Post by hubertbartels on Feb 26, 2017 14:52:53 GMT -5
In the moldering wreck of Hickory House, it was decided to make a cold camp. The house creaked and settled during the night. There was a strong smell of insects in the building.
Morning came. The front of the lodge faced the goblin encampment. Since the party did not see any signs that the goblins entered the hunting lodge, it was decided to explore the house. From the Great Hall, the party forced a door and found themselves in a long hallway. There were a lot of bedrooms and sitting rooms, all prepared for guests that would never come. A room facing the front of the lodge let the party spy out on the encampment. About 300 feet away, a worg could be seen pacing in front of an open-sided shed.
The long hallway led to an atrium with stairways leading from the entrance to the second floor. Continuing to explore, the party found a long abandoned dining room with an attached kitchen. The smell of insects had been growing stronger. In the kitchen, the party found several goblin bodies, some almost stripped to the bone. They do not look to have been there very long. Then two swarms of centipedes rushed to attack from underneath the kitchen drawers. The party dispatched them.
Looking over the bodies, the party found an iron medallion to Iuz. They then left the rotting kitchen and proceeded through some doors into another Great Hall. This was octagonal in shape and formed the base of a four stories tall tower. A stairway led up and down.
The party descended into the basement, breaking open a magically locked door to enter. In basement, they found lots of rooms with junk. They proceeded down a corridor, through another padlocked door and discovered four zombies, dressed in servant’s clothes. The party made short work of them.
Behind another door, the party uncovered an alchemical lab. While most of the equipment and reagents had decayed into uselessness, the party did find a few sealed vials. Exploring further, they came across a blockaded door. Knowing that many of these chambers could be accessed from neighboring rooms, the party checked the adjoining chamber.
But they found more zombies. As the party started to defend themselves against the undead, another zombie entered the chamber from the blockaded room. She was dressed in shiny new leather armor, carried a short sword, and bore a look of intelligent evil in her eyes. When all the zombies had been destroyed, the party got a chance to look into the blockaded room.
Inside the room was another body, dead from sword wounds, He was lying among books and bookcases – one of which had fallen across the door from the corridor. Aerwyn was able to rescue only a few books from the debris. The zombie in leather armor had tried to destroy most of the books in the room. One of the books was marked ‘Kyrien’s Spellbook – Vol 1.’ Another was a personal diary. According to the diary, Kyrien was obsessed with using arcane magic to cure disease and heal injuries.
His diary records how his wife had been killed by a hostile plant out in the garden and how he tried to use an arcane ritual to keep her from becoming a mindless undead. But she came back horribly wrong and killed him. He was also responsible for the undead servants in the house.
The second floor contained more bedrooms and sitting rooms. While exploring rooms close to the atrium, Wolfram discovered footprints in the dust on the floor. Following the prints to another bedroom, they found two young girls. Laura and Mira had been captured by the goblins at Chestnut Freehold but they recently escaped. Laura told the party that the goblins also were holding a stableboy and a kitchen maid from Chestnut Freehold – and that the goblins had recently added two soldiers. These were probably the men that the party was asked to look out for by Lord Severan.
The young girls told the party that the prisoners were being held in the ‘Sweet House’, a two story shed that had been used in the past to boil down the hickory syrup. The goblins had wanted to eat them but a large ‘tusked one’ ordered them to wait until Godsday. That would be 4-5 days later. The girls mentioned that the ‘tusked one’ wore a medallion of Iuz.
It was decided to rest for a day and ambush goblins returning from their patrols to whittle down their number. Then, the party would move against those in the Sweet House.
