Adventure Log: December 15, 2018

A Difficult Choice

The adventuring party has pulled off the unimaginable. Against all odds, they have freed the Maccabee from the clutches of the Kuo-Toa, surviving their ordeal in the sewers under the warren-like streets of Cumorah, and prevailing over an enemy host that vastly outnumbered them—but at what cost? In the shrine above them, a Kuo-Toa Archpriest—the mysterious “counselor” to Selene, the Maccabee’s sister—has opened a portal onto the transcendental ocean and conjured forth Sassu-Wunnu, the Lord God Kraken, from out of its cold, grey depths.

The party, faced with a difficult choice, has decided to escape into the sewers with the Maccabee rather than risk another costly fight against superior numbers in a bid to stop the ritual. But by taking the Maccabee, the adventurers have deprived the archpriest of his sacrifice. Because of them, the archpriest has no offering with which to placate the abomination he has foolishly summoned into the world—and therefore no way to control it.

As the adventurers slip quietly away into the sewers, the kraken arises in the family shrine. Coils of tentacles unfurl from the unreal waters of the transcendental ocean, whipping over the heads of the black-robed cultists as the Kuo-Toa archpriest backs fearfully away, the ritual dagger slipping from his grasp and clattering to the flagstones at his feet as the shadow of the leviathan passes over him like a dark omen. Outside the temple, the Lilith Moon, passing through total eclipse, hangs in its unnaturally low orbit in the midnight sky. The satellite is an ominous black disc blotting out the stars, a hole in the sky floating over the spires of Cumorah.

The kraken roars, shaking the city to its foundations.

Festival Night

When the party emerges from the sewers, they are greeted by a surreal sight outside the palace. It is festival in the city and the public square is filled with costumed and inebriated revelers when the kraken smashes itself free of the shrine. Its tentacles are a writhing nest. The chimerical creature is a cross between a sea anemone and a medusa jellyfish. Its body is a gargantuan anemone-like stalk, atop which is a gelatinous jellyfish bell trailing countless stinging tentacles. As terrified cult members stream out of the temple, one of the kraken’s stinging appendages snakes out and envelops the fleeing archpriest, lifts him shrieking into the air, and inserts him into a cavity underneath the massive bell.

Nik takes flight, attempting to carry the Maccabee to safety. But the kraken, attuned to its sacrifice, senses the Maccabee’s presence. A colossal tentacle smashes down upon Nik, grazing her wings, sending her and the Maccabee tumbling back down to earth. She and her companions lift the Maccabee to his feet and hurry him across the square, and the kraken follows.

The Death of Selene

The adventurers retreat to the Ramparts, a massive assemblage of lofty platforms on the north wall of the city, from which sentries guard the approaches to the city in the surrounding valley. With the help of the Warden of the Watch, one of the Maccabee’s most trusted officers, they and the Warden’s men form a human chain to pass dozens of kegs of black powder up from a cellar of the nearby armory and roll them out onto a lower platform of the Ramparts. With wreckage raining down on them from the rampaging kraken, which is dismantling the upper levels of the structure in its rage, they amass the powder kegs on the platform to use as a bomb. All they need is something—or someone—to use as bait.

A macabre solution presents itself when Selene is captured and flung to the ground at the feet of the Warden. As his men look on, she pleads miserably for her life. One of the Warden’s lieutenants, gazing down at the wretched woman in undisguised disgust, suggests that she be thrown to the kraken.

“She is a Maccabee, isn’t she?” he asks. “Her noble blood is the same as her brother’s. Let us find out if it will placate the beast. I say her death instead of her brother’s.”

Ven, a healer of Faerûn who has dedicated his life to defending all beings no matter how misguided or debased, implores the soldiers to show her mercy. But the Warden is a cruel man and decides that justice will be served by using the Maccabee’s sister as bait—where was her sense of mercy, he remarks, when she conspired with the Kuo-Toa to sacrifice her own brother to their god?

The Warden binds the woman with rope, grabs a spool of fuse line, and personally drags her out onto the platform and ties her to the powder kegs. He attaches one end of the fuse to one of the kegs, and Nik takes to the air with the spool, letting the fuse feed out behind her as the Warden and his men escape through some underground tunnels toward the garrison to the east of the city, accompanied by Ven, Korric, and Sant’oka.

As the kraken closes in on Selene, Nik uses arcane magic to light the fuse. The kraken, accepting the sacrifice, caresses the woman with its poisonous tentacles, their venom searing her flesh, cutting her to ribbons. Selene dies shrieking in agony as the fuse burns down and detonates powder kegs beneath the kraken, destroying it. The concussive blast can be felt a mile away in the tunnels.

