The temple doors yawned behind them like the mouth of some perfumed hell, and within that defiled sanctuary the thing that had come down from the rafters watched them and smiled, a smile too knowing for any creature of flesh. Smoke curled around her limbs. Fire licked at the wooden bones of the roof. The corpses and the wreckage of the fight lay scattered across the stone, and for a moment the company only stood there in the ragged silence that follows violence, every breath torn from lungs already half spent.

It was Thindruk Steelbone who first gave the terror a shape a man could hold. He had heard the old tales, the kind traded in low voices over sour wine and older grudges: that daemons did not belong in the mortal world, that they came only by summons and corruption and bindings laid in places grown too foul for the gods to touch. They could not wander far unless some power held them fast, and even then the world rejected them the way a wound rejects poison.

So the dwarf did the thing proud men so rarely manage, and chose to live. “No point facing this demon here,” he said, the words clipped beneath the thunder rolling toward the castle. “Let us put distance between it and ourselves, and see if we can find its summoner.”

There was no gallantry in the retreat, only good sense. Thindruk went first, surprisingly swift for a dwarf so fond of his dignity, quitting the temple with all the command of a nobleman leading a charge in the opposite direction. Nora, still battered and voiceless from the earlier fighting, dragged herself upright and stumbled after him. Wanda stayed long enough to be sure Felrick would not be left behind, not after the lessons tooth and claw had already carved into them. Qavitrae moved with bow and blade ready, her eyes searching the ruin for whatever cruelty meant to show itself next.

Felrick could not quite leave without answering the daemon in kind. Small and quick and stubborn as a thorn under a fingernail, he raised his pistol and fired. The shot cracked across the courtyard like a judgment, and the ball flew true into the daemon’s breast, so that for one impossible instant it seemed audacity might do what steel and prayer had not. Then the bullet passed through her as through a column of incense. Violet smoke puffed from her back, and where a wound should have opened there was nothing at all, no blood and no torn flesh, and she did not so much as flinch. The hope guttered out before the echo did.

Wanda gave up any thought of tangling the creature in her whip, for what good was a snare against smoke, or a trip against a thing that wore flesh only as a mockery? The company withdrew from the temple entirely and gathered in the rain-slick courtyard, and the daemon came to the threshold laughing. Wanda seized the heavy doors and slammed them shut with a boom that rolled through the stone like the lid of a coffin falling closed. It should have felt like a victory. It felt only like postponement.

The fire had not died with the closing of the doors. It smoldered on within, gnawing upward through rafters and roof beams, patient and indifferent. Rain began to fall in heavy drops out of the swollen night, and far off, beyond the black edge of the spire, greenish lightning flashed.

Qavitrae alone saw what the others had missed. High in the tower beside the temple a figure stood framed in a window, near enough to a man in height but wrong in shape, its silhouette almost oval, with small frail arms, more than two of them, stirring at its sides. It watched from above with the stillness of a spider in a cracked wall.

Then her eyes went to the taller tower of the mansion. At its crown a great hatch or wooden door had swung open to the storm, and it had not been open before. The deep rumbling they had felt shuddering through the castle had come from there, and whatever the hatch was meant to do, it had laid the tower bare to the night sky.

There were too many horrors now to hold in a single mind. A daemon in the temple, a many-armed shape in the tower, something heavy moving above them, a hatch thrown open to the storm, prisoners somewhere below. The castle was less a fortress than a sick body, each chamber swollen with its own separate infection.

She gave Felrick her warning about the window, but there was no time to chase down every shadow. They had nearly died already at the hands of one nightmare’s servants, and they could not spend themselves against all the nightmares at once.

Qavitrae shared out the last of her laudanum among the worst hurt. Nora, still unable to speak, took hers with the grimness of someone who had no breath to spare for thanks. Felrick took his share for his own wounds. There was too little medicine between them and far too much blood.

Thindruk set his ear to a nearby door while the rain gathered its strength outside. At first he caught nothing but the breathing of the storm, and then, underneath it, the murmur of voices. Several people waited beyond, talking softly.

They weighed what they had. The obvious door would be watched, but the dining hall offered another way in, and so they slipped back inside, out of the storm and into the stale, sour warmth of the castle.

