One Small Step... 11/12 and 11/19 session recaps

Ander continued to hound the one-eyed man in the town of Tregynon. Thoric finally took a different approach and left a message at the man's shop inviting him for a chat. Sure enough, the guy showed up at the bar and started up a conversation after Thoric bought him a few whiskies.

It turned out that this guy (named Enwyd)was about the only one in town who was willing to supply Orvalion for reasonable prices a few years back. Orvalion would come into town, buy supplies, and then disappear back into the mountains again. Enwyd also knew that Orvalion somehow befriended the local kobolds.

One day a few months ago, a man came into town asking about Orvalion, and Enwyd didn't have a problem telling him what little he knew. Then man then stabbed Enwyd in the eye and left him for dead. Enwyd has been a little shaky since then, and was spooked when Ander started spewing anti-dragonborn rhetoric. He was even more spooked when Ander started following him around.

Having obtained an eyewitness report of Orvalion's presence in the town, and having in their posession a scroll of Linked Portal and a portait of a dragonborn lady, the party finally decided to return to Shandrapur with their evidence. They hired on with Lars Allynwy again, and they didn't face any tax collectors or highwaymen on the way back.

Boreas and Thoric visited Caelebhan with their report and the portrait. They had resolved not to mention anything about the portal scroll, and managed to keep that a secret while talking with him. He paid each of them the 200gp he had promised, and refused to divulge his reasons for wanting to talk with Orvalion when Thoric once again questioned him about it. He did, however, tell them who the portrait depicted. It was a likeness of Kendrini Nabendu, servant to the Nabendu family of dragonlords. Later, Xakoraki was able to remember that she was reputed to be a spy and assassin for Nabendu. Caelebhan, however, said that he did not think that she had survived the rebellion.

After gathering some provisions and visiting the local temple of Linitheriva, the party headed out of town to the portal circle. There they cast the ritual on the scroll, and peered into a small stone room. They stepped through, and as soon as Boreas stepped out of the circle to check the hallway for traps, the ceiling descended upon them. The party managed to make it into the hallway before the ceiling met the floor, sealing off the magic circle with a massive block of stone.

The door at the end of the hallway was trapped with a glyph of lightning that Ander was able to carefully deactivate. Beyond the door lay a somewhat barren magical lab. Many books appeared to be missing from the shelves, but there were alchemical reagents intact and some spare ink and parchment stored here and there. Based on the dust, it seemed as if someone had been there within the past year or so.

They ventured into another hallway and found a barred and magically sealed door, a regular door, and stairs leading upward. The regular door revealed a bedroom, which also appeared to have been used within a year or two. Nothing of value was in it.

Up the stairs they heard what sounded like open space and wind. Once at the top, they discovered that they were on top of a mesa with a sheer thousand foot drop on all sides. There was a large pool of water on top, and off to one side was a perfectly square pit about the same size as the room with the teleportation circle. They also found two extremely weathered skeletons up there, lying in pieces near each other.

Back to the sealed door they went, and they heard shuffling on the other side of it. They unbarred it, and Xakoraki opened it to find herself face-to-face with a lot of zombies. She breathed acid breath upon them, which felled all but three. Thoric stepped forward and turned the undead with the holy light of Linitheriva, and Ander and Xakoraki stepped up to smash the remaining zombies into the ground. The party emerged from combat untouched.

They took a breath and headed down a long stairway that turned twice to the right. At the bottom they were greeted by the sight of a long hallway that was completely filled with dessicated undead! We left them there until the next session.