Thursday Abomination Vaults

The battle against the Eyes of the Empty Death resumed with the wisps still hunting Otari Ilvashti’s ghost. One repeatedly vanished, reappeared, and struck with lightning while the party struggled against creatures that ignored most magic and were nearly impossible to hit. Ixor was critically struck and dropped, Flint’s hurried treatment went badly, and Slag committed his last three-action Heal to restore the group. Otari destroyed one of the beings that had tormented him for centuries, and Ilian landed the attacks that finally broke the last wisp. With the cavern quiet, Otari told the party how the Roseguard’s battle with Belcorra collapsed the floor beneath him and left him trapped in the lower Gauntlight. He hid from Belcorra’s creatures, fled past a minotaur, survived a chul’s den, found secret stairs that led only deeper, and eventually reached the underground lake, where an otyugh infected him. Fevered and dying, he crawled onto the island and never left. Otari revealed that the Gauntlight is Belcorra’s weapon, built to strike Absalom with cursed light and raise the dead, and explained that the spectral seal requires four Roseguard relics: his thieves’ tools, Aesephna’s Hunter’s Brooch, Zarmavdian’s spellbook, and Vol Rajani’s sword. He warned that Volluk Azrinae must be defeated before the seal is opened, then asked the party to return afterward, perform his final rites, and release him. The group returned to Otari, advanced to level 5, recovered Otari’s equipment, and spent a week healing, retraining, shopping, and making equipment changes. Carman unveiled the dragonhide keepsakes at Blades for Glades, where the cured hide seemed to answer the person who would carry each piece. Regit received the Gentleman’s Cane, Ixor the Command Grip, Ilian the Scale-Slip Wraps, Flint the Smoke-Scale Bandolier, and Slag a Dragon Fang Reliquary made from a leftover fang. Ixor then approached Keeleno about curing Jaul instead of killing him. Keeleno offered the original 300-gp bounty plus a diamond worth another 300 gp for Jaul’s head, but Flint refused to become an assassin. Ixor placed Ana’s necklace and locket into Keeleno’s hand as proof that Jaul had preserved her memory and still carried remorse. Keeleno did not forgive Jaul or clearly withdraw the bounty, but closed his office and took the day to consider what had been returned to him. At Menhemes Manor, Oseph authorized the relics’ release, Doriana retrieved Aesephna’s true brooch from behind the museum’s imitation, and the party learned that Vol’s sword was being displayed at the library. Zarmavdian’s spirit refused to surrender his spellbook merely because the mayor had signed a document. Slag answered the wizard’s test by explaining that sacred knowledge must be protected, shared when it serves a worthy greater good, and personally stewarded rather than handed away blindly. Zarmavdian accepted the answer, and Slag spent a day learning Morlibint’s handling procedures. That night, Otari’s bells sounded and smoke rose from the library. Witnesses saw Carman fleeing with Vol’s sword, though no one actually saw him start the fire. The party tracked him to Smuggler’s Refuge, where he claimed the sword as his family’s inheritance and dismissed the story of Otari’s ghost as another trick. Ixor offered him a third choice: carry Vol’s sword into the Gauntlight himself. Carman accepted and joined the expedition. Back below, the party recovered overlooked kobold gear and trophies, Slag fought off ghoul fever, and a mermaid fountain struck him with a freezing high-pressure torrent before Flint and the others destroyed the trap. The session ended with all four Roseguard relics physically assembled, Carman still carrying Vol’s sword, Otari awaiting final rites, and Volluk standing between the party and the spectral seal.