The dining hall had not changed, and yet it seemed worse for their having come back to it. Somewhere above, something large was moving across the upper floors, its footsteps thudding through the ceiling, the wood groaning under a weight never meant for the rooms of a house. Whatever walked up there was no mere servant, and no one suggested they go up to learn its name.

They pressed on instead, clearing the ground floor before they would dare the depths. A door near the hall let onto an exterior patio where the wall simply fell away into open night, for the castle’s builders had never feared men climbing the cliffs. Beehives stood out there in the dark, quiet in the rain, their tenants asleep. Even the ordinary had turned suspect in such a place. In a house like this the bees might wear human faces and the honey might bleed, and nothing at all could be trusted.

Beyond another door lay the kitchen, filthy and neglected, rusted cleavers on the walls and the worktables littered with the leavings of careless hands. The great chimney ran up to join the hearths of the dining hall, a sensible piece of building made grotesque by everything around it. A door past the kitchen stood open, and from the hall beyond it came hoarse whispering.

Wanda and Felrick went forward quietly. Qavitrae followed with that lethal grace of hers, and Thindruk came after with all the stealth a viscount could muster. Nora, wounded and wrung out by the fight, managed rather less. A pan clattered. A plate rang. Then her hip caught the table and the whole kitchen seemed to come down at once in a cascade of clanging pots and tumbling implements, and so much for subtlety.

Thindruk did not hesitate. If stealth had failed him, authority would have to do.

He drew himself up and barked into the hall with all the wounded outrage of a nobleman cheated of his due, calling the unseen servants lazybones and lackabouts, declaring that the castellan had promised someone to guide him down to the dungeons, demanding to know whether the lot of them were worth their weight in spittle.

The whispering broke into panic. Around the corner came a short, round woman on stubby legs, trailing a stench that felt almost personal, and behind her leaned a thin man-shaped creature with no nose and skin gone translucent, the muscle beneath it shifting in plain view as he moved. Both of them stared at the armed and blood-spattered intruders who had somehow, by sheer arrogance, become expected guests.

The woman stammered out apologies. They had been asleep, she said. They had heard the commotion and wanted only to be sure that nothing was amiss.

Thindruk gave her no room to breathe. He had come, he announced, to question the new prisoner. The bacchanal had disappointed him. The feast had been a flop, the evening tedious past all bearing, and at the very least he expected the small pleasure of interrogating someone.

Then Wanda stepped up beside him, her mace still fouled with the night’s work, her whole bearing a promise that her irritation would turn to violence if the servants failed to satisfy their noble guest. They were not wholly convinced, perhaps, but they were convinced enough to fear being wrong.

The prisoners were kept below, they said, under the stairs in the hall. And yet neither of them moved.

Wanda’s hand drifted to her whip. Thindruk’s voice went colder. In the end it was the noseless one, who they would later learn was called Bruno, who shuffled forward to lead them. The woman stayed behind in her kitchen, scowling less like a conspirator than a queen affronted by trespassers in her own filthy court. Wanda watched her and understood the shape of the resentment well enough. The creature did not care who had been killed, or what was done beyond her walls. She cared that strangers had come tramping through her domain.

Wanda, oddly, respected that. She gave the woman a copper and a nod and left her to her kingdom of grease and rust and rot.

Bruno led the rest of them back into the dining hall. By candlelight he showed them a cunning door hidden beneath the staircase, all but invisible in the dark, and a touch of his hand sprang the panel loose. Cold air breathed out of the opening, carrying the stink of wet stone and old suffering. Bruno peered down and muttered that old Slurd was not in his cupboard, as if a missing dungeon-lurker were no more than an inconvenience. Beyond the panel, stone steps went down into the dark.

Thindruk insisted that Bruno go first. The servant tried to wriggle out of it, his reluctance plain, but Qavitrae’s idle knife working beneath her fingernails and Thindruk’s flat expectation drove him down ahead of them.

The stair let out into a narrow basement hall, unkempt and damp and close. The air was fouler down here, thick with sweat and decay and blood and must. The upper floors of the castle had been a kind of madness; the depths felt worse, and quieter, and far more deliberate.

Bruno checked at one door first, lifting a hand as though to knock, then thought better of it and turned away. Before anyone could ask why, a snore erupted from behind it: a thunderous, wet, monstrous sound that filled the whole corridor. Whatever slept in there frightened Bruno badly, and Thindruk read it plainly in his face, that he had meant to bring them to this door and lost his nerve at the last.

