The reliquary was ancient brick, with short, vaulted ceilings. The doors out were a mix of locked wood doors, barred iron doors, and metal portcullises. The former two were easy for Timothy to open with his tools, while the latter could be hauled open with sheer brute force, at cost of time and making a lot of noise.
The first room had a cabinet with an old bottle inside. The next, a huge therapod fossil on display, and a door back into the cult stronghold. Tim tried to pick it, provoking the dinosaur bones to animate and threaten the team until they backed off. Duly deterred, they peeked through a portcullis to find the chamber beyond guaded by a stone golem. They elected not to challenge it either. The room after that had ark age ceremonial vestments, still encrusted with gold crosses and cabochons. The room after that was filled with polearms. Mostly decayed and rusted into uselessness, save a single one which glowed when Mort grasped the shaft. A magic weapon!
Through the portcullis to the next vault, they spotted a strange creature. A five legged dog the size of a truck, imprisoned in a circle of glowing runes on the floor. The beast spoke in a human voice, asking them to release it. The self righteous clerics that built the vault imprisoned it in the circle. Saint Boniface was the wisest among these monks, who plumbed its secrets with false promises of eventual freedom. Then the inquisition killed them all. That was a thousand years ago. The team asked the dog what it would do if they released it. It planned on killing the descendants of the clergymen that imprisoned it. Apparently they didn't take clerical celibacy that seriously in those days.
The gang decided to wait on letting the dog out. They went back to the fossil room to weigh their options. The skeletal dinosaur glared at the door to the next room. They killed their lights. For a moment, they saw the glint of a flashlight from the doorway. Then it went out. Something shuffled through the door. They turned their lights on again. It was an archaeologist from U of Coal City, investigating the reliquary. He heard something moving in the dark and went to investigate. His friends were in the next chamber over, waiting for him to return. The characters were suspicious, but didn't press the issue. They let him go on his way, and went to investigate the stone golem room.
They lifted the portcullis to get a better look at the statue-man, and it warned them not to go any further. It wore a horned helm and crude armor, with a stone axe laid across its knees. It told them if they approached they would have to fight to pass. None of the lousy priests that built the reliquary dared challenge it, electing to wall it up in this tomb. The team followed their example and decided to backtrack instead.
They went back to the first room, where the archaeologist had come from. The cabinet was open and the bottle inside was gone. the portcullis to the East was open, behind it was a sealed door with a glass window. A cloud of gas on the other side of the window promised danger to anyone who opened it. They decided not to, and investigated the room to the South instead. They found a heap of gold, watched over by a grimacing stone face on the wall. Clem picked up a coin, and the word THIEF instantly appeared on his forehead. He dropped it, and it disappeared. The next vault had a golden scepter beneath a column suspended from the ceiling.
They heard a sound from the North. A flashlight beam illuminated a bloated, tattooed woman with a pistol, who ducked out of sight. Mort rushed in with his magic billhook, then ran back immediately when the glowing blade illuminated six vampires with pistols and shotguns.
(The "archaeologist" from earlier was a useless civilian in the entourage of an Elder Vampire. The Elder Vampire took D6 dungeon turns to retreat and come back with D6 armed Fledgeling Vampires as reinforcements)
Everyone grabbed cover while Cassiopeia tossed a grenade through the door. They waited a couple rounds before running in after it, weapons at the ready. They were greeted by two dead vampires, and a smear of saline-like vampire goo leading East through another door to the fog room, which was wide open. Tim masked up and ran in to close the door. The mist pooling around his legs caused an unpleasant tingling sensation, like a peeling sunburn. Then they went through the vampires' pockets. They debated looking for the rumored dungeon butcher to sell the vampire corpses, but decided not to drag the bodies around with them. They could always come back.
They found a copy of The Thief's Arts on a plinth in the next room. This chamber also had a door to the fog room. That door swung open, A skeleton in a spangenhelm and mail marched out of the mist, brandishing a round shield and leaf bladed sword. It was followed by a mummified nun and two mummified monks. It demanded to know if the adventurers had seen the bloodsucking reprobates who had defiled the reliquary. The adventurers had indeed seen the vampires. They told the Death Huscarl that they were making a pilgrimage to the tomb of Saint Boniface of Coburg, and the vampires had ambushed them. The skeleton told them the Saint's head was in the Western-most chamber of the reliquary. Then it sallied off in search of more grave robbers, mummified saints in tow.
The chamber to the west had a fountain of holy water, which Clement bottled. The room beyond had a mysterious black powder, which burned furiously when ignited - more than any Dark Ages powder recipe had any right to. Tim lamented his lack of a vessel to carry the substance in.