The battle against the Eyes of the Empty Death resumed with the wisps still hunting Otari Ilvashti’s ghost. Ixor was struck down by a critical blast of electricity, Flint’s emergency treatment went badly, and Slag committed his last major Heal to keep the party standing. Otari destroyed one of the creatures that had tormented him for centuries, and Ilian landed the attacks that finally broke the last wisp. With the cavern quiet, Otari told the party how the Roseguard’s battle with Belcorra sent him falling into the lower Gauntlight, where he was driven deeper by her servants, infected by an otyugh, and left to die on the island. He revealed that the Gauntlight is a weapon meant to strike Absalom and raise the dead, and explained that the spectral seal requires four Roseguard relics: his thieves’ tools, Aesephna’s brooch, Zarmavdian’s spellbook, and Vol Rajani’s sword. He also warned that Volluk Azrinae must be destroyed before the seal is opened. The party returned to Otari, advanced to level 5, recovered from the delve, and received Carman’s dragonhide keepsakes, including a Dragon Fang Reliquary made from a leftover fang for Slag. Ixor then approached Keeleno about curing Jaul rather than killing him. Keeleno offered 600 gp for Jaul’s head, but Flint refused to become an assassin, and Ixor returned Ana’s necklace as proof that Jaul still carried remorse. Keeleno did not forgive him, but withdrew to consider what justice might mean. At Menhemes Manor, the party secured Aesephna’s hidden brooch and authorization to collect the other relics. Zarmavdian’s spirit refused to surrender his spellbook on paperwork alone, but accepted Slag’s answer that dangerous knowledge must be protected, shared only for a worthy cause, and personally stewarded. Before the party could claim Vol’s sword, the library caught fire and witnesses saw Carman fleeing with it. They tracked him to Smuggler’s Refuge, where Ixor offered him a third choice: carry his ancestor’s sword into the Gauntlight himself. Carman accepted and joined the expedition. Back below, the group recovered overlooked treasure, Slag fought off ghoul fever, and a mermaid fountain nearly froze him with a high-pressure blast before Flint and the others destroyed it. The session ended with all four Roseguard relics physically assembled, Carman still carrying Vol’s sword, and Volluk standing between the party and Otari’s final release.

The session resumed inside the Watching Wall trap with Regit and Ixor still compromised by fear and confusion. Flint forced his way into the crowded hall and shot the eye in the wall, but the party quickly learned that ordinary damage barely mattered against the haunt. Ilian, Grizzle, Flint, and Slag worked to contain the danger without simply cutting down their own companions. Slag eventually recognized the Wall as a haunt, prayed to Irori, and used a burst of healing to break it for the moment. When the haunt fell silent, the party saw the truth behind it: a spy had been placed in the room five centuries ago to watch the original Roseguard through a peephole. The spy died fighting them, and when Belcorra died his paranoid spirit remained as the Watching Wall. The secret doors behind the room opened into the Spying Hall, a plain angled passage with alcoves, two silver-rune teleportation circles, and the peephole back into the sitting room. Ixor recovered two more valuable books from Morlibint's list. Near the books, the party found a faintly glowing vein or lattice in the foundation. Slag could tell it was ancient and seemed natural to the stone. Ilian recognized arcane significance and a possible elven connection, but no one could identify it. Afterward the party opened an unexplored door and interrupted canker cultists worshiping a rotting flesh shrine surrounded by bone-and-hair effigies. The fight is still in progress. Slag used silver Needle Darts, Ixor held the doorway with shield work and Hampering Stance, and Ilian used Caustic Blast as the cultists answered with Harm. One violet fungus is down, enemies remain active, and next session begins at the top of the round.

The party returned from the Wrin crisis with one problem survived but not solved. Wrin lived, the Hounds of Tindalos had been driven back, and the swamp shrine still stood, but the old trail remained bright. After rest and recovery, Regit, Ixor, Ilian, Grizzle, and Slag returned to the Gauntlight library level, where nearly every room still held unfinished business.

Slag stepped fully into the party record by exorcising the Vengeful Furnace, laying to rest two spiteful spirits still trapped inside their final argument. The group then found Chandriu Invisar, a ghostly drow scribe-administrator lost in a loop of work, love, betrayal, and resentment. Her release led to knowledge, treasure, and the discovery of Korlok’s infernal contract. Regit found the loophole Korlok had suspected for centuries, giving the old devil a way out of his post and pulling Volluk Azrinae back into the story as a major threat below.

The night ended badly in a ruined sitting room when the Watching Wall opened its eye and turned the danger inward. Regit and Ixor were left frightened, confused, and no longer safely aligned with their own allies, leaving Ilian, Grizzle, and Slag staring at a cliffhanger where the next threat might come from within the party itself.

