Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Twelve, Part Two

(Continue from part one)

Having slain a wizardling and survived the curse, the players went back to the locked door guarded by the two apprentices. Sax decided to spend his entire necklace of fireballs to open the door - nothing else would do it. The blast melted it like a candle, opening a space to the room beyond. The next chamber had a statue of Cassie, making an obscene hand gesture. She decapitated it with a burst of gunfire, slicing through the pulpy material and dispelling its mesmerizing magic properties before it could ensorcell anyone.

The hallway beyond the statue room led to a chamber filled with eggs. The players could hear someone breathing heavily inside the vent on the opposite wall, watching them. They tried to communicate by shouting at it. The Wizard in the wall - who had once been Boney the Ancient Lich - responded that they had slain one of his children already, and they would not slay another and live. They offered to leave his kids alone if he told them where the power source holding the bridge to the abyss was. He gave them directions to a room on the fifth floor, past the unformed void of the fourth.

(The module text doesn't give the players any opportunity to speak to the Wizard. He's supposed to be a cosmic being so utterly beyond humanity that he can't even communicate except for horrible transformations and hastily scribbled notes. But the players had proven more dangerous than he anticipated, and this looked like a good opportunity to trick them. He gave them directions to the room of floating doors)

On the Wizard's assurance that it was safe to do so, the players walked through the void on floor four, from one door to the next, without falling into the abyss. They climbed up through the hatch to floor five. The first room had an enormous ball of tangled fibers, glowing and rotating beneath a series of holes in the ceiling, which led into inky darkness. The ball's strange droning resolved in Sax's mind, into a song from his childhood - from the well worn cassette his dad would throw in the car every time they went on a road trip. Cassie poked him and he came back to his senses.

There were two doors. One led into another void, where doors dangled from ropy limbs in the darkness. Another led to a room filled with severed body parts and scraps of cloth. Neither of these seemed like appealing choices, but when the team turned back to the tangly-ball room, they found an enormous finger, poking through a hole in the ceiling to touch it. When the finger made contact, the ball began to spin violently, extending fibers and spraying acid all over the room. The finger retreated into the roof, singed and pitted. Sax wondered if maybe this thing was the Beacon after all, and the Wizard had lied to them about where to go next. Leon concurred that the thing attracting giant monster fingers from the void was probably the Beacon.

Silas asked for a break before the team planned their next move. (Both NPCs and players had taken significant Grit damage). They went back downstairs to find a room without any vents or creepy hazards, and spent about ten minutes catching their breath. Then they came up with a plan to deal with the Beacon. Cassie climbed up onto the ceiling, avoided the holes to the abyss, dropped onto the rotating mass and slapped the sticker on. She was a bit bruised when the ball hit the ground, but the holes in the ceiling no longer led into the void. The abyss portal was shut down.

(The module text doesn't explicitly describe the relationship between the ball thing and the void, other than the name "Beacon" and the finger)

The players considered this a job well done. Leon disagreed. There was still the Wizard, who had kidnapped people and mutated them into awful creatures that begged for death. The players agreed that this was a problem worth solving. The Wizard had obviously given them incorrect directions to the Beacon, it's not like he was holding up his end of the bargain. So they went downstairs to take care of the gestating wizardlings. The fourth floor hallway was just a normal corridor, the endless void was gone. In the nursery, the team burned the eggs, using grenades and rifle fire to stop the Wizard from dropping down into the vent to spit spores at them.

With the first four floors explored and thoroughly trashed, the team ascended back to the room with the extinguished Beacon. They decided the room of dangling doors was a safer bet than the room of dismembered body parts. They stepped into the void, which hadn't gone away with the destruction of the Beacon - it wasn't the abyss, it was a high level Darkness spell. Sax approached one of the doors, intent on leaving the room. It opened to reveal the dismembered body room. He tried to step through and the dangling door yanked upward, hitting him in the nose. The doors began to spin - the limbs they were dangling from yanking them in a circle. The circle began to close, and the team tried to all jump through the same one, before they fell through random doors.

Sax and Silas managed to get through the same door, but Cassie and Leon were separated. Cassie ended up in the dismembered body room, Sax and Silas ended up in a large empty room (formerly another portal to the abyss) and Leon was nowhere to be found. Cassie quickly snuck back through the scattered human-chunks to the room with the Beacon. Leon was covered in slime, pointing his shotgun at the ceiling. The Wizard had tried to grab him, but he scared it off, temporarily.