They moved on. Another door stood sealed over with boards and heavy nails, a crude skull painted on it long ago, the paint runny and amateurish, as though fear had guided the brush more than any skill. Felrick and Qavitrae reckoned the turns and the distance through the twisting passages and understood, with grim certainty, that the sealed door lay beneath the terrible pit outside. Whatever waited behind it had been shut away for a reason, and not a gentle one. No one reached for the boards.

Bruno carried on through the narrow halls until they came to a torture chamber. There was nothing elegant about the room, no theatre to it, no arrangement meant to frighten. It was only a place where bodies had been hurt. Dried blood had blackened the surfaces, and fresher stains glistened among torn scraps of flesh, and the instruments of torment lay mixed in with other things too filthy at first to name.

A man sat in a cage. He was pale and wrinkled and impossible to put an age to, his beard and hair grown long and untended, fat leeches clinging to him sleek and satisfied where the rest of him had wasted away. Even so, he opened one bleary eye with an almost courtly calm and greeted Bruno by name.

Bruno called him the doctor. The doctor, for his part, seemed glad of the company, and offered them tea.

That, more than the daemon, more than the fire, more than the snoring horror behind the sealed door, was what chilled the company. The tea service was real. It stood there among the tools of torture, so crusted with grime that the porcelain and the steel seemed to belong to one and the same foul trade. The man in the cage spoke as though Lady Ingrid’s generosity had made his lodgings really quite comfortable.

Thindruk had no patience for tea. He demanded the new prisoner, a young woman with a sharp tongue, brought in only within the last few days. The doctor knew the one he meant. She was in the cells just beyond, he said, sharing the room with the tax collector. Slagdog kept the keys.

The next door opened on a chamber of filthy cells, and there they found Aubrey.

She was conscious, battered, plainly marked by torture, and yet beside the others she looked almost healthy, only because the others had been worn down to things that barely held their human shape. A thin man in the tatters of fine clothes stood near her cell. Five villagers, flea-bitten and pitiful, were crammed into another; they had been whispering among themselves until the door opened, and now they only stared out, too weak to run and too long abused to find hope quickly.

The rest of the cells stood empty. The locks wanted keys, and no keys hung anywhere on the walls. Slagdog had them.

The name had grown heavy already by the time they turned back toward the sleeping room. Bruno did not want to wake him, and none of the servants did. The dungeon-keeper’s snores still rolled distantly down the corridors like some beast dreaming of meat.

The company gathered near the doors to Slagdog’s chamber. Their one reliable strategy in this castle had been an ugly one: strike first, strike while the thing slept, and leave it no time to raise the alarm. There was nothing heroic in it, but heroism had not carried them this far. Blood and deception and speed had done that, and so had a willingness to become, for the space of a single heartbeat, worse than the creatures around them.

Bruno was standing too near the truth of it. Thindruk gave the look, and Wanda understood him.

Her whip slid free. She looped it about Bruno’s neck and hauled tight before he could cry out. The noseless servant struggled, heels scraping the stone, hands clawing at the leather, his body fighting for a moment with a desperate animal panic. Then the air went out of him, his limbs slackened, his weight sagged, and he crumpled unconscious at her feet. Not dead.

Nora came round the corner. She could not speak, but her face said enough on its own. She looked at Bruno, then at Wanda, then back at Bruno, and the question needed no words at all.

Wanda had not killed him. So Nora did.

She took her sword in both hands and drove it down through his neck. The body shuddered, and the blood spread across the floor in a dark and eager sheet. Nora gave a curt little bow, as though she had finished some service nobody had ever properly thanked her for, and went back to her place.

Behind the door, Slagdog snored again, and the sound rattled the wood in its frame.

So the company stood there in the dungeon corridor with blood at their feet and the freed prisoners behind them, a temple burning above them, a daemon laughing somewhere out in the storm, and a sleeping monster waiting just past the next door.

For one breath, none of them moved. And then the castle itself seemed to hold its breath along with them.

Session Notes

  • The session opened in the aftermath of the prior fight, with the party battered by beastmen and confronted by a daemon of Slaanesh that had lowered herself into view and presented herself as an immediate threat.

  • Thindruk asked what he would know about daemons in general, or about this daemon in particular.

