Villa Hahn (Continued)
Last week, we left our heroes standing at the gates of Villa Hahn, Ruprecht's childhood home, on the trail of Tobias and Karl.
This week, everyone had a new character booklet, and it turned out when filling these in that they were so over encumbered with stuff that they shouldn't be able to walk. We decided it only fair to retrospectively give them a donkey named Sam and offoad all the stuff they couldn't carry onto the beast, and that Sam is currently stabled back in Keitchdorf with most of their money.
The GM promised not to be evil with this arrangement.
Anyway - back to Villa Hahn - this entire session was based on the search here, so this update should not be as long as usual. Maybe. Especially as they avoided most of the areas in the grounds.
Little remained of the Villa’s former splendour. Archaon’s armies devastated the region, and the Villa is no exception, even though the mansion itself escaped unscathed. The land, however, was darkly poisoned, the once fertile soil now a sloppy marsh of foetid water and stinking mud. The once-bright paint on the Mansion itself was faded, and a glistening sheen of sickening oil coated the structure, giving it an ochre hue. The windows were all bricked up. All the beautiful landscaping that once existed was long gone. The sodden ground belched up streams of noxious gas The once pristine and orderly flowerbeds were choked with weeds.
They avoided what looked like a pool filled with slime at the front of the house, and checked out the stable. Although it was intact, there was not much here except for old droppings turned white with age, and a few rusty tools and rotten saddles. In one stall was a complete skeleton of a horse. A pitted green brass plate overhead proclaimed the bones to be “Beauty.”
The most interesting thing is the small cart attached to a very dead horse. It looked as if wolves had set upon the beast and ripped it apart where it stood. In the back of the cart was a child’s coffin. The lid had been removed and flipped upside down. Scratch marks covered the inside.
The PC's hesitated here, and were attacked by a pack of four giant wolves which they managed to kill, but not without being wounded (Ralf lost a Fate Point) - they made their way to the mansion itself, checking for footprints but not being able to follow any trail due to the mud.
The entrance was through the front double doors. One of the two doors stood ajar, revealing darkness beyond. muddy footprints were evident all throughout the vestibule, heading into the main hall beyond and up the stairs there.
They searched all of the rooms in the mansion, most held nothing of interest but some did. In a study they found, in a locked drawer, a ledger detailing the importing and exporting of illegal goods into Wolfenburg from all around the Empire and beyond. Very high prices are listed next to these objects accompanied with initials, but no names are given. A note was inside this:
In a dining room a shimmering ghost of a woman appeared and began to mutter, “Kill the killer… kill the killer… kill the killer"
In the Wine Cellar beneath this kitchen, they met Lucius Hahn, Ruprect's father - still alive - or maybe not... Upon close inspection, Lucius is little more than a coat of living flesh, kept alive by the foul will of the appalling creature that stole his skin.
The massive insect is beetle-like with long, twitching antennae and an impossibly long tongue that it kept curled up until it wished to drink Lucius’s fluids. It rested on Lucius’s back with its six legs lodged into him. It attacked the PC's, Lucius urging them to keep away - but the creature used Lucius’s body as makeshift armour until he was gone, and then it fought on its own. It did not last very long.
In Erich Hahn's bedroom, they found Erich’s personal diary in a nightstand. There were several pages torn out of the middle of the diary, and the writing that followed looked like the hand of a different person.
As the PCs drew closer to the next room - Genevive's bedroom - they heard the sound of a little girl crying. and saw a man, Gregor Schlossberger, in leather armour and holding a sword in front of him. At his feet was what appeared to be the body of a mutilated woman in a blood-soaked dress. The man stared across the room at a terrifying mass of flesh and sinew.
Between him and the horror was a little girl who was crying. The creature beyond her had skin that was oily black like that of a slug, and it was covered in horrible sores and seeping pus. Razor-sharp spikes and tentacles stuck out of the creature in random places, and the fingers and toes on its four legs, and four arms were webbed and had what looked like stingers on the ends. No heads were discernible, but one face was where the stomach would be and another was on its back.
Having read the note they found in the diary in the other room, the PC's guessed the little girl was Genevive, and also a creature of chaos, and killed her first. Then they and Gregor killed the creature. Gregor explained he was an adventurer from Wolfenburg, and had only come into the mansion in search of treasure. He became a companion for the party. Searching the bodies revealed the little girl was wearing a strange necklace - three intertwined circles with a fly in the middle - they had by now come to recoognise this as a symbol of Nurgle, and did not take it.
Finally, in Ruprecht's bedroom, they found a journal.
From this, they correctly guessed that the entrance to the Temple they were looking for lay in the maze, and they needed the necklace the girl was wearing to get through the maze. So they went back to her room and took it.
They headed straight to the maze, not exploring the rest of the grounds, and as they had the Sigil of Flies from Genevive's neck, quickly found their way to the centre of the maze - a large clearing with a circular mound of oily blue-black flesh in its centre.
