Mission 2 - The Acolyte's Hideout

[!abstract] The Job
Clear the Dead Three out of The Bathhouse and whatever is festering beneath it.

The Plan

Recon first. We filter into the bathhouse one at a time over half an hour or so, like honest customers. Me, I'd have kicked the door in, but the wizard wanted a plan, and apparently plans are a thing now.

On the walk over, every second tongue in the street is wagging about Elturel. Nobody knows anything. Everybody's sure.

The Recon

The Bathhouse is a big stucco building with a clay-tile roof and a courtyard. Fancy, in the way rotten fruit is fancy.

Iliran Tilorri - Mike goes in first, Baktha Tassup - Ryan right behind. Thomus - Thomas books a massage, and an attendant named Qurmilah tells him the warm water comes from an elaborate system of pipes under the building. He also spots a false wall in the massage room. Salah Secumber - Hal gets rubbed down by a fellow named Jabaz in the other chamber. Half a dozen locals are splashing around the shallow pools, and not a single attendant in sight.

I stay outside. Someone has to be the lookout, and I'm very, very good at being the lookout.

The Docks

We leave with a plan to come back after dark and take a stroll down to the docks to look over the Uncivil Serpent. Mike floats the idea of having his father outfit her and sail under his family's banners, in exchange for donating the ship when we're done.

A ship. Of our own. I can taste the salt pork already.

The Infiltration

Night falls. We creep back to a window at the rear of the bathhouse. Mike gets a boost, pries it open and tosses down a rope. Then three figures in crimson robes drop out of the shadows onto him.

Blades flash. Three wounds. Mike answers with a boom, a thunderwave that hurls one cultist through the doorway and into the bathwater and slams the other two against the stone.

I haul myself up the rope. "Are they dead?" I ask, and in my enthusiasm, accidentally smack one of Mike's wounds. He took it well. Eventually.

One of the cultists is trying to stand. My blade makes the decision for him. Two more come through the door. One buries a dagger in Mike's chest. The other's eyes glow green and he fires a ray of black necromantic muck that just misses me. I'd like to say I wasn't scared. I'd like to say a lot of things.

Thomas and Baktha pile in, and Salah launches himself off the window ledge onto one of them. I charge the necromancer to throw him in the bath, but he's planted like an iron post. So I draw my shortsword and open his throat instead. Thomas finishes the straggler. We strip the bodies and go down.

The Dungeon

Knee-deep, freezing water. Damp and rot in the air. A hidden passage opens. In the first chamber, a bloated corpse floats in the dark, two days dead. Nice touch.

East of that sits an altar slick with blood, topped with a human skull frozen in a scream. South, an alcove with a tapestry showing four faceless figures dismembering a fifth. Salah touches it. Of course he does. It bursts in a cloud of yellow spores and poisons him half to death.

The path rises out of the water into an octagonal chamber with three doors, each bearing a god's face: Bhaal to the north, Bane to the east, Myrkul to the south.

Baktha opens the north door, which loops back to the entrance. Drawn to Bane's black hand, I take the east, a long hallway of short stairs ending in a flooded chamber. Thomas takes the south.

Inside: three robed figures sleeping in a triangle around a single torch. One wakes and glares at Thomas. Salah charges in and crushes a skull before it can rise. Mike lights up another with a firebolt, and Baktha, in his enthusiasm, singes off his own eyebrows. Thomas finishes the last with a firebolt.

Past the sleepers, a looted sarcophagus. Three spellbooks inside: a crimson one of fire and illusion, a brown one with a personal rune full of utility enchantments, and one bound in black scales, all shadow and darkness.

On the eastern path, up a short flight of stairs, we find a battered elf chained to the wall and two tormenters having fun with him: a woman in chainmail with a wooden shield, and a brute in a plate helm and chain shirt. We hit them hard. Salah's guiding bolt goes wide, Mike's firebolt glances. The woman, The Fist of Bane, swings at Baktha and misses. My first stab glances, the second misses. The brute, The Iron Consult, bellows and provokes her into attacking again.

Baktha drops the Fist of Bane. Salah finishes the Iron Consult. The elf is free of his misery, in a manner of speaking.

A suit of armor with arcane writing on its gauntlets. A burlap sack behind its legs. Mike touches it. The gauntlets detach and go to work on him. We smash them, but not before they knock Mike senseless. Lesson learned: never touch anything. Except food.