    • He made an Education check and achieved a tremendous success.
    • Thindruk recalled that daemons are not native to the mortal world and can only enter it through corrupt sorcery, befouled lands, or similar unnatural means.
    • He understood that daemons usually require a place of binding to sustain their presence in the world.
    • Such a binding is generally localized, often to the scale of a room or building, though legendary sorcerers might bind a daemon to a much larger area.
    • Thindruk also understood that if a bound daemon leaves the place sustaining it, it cannot remain in the mortal world for long, perhaps only moments or minutes.
    • Based on this, Thindruk concluded that there was little reason to fight the daemon where it was strongest and suggested putting distance between the party and the temple while looking for its summoner.

  • Thindruk began the retreat from the temple.

    • He moved away from the daemon and toward the rest of the castle grounds.
    • He positioned himself as though leading the charge away from the temple rather than toward it.

  • Wanda chose not to abandon Felrick.

    • She considered delaying her retreat until after Felrick had made his escape.
    • She waited for Felrick rather than immediately fleeing ahead.
    • She confirmed that her earlier Litany of Hatred had not affected the daemon because the daemon had not been visible at the time.
    • The group clarified that Litany of Hatred could not be reused in the same combat by Wanda.

  • Nora, who had been revived with smelling salts and dragged out of the church by Qavitrae at the end of the previous turn, was awake but prone.

    • She stood up and then used the rest of her action to run away from the temple.
    • Because of her Coordination training, standing only cost her one AP.
    • Nora ran roughly twenty-one yards away from the immediate danger.
    • She remained wounded and exhausted from the preceding fight.

  • Felrick assessed the retreat and noted that, with his high Movement, he could move farther with two AP than the others had managed with more effort.

    • Before fleeing, he decided to take a pistol shot at the daemon.
    • Felrick fired his windlock pistol at the daemon and hit.
    • Because the attack was made with a black powder weapon, the daemon could not dodge it.
    • Felrick spent a Fortune Coin to improve the damage result.
    • The bullet struck the daemon squarely in the chest, but it passed through her body.
    • A plume of violet smoke flew out behind her, and no wound remained after the bullet passed through.
    • The party realized that the daemon appeared to be insubstantial or otherwise immune to ordinary gunfire.

  • After seeing Felrick’s shot pass harmlessly through the daemon, Wanda abandoned the idea of tripping or choking the daemon with her whip.

    • Since the daemon had shown that she could turn to smoke or otherwise fail to be meaningfully affected by physical attacks, Wanda chose to run instead.
    • She moved to stand protectively in front of Thindruk and Felrick, saving some capacity for defense.

  • Qavitrae also retreated from the temple.

    • She moved away from the daemon and began reloading her crossbow.
    • She spent one AP to begin the loading process, leaving one more AP of loading to complete on her next turn.

  • The daemon did not pursue the party.

    • Instead, she moved to the doors of the temple, watched the party fleeing, cackled maniacally, and slammed the heavy temple doors shut.
    • Smoke was already rising from the temple.
    • The temple was not yet an inferno, but there was clearly fire inside.

  • The group made Awareness checks after the retreat.

    • Qavitrae was the only one who noticed anything significant.
    • She saw a shadowy figure high in the tower next to the temple, standing in a window on what appeared to be the highest floor.
    • The figure’s silhouette was not human.
    • It was roughly human height, but its outline was more like an ellipsis, with small, frail, spindly arms.
    • It had more than two arms.
    • Qavitrae also noticed that the top of another tower on the mansion had opened to the night sky.
    • Large wooden doors or a hatch at the top of that tower had opened.
    • The rumbling noise that had passed through the castle seemed to have come from that tower opening.
    • The hatch had not been open when the party entered the castle.

  • The immediate combat ended.

    • The party did not return to the burning temple.
    • Qavitrae distributed the last of her laudanum to the most badly injured members of the party.
    • Nora was seriously wounded and Felrick was moderately wounded.
    • The laudanum improved the condition of those who received it by one injury step.
    • The party noted that the temple fire was still burning.

  • Thindruk investigated a nearby door.

    • He listened at it and initially failed his Eavesdrop test, but used an ability to reroll after a failed eavesdrop attempt.
    • On the reroll, he succeeded.
    • He heard several people quietly murmuring on the other side of the door.
    • The voices were too quiet to make out clearly, but there were definitely multiple people behind the door.

  • Thindruk told the others that several people were on the other side of the door.

