Castle Xyntillan Session 23: A Thief Takes the Throne

In the last session, the party plundered the rooms of the vampire Countess Maltricia, encountered and slew her husband, and suffered a level drain! Will they be able to get away from Maltricia? Will they hunt down the remaining vampires? All this and more in this week's session of Castle Xyntillan!

The Party

Longo Lightfoot, Halfling Thief, wears a sky-blue headscarf. Played by CaptainSabatini.
Corby the Joyful, Human Cleric of Sucellus, wears a short, conical hat. Played by diregrizzlybear.
Idred the Most Omniscient, Human MU, wears a full-visored greathelm. Played by David Perry.
Boroth Swinney the Joyous, Human Fighter, wears a masked helm depicting a happy human face. Played by Justin Hamilton.
Francois, Light Footman, noticeably dogless. 

Rodolfo, Heavy Footman, running from a warrant in town.

Hubert, Heavy Footman.

Gwynefa, Arbalist.

Emil, Lightbearer, strange obsession with some Malevols.

Karo, Arbalist.

Allan, Arbalist, claims to know a great secret, pursues a Malevol for past crimes.

Clovis, Heavy Footman.

Eric, Light Footman and cart driver.

Oscar, Arbalist of unusual strength

LaBeouf, Camp Cook.
Raymond, Mule.

Casualties

None

Loot

Solar medallion, 450gp

500gp

Silver snuffbox, 650gp

Staff of the Merovings, 5000gp

The Game

• While securing the Count's apartments, the party discovered a procession of undead ladies and their servants, watching a skeleton in ragged courtly garb painting a surreal mural on the wall outside. After a brief vote, they approached the group.
• They were instantly reviled by the fashionable skeleton, who identified himself as Bartholomew Goncourt-Malevol, for their utterly gauche fashion sense.

Idred: *looking down at his regal robes* Even me?

Longo: *looking down at his bondage gear* Even me?

GM: Especially you.

*spooky painting stops*

• The party got thoroughly cussed out to the tuts of the undead ladies, and slunk away before the manservants got violent. Stuck for the moment in the Count's study, Longo clambered up the shaft of the fireplace to the next floor. The room above was messily done in blacks and reds, and the portrait of a stern executioner bore down on the halfling with a psychic pressure.
• Longo pulled through, and before inviting the rest of the party up, covered the portrait with his tarp, eliminating the pressure. With no danger immediately visible, the party joined him and explored the room. Idred picked up yet another tome of eldritch magic, The Dancing Plague, and the party discovered a pair of skeletons slumped over a table, tarot cards scattered about.

Longo: Is it a deck that might have many things in it?

Boroth: So it would seem.

• When they updated their map, the dimension of the room seemed off, so they checked about for secret doors, and found one... leading directly into a corridor filled with corpses. On the other end of the corridor, they saw another hidden door, and heard both snoring and the sharpening of blades beyond. They resolved to see what was on the other side.

Idred: Are you sure you want to check Longo? It means crawling through corpses.

Longo: That's like a Saturday to me.

• On the other side were several clergy, one taking a rest, and a figure in full plate armor: Brother Michel! And the room was Angela's suite!

Boroth: We might have brought a paladin here.

Corby: I swear we're not responsible for these corpses!

• Michel's party jumped as the door slid open, and Michel's assistant, Brother Murk, called a spell to his lips with frightful speed, but Michel calmed them down. The two groups spent a time catching up. The party's warning that Angela was likely a succubus turned out to be wholly correct, and though the paladin's expedition drove her out of the castle, they failed to slay her before she returned to the inferno. Michel congratulated the party on their destruction of the vampire, and encouraged them to keep at it.
• Saying their farewells to Michel, the party decided to investigate the closet from which they had heard humming on a previous expedition. They burst the door open, and inside was James, the ghostly butler. 
• He was squatting in front of a giant pile of varicolored sand, which was flanked by several smaller piles. He informed the party that, since the wedding, Maltricia had ordered him to sift the sand into various piles, and he was nearly halfway done!

Longo: Wait, you're incorporeal, how are you moving the sand?

James: Slowly.

• Idred in particular wanted to figure out a way to get James off the job, but they didn't want to try anything too risky, so they left him in the closet with a promise to visit soon.
• Throughout the whole ordeal, Boroth's vamp-sense had been screaming at him. He sensed one of the castle's remaining three vampires very close, just to the south. It hadn't moved in all that time, so they were confident it wasn't Maltricia, and James said that the apartments south belonged to Philomene Malevol.