After the dragon salvage and the Rowdy Rockfish pause, the party turned toward Wrin for help understanding the swamp shrine and the strange dangers now circling Otari. Silver preparations, old werewolf business, and Wrin’s cornerless shop set the tone for a night about angles, omens, and things that notice when fate is disturbed. Slag stepped into the party’s orbit, and Regit sensed something dark settle around Wrin as the cards warned that her fate was about to be tested.

At the Fogfen shrine, the problem became physical. New organic partitions had risen from the muck, forming sharp right angles around a place that should not have had them. Wrin understood the danger too late: the angles became doors, and four Hounds of Tindalos stepped through. The party fought to hold the line around her while the hounds tore through space, pressure, and fear.

Wrin survived, but the victory did not cleanly solve the problem. The shrine was only partly burned, the stone beneath remained, and the old trail tied to Wrin’s dangerous glimpse along the wrong seam of time was bright again. The party returned to Otari with a living Wrin, a wounded shrine, and the knowledge that the hounds were not finished.

The party brought the juvenile horned dragon’s carcass back to Otari and immediately turned monster-slaying into town rumor, salvage, and opportunity. Townsfolk came to see the body, Carman Rajani helped discuss practical keepsakes, Morlibint and Vial wanted specimens, and a traveling Absalom buyer offered increasingly dangerous money for the dragon’s tongue-root. The party refused the sale, keeping the dragon’s remains in local hands instead of letting the wrong buyer carry a volatile piece of the kill out of town.

The greasy parchment finally gave up its secret through the old Third-Salt-Bath method, revealing a route-and-chamber sketch tied to hidden ways below Otari. Yinyasmera had never seen it in Osprey records, and her warning about Vesk Ruln made the find feel less like a simple map and more like something that had driven earlier searchers toward disaster. The route pointed from the spring tunnel toward a deeper hidden place, but the code remained unresolved.

The night also pulled the party toward another old wound: a druidic plea tied to Jaul Mezmin, Keeleno, and the werewolf tragedy. Salt-Tick’s warning turned the session from dragon triumph into preparation for dangers that are older, stranger, and much closer to Otari than the party may like.

The session opened at the dragon’s turn, with Regit badly hurt, Ixor stopped short, and the juvenile horned dragon still dangerous enough to kill someone before it died. The dragon lashed out in a final frenzy but overreached badly, giving Regit the opening to cut it down with the silver sword cane. Zolgran and the remaining kobolds did not immediately collapse, and the party had to finish the lair fight the hard way, with Flint, Lahota, Ilian, Ixor, Regit, Grizzle, and Chauncey all caught in the messy aftermath.

Once the lair was secured, the party searched Zolgran’s hoard, dealt with the dragon body, and followed a tunnel into surface air. The path led into the Fogfen, where a crude skull shrine to Nhimbaloth waited in the dark. What looked like a foul landmark quickly became a fight when will-o’-wisps emerged and used the shrine, fear, and the swamp itself to make the night dangerous.

The party defeated the wisps and returned to Otari shortly before 10 p.m., bringing back both a dragon’s body and a new problem. The Fogfen shrine made clear that Nhimbaloth’s influence was not confined to the dungeon walls, and the swamp had become part of the Gauntlight’s widening shadow.

The party opened mid-combat in the spring-fed cave, finishing the last gibbering mouthers after a punishing fight of spit, teeth, and engulfing flesh. With the cave finally secured, they searched the wishing pool and recovered coins, useful gear, consumables, and a strange greasy parchment covered by a stubborn film. The creek draining from the cavern hinted at more routes below, but the party chose the southern secret door first.

Behind a sofa, the group found Augrael’s comfortable book-filled refuge and negotiated instead of rushing into another fight. From there, the party followed a long tunnel to a Nar-Voth road sign, chose the Otari branch, and pushed through xulgath resistance. The underground route made the Gauntlight feel less like one isolated ruin and more like part of a broader hidden road system beneath the town.

