January 4th, 2025
Vita, Custodia 5th, 1194 (Continued)
After killing the derro and gytillipedes, Greynor explore the next room. He finds a pool of water, but retreats after getting peppered with crossbow bolts by about 12 hidden derro.
Once everyone else arrives, we enter the room with the water. We dispatch many of them and the rest surrender. During the combat, Ralzer acts strangely and won’t enter the room.
According to the derro, Tolm has been gone many weeks. He’s been helping them to overcome their sunlight aversion, allegedly. The derro are here to trade with him and are waiting for his return. Our description of Tolm doesn’t match theirs. They describe him as looking like the portrait. They don’t interact with Kyzvyn, he’s crazy and the area is haunted.
Ralzer now appears for be afraid of bodies of water and Ishtar diagnoses him with a phobia, which will take some time to treat. Sigmund believes it could be a result of the strange sunken cityscape painting.
We being a deep search of the manor. We find nothing of note in the basement laboratory. The ground floor has lots of alchemical stuff and a box of wine from Jasper. The maps in the study are nice and there is space for one that appears to be missing. Each is a region of Moravia; the missing one is Vallyn. Behind a map we find a scroll of raise dead.
We search the painting room, careful to avoid the landscapes. Behind a painting is a trapped and locked safe containing gold and a book about cabal magic.
In the top room the patchwork things are skinstitch constructs and they housed swarms of hell wasps inside them. We find more alchemical paraphernalia. There is a brain in a jar with an ivory horn attached to it, we can hear lullabies from it. There is a jar labeled #61 with a cloth that floats in it like a drowned sheet caught in an unseen current. It responds and may be intelligent. We find a hidden ladder to the next floor.
The next floor is adorned with many curtains made from skin, taken whole, with faces of torment. There is a person sobbing on another ladder leading up. He looks like another hollow one. He’s clutching some paper and is upset that the master is gone “days ago”. He doesn’t know where the master went, but he does give us the note. It mentions the Mysterium, the otherworldly protector of the library, and a soul in an iron puzzle box. There are a number of pictures of angels with a caption, “swivel the heads in the right direction to delve further”. The handwriting matches the other Tolm documents we have.
While climbing up the ladder to the next floor, Ty has images in her head of a fungus rapidly growing, collapsing, then growing again. She also hears, “it reaches its tendrils through the minds of those who know of it. It reaches beyond the veil of dreams. Hurry.” Climbing up that ladder leads to an attic completely overgrown with vines and has the a scent of decay. There is some kind of large plant-like creature on the roof rafters.
Ty gets another message in her head as she approaches, “it sends its tendrils through their minds to gather its strength, but despite your knowledge you are clean. You can stop it. Don’t let it infect this world.” We engage the creature and kill it, it had many elemental and physical resistances.
There is a chest up top; it has some notes inside along with some diamonds and platinum. The notes are talk about pathways through stars, his remorse for using Ildan as a sacrifice to move forward, and a lot of mindless ranting.
We discuss the possibility of using scrying magic on Tolm.
We then try to talk to specimen #61. It is not Tolm, but it does know of him. Tolm went to the Mysterium, but it doesn’t know where that is. It doesn’t know of Gilarabrywn. It knows Ildan, Tolm’s apprentice, but not what happened to him. It then asks us to dump some chemicals into the jar and kill him—we do so.
Ty goes ethereal and this area and the cavern looks to be a little darker than normal.
We try scrying on Tolm twice, as the kidnapper of Ishtar and as the Tolm that we defeated long ago. Neither of the attempts work.
We search the caverns around here and find a secret tunnel that opens into a room with six magic circles etched into the ground. There is a central circle with five others surrounding it. They don’t look to be more than a few years old and all have summoning wards. There are lots of old crates and some more wine boxes from Jasper. This looks to be a hidden store room that was converted to a summoning chamber.