The mound was about 1 or 2 feet in height and roughly 12 feet in diameter. Several black tendrils or roots extended from the mound and dug into the nearby dirt. The mound occasionally pulsed as if alive, and they saw fluids of green and yellow racing through translucent veins just below the surface of its skin.
When the PCs approached, the mound opened from its centre with a wet tearing sound, its flesh pulled tight to the outer edge of the circle, like a sphincter. Five cultists climbed out of this newly formed... bum hole. The cultists as surprised to see the PCs at their temple as much as the PCs were surprised to see someone walk out of a giant mound of bruised flesh. The cultists attacked the PCs, and the mound closed behind them.
After the PCs dispatched the cultists, they tried to go inside the temple, but the mound did not open for the PCs when they approached it. The only way for the PCs to enter the temple was to hack through the material. This method was not pretty nor did it smell good. The skin of the mound was tough, and they had to hack away for an age, getting covered in pus and blood and other disgusting goo by the time they made a large enough hole to climb through.(one or two of them gaining an Insanity Point for witnessing this horrific sight...)
Inside the Temple
Clearing away the darkened flesh, the PCs found a blue stone staircase descending into the earth. There were nine steps in all, stopping at a bare anteroom. Through an arch, the PCs saw a long hall pierced with a row of alcoves on either side.
The walls, ceilings, and floors of the temple were made from large blackish blue stones that make every corridor and room look like bruised flesh. The air in the temple is almost unbearable: the smell of rot and decay permeates everything. Throughout the complex, cloudy mucus oozes from between the cracks of the stones, dripping from the walls and ceiling and bubbling up from the floor. In places, these sticky strands of goo actually form webbing.
Through the arches were sleeping crèches for the cultists. They hold maggot-ridden scraps of cloth and bile -stained bedrolls. The hall stank of vomit and urine. Yellow chalk drawings of what looked like flies and other insects along with symbols and runes cover the stone walls.
The temple library is barely that. It was mostly used as a storage area for Ruprecht’s books and items too dangerous to keep in the house. A couple of small shelves house a few books, mostly covering topics such as the history of Nurgle cults and some depicting simple religious routines and rituals that are not of a magical nature. The PCs search the shelves, and discovered a leather-bound book of obviously higher quality than the others - The Libram Pandemic. Penned by Hadred over 150 years ago, this book was a catalogue of hundreds of diseases. It described the diseases, usual locations they are found, and even some cures for a couple of them. It looked valuable, and exuded magic, so Mormocar had a quick look through and put it in his bag for later.
There was nothing else of much interest on this upper level, so the PC's made their way down the stairs.
From down the hall and around the corner, the PCs heard a constant droning - chanting from the cultists. The ritual to bind Ruprecht to Karl with the Necklace of Unfailing Loyalty had begun.
As the PCs passed one of the cages, a man reached for them through the bars, screaming. His mouth, hands and chest are covered in blood. The body in the next cage had Human teeth marks in it. He continued to scream, but the PC's ignored him and stormed instead straight towards the sound of chanting, weapons drawn.
When the PCs turned the corner, they saw the Plague Shrine. An altar on the far side of the room stood 3 feet tall, decorated with what appears to be viscera. Set into the floor with snot-green mosaic tiles was an octogram positioned in the centre of the room. When they entered the shrine, 9 cultists stood around the octogram facing the altar. Tobias, Karl, and the high priest are standing at the altar with the high priest chanting and lifting the Necklace of Unfailing Loyalty above his head about to lower it around Karl’s
neck.
The PC's attacked. This disrupted the Ceremony and the Priest did not put the necklace onto Karl's neck, but instead started Channeling, ready to use some foul magic. Tobias did the same.
Shortly after combat began, Sophia, the Lahmian Vampire Thrall and twelve of her allies came into the room behind the PCs. They had followed them all the way from Altdorf!
Sophia said, “I knew you would lead us to the boy. Humans are so simple. Neither one of you will be taking the boy. We need him. He will follow his destiny. He will be the Champion of the Night!”
And there was a huge fight - Tobias killed a number of the Lahmian thugs with a single spell, the PC's and Gregor killed Tobias, the Priest and Sophia and all the minions.
As Tobias died, a strange alien like organ tore free from the dead flesh, sprouted limbs, and escaped through the hole in the back wall. When the Priest, Johann, died, a swarm of biting insects burst from his body and attacked everyone around before dispersing. This had been a tough fight - and there had been no sign of Ruprecht - presumably the ritual to bind Karl to him did not actually need him to be there, and he is still somewhere North as indicated in his diary.
Karl survived the battle, clearly, and as soon as he spoke, all the PC's immediately fell back into worshipping him... Gregor didn't, but everyone else did...
We left the session here, the PC's surrounded by dead bodies, in the temple with Karl. The GM awarded Fate points on top of XP's as the party had lost several, and they had just killed two high ranking Nurgle Cultists and a Vampire Thrall, so it only seemed fair...
End of Session.
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