    • He suggested that the party could attempt to surprise them or enter through the dining hall instead.
    • The party decided that whoever was behind the door might expect them to come in through the front, so they chose to circle around through the dining hall.

  • The party returned to the dining hall.

    • Nothing obvious had changed in the dining hall itself.
    • The party could hear something large moving around on the floor above.
    • The sound was not merely footsteps from an ordinary person.
    • Heavy thuds and creaking wood suggested a large creature or heavy presence upstairs.

  • The party debated whether to go upstairs toward the heavy movement or continue clearing the current floor.

    • They chose to clear the floor rather than risk running away later into enemies behind them.
    • Wanda opened a door with her shield raised while Felrick prepared to shoot past her if necessary.

  • The door opened onto an exterior patio rather than an enemy-filled room.

    • The wall on the cliffside was low or absent because the castle’s builders did not expect attackers to ascend the cliffs of the spire.
    • The patio offered a dramatic view over the edge.
    • There was an apiary there, with several beehives.
    • Since it was night, the bees were quiet.
    • The party briefly considered the possibility that the bees might be unnatural, but nothing indicated they were human-sized or immediately active.

  • Wanda listened at the next door and heard nothing.

    • She cracked the door open and found a kitchen.
    • The kitchen contained a large stove, a large wood stove or oven arrangement, work tables, hanging rusty cleavers, cabinetry, and other kitchen implements.
    • It was filthy and poorly maintained.
    • A door beyond the kitchen was already open, revealing a small hall.
    • From beyond that open door, the party could hear quiet, hoarse whispering.
    • The voices seemed to be discussing the commotion outside and wondering what was happening.

  • Wanda attempted to move quietly toward the whispering voices, and Felrick went with her.

    • Other party members also moved in, except those trying to stay back.
    • The party made Stealth checks.
    • Several members succeeded, but Thindruk failed and Nora critically failed.
    • The stone floor helped keep movement quieter, but the kitchen was cluttered.
    • Thindruk caught a pan with his cuff, causing it to spin into a plate and make noise.
    • Nora, exhausted from the earlier fight, accidentally hip-checked the table and sent many items clattering.

  • As soon as stealth failed, Thindruk improvised a deception.

    • In an imperious voice, he called out to the hidden servants and demanded that they show him to the dungeons.
    • He claimed that the castellan had said someone in the kitchen could guide him.
    • Thindruk made a Guile check, benefiting from deceiving people of a different social class.
    • He succeeded very well.

  • Two servants appeared from around the corner.

    • One was a short, fat, ball-shaped woman with stubby legs and a terrible smell.
    • The other was a thinner man with no nose and translucent skin through which muscle could be seen moving beneath.
    • Both looked at the party wide-eyed.
    • The woman insisted that they had not been lazy, explaining that they had been asleep and had heard a commotion outside.
    • She said they had come to make sure nothing was amiss.

  • Thindruk continued the deception.

    • He declared that what was amiss was that he was waiting for an opportunity to interrogate the new prisoner.
    • He complained that the bacchanal had been disappointing and the feast had been a flop.
    • The noseless servant responded that there had been no feast.
    • Thindruk cut him off and demanded to be taken to the prisoner.

  • Wanda reinforced Thindruk’s deception through intimidation.

    • She stepped forward menacingly, visibly armed and still marked by recent violence.
    • She made an Intimidate check.
    • The servants were not fully convinced by the deception, but they were frightened enough by the armed, bloody party to cooperate.
    • They stated that prisoners would be in the dungeon and that the way there was through the hall under the stairs.
    • However, neither servant immediately moved to lead the party.

  • Thindruk demanded that the noseless servant open the way for his “guest and superior.”

    • The noseless servant agreed and stepped past the party to guide them.
    • The party anticipated that he might notice the corpse of the old servant or butler they had previously killed in the dining hall.
    • Because the dining hall was dark, and because the servant carried only a candle, this did not immediately disrupt the deception.

  • Wanda remained near the fat kitchen woman.

    • She stood within whip range and watched her.
    • The woman scowled but did not attempt to flee or raise an alarm.
    • Wanda later gave the woman a copper and thanked her for her service to their lord.
    • Wanda scrutinized the woman and critically succeeded.
    • Wanda concluded that the woman mainly resented the party’s intrusion into her kitchen.
    • The woman seemed to understand that the party had probably killed people, but she did not appear afraid or particularly loyal to anyone outside her own kitchen.
    • Wanda gave her a respectful nod and left her territory.

