-climax. I don't really believe in boss encounters, or at least that a boss encounter needs to last some number of rounds, but I was expecting him to at least make it to turn two. He was resistant to non-magical damage and capable of healing by draining STR points from creatures he touched, so it all worked out great that the party successfully executed their alpha strike!