Heather Under Moonlight

Session 22, 18/11/25

Nissa was late today (something came up at her player's job) so Relimi and Aethelwynn, with Relimi's cleric hench and new grizzly bear skeleton, set out for to find some low-risk work, and boy do they find it. After a fruitless period of rumormongering in Tor and with the No Tongue nomads, Aethelwynn goes around in Ambell, and is approached by a man who recognizes the paladin; the man says that his wife is very sick and asks Aethelwynn to heal her.

Aethelwynn and Relimi head out to a tiny hamlet in the middle of nowhere to discover his wife, pale and exhausted. Relimi, with her new knowledge of Physic, determines that the woman's humors are unbalanced and she has not enough blood, as if it had been bled through a wound. Aethelwynn's power of curing disease has no effect, but ordinary healing magic restores the woman to good health. Our would-be healers camp outside of town, seeing a dark shadow pass the moon and engaging in a mighty combat against an owlbear. At about this point, Nissa arrives out of the dark and storm to rejoin the party.

The next morning, Relimi goes to inspect the woman again and determines that she is once again fallen ill; attempts are made to slow poison, and then Nissa suggests that they look for bites. Finding a pair of almost imperceptible puncture marks, the party grimly stocks up on garlic and prepares to repel a vampire. First, they go hunting for it; hearing from a way-priest that there is a cursed pool to the South. They drain the pool, finding only a lead scroll-tube marked with the symbol of the College of Alienists, and containing only teeth and a kneecap-bone. That night, Nissa and Relimi sleep outside while Aethelwynn and the family sleep inside.

A huge bat alights on the building's roof and turns into a woman; the vampire. The vampire charms Nissa, and tells her to go back to sleep; Aethelwynn stabs at the vampire with her halberd through the thatch roof, but to no effect. The next round, the vampire tries to stop Relimi too, but loses initiative and Relimi sics the bear and owlbear skeletons on her. The skeletons bury the vampire under the side of the house, and then Aethelwynn splashes the vampire with holy water; she, seeing the fight as more trouble than it's worth, turns into mist and bails.

The party ride through the night after her, but don't find her lair; because of the forced march, they're stuck in the woods for a couple of days. Merce stays in town with the bear skeletons set to guard him. The first night, the vampire returns, stalking about the house Merce is staying in; when nobody will exit the house or invite her in, she summons wolves, killing the town's sheep and six people. The vampire does not return the next night.

Meanwhile, the other party recovers from their harrowing nighttime ride and returns to Tor and Ambell, collecting Celebrindel the thief/magic-user and hiring factors to search out some magic items for purchase. They also identify the scroll tube as a magic item allowing an evil cleric to command undead creatures that they otherwise would only be able to turn.

Looking to continue their search, the party heads Northwest and comes upon a square keep standing atop a hill near a confluence of rivers, with the burned ruins of a village standing all about. They decide that this must be the vampire's castle and that they should try to bargain with her using the tube of undead command, reasoning that she would be very worried about such an item floating about on the open market. They meet with her grey-skinned manservant, who invites them in and (pretends to!) carry on a dialogue with the vampire lady as an intermediary.

Finally, he invites the party to meet with her, and invites them into the kitchen and then down below into the cellars. Without any hesitation, the party heads on into this walk-in pantry room, at which point the Igor slams the door and drags a cabinet in front of it. The party, looking down into the cellar, sees two giant spiders; they wait in the walk-in pantry for a while. Hearing movement outside, the party decides that they need to kill the giant spiders; at first, trying to do it with system shock from Haste, then when that fails blasting one off the ceiling with Magic Missile and Sleeping the other. Celebrindel descends to finish the thing off, and Nissa follows her.

At that moment, one of the vampire spawn - another one, the Captain of the Guard - drags the cabinet aside and ushers a swarm of well-armored zombies in to slaughter the PCs left upstairs. Relimi successfully turns the Spawn and the zombies start to rush the two PCs down in order to remove the holy symbols from the equation. That's about where we left the session, because it was very late; we ended up having to follow someone else out of the building because the automatic locks had gone on for the night.