In the Mouth of Madness

In the Mouth of Madness
Date	23/7/2025
Storyteller	Tire
Tier	Trainee
Player Characters	Capri, Hiroyuki, Reiker, Tris
Rewards	300exp 100gp 4x Lesser Healing Potion 4x Lethargy Poison Expanded Healers toolkit (Sold for 25gp) 100gp
Result	Success
Author	Capri
Downtime	2

Associates raid a makeshift asylum and assassinate a Dark Tapestry cultist

Log

Right, so. Tris, Reiker, Hiroyuki, and myself. The job? Take down some keepers. I looked over a past report, the "Prince of Darkness" for some more context but we were to track down whatever leads we could. Reiker managed to puzzle his way through a cryptic warning we got too; the relationship between whatever these keepers had summoned and them. In essence, opening whatever pulled this thing from the dark tapestry linked the souls of summon and summoners. If the summon kills a keeper, it gets stronger; if the conjuror dies then the summon is forever deprived of this power boost. Seems simple then, off the summoners and then end the beast while it's at its weakest or kill the thing before it can reach the keepers itself.

So after a day of legwork, we knew three things. Three things, three keepers. It's perfect, right? First, a large building in the lower stacks, people had been going missing in the area and never seen again for the last couple of weeks. Farther into the lower stacks, closer to the sea, people had been complaining of a mighty stench. And finally, in the upper stacks there was an old church to who knows what god that we had intel a keeper was hanging about in. We reckoned it was better to go for the first option, people actively going missing seemed a mite more urgent than the others.

We got there and scoped it out and it was a bit of an oddity for the lower stacks, a big 2-winged stone building. But it was all quiet so naturally we went to slip in through the back door. The joint was messed up, let me tell you. Almost every room had some folks shambling around , muttering under their breath (some doing some nasty stuff but I'll spare the gory details). We spied a scar on each of their noggins and it seemed like someone had taken a knife to the grey matter within on each and every one of them. Not wanting to alert them or get into any tussles with these folks as presumably they were just the poor souls that had been going missing in the area, we avoided any inhabited rooms and crept around all sneaky like as we followed Hiro's lead all the way into a larger chamber with a bound victim chained up like a slab of meat. He looked to be bait for.. something? But there was a staircase down and all the really nasty stuff tends to happen in basements so off we went.

Lotta cages down there but we soon met a more lucid inhabitant, an older man with a wide collection of sharp tools freshly cleaned of blood. Reckon this was our lobotomiser and keeper both. He was a tough customer as he sprang into the fight, wrapped Tris and Reiker with weird magic snakes, Tris going right down before being saved by a timely scroll of soothing from Hiro but he split the party very effectively, shankers being pushed into one corridor and casters into another. Me and Hiro slugged it out with him for a while and I got blasted down with an injection of void energy but after a timely potion from Tris, we chased him down as he began to flee and I caught him in the neck with an arrow, ending the blighter for good. Hopefully.

Keeper Crove was his name. Found some papers in his room. He was waiting for the thing they'd summoned to try to subjugate it. The bloke we'd sussed as bait on the upper floor was, among others, meant to guide the creature down into a trap. The beast has powers of invisibility and the basement's main hall is lined with something to get rid of that. Something to note for any associates that might be looking to battle the beast, this bloke has already done some of the work.

Anyway, we patched ourselves up with Tris's magic and some of Crove's appropriated surgical tools but figured we should deal with any other threats in here before sending folks in to rescue the captives. Heading down deeper into the basement, there were a lot of darn cages about and more lobotomised victims set up as bait, Reiker had to daze a few of them so they wouldn't raise any alarms as we passed. We came across a torture chamber occupied by a Dero that was actively inflicting his brand of hurt on some captives. We didn't show any mercy there and he went down easier than his boss.

Eventually we doubled back and found another captive, bloke called Oleg who it seemed like the keeper's cutting hadn't quite taken on, he still had his faculties. He described a creature down the way as a mass of tentacles, eyes and mouths. Certainly sounded like something that needed killing so we told him we'd get him out when it was safe and pressed on, Hiro turning into a crowbar to pop open a couple of doors and through them was the beast as promised.

The room it was in seemed unfinished or damaged. The stone floors turned to dirt and there was a deep sinkhole but before them was a creature exactly as described but all the more grotesque in the flesh. It was a grueling battle. I might have lost my life if it wasn't for Tris's conjured tree protecting me. And Tris protecting me as I ran back to a safe distance (Very sorry about that and I returned a potion when I could). It was touch and go for a while but after a lot of back and forth, Hiro managed to strike the felling blow. The creature was identified as a chaos beast, bound from the dark tapestry and it was being fed rotten scraps from a chute in the ceiling.

We freed Oleg and another fellow that still seemed to be able to fuction named Ploog and left victoriously. Recommendation: Maybe some expert help is needed here. A lot of close calls.