Session 2 (July 31st, 2015)
Day 2 in New Sarnath (Afternoon)
Minor Architectural Miracles
The party makes their way through the ruined canyon of fallen streets and collapsed structures with difficulty, but eventually they notice something that might have made the trek worthwhile.
As they climb and get back to the high ground of the boulevard, they realize that the ground in front of them is in fact the roof of a building and that roof is of rather fine building materials and good craftsmanship; that means the building it is part of belonged to someone with money.
They make their way across the roof of the sunken building, looking for a way in. They notice a hole going down in the rubble a little ways away from the roof, and the party realizes that what they are currently standing on is a canopy of broken buildings and stonework; about 30 feet below is the still intact house and its walled courtyard.
Whether by miracle or pure luck, this building and its property was forced down by the shifting earth yet it was forced as one unit. Perhaps even more of a miracle (or lucky break for the party), the surrounding area did not collapse on the house, destroying it and burying it. Instead those surrounding buildings were held up by its roof, the property walls, and other unknown structural anomalies in around the boulevard.
The specifics don't particularly matter to the party though (beyond Braggor assuring himself that the whole thing isn't likely to collapse inward at any moment). That's some long dead rich guy's house down there. Let's loot it!
The party secures a rope and descends; Braggor leaves the the shopkeeper's skull behind on the empty chest he'd been carrying around. You always need someone to keep lookout after all.
The sunken courtyard is empty besides some ruined decorative stonework, so the party looks for ways into the house and finds two: A heavy wooden door into the house itself and a chained and padlocked cellar entry. The party decides cellar first.
The Cellar
The padlock is completely rusted through; it can't be picked by it should be fairly easy to break. After Braggor fails miserably at doing so, Vlad shoots the lock off and the shot is nearly deafening in the almost completely stone encased courtyard.
The sound of the shot, so loud in the unnatural stillness of the Doomed city, would definitely let anyone nearby know that they are not alone. They decide to keep future gunshots to a minimum lest it attract unwanted attention.
The party pulls open the dual cellar doors and the smell of feint decomposition follows. The air is musty. No one must have been here for a long time. That means unlooted, thinks the party, and they go down the stone steps.
They find themselves in the southwestern corner of large rectangular stone basement. Directly in front of them are two large kegs on stands and beyond that they see the bottom of steps heading up into the house proper.
Ahead and to the right they see a sturdy looking door and a large stack of crates and barrels in the corner next to it. There is a stone wall partitioning off the area directly to their right, so they would need to approach that door and the crates in order to see what else is in the room.
There is something rather troubling about the area; there are many broken and gnawed bones scattered about the basement. To Thanus's keen eye not all of them look like animal bones. Quite a few are humanoid, but all of the humanoid bones are those of limbs.
Some fingers, hands, feet, maybe parts of legs; no bones from a torso or any complete skeletons. It's like someone had just been cutting off random limbs from people and throwing them down here. Perhaps to feed something.
Braggor isn't all that troubled immediately approaches the kegs to see if they still have booze of some sort in them and he finds the first to be full and the second half full. He turns the spigot and gets a handful to try. Wine. More specifically wine that did not age well at all. Purify Food and Drink puts that right and he tries it again; ah, good stuff.
As he is messing with the casks, Braggor realizes that beady little eyes are watching him. A dire rat hides beneath the stand of the second cask, watching him with unnatural malice and perhaps intelligence. Braggor does his best to stealthily alert the party to its presence before kicking out the stand and trying to crush the little beast with the half filled cask.
It dashes out in time and leaps at Braggor! Initiative!
While this was happening, Thanus held back but Vlad went toward the door they saw to get a look behind the partition. Beyond the basement's diving wall he sees a few wooden stalls and even more bones. In the back corner he sees a full skeleton, though it is broken and gnawed. Around it he sees a the remains of a ripped maid's dress.
As he takes in the scene, a hunched humanoid figure leans out from the last stall and Vlad sees rotten flesh and a glowing red eye. He decides to shoot it, but he only grazes the head. The shot is deafening and echoes in the stone basement and a guttural scream of rage follows.
The figure in the stall emerges and charges Vlad; the hunched rotten figure wears a tattered maid's dress and reeks of death. It is a ghast. From its stall follow a few more dire rats and from the pile of broken crates and barrels by the door comes a rat swarm. The ghast moves through the swarm and it parts around her, welcoming her; clearly she is the one controlling the rats.
The battle doesn't take long and is mostly uneventful. The rats prove to be more of a nuisance than active threat and the Ghast herself fails to paralyze anyone. Soon she is killed (for real this time) and the surviving rats scatter, no longer extensions of a malevolent intelligence but simply mindless vermin once more.
A rather fucked up way to die
The party examines the rest of the basement and it soon becomes clear what had been happened here. The entry they came through had been padlocked from the outside. The heavy wooden door by the crates bears deep scratches, as if someone was desperate to get through, yet it is both incredibly sturdy and locked.
The door at the top of the stairs leading into the house likewise bears scratches, as if by ragged fingernails, but while the door itself is broken in places, clearly something heavy collapsed against it on the other side as to make it impassable.
Behind the crate pile, which the party realizes was a rat's nest, the basement wall is cracked, yet the crack too small for anything in the basement to use except for the rats.
The ghast must have once been a maid of the house and trapped in the basement with the other skeleton they saw, the one laying in the ragged remains of a maid's uniform. With no way out and nothing to eat but each other, clearly the future ghast made a certain decision. In the back corner stall where Vlad had seen it originally, the party finds a mithril switchblade.
From there it seems that in undeath the maid gained an affinity for rats and the vermin had been bringing her all the food that they could fit through the small hole behind their nest.
Back to looting!
The party examines the sturdy door and realize it is rather heavily reinforced and has a damn good lock; before trying to kick it down or shooting anymore locks, they decide to search the upper house. Maybe there will be a key? They exit the basement the way they came and use the other door in the courtyard.
The inside of the house is mostly intact, but several large decorative pillars have collapsed, one of them against the basement door. There are a large number of rats in the house, but they scatter before the party; they get the feeling that there would have been a lot more combat up here if they hadn't gone to the basement first.
It takes some time, but the party finds everything that remains of value and hasn't been ruined by time and rats; silverware sets, a couple tapestries that need minor repairs, a couple exquisitely made dresses that are about 150 or so years out of fashion, a bottle of Elven absinthe, etc. They also find a key with a series of numbers carved into it stashed in a hidden compartment in the nightstand.
It's pretty clear what door it unlocks, so back to the basement the party goes.
To be continued...
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