After a break the saga continued.
The PC's playing today:
- Alan: Ron "Foul" Guttermann, a human who is a rat catcher by trade, and has a small but vicious dog named Dog.
- Ali: Aeslor Arha, a Wood Elf who is a Wizard's Apprentice.
- Cassandra: Fayth, a Human Initiate of Shallya who is fed up of religion.
- Daniel: Grimmick Grimjaw, a Dwarf who is a Student Engineer.
- AJ: Harbul Junior, a Halfling thief.
Harbul joined the party from the boat after they had defeated the ghoul and rested to heal some wounds. Aeslor had taken the cylindrical five pointed star key which opened the trap door and everyone went through it. The trap door led down to a secret workshop / library which was guarded by five zombies, each of whom were carrying a cylindrical six pointed star key on leather thongs around their necks.
One of the rooms is a laboratory and is littered with alchemical apparatus. Benches are piled with beakers, retort stands, odd-shaped jars, lumps of different ores, and so on. Various esoteric calculations have been chalked on most surfaces: the walls, ceiling, floor, and bench tops. A gargoyle-shaped lectern bearing a large, leather-bound book stands in one corner.
The book is hand-written in Classical language and has copious marginalia and multiple revisions. It contains research into the summoning and control of skeletons, zombies, and ghouls. they have not had time to read it properly.
In a study room they find a large desk, a plans chest, and a drawing board. Various ancient portraits hang on the walls. The potraits are labelled as being the Von Wittgenstein family and the books and papers identify this secret place as belonging to Dagmar Von Wittgenstein.
Opening the desk drawer resulted in Harbul getting covered in purple ink, which exploded into his face when he pried it open. Inside there were quills, bottles of ink (many dried up), and parchment. There is also a battered notebook with yellowing pages covered in complex calculations and notes written in a
spidery hand. Anyone with the Lore (Magick) Skill quickly works out that the calculations are to do with the orbit of the Chaos moon Morrslieb. The moon is mentioned several times in the text.
The plans chest has several antique maps showing various parts of the Empire, the Reikland, and the western marches of Talabecland in particular. All the maps have a number of intersecting lines carefully drawn on them. One intersection in the Barren Hills has been roughly ringed. Fayth and Aeslor recognise that the lines of the triangle trace Morrslieb’s erratic orbit.
Propped in one corner of the room is an ornately carved staff. It has a strong magical aura coming from it. Aeslor took it.
The books in the library are written in a variety of mundane, secret, and arcane languages. They cover many subjects, from alchemical treatises to ‘novels’ of a somewhat insalubrious literary nature.
The circular inner wall at the centre has two 18-inch-long bars attached to the wall at waist height, one at each end. If any two adventurers push on these bars, the entire wall rotates so that a gap in this wall will align with the central accessway. The floor here is inscribed with a glowing hexagram, or six pointed star. There is a hole at each point of the hexagram. These holes are star-shaped, and the right size to accept the keys carried by the five zombies. There is a trap door in the centre of the hexegram but no way to open it or smash through it. Of course, being a hexegram, with six points and the adventurers only having found five of the six pointed star keys, one key is missing.
The adventurers took some time to try and figure out where the circled area on the map they found was. The map we were using from the 4th edition of the games was not very clear, so I swapped it with the original first edition one.
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