  • The noseless servant led Thindruk and the others back into the dining hall.

    • He went behind one of the staircases and revealed a subtle doorway set into the base of the stairs.
    • The doorway was difficult to notice when closed, especially in the dark.
    • The servant pressed a panel, causing it to pop out, then swung it open.
    • Cold air wafted out.
    • He looked puzzled and mentioned that “old Slurd” was not there, saying that Slurd sometimes fell asleep in his cupboard.
    • The open passage revealed steep stone stairs descending into darkness.

  • Thindruk insisted that the noseless servant continue guiding them rather than simply pointing them down the stairs.

    • Thindruk made a Scrutinize check and succeeded.
    • He could tell that the servant did not want to go down into the dungeon.
    • The servant made a half-hearted attempt to explain that the way was simple and easy to find.
    • Qavitrae drew a knife and picked under her fingernails, adding silent pressure.
    • The servant relented and led the way down the stairs with the candle.

  • Before descending, Nora looked out toward the burning temple.

    • Despite the rain, the fire had grown considerably.
    • The wooden parts of the temple, especially the roof, seemed likely to be lost.
    • Since much of the structure was stone, some of the building would likely survive.
    • The fire had grown strong enough to overcome the rainstorm.
    • The temple doors were open again, and some people were staggering out.
    • They were naked, burned, and standing in the rain, looking confused and stunned.

  • The party descended into the dungeon.

    • The stairs led into a dark, unkempt basement hallway with several doors.
    • The area was damp, chaotic, and foul-smelling.
    • The noseless servant, identified as Bruno, led the party forward.
    • He stopped at one door and almost knocked, then hesitated and changed his mind, moving toward another door instead.

  • Thindruk tried to read why Bruno changed his mind.

    • Thindruk made a hard Scrutinize check and succeeded.
    • Qavitrae critically failed her own attempt to interpret the situation and became convinced that there was either something extremely valuable or extremely deadly in the room, though this was not reliable.
    • A tremendous, bone-shaking snore came from the room Bruno had hesitated at.
    • Thindruk understood that Bruno had considered leading them into that room but had chickened out because whatever was inside frightened him.
    • The snoring creature or person also made a “nom, nom, nom” sound in its sleep.

  • Bruno opened a different door and led the party into more narrow basement corridors.

    • The basement smelled of sweat, decay, blood, must, rot, and rancid filth.
    • The corridors contained more doors and a spiral staircase going farther down.
    • One door was boarded shut with heavy nails driven into the door and frame.
    • A crude skull had been painted on the door in old, runny paint.
    • Thindruk mocked the dungeon keeper for being afraid of his own dungeon.
    • Bruno replied weakly that there was “a lot of nastiness” in there.
    • The party recognized that the dungeon keeper was likely the source of the tremendous snoring in the earlier room.

  • Felrick wondered whether the boarded skull-marked door lay beneath the terrible pit outside the building.

    • Qavitrae made a Navigation or Survival-related check and critically succeeded.
    • She was certain that, based on the party’s path and position, the door lay almost directly beneath the pit.
    • This suggested that the skull-marked, nailed-shut door was connected to whatever danger or mystery was associated with the pit.

  • Bruno led the party past the skull-marked door and deeper into the dungeon.

    • Wanda listened at another door and heard another loud snore, likely from the same chamber as before.
    • The party continued into a room that proved to be a torture chamber.

  • The torture chamber was filthy and horrific.

    • It contained dried blood, some fresh blood, torn flesh, and torture implements.
    • Cleaning the chamber was clearly not a priority.
    • A man sat inside an unlocked cage.
    • He was pale, wrinkled, and difficult to age.
    • His hair and beard were long and unkempt.
    • Leeches clung to him and were fat with blood.
    • He appeared weak, but he opened an eye and spoke calmly when the party entered.
    • Bruno greeted him as “doctor.”
    • The doctor welcomed the company and asked who Bruno’s friends were.

  • Thindruk treated the doctor as a prisoner at first and told him the party was of no concern.