(By RAW, the Wizard kills any character left in a room alone. I gave Leon a save and he passed, and Cassie got to him before the Wizard could try again)

Silas and Sax tried to find their way back to Cassie. They chose the wrong door, though, and were quickly assaulted by an adolescent wizardling, guarding a door further into the tower. They killed it with a couple lucky shots (going straight to Flesh) but a second one hatched from a pod on the ground and joined the fray not long after. This one proved tougher, scoring a lucky hit that dismantled Silas, before going to work on Sax. The beast hacked the mercenary's arm off, and his flamethrower ran out of fuel at the most inappropriate time. Bleeding to death, with little prospect of winning the encounter, Sax yanked the pin from his last grenade with his molars and let the wizardling embrace him.

(The spinning doors are deadly even without the module's "Wizard instakills lone characters" rule, because they can split the party in a situation where they potentially have to fight tough enemies)

Cassie and Leon (who I gave to Sax's player) returned to the entrance to the dungeon. The plan was to escape and get help, but the door was sealed. Leon was able to squeeze through using his still-active Octopus Flesh, but Cassie couldn't follow. Leon promised to return with reinforcements and hotwired Sax's car. Then the Wizard crawled out of the vents to hunt Cassie. Thanks to her incredible stealth (including the romper of invisibility) she was able to evade his attentions. He knew she was still in the tower, somewhere, but not where.

(The module doesn't say if the Wizard has See Invis, Infravision or other magical aids to his perception. It's implied that he does, since his chamber is filled with magical darkness that requires True Sight to see through. I erred on the side of not letting him automatically detect the player character, since I don't like things which magically negate core elements of a player character)

Leon petitioned the remnants of the Explorer's Collective for help. He got a load of explosives from Rabban the Quartermaster for breaching doors, and the aid of Adrian the Exploring Kid. Adrian had been "adopted" by the Seekers of the Path, and had inherited the mantle of a Puissant Sorcerer. The Chthonicists were always friends to him - Carl the Rock had been like a father. As Leon was the last of the stone mages, Adrian would render him all assistance in his power.

The drive back to the tower was taking too long, so Adrian mumbled a ritual to "shorten" the path. In seconds, Sax's battered sedan was parked in the dead ground outside the tower again, with Leon planting the explosives on the front door. Door blasted open, Adrian dropped an Invisibility on Leon and himself. The pair of mages hurried upstairs to find Cassie's hiding place. She was holed up in the old acid bath room, counting on the residual fumes to stop any stray spores the Wizard pumped through the ventilation system from catching on her skin. With the band back together, they continued upstairs, back to the Beacon room.

The door into the dark room with the dangling doors now led into an empty room. The empty room opened into a scorched chamber, with four corpses: Silas, Sax, and two dead Wizardlings. Lying burnt, blasted and bloody before the final door.

The final door led into a dark hall. The dark hall into a dark chamber beyond. The Wizard knew they were coming, but couldn't see them thanks to their respective sources of invisibility. That would give them one shot before he pounced. Cassie spotted the curve of his hairy carapace, looming in the dark, and fired a single thundering round. Which missed. Sax followed up, and put a fistful of buckshot squarely on target. Adrian cast Disintegrate and deleted the Wizard with a single flick of his finger.

(The Wizard had a 75% chance to Save vs Magic and failed)

The sound of laughter echoed throughout the chamber, despite the absence of any mouth to form it. The laughter turned to choking sounds, then silence. The fibers of the tower turned gray and calcified, the sticky blue stuff crumbling to dust. Adrian dropped a Rip Portal and returned the team to the lawn outside, in time to watch the corroded remains of the silo collapse to the ground.

(This may seem like a deus ex machina to readers not familiar with the Cow Town saga. The players spent eleven sessions sweating, bleeding and dying to forge a friendship with the Seekers of the Path and the Explorer's Collective. A powerful mage from session one showing up at the end to repay that sacrifice by Thanos Snapping the boss out of existence was an entirely natural conclusion to the arc)

The Explorers gave Sax and Silas a private funeral. Anything flashy would have been immediately noticed by the Seekers of the Path, who would have realized John and Jo were holding out on them. Just a small explosive cremation, to send them on their way to the Great Lord of Embers (Sax had asked for a Cthugha Cult ceremony). John and Jo offered Leon and Cassie some trinkets by way of consolation: as the last Chthonnicist, Leon got Carl's old Ring of the Octopus. Cassie got a trinket they no longer had use for: the silenced garotte Throat Closer. A couple going-away presents, since the Illusionists didn't expect to see them again.

But they had other plans. Leon stuck around in Cow Town, spending his ill-gotten gains to revitalize the underground art scene. With Coal City no longer an occult gang warzone, rents were skyrocketing. Cow Town was an attractive alternative for students and dropouts looking for a cheap place to live as Bohemians. Cassie worked to revitalize occult commerce with her family in the Red Kimeras, Coal City's ruling gang.

The hardy forest planted by the Druids reclaimed the ruins of the silo. Without a reeking cloud of meat-fog over the town, the stars were visible at night.