Longo: I'm in no rush to stab Fiona... Felicity... Felimine, whatever.

• Next on the party's to-do list was the grey, aspic-like ooze which they had bypassed by way of the chimney earlier. Knowing that these creatures were often resistant to magic, but not knowing what it was resistant to, Idred popped open the door and blindly fired the Wand of Cold inside.
• The whole room got covered in frost, but the grey ooze seemed totally unaffected. They shut the door again. Boroth went in next with a polearm to slice a piece of the ooze off for experimentation. Unfortunately, he slipped on a patch of ice, drove the halberd straight into the floorboards and got burned by the ooze's acidic touch as he ran away.

• Plan C, as it turned out, was to pull out crossbows, slings and darts, and let the ooze out of the room while the party peppered it from afar. Despite some close calls, this one worked, and the grey ooze fell apart under light crossbow fire. Inside the ooze was a golden solar medallion, which Idred made sure to pick up once the acidic remains of the ooze stopped sizzling.
• But coming up the stairs behind the party came a drunken chorus of WOOOOOOOO! Six men, five of them berserkers and one a grizzled Malevol in campaigning armor with a sack of gold slung over his shoulder.
• The Malevol fixated on the sun medallion, and offered to not beat up Idred in exchange for it. This did not go over well.
• The two parties clashed on the open ground, and two of the berserkers fell to the ground before Idred put the remaining enemies to sleep. They recovered a great big sack of gold from the Malevol's body, and went down the stairs to their next objective.

Longo: Dammit! I should have asked him where he gets his veggies!

• The party's map still left a chunk of the castle in the southeast unexplored, with no obvious way to access it. The party systematically checked the walls in the area for secret passages, but found none. They were interrupted in the course of their search by Medard, appearing before them for the first time in his full, ghostly form, rather than as a talking bust. 
• He congratulated the party on their achievements thus far, and gave Boroth a hard pat on the back, which healed some of his wounds. Medard told the party that the soldier they had just killed was Patrice Desjardin-Malevol.
• Going up another chimney, Longo popped his head into a darkened storeroom filled with magician's equipment, and a dozen undead ladies crowded around a glowing crystal ball conducting a seance.

Longo: Corby, can you turn up a chimney? We have undead witches.

Corby: Are they friendly?

• Not wanting to tangle with witches, the party headed north to clear out the prisons and the skeletons within. Their standard operating procedure for room-clearing was well-practiced by this point: use the door as a chokepoint, move injured fighters into back rows, have the cleric turn the skeletons to dust. 
• Unfortunately, the skeletons in this room turned out to be better armed than their counterparts outside, and their halberds made for a greater threat. Clovis went down to 0hp, but was dragged from the front row and revived with a potion seconds later.
• Soon enough, however, the last of the skeletons fell. The party made sure to loot a few more polearms for their hirelings, and took a silver snuff box off the corpse of a young noble. With the security forces gone, the party made a more thorough exploration of the prison, finding no current prisoners and a strange fountain at the end of the hall. Nobody was willing to drink.

Idred: Why did we lose Herman?

Boroth: Some say you can still hear him oinking on the wind, those moonless nights. And by 'some' I mean me. Right now.

• Beyond the prison, where the party had never ventured before, they found a massive throne room. They felt threatened by the suits of armor flanking the throne, but a scan showed no threat from them. It also revealed a magic source within the throne.
• They got closer to investigate, but were ambushed by a swarm of animated hands, and Boroth nearly got slammed to the ground, but the party prevailed in the end. They dismantled the throne, and recovered a silver staff, topped with a ball and cross. As soon as Idred picked it up, a pulse of power went through him, and he felt a directional pull like a location spell, down and north-north-west.

Idred: Guys, I think I know where the Grayl is.

• Longo sat in the dismantled throne, and discovered a hidden button, which lowered the throne into the dungeon below.

Takeaways

The party, through a combination of luck, prudence and not dying, has managed to reach the upper level range of the adventure. Two of the party members are 6th level as of this session! No wonder then that the campaign is narrowing towards the greatest treasure in the castle.

Many of the random encounters are no longer serious threats, assuming they don't catch the party by surprise. They're resource taxes for the most part, and by this point the party still has plenty of supplies to go before they'll have to go on back. In general, the limiting factor on the length of an expedition is how long it takes to discover a treasure horde too heavy to carry around.

Next Chapter: The Grimmest Gardens