    • Qavitrae inspected the cage and found that it was not locked.
    • The doctor rose feebly and offered tea.
    • He said Lady Ingrid had provided him with a tea service in the room.
    • The tea service was present but so filthy and mixed in with torture implements that it had initially looked like more torture equipment.
    • The party found this more unsettling than many of the castle’s other horrors.

  • Nora listened at a nearby door while the others spoke with the doctor.

    • She made an excellent Eavesdrop check.
    • She heard multiple voices beyond the door.
    • The voices were muffled and speaking quietly, but they sounded like people trying to whisper loudly and occasionally breaking into normal speech.
    • Nora stood with her back to the door while the others continued the conversation.

  • Thindruk asked the doctor about a new prisoner brought in within the last couple of days.

    • The doctor said the von Wittgensteins regularly brought in new “guests” and described them as gracious hosts.
    • He identified the likely prisoner as a young woman with salty language.
    • Thindruk said he needed to speak personally with her.
    • The doctor said she was in her room just beyond the nearby door.
    • He believed Slagdog had roomed her with the tax collector.
    • He tried to recall the tax collector’s name, suggesting Johan Bartholomew or something similar.

  • Thindruk looked pointedly at Bruno, indicating that he should open the door.

    • Bruno opened it.
    • The handle was crusted with blood and other dried substances, so the party was glad not to touch it themselves.
    • Beyond the door was a set of filthy cells.

  • Inside the cells, the party found several prisoners.

    • Aubrey, the party’s hireling, was in the cell on the far right.
    • Aubrey looked battered and injured from torture but healthier than the others.
    • A thin, weakened man in tattered but once-nice clothing stood at the door to Aubrey’s cell.
    • Five flea-ridden, pitiful villagers were crammed into another cell.
    • All the prisoners showed signs of torture.
    • Many looked starved, weakened, and deprived of sunlight.
    • Several seemed barely strong enough to stand.
    • The whispered conversation stopped when the door opened, and the prisoners stared at the party in terror.
    • Two other cells were empty.

  • Nora looked for keys or an obvious way to unlock the cells.

    • The cells clearly required a key.
    • Some other doors in the area also appeared lockable, though they were not currently locked.
    • No keys were visible in the room.

  • Thindruk ordered Bruno to pull Aubrey from the cell so he could speak with her in the other chamber.

    • Bruno said they would need Mr. Slagdog’s keys.
    • The doctor corrected him by saying it was “just Slagdog.”
    • Bruno explained that Slagdog kept the keys and that they would need to wake him or wait until morning.
    • The doctor suggested that Slagdog might be refreshed and in better spirits in the morning.
    • The party did not want to wait.

  • The party prepared to wake or ambush Slagdog.

    • Bruno was reluctant to wake him.
    • The party positioned themselves near the doors to Slagdog’s room.
    • They discussed whether Bruno should be allowed to wake Slagdog or whether they should kill Bruno first and then try to sneak in.
    • Since killing people in their sleep had been a successful strategy for them, the party leaned toward ambushing Slagdog while he slept.

  • The party decided to eliminate Bruno before approaching Slagdog.

    • Thindruk signaled that Bruno should be killed, though he did not initiate the attack himself.
    • Wanda used her whip to loop around Bruno’s neck and choke him.
    • She aimed carefully before making the attack.
    • Her first roll failed, and the party used a Fortune Coin to reroll.
    • The reroll succeeded.
    • Bruno struggled and nearly caused noise, but Wanda spun him away from the door and choked off his air before he could cry out.
    • He collapsed unconscious.

  • Nora then killed Bruno.

    • Seeing that Wanda had only knocked Bruno out, Nora silently came around the corner.
    • She looked down at him, looked at Wanda, and seemed to ask whether Wanda was finished.
    • Nora then drove her sword through Bruno’s neck with both hands.
    • Bruno’s body shuddered and bled heavily.
    • Nora gave Wanda a curt bow as if to say “you’re welcome” and returned to her position.

  • The session ended on a cliffhanger.

    • The party stood outside Slagdog’s room.
    • Another door-rattling snore came from the other side.
    • Slagdog remained asleep beyond the door as the party prepared for whatever came next.

  • At the end of the session, the party received 100 XP.

    • The characters reflected that they had fled from a daemon, found the dungeon, discovered Aubrey and other prisoners, met the doctor, and killed Bruno.
    • The GM postponed assigning corruption until the end of the broader castle section, noting that there was still more evil and corruption the party might encounter.