ADVENTURE LOG: September 15, 2018
“Below the thunders of the upper
deep,
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth.”—Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Story So Far
A bloody skirmish has been fought in the North Woods of Jericho’s Purchase, and an unexpected victory has been won. The commune has risen up against its would-be executioners, routing the dreaded Black Watch and their fearsome drow chieftain, defying their taskmasters in Gilead, and committing an act of insurrection against the Synarchy. The commune is defenseless. Its people are mere farmers, millers, and brewers. Yet with the aid of four mysterious travelers, they have survived, and provoked the awesome might of DARKMANSE. Retribution is certain to be swift, spelling certain doom for the citizens of Jericho’s Purchase.
The dead have been buried in the mass grave in the clearing where the battle was fought, the only funerary observances being some hastily said prayers and a dressing of wildflowers from the south meadow before the shovels were taken up to fill the hole.
The drow and their collaborators from Gilead, however, have been left where they fell, food for the carrion birds.
The Sacrament of Interment, as required under the ancient and ineffable supreme mystery of Darkmanse, will never again be observed by these people. When the deceased person is prepared for its pilgrimage east on the Straight Road, the body is wrapped in a shroud and the forehead inscribed with a sacramental clay mark consisting of three lines: Yama (the breath of the maker), Kala (the breath of his creation, which is TIME), and Atma (the soul of the departed, which the priesthood calls the “sacrifice eternal”). The people of the commune have instead anointed their dead with wildflowers from the meadow.
The Council
That night, a council was held in the great hall of the centuries-old brewery. A fire roared in the hearth, casting up sparks, lending its light and warmth to grim proceedings whose scales were weighted with matters of life and death.
There were more than 300 people gathered here. There were the men who only that day had had their first taste of what fighting was like, and there were the mothers swaddling their babies. There were the old people. There were packs of children, whose eyes glittered in the leaping firelight as the west wind whistled in the rafters, and there were all the wounded. All of these people were gathered in the lodge room among the massive oaken casks of ale, which loomed over them in the firelight like silent judges.
“It was Jessup that brought this calamity upon us!” a bitter old woman shouted from the back of the hall. “Harboring a giant! Fraternizing with them offworlders! Foolish old man! We should’ve handed the both of them over to the Inquisition as the law requires!”
The old woman was shouted down by the crowd. Order was restored by the rapping of tempered steel against the cast-iron chime hoop of a beer cask. It was, Tom Glover, the brewer, who had armed himself with the reeve’s own sword.
"The law!” scoffed Tom. “Listen to me, friends! The law does not care a lick for common folk such as us! On the contrary, the law came here today to bury us in that pit, including the babies! And I ask you all, where is that law today? I’ll tell you where they are—out there in them woods where they deserves to be, rotting under the open sky!”
Ned Turner, the miller’s son, stepped forward. “The giant fought bravely today,” he said, his voice grim and measured. “He is one of us—one of our own. We must not fight among ourselves. We need to stick together. It’s the only way we will survive.”
Jorah, the wheelwright, rose angrily to his feet. “Survive, you say? Together? Against the Black Watch? Against the Synarchy? They’ll be coming for us all, Ned, and together we will die.”
He turned to the four strangers—the tiefling, the shapeshifter, the gunslinger, the cleric—who were seated at the foot of a huge cask of springtime porter. “Why don’t we hear from our four saviors, eh? Speak, friends. Nay, I pray you. Share with us your wise counsel.”
All eyes in the lodge room turned to the four adventurers, who urged the people to flee that night. It was decided that the commune’s survivors would travel under the cover of darkness to seek the help and protection of Cumorah, a city half-a-day’s journey north from Gilead, with the four adventurers acting as armed escort.
As the gathering was about to disperse, Gorney, one of the more eccentric residents of Jericho’s Purchase, issued a prophetic warning.
“Beware, the lunar eclipse comes tomorrow night,” he said. “The Lilith Moon will boil bloody red like a witch’s cauldron! I heard Jessup tell of it. He called it ‘totality.’ A very troubling omen.”