City of the Damned

As the Maccabee is recuperating, he orders that the city be cleansed of the Kuo-Toa and their followers. Killing squads are sent down into the sewers to root out and exterminate the Kuo-Toa to a creature, including the very young ones. The corpses are burned in huge bonfires. Soon, spires of oily black smoke can be seen rising from every quarter of the hilltop city. The Maccabee’s men round up cult members throughout the city and slaughter them. The “cleansing” goes on for several days, and the flames of the bonfires are kept well fed.

The adventurers are horrified by the atrocities they witness in Cumorah. They hope to put the city behind them at their earliest opportunity, but first they need to recuperate from their many ordeals since setting out for Darkmanse. They are also the captive guests of the Maccabee, and must tread carefully.

Ven refreshes his spirits for several days in a shrine to Lathander, the deity he serves. The shrine, known as the Temple of the Morninglord, has been established in this free city by an elderly dawngreeter and his novices. The old man confirms for the party that the locket they retrieved from Eva’s mausoleum is a palantír, a “seeing stone” of abyssal origins.

Korric shares with his companions a vision he had while in the sewers. He describes how strange memories flooded into head as he gazed in mystification at his own handwriting on those sewer walls, memories that seemed to belong to somebody else. Disorienting images flashed before his mind's eye that reminded him of pictures he'd seen in Life magazine—pictures of NASA scientists with their rockets and landers, of Sputnik and the Soviet space program, of Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. The images in his head, he explains, were of a lab like in those old photos. Everything was sleek and modern. There were men in white lab coats, and he was being shown documents of some sort. The letterhead on the documents, Korric tells his companions, looked very official: Office of Scientific Research and Development, U.S. War Department.

"I saw a rack of stoppered glass vials on the table," he continues. "Stamped on the vials in white lettering were the words Project RAND, and in the vials there was blue liquid of some kind." 

That evening, the Maccabee holds an audience with the delegation from Jericho’s Purchase to discuss the situation with Gilead. Seeing an opportunity to win new territories, he declares himself Lord Protector of the village. There will be war with Gilead. Nik and Sant’oka question Fjolvar, the stone giant, about the mysterious Doctor Jessup, and learn that Jessup had spent his final months in Jericho’s Purchase holed up in his observatory at night, building something. Nik and Sant’oka believe he has built a machine of some kind that he used to vanish into time. Nik wants to return to Jericho’s Purchase ahead of the Maccabee’s armies to search Jessup’s library and observatory, but Korric and the others, fearing it will be suicide to return there, refuse to go. The party decides to resume their journey eastward, to the Darkmanse.

They see Mister Shelby, the tavern keeper who betrayed them to the Kuo-Toa, as they are riding out through the city gates. The Maccabee has had him impaled on a stake outside the city walls as a parting gift to the adventurers.

Mythos

Legends have begun to grow around the adventurers and their exploits on the road to Darkmanse. The party has earned good will among the traveler guilds as the story of how they saved the Seven Caravans child from Eva, the ghast, passes from clan to clan and across the continent, embellished with each retelling. Word has begun to spread concerning the adventurers’ deeds in Cumorah, their heroism at the Battle of the North Woods and their routing of the Fisher there, as well as their role in the outbreak of war between Cumorah and Gilead. The Black Watch has put a price on their heads. The adventurers have attracted unwanted attention from the Synarchy, which has spies in every city.

Reputation can be a two-edged sword. In this time of civil war, allegiances are increasingly divided, and the party will need to be careful about revealing their true identities in the days and weeks to come.
 
Mysterious Island

While traveling the Pilgrim Road, the adventures are driven into the feywild jungles by a stampeding herd of Afyal elephants, and find themselves trapped on the edge of a gorge. They escape across a set of flimsy rope bridges that have been strung across the gorge to an earthberg floating in midair above the forest below. The earthberg is an island unto itself, dense with jungles and teeming with wildlife. Ven and Korric nearly fall to their deaths while crossing the makeshift bridges.

In the jungles of the floating island, the adventurers come upon a grotto overgrown with hanging vines. It is a roadside shrine of sorts to Hecate, triform goddess of necromancy and entranceways. Travelers to the island have left coins, candles, and glass beads at the foot of the statue. Ven recalls that the symbol of Hecate is sometimes associated with the Thune, the three sisters of prophecy.

As Nik inspects the statue for hidden writings or any other secrets it might hold, she disturbs a nest of giant centipedes, which have made their home in this shrine to an underworld goddess. A rustling sound issues from mossy crevices of the grotto as eight poisonous insects swarm out of the rock, setting upon the adventurers.

DM's Note. At the completion of the Cumorah adventure, the PCs leveled up from third to fourth level.