Argynvosthold - 2nd day - Spectral Battle
Curse of Strahd - Session 23 - 05/08/2021
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Session Summary
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Session Details
Argynvosthold, another day trying to determine if there are allies here or a great artifact that will aid us in the ultimate fight with Strahd Von Zarovich, when the time comes.
Something else we had not considered, what does the little ember/dragon have to do with all of this. We must keep that in mind!
We took a short rest and somehow we feel a little stronger than we were. Rinn thought that maybe Misty was a little weird, on edge and such. No one noted the flicking tail. We moved to the second floor to the two rooms we hadn’t searched. We line up line up at the first door and open it. It’s a room with two beds that are not in good shape and a tattered rug with a fireplace. Very dusty, little to no activity in a while. Rinn uses Mage Hand to move things as he searched everything.
We moved to the next room and opened it. This room is full of cobwebs, with a black marble hearth, above which hangs a painting of a handsome, well dressed, man, with a wry smile and a thick mane of thistledown hair. On the opposite side of the room is a bed, and across from the door is a wardrobe with its doors hanging open and empty. It appears that most of this place either collapsed or has previously been ransacked.
We work our way back to the first floor and head to the chamber with the altar where the Revenants were praying. We pass through a room with a large table. The chairs around the table have chairs with backs carved to look like folded wings. There is a chandelier that glows with a soft light. Two life like statues in armor. They are stone. We make our way into the altar room Rinn checks out the Chandelier as everyone else comes into the room. It has a glow but the whole thing is glowing with n arcane light. Not practical to take.
They progress to the altar room. The altar has the rising sun emblem showing as being an altar to Lathander. Kyana begins checking the altar to see if it’s been desecrated. She determines that it hasn’t been desecrated but it has been abandoned. Kyana spends time praying to the Morning Lord to revive the altar. Rinn, begins cleaning the Altar mending the cloth that is draped over it.
Dain opens a door that leads down some steps to the cemetery. He lets everyone else know what he sees and starts to make his way down there when Haldar checks to see if he can sense any undead there. He doesn’t sense anything so they both move down that way. He gets to the gate which stands partially open. Haldar joins him and they browse through the markers noting names and dates.
Dain notices that some of the graves have been dug up. Haldar senses something behind him. As he turns back and looks higher on the tower, he sees a well-dressed man looking back at him. The man gives Haldar a wry smile and turns and walks out of view. Dain sees mostly names of soldiers from the Knights of the Silver Dragon with names with titles. Dain moves on to the mausoleum. There are tarnished silver-plated gargoyles shaped like dragon (something) on the roof. There is a marble door. There is a name on the mausoleum “Argynvosthold”. Dain decides not to desecrate the graves of those buried inside, so he leaves it and heads back to the mansion.
Haldar looks at the mausoleum and sees the doors have been opened before. He opens the doors and goes in. Within are several crypts with big sarcophagi in them with their lids slid partially open as though they had already been ransacked. In looking around, he noticed where there had been plaques on them at some time, but they are gone now. He determines that these are crypts for notable creatures, but there is nothing left to identify them. When he peers into the crypts, there is nothing in them. He tests for secret or hollowed out compartments and finds none. He leaves the place, closing the door, and heads back to the mansion.
As Kyana looks up from her prayer, she sees the cleaned up and mended altar and is surprised. She began offering prayers to Lathander thanking him for the restoration. She had done this many times over the years and never has she lifted her eyes to find everything restored like this. She does have the look of someone who is perplexed. Rinn realizing what she was thinking told her that he had cleaned it and mended it while she was praying. He thought he would restore it for her, so it looked good while she was praying. Snoggly asked if Rinn had bothered to search the altar while he was cleaning up. He hadn’t so he took a few minutes now to go over it. He did find an inner compartment but there was nothing in it.
Turning their attention back to the tower, Haldar tells everyone of the many he was in the window high ion the tower. From where they stood, Rinn looked up to see how far up in the tower we could see from here. We, of course, saw the second floor which was the room with the balcony that horseshoed this room from above. The stairs to either side of this room seem to be the path to go up. Rinn takes the staircase up to the third level. It was then that the third floor floated in and landed there for us to climb to. As it landed, it rotated 180 degrees once, and then a second time, before landing. There was a window looking out from where he stood and one overlooking the cemetery on the opposite wall, and three windows along the wall to his left where there was a landing. There is no way to exit the staircase on this floor though. The rest start up behind him, Haldar, Kyana, and Dain start up the opposite staircase.
We decide we should proceed to the fourth floor. The next level appears to be opening up. He let Haldar know that it opened up and that he was going to go up and peak in and see what’s there. As he started to move, he noticed a phantom like figure, that looks like a soldier, coming down the stairs. Rinn lets Haldar know there is someone or thing coming down the stairs, looks like an apparition. We couldn’t move up to the room as he was between us and the room. Rinn backed up to the wall, on the off chance this is a repeating vision recorded in the limestone deep beneath the mansion, playing back scenes from days long past. He had seen something about that on “Ghost Hunters” once. If that were the case, the specter may just walk on by. He didn’t! Another had started down behind this one. As the closest one approached Rinn, it suddenly became very solid and attacked. Initiative was rolled and a battle commenced. Finally, less typing!
