06. March 8, 2020

Wondering how to Get into the Caverns

We speculate there could be more entrances to the caverns under the City of the Dead and under the city in general. We know the city’s water supply is from aquifers under the city, accessed by wells and pumps throughout the city. We also speculate that temples might have small catacombs that go down and hit a cavern entrance. We guess we were below the level of the more common aquifers, which we believe are on the same plane as (though hopefully not connected to!) the sewers. There could also be entrances into caverns in the cliff-face, from the farmlands that are to the east of the city.

We head to the Troll Yard, the big area that’s as far west as you can go in Field Ward, it’s where Corin the missing artist liked to do his paintings of the sea. In the Troll Yard there’s a gatehouse/guard house like a mini fort on the north leading out of the city, and also a gate to the south leading in to the city. You can go out a troll gate to get to the cliffs overlooking the sea. We ask if anyone has seen Corin in the last week. The guardsmen recall seeing him in the past, but have not seen him in 5 or 6 days.

Exploring for Caves from the Farmland

We walk back and exit from the North Gate, which has a road that bends out and around the farms and eventually meets with roads that come out from the east gate and the south gate of the city. We knock on a door and talk to a farmer, who thinks that our desire to explore caves and go spelunking is weird. The farmer doesn’t know of any cave entrances. The nearest creeks runs north/south, it’s 10-15 feet across, and doesn’t come from underground or go underground along the cliff face. There’s a military parade field that is closed off, it butts up to the cliffs against part of the city of the dead, we cannot enter the area. But further south, there’s a bunch of tumbled down ruins of buildings (which don’t have anything of interest that we can see), but in a copse of trees uphill from there Hakon spots a crow hopping around. Cam walks up and goes to toss a piece of bread to the crow; he suddenly feels funny and stops--he feels a sensation like something warm like energy creeping up from the top of his spine (maybe originating from the tattoo on his neck, or maybe not) and up his head across his skull. The crow--or maybe it was a raven?--flaps down and takes the bread, then flies into the copse and disappears. The sensation disappears.

A Flat Stanley Door

We start following where the crow went. The sensation comes back--Cam says he feels anxious, and is having problems catching his breath. He feels clammy, we make him sit down. Jaindoh senses that all is normal, except there’s an area where she senses nothingness--there’s a point in space that’s roughly ovalish and about 7 feet tall and 3-4 feet wide, and as Jaindoh walks around it and realizes it’s two dimensional. It’s a few feet away from where Cam is sitting. We tie ourselves together with rope and an end to a tree, and Hakon volunteers to go in. He slowly steps through (he seems to get sucked into it) and the rope falls limp.

An Eerie Landscape in a Foul World

Hakon no longer sees us. He sees smoke from on top of the cliffs, and he sees the copse of trees and a raven in a branch eating some bread. In the farmlands, everything has been has been scoured; he sees what looks like skinless wolves eating something they killed. Hakon’s been gone for several minutes. The rest of the party figures he’s lost or stuck, and tie themselves together and go through. Hakon sees his friends step into the copse. As Cam steps through, he seems to faint, and a ghostly version of himself goes into the trees and the ghostly spectral Cam is freaked out seeing himself, and is kind of floating away from the body.

Jaindoh senses the land is foul. Really, horribly foul, both in appearance (it is ashy, smoky, hazy) and evil. She has to concentrate really hard to have her divine sense activate in the first place.

Spectral Cam the Spellcaster

The spectral Cam looks smart. He pulls out glasses, and is studying the scene intently. A spectral cat is next to him, it also looks smart. They talk to each other. We cannot hear them, however. Spectral Cam seems to be ignoring us to study the scene. We write “can you see us?” Spectral Cam sighs and rolls his eyes, and finally looks at us. He starts waving his hands, and silver sparks from his hands coalesce with the ashes and form sparkly pink words. Jaindoh, Reddy, and Hakon realize it’s some kind of incantation. Jaindoh writes it down, and then successfully manages to make flaming balls come from her fingers. Spectral Cam snaps back into his body. The physical Cam comes to, the last thing he remembers was tripping when coming through the portal, and he thinks he hit his head.

The raven looks at Cam and says accusingly “you said you’d find the cure to everything.” (To the amnesia?) Cam realizes he’d seen the crow or raven the day we were rescued. Cam speaks to the bird...it seems to think it odd that he is quizzing it and asking questions he ought to know the answer to, thinks Cam is trying to test or trick him. It asks “Is this a test?” Cam answers something non-commital, and the raven laughs and says “see you later” and flies off.

The Wolves Report

We approach the skinless wolves. They are fighting over a corpse that has been defaced and delimbed, it looks like it might be a human or half-elf they killed. They seem to recognize Cam, and sit up, suddenly still, like they’re at attention. We tell them “Report.” The wolves look back and forth from Cam to the rest of the party, and Cam says “it’s okay, you can tell them.” The wolves say “okay” and reveal “we hunted them down and killed every last one of them. All 74. None of them had the mark.” Cam says “how long were you hunting them?” 8 months is the answer. They say “some may have slipped through, into the City. But none were left here.” Cam asks “where was their base of operations?” They ask, like the raven did, “is this a test sir?” And when Cam says yes, they sit at attention and stare into space. Eventually, Cam says “keep up the good work. You can go back to your meal.” And they two wolves begin snarling at each other again and snatching meat from their kill.

One Got Away

We walk away, heading north. Hakon says the corpse spoke to him, it whispered that an unmarked one got away and went into the city.

