Session 23 – Short and Sweet

The party continued exploring the labyrinth beneath Wolfsheim’s mansion. In the next room (once they forced the door open), they found his treasury. There was a bunch of gold coins, some sapphires, and a magical sword that provided bonuses vs lycanthropes. All of the treasure was rigged with dart traps, but the party managed to get their booty unscathed.

Looping around to the south, they encountered a room with three weretigers who attacked them and put up a strong fight.   In the next room, they found an armory of mundane weapons and a wererat cowering behind one of the racks. He begged them not to kill him.

The party let him know that Wolfsheim was dead, and so he was free. His face fell. Tiv asked him if he was a lycanthrope before coming into Wolfsheim’s employment. He told them that he wasn’t. Wolfsheim would exert some control or influence on the street gangs of An Chathair. Wolfsheim saw him take on two larger street toughs one day and offered him a job. What the young man didn’t know until it was too late was that the job included lycanthropy.

He was able to tell the party that, while he hadn’t ever seen the green glowing necklace so important to Wolfsheim, he knew it was kept in some hidden room at the north end of the complex.

The party followed one of the northern doors they’d discovered, but this led them to a room that contained devil swine lycanthropes. The party tried to set up a kill box for the two they could see, but the swine focused all their attacks on Jack, in an effort to force him back and break the party’s perimeter. The party didn’t realize that as the swine would rotate to the back when they got seriously wounded, they would also swap out with fresh teammates, as there were more than two in the room beyond.

Some lucky rolls meant that the swine’s plan didn’t work, although one of the previously wounded swine did manage to ambush them after they thought the room was clear, since they’d lost count of how many there were.  Jack and Dwårfy would need to get high level healing services later, as they were now in danger of contracting lycanthropy themselves (and that would be automatically fatal for Dwårfy).

As the party was now no longer heading north, they decided (after a lot of healing) to backtrack and try the other northward path from within the treasury room.

In the next room, they found Wolfsheim’s personal shrine. On an altar was a wolf skull and a fancy silver dagger. The party accidentally set off a gas trap, but everyone passed the saving throw and suffered no ill effects.

A portcullis led to a corridor with three dead ends. After checking them all for secret passages, and failing to find any, Jack just attacked the wall out of frustration. It turned out that the exact place he chose to strike busted into a secret door. (Everyone had failed that particular check, but Jack just lucked into hitting the right spot.)

Another secret panel in the room beyond revealed an emerald necklace with an eerie green glow displayed on a pedestal.

Realizing that they had what they came for, the party grabbed the necklace and headed back out the way they’d come.

On the way back to Fillí some of the party members started to feel ill and to manifest strange burns on their skin where it was closest to or in contact with the necklace.

Safely at their destination, they set about finding a cleric for Jack and Dwårfy, merchants to convert some of their burdensome inventories to cash, and to give the sailors on the Eldridge the necklace (which they couldn’t wait to get out of their possession!).