Carnival
The night journey to Cumorah proceeded without incident, and the people reached the outskirts of the city at sunrise.
Cumorah stood atop a lofty buttress of Paleozoic rock, a wonder of tectonics that was said to have been thrust up out of the Appalachian Plateau by the Dead Hand of the maker himself. The surrounding hills were occupied by the villas and gardens of the city’s aristocracy and prosperous merchants and bankers, and were blanketed with vineyards and orchards that reached to the walls of the city. Cumorah’s domes and spires were hazy against the morning sky.
Cumorah was one of the free cities and therefore a safe haven for offworlders, who moved freely within its walls. The city was a hotbed for the Ultramontanist Heresy, or sky burial. The charnel grounds, known as the Spiritual Sky, were to the north of the city. Cumorah was also an influential banking city. The powerful Bankers Guild was rumored to be financing both sides of the Darkmanse war.
The refugees from Jericho’s Purchase, weary from traveling through the night, arrived at the estate of a wealthy banker named Malcolm, who agreed to shelter the people on his lands while a delegation from the commune went up to the city to plead their case with the House of Maccabee, the ruling family of Cumorah. After hearing of the people’s plight, Malcolm offered to provide the introductions himself.
A festival was underway in the city when the adventurers arrived. A carnival atmosphere pervaded the squares and narrow cobbled lanes, which thronged with masked revelers in strange and colorful costumes. There were jugglers and conjurers, processions and ritual observances, games and spectacles. Everyone was waiting in anticipation for the lunar eclipse, which was to occur at the stroke of midnight.
When the delegation from Jericho’s Purchase had its audience at the palace, they found that all was not well with the House of Maccabee. The Maccabee was said to have fallen ill, and his sister, Selene, received the delegation instead. Wild haired and disheveled, she appeared to be under the control of a mysterious “counselor” in hooded robes who whispered sibilantly in her ear, advising her on how to respond to the questions posed to her.
The adventurers, growing concerned, insisted on speaking with her brother immediately. Selene consulted with her counselor. She said haltingly, as though struggling to make the words her own, “The Maccabee is very sick, and must not be disturbed.”
In the shadows all around the hall were other hooded figures, who whispered furtively among themselves as the adventurers pressed Selene for answers. Sensing danger, Malcolm brought the disquieting audience with Selene to an abrupt end and hurriedly escorted the delegates from her presence.
“So the rumors are true,” he said once safely outside the palace again. “The Maccabee’s sister has fallen into unwholesome forms of worship.”
Explaining that Selene was said to be under the spell of a mysterious religious cult that had a growing number of fanatical adherents throughout the city, the guild banker warned that the delegates may have drawn unwanted attention from cult, and that their lives may now be in danger. He offered to take them to someone in the city who could help them.
Remembering the warning to Nik in Doctor Jessup’s letter—“Someone will befriend you and your friends in Cumorah. DO NOT TRUST THEM”—the party was rightly suspicious. But alone and in peril in an unfamiliar city, they decided that they had no choice but to trust Malcolm, who led them to an abandoned orphanage in the slums on the east end of the city.
The party should have trusted its instincts, however, because “Malcolm” was in fact a doppelganger assassin faithful to the Archivist, and the rendezvous in the orphanage—where four other doppelganger assassins lay waiting—was a trap laid for Nik.
With the help of the stone giant, the party fought a fierce and bloody battle. Nik would surely have died in the ambush if not for Ven’s healing magic. Three of the assassins were killed. The party captured and interrogated the fourth using a spell that constrained it to answer all questions truthfully.
“Who is the Archivist?” demanded Nik. “Why does he want to kill me?”
“You already know what you did,” the creature answered, adding, “that is to say, what you will do.”