The final room had a skull in a cabinet. Success! The portcullis to the North of the ultimate chamber looked on into the room with the five legged dog. Their circuitous path had taken them in a loop.
On the way back, Tim scooped the mysterious powder into his helmet. Not to be outdone, Clement tried to snatch the scepter from under the suspended pillar. He got the rod, but also got crushed when the pillar fell on him. The crushing force of the falling stone broke something inside, inflicting massive internal bleeding. Mort tried to cast cure wounds, but his God of Darkness demanded a ritual of many rounds duration before the spell would take effect. Tim tried to administer mundane first aid, but only accelerated Clement's demise.
The party gave Clement a moment of silence before removing his equipment for transport back to the surface. With his motorbike (whose keys he had tossed into the flame) and Elsa's van, they now had two motor vehicles from dead party members. They debated dragging his corpse to the dungeon butcher they'd heard about and cashing in, but decided to give him a dignified burial and not risk any more underworld encounters looking for a creepy cannibal.
They met a fire cultist in the prayer room on the way back to the surface. She was so badly burned, it was a wonder her tendons still worked. She asked them how long Clement had been dead. Half an hour, maybe? She shouted to get him to the pyre, quickly - his brain hadn't decayed yet. They rushed his remains to the sacrificial alter and tossed them into the blaze, incinerating them. The flames washed over the cultist, burning her even further. Though her eyes boiled out of their sockets, her ruined face remained frozen in a grimace of religious ecstasy.
She explained that incineration on the altar transported the offering directly to the Lord of Embers. Clement's brain had been uploaded and he would live forever in the Lord's mind. Few people got that privilege, few enough that she sometimes thought about expanding the pyre until it consumed the entire world, saving every mind on the planet.
Tim wasn't convinced. If the current reality was a simulation as the fire cult believed, uploading Clement's mind to a fire god within the simulation would render him at an even lower resolution. The cultist responded that the fire god had good compression algorithms. This prompted a debate about information theory and the nature of consciousness.
Back on the surface, the survivors piled into the van and took the head back to the church. A bored looking teenage clerk was on duty at the ticket counter. He told the ragged adventurers that meal service was just down the hall. They said they weren't hungry, but had an appointment with Father Bacon. He told them they needed to leave their glowing halberd outside.
Upstairs, Father Bacon asked his business associates to give him a few minutes alone with the party. He hadn't expected them to survive, but was very happy with their work. He took Acrasia into his drawing room, where he'd sculpted a clay arm. He'd modeled it on surveillance photos and the tail he put on her earlier that day, so he had to adjust the size just a little. Then he smeared it onto her stump, spoke a prayer, and it became flesh and gin, just like the rest of her. She was healed!
Tim also warned the Reverend Father about the five legged demon and hater of churches in the reliquary. Father Bacon was surprised to hear that the old legends were true. He'd assumed the stories were superstitious drivel mixed with false confessions extracted by the inquisition. It was very interesting news.
The four picaros ended the day at Lechaim, a latke truck run by the ex-wife of the Pound of Flesh guy. Sort of. Though divorced under secular law, he refused to grant her a get. The sun sank through a haze of rancid meat-smoke. They thought about the friend they'd lost, and the big pile of money they'd found.
Mystics are terrible. I understand what the design goal was - to make a wacky and unpredictable class like a 5E Wild Magic sorcerer or Dungeon Crawl Classics Wizard, with crazy fun miscast effects. But they aren't fun, they just suck.
They get a smaller spell list than the Occultist, and in return they can never actually cast their spells when they need them - just roll on the same D20 table of penalties over and over. Sure, the Occultist can't repeatedly cast the same spell over and over, like the Mystic can. But neither can the fucking Mystic, because half their miscast results stop them from casting anyway.
There's a mechanic for Mystics giving other classes spells to cast, but it's even worse - requiring even MORE successful die rolls before the spell goes off, and inflicting even MORE D20 miscast rolls, even on a success.
The Mystic class is bad, and I'm going to warn the players not to play it until I find a way to fix it.
The players enjoyed themselves, though. The guy who died immediately rolled up a new character for next time. I've got a clearer idea for the personalities behind the factions and how they interact with each other, which should make generating jobs and conflict easier in the future. The characters made it out of the dungeon with crazy loot, which is going to make them overpowered in the future. They found enough money under the XP times 5 rule that they would have gone straight to level 3, if there weren't explicit game rules against gaining multiple levels in a single session. But like in Coal City, more power equals a larger target on their back.
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