Back in the room behind Myrkul's door, we rest. Footsteps. Voices. We set an ambush. Three acolytes in red with skull flails step in and get the surprise of their lives. Two drop. The third bolts and we chase him to a hidden chamber where a necromancer is mid-ritual, swirling with rats. She drops a fireball on most of ==Umbra Contundens== and we cut her down anyway. A padlock and key are tangled in her hair. Turn the key, the lock opens, and a spectral skull rises and stares into each of us with silent laughter. I was off guarding the passage. Smart is the new lucky.

Next, an altar of skulls and bones. Mike ignites a brazier, then all of them flare to life, burning green. An inscription: "Rise and be counted." Salah reads it aloud, and the bones on the altar rise into three skeletons that obey him. Hal the necromancer. Fantastic.

The next flooded room reeks of methane and sulfur. Thomas, in his infinite wisdom, throws a firebolt in. The room goes off like a keg. He and Mike are knocked flat, Baktha is badly burned. Brilliant.

Down a long hallway of side corridors, some collapsed. In one, Baktha finds a stone vault with a skeleton on it, a false bottom, and under it a mummy floating in briny red liquid with moonstones for eyes and a bag of beans stuffed down its throat.

Salah sends a skeleton to unbar another door, and six zombies lunge out. Salah flees into a room smeared with blood, two flayed bodies shackled to the wall, a cat-o'-nine-tails and a bucket of salt on the floor. I cleave a zombie in two and we form a killbox in the hallway. They come at us one by one and meet bludgeoning, slicing and searing.

In the torture chamber, Salah finds a dying Tiefling, Vendetta Kress, and heals her for 8 hit points. She distributes wine for the Oathoon Family's establishments, was tortured senseless, and can tell us nothing. We rest in a cleared room, then walk her back to the street. Then back down.

The Lower Depths

Past the torture chamber, stairs descend to a fork: one door south, two east. Behind the second eastern door, four armored men are asleep. I slip in and open one throat. Then the next, and my armor clanks. The other three wake. I gut a second and we finish the rest.

In the last room, a sarcophagus brimming with blood. A frail old woman steps out from behind it. "Thank goodness, you're here! My heroes!" Salah, ever cautious, casts detect evil, and her glamour drops. A hag. She slashes Salah to ribbons and vanishes.

I swing blind at where she should be. She slides a charm into my head, and for a moment I'm her loyal protector, my blade turned on Baktha. Mike's thunderwave shatters the spell and kills her. Baktha and I both pay for it. We rest.

During Baktha's watch a monstrous commotion thunders by: an ogre-like brute dragging a giant bat. We follow behind. A hidden door, a flooded hallway. In the east room, four bone-white skeletons rise from the water and mob Baktha. I smash one, Mike's thunderwave takes three more, Thomas finishes the last.

At the end, atop a heap of corpses, a scarred giant with a club fights a shirtless man with a skull for a head and two scimitars. The giant is Mortlock Vanthampur. The skull-faced one flees.

Mortlock talks. His own family is paying the Dead Three to murder citizens, to weaken The Flaming Fist and open a path for Thalamra Vanthampur to take The Council of Four before Baldur's Gate falls to infernal forces. His brothers hired the cultists to kill him. Amrik Vanthampur, proprietor of The Low Lantern, pays the cultists regularly. Thurstwell Vanthampur, too sickly to leave his mother's estate, uses imps as spies around the city and has almost certainly been watching us.

We chase the skull-headed leader into a hall of colossal wooden statues of the Dead Three. He's good. He drops Baktha. Salah lands a guiding bolt and we finish him in a nasty exchange. We pick the compound clean for a modest haul of coin, gems and jewelry.

Out on the street we meet Tiamat's cultists. Their leader, Ultiss, proclaims our doom. We cut through them like soup. Then it's back to the Uncivil Serpent to sleep.

Loose Ends

We trade loot for coin with every merchant who'll deal, then report to Darmin Zodge (Captain). He's grim but satisfied and gives us our next job: kill Amrik Vanthampur. The Vanthampur web runs deep, and someone has to start cutting threads.

Previous: Mission 1 - Kill the Dead Three's Acolytes · Next: Mission 3 - Amrik Vanthampur

#session #mission