The party asked the creature if it had any information about the Maccabee or his whereabouts, and the creature said yes. It told them that the Maccabee was being held captive by the Kuo-Toa somewhere in the sewers underneath the city, and that the Kuo-Toa planned to sacrifice him in the Maccabee family shrine at midnight, when the moon was at full eclipse. The rite, the doppelganger said, would open a portal to a mysterious plane called the “transcendental ocean,” and bring forth a primeval sea deity of the Kuo-Toa’s own insane imagining. The Maccabee was to be a sacrificial offering to this leviathan, which was made real by the Kuo-Toa’s collective fanaticism.
Nik thanked the doppelganger for its information. Then she strangled it.
Acting on a tip provided to Korric earlier by Tom Glover, the four adventurers headed off alone to a tavern called the Pugilist, which, according to Tom, offered a secret entrance into the sewers, as well as a valuable ally in one Mister Shelby, an old friend of Tom’s from his days as a tough young underfighter (1).
A smiling Mister Shelby welcomed the adventurers with open arms, telling them that a friend of Tom’s was a friend of his. He showed them the secret door and led them down into the sewers, giving them his lantern to light their way.
But then, as he backed away slowly up the stone steps to the surface, the smile evaporated from Shelby’s face. With a fanatical shine to his eyes, he declared shrilly, “Sassu-Wunnu rises at midnight tonight! Fools! You cannot stop the advent of the Lord! ‘A ry’gzengrho! Hail to the ancient dreams!”
Thereupon, he called down the sewers in what may have been a warning, or perhaps a summons. “I’aS’ha-t’n! I’aS’ha-t’n! I’aS’ha-t’n!”
Shelby withdrew to the surface and slammed the door shut behind him, leaving the four adventurers alone in the dark with only the feeble lantern light to see by.
The barkeep had hardly issued his call when there came an ominous din that seemed to rise up from the depths of the sewers to the east of the city.
Gritting his teeth, Korric drew his revolvers.
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth.”—Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Story So Far
A bloody skirmish has been fought in the North Woods of Jericho’s Purchase, and an unexpected victory has been won. The commune has risen up against its would-be executioners, routing the dreaded Black Watch and their fearsome drow chieftain, defying their taskmasters in Gilead, and committing an act of insurrection against the Synarchy. The commune is defenseless. Its people are mere farmers, millers, and brewers. Yet with the aid of four mysterious travelers, they have survived, and provoked the awesome might of DARKMANSE. Retribution is certain to be swift, spelling certain doom for the citizens of Jericho’s Purchase.
The dead have been buried in the mass grave in the clearing where the battle was fought, the only funerary observances being some hastily said prayers and a dressing of wildflowers from the south meadow before the shovels were taken up to fill the hole.
The drow and their collaborators from Gilead, however, have been left where they fell, food for the carrion birds.
The Sacrament of Interment, as required under the ancient and ineffable supreme mystery of Darkmanse, will never again be observed by these people. When the deceased person is prepared for its pilgrimage east on the Straight Road, the body is wrapped in a shroud and the forehead inscribed with a sacramental clay mark consisting of three lines: Yama (the breath of the maker), Kala (the breath of his creation, which is TIME), and Atma (the soul of the departed, which the priesthood calls the “sacrifice eternal”). The people of the commune have instead anointed their dead with wildflowers from the meadow.
The Council
That night, a council was held in the great hall of the centuries-old brewery. A fire roared in the hearth, casting up sparks, lending its light and warmth to grim proceedings whose scales were weighted with matters of life and death.
There were more than 300 people gathered here. There were the men who only that day had had their first taste of what fighting was like, and there were the mothers swaddling their babies. There were the old people. There were packs of children, whose eyes glittered in the leaping firelight as the west wind whistled in the rafters, and there were all the wounded. All of these people were gathered in the lodge room among the massive oaken casks of ale, which loomed over them in the firelight like silent judges.
“It was Jessup that brought this calamity upon us!” a bitter old woman shouted from the back of the hall. “Harboring a giant! Fraternizing with them offworlders! Foolish old man! We should’ve handed the both of them over to the Inquisition as the law requires!”
