The Library of Lanthorn: Session 3

The Halflings felt sick after waking up from their nap, like something very bad happened. The soldiers  milled around outside, along with the Librarians. Concerned that the Lock had been opened, the group descended into the Library - either to close it again or loot the place before it was destroyed.

The archive stairs led back into the basement stacks. The worms were finished eating the dead soldier and fresh worms crawled around the corpse. The altar of Oil Lamp gave off a strange hum. Delgal deployed his Unseen Servant and commanded it to start pulling books off the shelves and tossing them on a cart. Then the group descended to level 3.

Past the portal room, Breadrick snuck ahead of the group and found an Orrery with a bunch of crystal spheres representing the planes. The room after that was a workshop filled with magical machines, and a big steam turbine to supply power. The rest of the group followed him in and began sifting the treasures. A crystal ball of scrying gave Delgal a view of a 60' long corridor with a dead soldier and scattered debris, and a bright light at the end amid scattered chess pieces. Roddy Applecreek opened the steam generator and was burned by energy from the Cherenkov Slime inside, which he promptly shut back up before it could escape. The other tables yielded gems, a Ring of Cold Resistance, and a broken Helmet of Comprehend Languages.

Sarah Carmody

The Orrery spheres had holes in them, indicating it was possible to pass through the layers of crystal and metal to the inside of the innermost ring. The rings moved incredibly slowly, it would have taken days to crank them by hand. Roddy was a skilled engineer and got the idea to hook the orrery up to the generator using the parts lying around the workshop. He attached a drive shaft and inundated the slime with water, then went to investigate a summoning table. He was able to extract a bottled Fire Elemental from the glass matrix of the machine.

A Caretaker flew through the chamber in a hurry. Breadrick ran after it, passing through a bathhouse and almost running into a Commonwealth soldier wielding a musket as she retreated through a stone door covered in images of Djinn. A horrible flesh monster came out of the door after her, expanding and contracting like a four dimensional object passing through a three dimensional plane. The soldier shot it, the Caretaker zapped it, Breadrick told the soldier to run and fled the scene. The monster killed both the soldier and Caretaker with rays of energy. Roddy rigged the reactor to explode, hoping to lure the monster into a trap, but it didn't pursue Breadrick.

Delgal looted a bunch of scrolls from a nearby storeroom while the Orrery spun and the generator steamed away. Roddy calculated the exact point to remove the shaft so that the orbs would spin down with all the holes aligned. The spheres ground to a halt and a soldier came out. He didn't know how long he'd been trapped inside but was happy to be free. He came down with Captain Wright, Scribe Ripley and some other musketeers, but got trapped when he tried to grab treasure inside the orb. The others were still missing. The adventurers deduced that Captain Wright was the thief detected by the Librarians, and had dragged his soldiers into the basement on an unauthorized secret mission to open the Lock and steal shit.

 

Ivelin

 

Breadrick grabbed a gem encrusted globe from inside the orrery and the group headed back to the surface to deposit their haul, stopping only to pick up the books collected by Delgal's unseen servant.