Aboleth Group - "Derrick, just stick your head down the well" - LMOP Session 16

10^th Dec 2019, 7:45 – 11:00pm

In-game timeline: Start of session, day 14. End of session, day 17.

Our “Heroes” are surveying the scene of a ruined tower, a large, colourful tent, ground covered in bodies and webs, and a clean and tidy well that is crying out to be investigated.

Derrick seems to have learnt a new word during the last battle - "carefully". He "carefully" walks over to one of the humanoid bodies on the group, and "carefully" investigates it. He sees that it appears to be a zombie, now dead (for the second, and possibly final) time. The other bodies lying around also appear to be zombie-like. Other than the 4 that the party killed, there are around 4 others that were already dead when the group arrived.

Derrick "carefully" approaches the body that is lying in front of the tent entrance, which is another zombie. Now that Derrick understands what "carefully" means, he no longer bothers, and instead hoofs the dead zombie body out of the way with a hefty kick.

Heading into the tent, he sees a number of bedrolls laid out, and nothing else. Many of them don't seem to have been used in many days, if not weeks. Derrick sets about searching through the bedrolls, in an anything-but-careful manner.

The remainder of the group, wondering what Derrick is up to in the tent, come in to join him. Esme spots the one bedroll that looks recently used, and focuses on that one, managing to find a number of potentially useful items, including a spellbook, a scroll of Animate Dead, a ring and a dagger, plus an old poem talking about a potentially magic weapon, Garoth's Needle, that was in the Forge of Spells many centuries ago, and an ancient book written in old Elvish, that Mallorn slowly deciphers and seems to be talking about a major event that happened over a thousand years ago called The Corruption, or The Cleansing, depending upon your point of view.

Finding nothing else of value in the tent, the group head outside, and Pruni suggests investigating the well, instructing Derrick to "Stick his head down it". Instead of following the order directly, Derrick uses the handle to raise the rope, expecting to see a bucket appear at the end of the rope, but being surprised at how heavy it seems.

A bucket does appear, but, tied to the rope and bucket, is an unexpected body of a female human wearing red robes. They suspect this may be Hamuna, the Red Wizard they have heard about. She has been dead only a few days, and looks badly beaten, though Esme cannot quite work out whether she died from a beating, or from starvation.

An attempt to use the Speak with dead scroll unfortunately failed, wasting the scroll, but searching the body revealed Hamuna's Journal, which was very useful in painting the picture that Hamuna had been working on the archaeological dig here, with her team, and found some interesting and potentially valuable finds, including a bronze seal of some kind, which she had sketched in her journal, and which the party recognised as being the human seal they obtained from the dragon in Thundertree. Hamuna goes on to say that the dragon appeared one day, killed all her team and stole all their finds. Hamuna, being of the necromantic persuasion, subsequently raised her team as zombies to protect the site from further incursion and continued to dig, finding a few more items, which the party had already discovered in her tent. There was no mention of what killed Hamuna, or her team of zombies, though Esme did work out that the zombies were likely killed by spider bites.

The group buried Hamuna and spent the rest of the day looking around the dig site, finding nothing. 

They did, however, look over some of their possessions, and revisited the bronze seal, studying the inscription and trying to work out what it meant. With a little bit of experimentation, they found out that if they read out the phrase in different languages, different parts of the seal glowed. Unfortunately they couldn't get the grey glass to glow at all, and decided it was because they did not know gnomish. If only they knew a gnome who could help?

They decided to head back to Phandalin, to rest up, claim their rewards, identify some of their loot and prepare to head to Cragmaw Castle to (finally!) rescue Gundren, if he is still alive. Their journey back passed without incident.

Back in Phandalin, Sildar gave them the 100gp reward for killing the orcs, though he took them on trust that they had done so, as they didn't provide a lot of convincing evidence of it. Sister Garaele was very happy with their answer about the whereabouts of Bowgentle's spellbook and gave them 3 healing potions as a reward. The group used some of their reward money to buy the vellum and inks that Mallorn needed to copy spells, and he copied Identify from Hamuna's spellbook into his own, and spent the day casting Identify on their magic items (luckily the party had also found 2 pearls, so they could use one of these as ingredients for the Identify spell).

Hugh, the axe, was shown to be a +1 battleaxe, created by a pacifist who hated dryads. It is especially dangerous against plant monsters, or wooden things.

The hairclip was shown to give a level of protection against mind control spells

The dagger was a Dagger of the Witches, and gave an increased chance of a critical hit, and could curse the target. Pruni took this, and, once attuned to it, seemed to have a reddish tinge to her eyes, and started to lose the hair in her eyebrows.

Esme took a +1 ring of protection

Derrick is still wearing the Tresendar crest ring, but Mallorn has yet to inform him of what magical properties it may have.

Mallorn is considering what other spells to transfer to his spellbook, given the cost of doing so may use up a significant amount of party funds.

We leave our "Heroes" fully rested, and almost ready to set out and tackle the perils of Cragmaw Castle!