The session ended in a kobold warren where the party broke through a thin wall and stumbled into Zolgran’s camp, with a dragon in the mix and the battle still active. The discoveries of the parchment, Augrael’s room, the Nar-Voth sign, and the kobold lair all pointed toward a dungeon that is connected, inhabited, and far less sealed off than Otari would like.

The night began above ground with Regit continuing a tense conversation with Carman Rajani. Carman was drunk, wounded, proud, and deeply unreliable, but his resentment kept circling Vol Rajani’s sword, Oseph Menhemes, and the way Otari remembers some bloodlines as heroic while others are left with grievance and shame. His claim that the sword was his did not arrive as a clean fact. It landed as a political wound, an inheritance argument, and a future problem all at once.

Below the Gauntlight, the party returned to old library spaces where books, salvage, and danger waited together. They recovered useful volumes, discovered an unfinished library wing, and found a +1 striking pick. The Vengeful Furnace revealed itself as more than scenery, but Ixor’s presence and the party’s approach forced the wrathful spirit into retreat rather than letting the room become a full disaster.

Recovery did not last. The group pushed into a spring-fed cave and ran into three gibbering mouthers. Regit was nearly swallowed, Ixor fought through confusion, and Ilian helped bring one creature to the edge of death before the session ended mid-combat. The party had made progress, but the cliffhanger left them still inside a horrible brawl with the cave very much alive around them.

The party returned from the Gauntlight changed, diminished, and better equipped, with Borgo gone from the active roster, Vaelistrix staying in Otari, and Sgt. Flint Ironhand stepping in as an old dwarven guard looking for Lasda and a way back into the town’s defense. For a short moment, Otari felt almost normal: treasure was sold, gear was upgraded, healing supplies were restocked, and the Rowdy Rockfish gave everyone a place to breathe.

Then the Gauntlight turned on Otari. The beam struck the cemetery, the dead rose, and the party had to hold the gate while the town saw the old ruin become a public threat. They fought through the Deadtide, dealt with scalathrax appearing under the beam, and helped Otari count the dead afterward. Five citizens died, three were injured, and the party became public heroes whether they wanted the politics or not.

The aftermath pulled them into Mayor Oseph Menhemes’s reward, Morlibint’s strange oil and research hooks, and Carman Rajani’s simmering anger over Vol Rajani’s legacy. The session shifted the campaign’s scale: the Gauntlight was no longer only a dungeon problem, and Carman’s line about the sword being his left a dangerous civic grievance waiting to be unpacked.

With Wrin still working on the party’s etchings and writings, the group returned to the Gauntlight and the servant’s level. A bit of devil homework yielded useful impressions but no complete answer, and Baron’s unfortunate encounter with a truly weaponized “weed” made washing him off a priority. The party rechecked a barricaded secret door, judged that clearing it would take about an hour, and chose to leave it for later.

In the water cavern, draconic singing led to a tense standoff with Frenzelkesh the river drake and Sludge Sage the young black dragon. Their price for passage was tribute: “Bring the leader’s body.” The party hauled Grauglust and a morlock worker corpse back as payment, and the tribute was accepted, though the broken boats and cavern routes clearly mattered for later.

From there, the group found a locked door that resisted keys and brute force until Ilian solved it with a flying kick, revealing an inactive teleportation circle chamber. A sarcophagi hall became an ambush with shadowy effects and the Majordomo, nearly dropping Vaelistrix and destroying Baron’s conjured Antique Guardian before the party recovered. The night’s strangest image came through the creepy light door: a ribbon of pale blue, another sign that the servant’s level was still full of old mechanisms, hidden routes, and unfinished danger.

Across this January arc, the party bargained with Tangletop in a flooded workshop while Grack Greystone and Osmund were still missing somewhere in the ruins. Tangletop wanted a shiny spyglass from the next area and warned the party about a mean beak-faced doll guarding it. The “doll” turned out to be Mr. Beak, an animated construct with a dark gem bound into its back and a cruelty that felt engineered rather than accidental.