The old woman was shouted down by the crowd. Order was restored by the rapping of tempered steel against the cast-iron chime hoop of a beer cask. It was, Tom Glover, the brewer, who had armed himself with the reeve’s own sword.
"The law!” scoffed Tom. “Listen to me, friends! The law does not care a lick for common folk such as us! On the contrary, the law came here today to bury us in that pit, including the babies! And I ask you all, where is that law today? I’ll tell you where they are—out there in them woods where they deserves to be, rotting under the open sky!”
Ned Turner, the miller’s son, stepped forward. “The giant fought bravely today,” he said, his voice grim and measured. “He is one of us—one of our own. We must not fight among ourselves. We need to stick together. It’s the only way we will survive.”
Jorah, the wheelwright, rose angrily to his feet. “Survive, you say? Together? Against the Black Watch? Against the Synarchy? They’ll be coming for us all, Ned, and together we will die.”
He turned to the four strangers—the tiefling, the shapeshifter, the gunslinger, the cleric—who were seated at the foot of a huge cask of springtime porter. “Why don’t we hear from our four saviors, eh? Speak, friends. Nay, I pray you. Share with us your wise counsel.”
All eyes in the lodge room turned to the four adventurers, who urged the people to flee that night. It was decided that the commune’s survivors would travel under the cover of darkness to seek the help and protection of Cumorah, a city half-a-day’s journey north from Gilead, with the four adventurers acting as armed escort.
As the gathering was about to disperse, Gorney, one of the more eccentric residents of Jericho’s Purchase, issued a prophetic warning.
“Beware, the lunar eclipse comes tomorrow night,” he said. “The Lilith Moon will boil bloody red like a witch’s cauldron! I heard Jessup tell of it. He called it ‘totality.’ A very troubling omen.”
Carnival
The night journey to Cumorah proceeded without incident, and the people reached the outskirts of the city at sunrise.
Cumorah stood atop a lofty buttress of Paleozoic rock, a wonder of tectonics that was said to have been thrust up out of the Appalachian Plateau by the Dead Hand of the maker himself. The surrounding hills were occupied by the villas and gardens of the city’s aristocracy and prosperous merchants and bankers, and were blanketed with vineyards and orchards that reached to the walls of the city. Cumorah’s domes and spires were hazy against the morning sky.
Cumorah was one of the free cities and therefore a safe haven for offworlders, who moved freely within its walls. The city was a hotbed for the Ultramontanist Heresy, or sky burial. The charnel grounds, known as the Spiritual Sky, were to the north of the city. Cumorah was also an influential banking city. The powerful Bankers Guild was rumored to be financing both sides of the Darkmanse war.
The refugees from Jericho’s Purchase, weary from traveling through the night, arrived at the estate of a wealthy banker named Malcolm, who agreed to shelter the people on his lands while a delegation from the commune went up to the city to plead their case with the House of Maccabee, the ruling family of Cumorah. After hearing of the people’s plight, Malcolm offered to provide the introductions himself.
A festival was underway in the city when the adventurers arrived. A carnival atmosphere pervaded the squares and narrow cobbled lanes, which thronged with masked revelers in strange and colorful costumes. There were jugglers and conjurers, processions and ritual observances, games and spectacles. Everyone was waiting in anticipation for the lunar eclipse, which was to occur at the stroke of midnight.
When the delegation from Jericho’s Purchase had its audience at the palace, they found that all was not well with the House of Maccabee. The Maccabee was said to have fallen ill, and his sister, Selene, received the delegation instead. Wild haired and disheveled, she appeared to be under the control of a mysterious “counselor” in hooded robes who whispered sibilantly in her ear, advising her on how to respond to the questions posed to her.
The adventurers, growing concerned, insisted on speaking with her brother immediately. Selene consulted with her counselor. She said haltingly, as though struggling to make the words her own, “The Maccabee is very sick, and must not be disturbed.”