Rinn was able to alert Haldar, though the message spell, that we are being attacked from above. Haldar moved up the stairs to see about coming at the enemy from the flank. He found a room at the top that has a passage off of the opposite wall leading, he presumes, to the other staircase. There is another staircase going up in this room and a spectral figure. He fired two shots at it with Silver tipped arrows, both shots passed through without connecting. He moves through the room and to the staircase on the other side and moves down to a point where he can see the one that is solid now and fires at it. That connects with the target but deflects off of its armor. Zanfyr casts Moonbeam behind the solid formed catching both him and the spectral one behind it. The solid one takes a little damage.
Misty moves through the rest of the group in front of her using a special ability she has to make an attack on the solid soldier in front of Rinn. Dain starts up the other side and makes his way to the room that Haldar passed through. The spectral figure suddenly becomes solid and strikes him. Dain casts Channel Divinity – Sacred Weapon at which time, his sword lights up with a bright light for 20 feet around him and dim light for 20 feet beyond that. It also increases his skill to hit an opponent. Rinn attacks the solid one in front of him. Snoggly touches Misty’s staff as she raises it to strike and cast a Magic Weapon spell imbuing it with magical properties for 1 hour. For his action, he took a shot of Whiskey.
Kyana moves up into the room past Dain and cast a sacred flame on the one engaged with Dain. The solid form in front of Rinn suddenly disperses as a result of the Moonbeam spell. Haldar unleashes two shots and takes down the other on that staircase. Zanfyr moves up the stairs and brings the moonbeam with him. Moving it into the room and out of the way until he can get in there to target with it. Misty moves back down to the second floor, crosses it to the other set of stairs and heads back up. She gets into the room behind Kyana. Dain is attacked and missed. He returns the favor and misses on his first attack but hits on the second attack. Rinn fires a bow shot the one facing Dain and hits. Snoggly comes up the stairs Kyana Sacred Flames the one in front of her. Haldar fires two shots at one of them and hits. Zanfyr moves the moonbeam over one of the creatures. A moment later, the creature disperses as the moonbeam destroys it. They are all down.
Zanfyr proceeds up the stairs moving the moonbeam in front of him. There is a large window, and nothing else. The moonbeam fades. He and Dain move to the window that overlooks the cemetery. Dain was trying to determine if this is the window from which the well-dressed man with a wry smile looked down on us from. He felt it was. There is no one here now though. Dain and Zanfyr headed back down and has decided to go down the steps to the next level down. There was a brief discussion before we did though, about the man that Haldar saw from the cemetery and where he had been. Zanfyr wanted to know what he looked like to know if he was one of the creatures we just fought. He was not.
Dain noticed that Misty’s tail was wishing back and forth as if she was sensing something that had her on edge. When he asked her about it, she told them on a voice she heard in her head when we were resting earlier. It was a James Earl Jones voice that said, “Rise noble Misty! You have restored me for a time! I await you above.”. She is very worried about continuing on. Dain points out that by what he said to her, he sounds pleased with her. She couldn’t pinpoint where it came from but she feels we are getting close.
Dain peaks down and sees that the floor opens to a similar sized room with a small balcony and a door leading out. Dain tells everyone there is a way out down here that may lead back into the main mansion. Rinn starts down and head towards the door. Everyone else follows down behind him. Misty is last to follow down. Rinn opens the door to find it opens to the roof top of the main mansion. The roof has one large collapsed area in the middle, but the rest seemed to be in decent shape. There is a dragon statue on the opposite side of the roof. There doesn’t appear to be an inch worm on this statue. There is a lot of debris on the roof but looks reasonably stable. Rinn looks down into the hole. There is a lot of rubble in the hole from a structure that used to stand here. He sees there is a floor below, probably the top floor of the mansion which we had not explored yet. Haldar searches the sky. It’s cloudy and rainy with some lightening in the distance. When looking back at the tower roof, there is nothing there as well. Zanfyr looks off to another side and sees old collapsing ballista.
Haldar begins moving around the hole, making his way to the other side. As he does, he looks to the south and see a wooded area, more of the river we followed down as we came here, and beyond that he sees a vast marshy area. He continues to cross the roof and Rinn follows closely behind. Dain makes his way that same direction. Haldar passes one of the ballista that had been destroyed. There were also a couple of turrets up here, but their roofs had collapsed in on them. Haldar moves to the dragon shaped gargoyle and begins it over. It is plated in tarnished silver! That peaked everyone’s interest. Rinn moved up to investigate it.
Haldar continues around and passes another ballista. We anchored a rope to the dragon statue and climbed down through the collapsed roof and into the room below. Misty untied the rope and came down last using her ability to control her fall. There was a brief discussion about the service going back to 8:45 and how people are always late to practice and we end up practicing the songs right up to just before the service starts. Then there was a discussion about a new table and chairs. There is a lot of damage and debris strewn about. There were some faded war banners and a stuffed chair and rubble. Debbie started blowing for walls and knocking them down. At the end of one hallway is a spiral staircase going down. Another way ends in a collapsed portion of the building that has fallen away.
As Misty makes it down to this floor, she hears the voice in her head saying, “Welcome Misty of Calimport!”. She senses where this is coming from and though not being compelled to move there, she instinctively makes her way to where she senses is the origin of the voice in her head. It leads her to a set of double doors. Haldar see a trail of scorch marks on the ground leading to the same doors. Misty alerts Haldar that the origin of voice that has been speaking in her head is towards the double doors. Haldar says, “Let’s go say hello then!”. He moves down and opens those doors. As he looks into the room, he sees a Silver Dragon standing there. He says, “Welcome Haldar of (wherever he is from)!”.