When the party brought the spyglass back, Tangletop paid in secrets. He tied the workshop to Volluk Azrinae, Belcorra’s cruel and obsessive maker, and revealed that Mr. Beak’s wrongness came from Borbo, a goblin helper sealed into the toy in the worst possible answer to wanting to be important. Destroying the soul-gem broke the prison and earned a brief touch of Pharasma’s favor, but the Gauntlight immediately answered with a bloodsiphon fight that went badly enough to force retreat.

The party returned, killed the bloodsiphon, copied the orange-star death imagery, met Korlok at the stair, and finally descended to the second level. There they faced traps, corrosive gas, morlock ambushers, and a caster who refused to hold still. The rescue mission ended in a repurposed storeroom jail: Shad, Zalinsky, and Gorul were alive, but Grack and Osmund had died of untreated infections. The arc ended with survival, revenge, and the grim knowledge that the party had arrived too late for two of their own.

Picking up on the dark ground level near the dead scorpion, Osmund, Lahota, Grack, and Ixor pushed north into a clammy skull-lined chapel. The room’s bone-white altar, ghostly stained glass, cracked skull wall, dead thief, and mossy skeletons made the space feel less abandoned than waiting. Then the moisture ran uphill, pale witch-light swelled, and corpselight-ridden skeletons pulled themselves upright.

The fight ground hard. Ixor held the line while Osmund and Lahota poured on damage, and Grack kept the party alive through Heal and medicine until the corpselights and their wisp forms were finally destroyed. The altar and window script revealed worship of Nhimbaloth, the Empty Death, a force that feeds on souls Pharasma never records, giving the party another clear look at the ruin’s spiritual rot.

A nearby Stonescale Spirits haunt tied to kobold bones brought a different kind of danger: fear, confusion, and the threat of friendly fire. Grack had to grapple allies to keep the haunt from turning the party against itself before the assault faded. The group left with identified loot, adder venom labeled “YUM,” a little coin, and a much clearer sense that Gauntlight’s dead do not always stay quietly dead.

Osmund, Lahota, Sy, and the newly arrived Ixor Giest opened the night on the Gauntlight’s unlit ground floor, clashing with a mitflit pack at the central sinkhole. The party routed them decisively and discovered that the sinkhole concealed a collapsed staircase that might be freed with enough hard manual labor. The ruin was already beginning to show itself as layered, damaged, and still full of routes that could change the map if the party invested time in them.

Boss Skrawng chose survival over pride, begging for his life and offering information if the party cleared out the “mushroom-eyed people” below. His warnings pointed toward a scary shrine to the north and darker-dressed surface folk moving through the ruins. The party let him slink off for the moment and kept his information as a lead rather than turning the scene into an execution.

Further exploration uncovered Belcorra’s office and sanctum, unidentified potions and elixirs, and a rusty key ring. The party felt an ancient primal pressure near the spooky northern shrine but went south to avoid being boxed in. A giant scorpion ambush ended without casualties after Sy, Lahota, and Ixor worked together to control the fight and blunt the worst hits, leaving the group with the ground floor a little more mapped and the shrine still looming.

The session began in the shadow of Thork Poisonbeard’s death. A giant fly had pushed him to the brink, Thork spent every Hero Point to survive, and then a disastrous Treat Wounds attempt turned recovery into cardiac arrest. With Thork gone, the party carried him back to the Dawnflower Library and temple for preparation and burial, while Lahota helped secure his effects and make sure clan items would be held properly for family or return to Galizhur.

At the Crow’s Cask, the wake turned into something rougher, warmer, and more Otari than formal mourning. Dwarven dockworkers arrived, produced illegal dwarven ale when none was available, toasted the fallen, and nudged the party toward local civic importance. Osmund got drunk and passed out badly enough to become the target of a tar-and-feather prank, while Grack debriefed Wrin and Lahota offered lodging through family ties.

The party arranged transport for Thork’s body through Gallentine Deliveries, pitched Gauntlight sponsorship to Oloria Gallentine, rested, welcomed Gruak into the group, and learned of Brelda’s missing son. When they returned to the Gauntlight, short skirmishes and new leads made clear that grief had not paused the dungeon. The dead had rites to receive, the living had ale to drink, and the ruins were still waiting.