In the shadows all around the hall were other hooded figures, who whispered furtively among themselves as the adventurers pressed Selene for answers. Sensing danger, Malcolm brought the disquieting audience with Selene to an abrupt end and hurriedly escorted the delegates from her presence.
“So the rumors are true,” he said once safely outside the palace again. “The Maccabee’s sister has fallen into unwholesome forms of worship.”
Explaining that Selene was said to be under the spell of a mysterious religious cult that had a growing number of fanatical adherents throughout the city, the guild banker warned that the delegates may have drawn unwanted attention from cult, and that their lives may now be in danger. He offered to take them to someone in the city who could help them.
Remembering the warning to Nik in Doctor Jessup’s letter—“Someone will befriend you and your friends in Cumorah. DO NOT TRUST THEM”—the party was rightly suspicious. But alone and in peril in an unfamiliar city, they decided that they had no choice but to trust Malcolm, who led them to an abandoned orphanage in the slums on the east end of the city.
The party should have trusted its instincts, however, because “Malcolm” was in fact a doppelganger assassin faithful to the Archivist, and the rendezvous in the orphanage—where four other doppelganger assassins lay waiting—was a trap laid for Nik.
With the help of the stone giant, the party fought a fierce and bloody battle. Nik would surely have died in the ambush if not for Ven’s healing magic. Three of the assassins were killed. The party captured and interrogated the fourth using a spell that constrained it to answer all questions truthfully.
“Who is the Archivist?” demanded Nik. “Why does he want to kill me?”
“You already know what you did,” the creature answered, adding, “that is to say, what you will do.”
The party asked the creature if it had any information about the Maccabee or his whereabouts, and the creature said yes. It told them that the Maccabee was being held captive by the Kuo-Toa somewhere in the sewers underneath the city, and that the Kuo-Toa planned to sacrifice him in the Maccabee family shrine at midnight, when the moon was at full eclipse. The rite, the doppelganger said, would open a portal to a mysterious plane called the “transcendental ocean,” and bring forth a primeval sea deity of the Kuo-Toa’s own insane imagining. The Maccabee was to be a sacrificial offering to this leviathan, which was made real by the Kuo-Toa’s collective fanaticism.
Nik thanked the doppelganger for its information. Then she strangled it.
Acting on a tip provided to Korric earlier by Tom Glover, the four adventurers headed off alone to a tavern called the Pugilist, which, according to Tom, offered a secret entrance into the sewers, as well as a valuable ally in one Mister Shelby, an old friend of Tom’s from his days as a tough young underfighter (1).
A smiling Mister Shelby welcomed the adventurers with open arms, telling them that a friend of Tom’s was a friend of his. He showed them the secret door and led them down into the sewers, giving them his lantern to light their way.
But then, as he backed away slowly up the stone steps to the surface, the smile evaporated from Shelby’s face. With a fanatical shine to his eyes, he declared shrilly, “Sassu-Wunnu rises at midnight tonight! Fools! You cannot stop the advent of the Lord! ‘A ry’gzengrho! Hail to the ancient dreams!”
Thereupon, he called down the sewers in what may have been a warning, or perhaps a summons. “I’aS’ha-t’n! I’aS’ha-t’n! I’aS’ha-t’n!”
Shelby withdrew to the surface and slammed the door shut behind him, leaving the four adventurers alone in the dark with only the feeble lantern light to see by.
The barkeep had hardly issued his call when there came an ominous din that seemed to rise up from the depths of the sewers to the east of the city.
Gritting his teeth, Korric drew his revolvers.
__________________
1. There are secret doors in many of the taverns of Cumorah that lead
down to the cavernous sewers beneath the city. In Tom’s younger days, fight
clubs were popular sport, but they were also considered to be venues for public
disorder and immorality, and hence were banned by the city council. For a fee,
patrons were given access to illicit fighting rings in the sewers below, where
they could gamble on the fights or even participate in them, which was a
reckless thing to do when Tom Glover was in the ring. He flattened many such
comers back in his day. Such boxers were known in Cumorah as underfighters.
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