Weird Visions

Jaindoh thinks the city is a refuge, or at least that unmarked ones are hiding there. She thinks that Alternate Cam is a ringleader for creatures in this alternate reality and that people in the city would be scared of him. As we walk, heading to the north gate, Jaindoh looks at the fired, smoking farmland, and keeps feeling an odd sense of pride when she sees the smoking ruins.

Before we enter the city, Reddy wants to check everyone’s tattoos. Our tattoos are all there, they still look the same. Hovering over Hakon, Reddy has a weird vision, she remembers frantically stitching the tattoo onto Hakon’s neck while he was just a lump of fleshy corpse, and hoping it would work.

North Gate and Field Ward in the Foul World

The first gate we expect to come upon isn’t there. There’s a crater, huge and smoking, we think it’s where the alchemical explosion went off in Salt Pork. There are guards around the north gate to get into the North Ward section of the city, they are skinless and hairless. We decide to skulk through Field Ward to the smuggler’s tunnel to try to get into it and into North Ward.

In the hovels along the cliffs, there are like 80-100 people packed in each one. There are emaciated people (people with skin and hair, normal people), they look like they are dying.

We get to the last hovel, get the people out (telling them there’s food back a few blocks...not a lie as Reddy couldn’t help but to pass out her food to the poor people), and then sneak through the smuggler’s tunnel into the North Ward. It’s all debris where we come out, the Maiden’s Tears isn’t there. But Cam can climb up on the pile of debris, and can identify where the smoking craters are. We think it important to note where they all are. Hakon maps them out, marking them all.

The Horrors in the Foul World’s City

We see 7 total columns of smoke, they roughly correspond to one per ward we think. The one closest to us in North Ward isn’t a crater, it’s a bonfire. The hairless skinless guards are throwing dead people into them. Except that sometimes we think some of the bodies are still moving, they aren’t dead yet.

We make our way through the city. There are three gates to the City of the Dead, all look unnaturally dark under the gate entrances, but there are three huge stone statues over them. The three statues are all of Hakon, but it’s the Hakon from the vision wearing bandoliers and all black and tossing a dagger. What’s funny is the stone statues are about 100 years old.

City of the Dead

We throw a rope up to climb over the top, but there’s a chilling wind (that drains 1 point of Con if you stay in it). We decide to brave a gate instead. Hakon volunteers to go first. He realizes the inky darkness are incorporeal undead. They all whisper something, the whisper takes about 12 seconds to be passed through the City of the Dead, Hakon thinks they all whispered “Master” in a welcoming tone. The rest of the party walks in without incident, and we proceed in. Everything inside is animated, and they all defer to Hakon, whispering as we go through.

The Passage Back to Our World

We make our way down the spiral staircase, and using Hakon’s map retrace our steps to the get to the place where we saw

Doctor Frankenstein’s Lab in Our World

The mausoleum has been there 300-400 years. Reddy thinks the passage is about 1000 years older or more. Looks like construction had started, like they were expanding the area for burying the dead, then decided to stop construction. Reddy wonders if the stone is a harder material or something, pulls out some tools to check--but when she tries to work the stone, she has the sense that she’s hurting the stone. The hallway is rougher as we keep going. There’s a chamber at the end, it’s finished, it’s about 1000 years old. The grate above it (see next paragraph) was added later.

The chamber is set up like an alchemical lab, with needles and quills and chemicals. There are also corpses in there, they’re stacked up like cordwood and there’s no obvious, visible cause of death. The corpses also seem to be preserved somehow, they are not decomposing. There are about 100 bodies (we lost track of the exact count), they are mostly humans and half-elves, and a very few are elves. They are all naked, so no way to tell how old they are from styles of clothing. There are ink stains all around their heads and shoulders and necks, but no tattoos on any of them. They are on old (like 40-50 years old) wooden tables reinforced with metal. Weird to have such tables down here, we think. We inspect the bodies again, and realize there are several bodies that are exact duplicates...there are identical (totally identical) twin or triplet bodies. Cam looks harder, and spots a Corin corpse down here. We also see Boris (the North ward guard with the Book of Clues). We don’t see anyone else we recognize.

We think the chamber is roughly under the High Road, just outside the City of the Dead, maybe between the Castle Ward and Trade Ward. Cam thinks we are likely below the Costumer’s Hall. We recall that after the breakin that involved people shooting crossbows and escaping, that Cam thought they could have escaped into the sewers about 2 blocks away. We look up. There’s a grate and an airway. Cam thinks he could barely squeeze into it, maybe. The girls couldn’t at all. We boost him up. It’s a 45 degree incline, it’s tough to get up it, Cam climbs about 25-30 feet and in the sewers. It’s spacious. And there’s a sewer grate about 10 feet away, and Cam can see the back of the Costumer’s Guild from it. He also verifies that the sounds in the street are normal and there are normal people.

Of the bottles in the chamber, we realize there’s a shelf with about 30 potions of healing. There’s also a shelf with 14 potions of Diminution, which will reduce the size of the drinker (for 1d4 hours) by half and make them weigh ⅛ less, Jaindoh says, though she can’t tell why she knows this is so.

Recalling the Mausoleum will be on lockdown, we could shrink ourselves and get out via the sewer. But that would alert the Thin Man that someone was in his chamber.

Portal Is Back

We walk 300 feet back down the tunnel, and Jaindoh realizes there’s a portal in our way. We are scared to go through, afraid we’ll end up in the Foul World. Or...considering some corpses were triplets, could this portal lead to a third world??

What Should We Do?

Should we wait for Thin Man to return, and confront him? Reduce ourselves and escape into our world? Or go through the portal and see if we reenter the Foul World or a Third World?

(We get to level up to level 2, since we have been learning more about ourselves.)