Slaves to Power

Slaves to Power
Date	09/04/24
Storyteller	Tire
Tier	Expert
Player Characters	Melfyra, Mantella Bright-Eyed, Orion Argyros, Suttonalia Morroweather
Rewards	275 xp, 477 gold, 4x peachwood talismans, scrolls of moonlight ray, consecrate flesh, and sparkleskin, jolt coil formula, crown of the companion
Result	Success
Author	Melfyra
Downtime	4

We get sent to Lancaster to locate a battery for some sort of mechanical orb? I'm not really interested in that, I just haven't been home in a few decades, and I wanted to see how the city held up over time. Even if this job is taking us to that terrifying citadel. Apparently the city proper's been mostly cleared out, we shouldn't face too much resistance. We don't find anything in the citadel, but we find a suspicious looking alleyway. Mantella overhears someone speaking a strange language. It's not one I'm familiar with. Mantella thinks it's Necril. It's not Necril. Orion's able to actually translate it. We hear two creatures, one called Rick, and the others name starts with an M? They mention bathing in red or something, definitely not something I do at all. We see some purple bat-like creatures. I'm guessing they are Rick and the second guy? They're highly unusual for what normally appears in Lancaster, even with the undead infestation. Sutton and Mantella engage, a bigger creature starts approaching. I'm able to identify the bat creatures as Sceaduinar. They come from the void, and hate living creatures. They tend to kill anything they find, or gather in places with high negativity. So perhaps not as unfamiliar to Lancaster? They are not undead, and are able to damage me with void damage. This is highly irregular. Fortunately, they're weak to my holy magick, and Mantella has a lightning attack that hits them really hard. There's more barricades set up near the location we were fighting. We get across them with little difficulty. They used to have an anti-undead ward, but not anymore, made evident by the fact that I can get over them with no problems. We find some warehouses. One of them has a an instrument with keys and strings, it sounds really bad. We also find some hatches. We head down them and find a cistern that hasn't been touched in decades. There's some sort of gore monster down here. It launches bone shards at Sutton and runs away. The fortune teller discovers some writings scrawled on the wall on the subject of fleshwarping. He's very familiar with the process. Nothing that pertains to what I used to do when I studied necromancy as a kid. It's a fascinating read. A skeletal crocodile approaches. It can't get through the narrow openings in the wall. Perhaps an old creation from the fleshwarper that left the writings? Perhaps they also have been responsible for the gore monster? It detaches its cranium from its body and launches it at me. It had a length of iron pieces fashioned into a loop attaching it to its body, it uses that to pull me closer. Definitely artificially made. As fascinating as the idea is, having something like that through its neck sounds really painful. We should probably put it down. The gore is clever enough to attack us from behind. It sounds like there's also a second one. We find some more tunnels and a more lived-in room. It appears some experiments were done in here. We find an incomplete Necrohusk and some more writings from the necromancer. The writings say they picked up an artifact that strengthened the magick they used, but the writings were incomplete, and we don't have any information on the location of the necromancer. That sounds like what we're looking for though. We don't have any more information, so we head back up to the surface. As we consider leaving, we hear a rattling outside. The manhole from the road outside blasts off, and a big monster surfaces. There's something glowing inside of it. It's probably what we're looking for. A couple of minotaur skeletons join in, complicating matters a bit. When we take down the monster, a skeleton that we suspect was the necromancer is left behind holding what must be the battery. We deliver that to Siltmean, and I also pick up the blueprints to recreate the battery if need be. Considering how it amplified the necromancer's magick, there's a chance it can be useful if used properly.