[WFRP] The Bloody Crown X

[TheSummoner]

Sieghard

"Right," Sieghard said. "Hildebrand wants to have a look at whatever's beneath all this. I'll be going down with her, you lot can keep watch over the hole." He turned to Elsa. "We can keep Morrslieb up here with them and have him signal somehow if there's anything we need to let them know."

[Erulasto]

32nd Sommerzeit

As the sun rose, Astoria worked her way through her morning prayers and the ritual donning of her armour as swiftly as she could and maintain respectfulness. Once prepared, she joined the others, working with one of the mining picks to help clear the stone for a while. As they neared completion, the Estalian gathered her shield and weapons instead, ready to descend when they were ready.

"I will join you, if that serves well. If there is something down there, any extra blade will help."

[LeSwordfish]

"I'm in." Ludo said, peering nervously down the well. "Can't be any worse than the library, can it? Or Kheneb. Or..."

He started down the stairs, before he'd had too much time to worry about it.

[LCP]

The steps were narrow and precipitous, with nothing to guard against the sheer drop into darkness on the open side. Ludo had no trouble keeping his balance, but for Astoria in her armour it was a different question altogether. She descended slowly and very, very carefully.

It was perhaps a hundred and twenty feet to the bottom, though the cylindrical shaft of the well itself only extended the few yards it took to penetrate the floor of the tower. Below that, the space around them opened up into what looked like a natural cavern, the steps crept down in an irregular track over walls of undulating limestone. A faint column of daylight filtered in from the mouth well above them; outside its limits, the walls of the cave were hidden in darkness.

Reaching the bottom with the others, Elsa lit up the first of her torches. Dark water reflected the dancing firelight – a deep, still pool in the rough shape of a teardrop, its thin end towards them. Looking up at the shaft through which they had descended, and the remains of broken stalagmites at the water’s edge, Ludo was struck by the way these things fell on one line – as if something had come crashing through at an angle from above.

The disintegrated remains of wooden structures lingered by the water’s edge, long since gone to rot and mould in the damp air. Beyond them, they could just make out a number of vertical fissures in the cavern walls, reaching back into darkness. Some were wide, some were narrow, branching off to all the points of the compass. Where they led, only Ranald knew.

Adelbert Only

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Something about the cavern made Adelbert’s skin crawl. There was something profane about this place, about the dark water that glittered so calmly in the light of Elsa’s torch. Above all, he had a sensation of being watched – as if he was trespassing in a place he didn’t belong.

Elsa Only

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For Elsa, just breathing the air in the cavern was intoxicating. Raw magic wafted on the vapour that rose from the surface of the pool, iridescent as oil. If the tower above had been build to channel the Aethyr, then this was the source.

As she took a step forwards, something in the corner of her eye caught the torchlight. By one of the cracks in what she reckoned to be the north wall of the cavern, a large black feather, still glossy and fresh, had drifted to the ground. Morrslieb was still up above – besides which, this was two or three times bigger than the largest of the raven’s flight feathers. For just a moment, she thought she caught the faintest whiff of ash and iron.

OOC:

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Here’s a map of the cavern, showing the pool and the locations of the openings in the walls.:



You can see the steps you descended on the east wall.

[-Sentinel-]

Elsa only

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So they left me a sign, thought Elsa, eyeing the feather. Perhaps she was being played like a fiddle. Perhaps they were leading her into a trap, or making her do something terrible that would spell doom for countless people. But she also knew they would never leave her alone until she followed the path they had laid for her, and that she had no means of defending herself from them if they grew impatient with her. Just thinking about them, her hand itched where it had last scraped against a nail.

She was scared of them.

More scared than she liked to admit.

But the only way was forward. Elsa had come this far, and refusing to play their games would not make them go away. She only felt guilty about roping her friends into this without telling them the whole truth. She swore to herself that if a moment came where one person had to die down here, she would not shy away from being that person.

Of course, that choice was not always given.

Elsa was silent for a moment. She seemed hesitant, or perhaps troubled.

"This looks like it's actually going somewhere," she said at last in a low voice, pointing at the northern crack. "I'll lead the way. Stay close."

[RossN]

Adelbert

'We are in a fell place,' Adelbert murmured as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. Instinctively he found himself making the sign of the hammer he'd been taught as a boy.

'Elsa can you feel it... almost like being watched?'

[TheSummoner]

Sieghard

"Watched? Do you think something lives down here?" Sieghard asked. The grate had to have been put in place for a reason... perhaps to keep something from escaping...

"Let me walk in front. Astoria, guard the rear."

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(1d100)[67] vs 46 Perception. Sieghard is looking for signs of anything living down here... Tracks, remnants of a recent meal, waste, the like.

[-Sentinel-]

'Elsa can you feel it... almost like being watched?'

"That's a common feeling when you have the wizard's sight," said Elsa, trying to sound dismissive. "Mundane people are blissfully ignorant of how often something is watching them."


"Let me walk in front. Astoria, guard the rear."

Elsa looked like she was about to object to Sieghard taking the lead, then decided against it.

[LCP]

Another, much smaller pool hugged the side of the passageway Elsa had chosen, extending just a few yards to the point where the tunnel started to narrow. Kicking a pebble over the edge, Adelbert watched it sink out of sight. There was no sign of a bottom - who knew how much more of the cave system lay beneath their feet, drowned under dark water?

The tunnel ran surprisingly straight, radiating away from the cavern. Past the entrance, it was just wide enough for two of the party to pass one another, though it seemed to Sieghard's eyes to be slowly narrowing as they advanced away from the pool. Darkness waited ahead of them, and darkness followed behind them, the light of the torch only reaching about ten yards ahead.

After they had followed the tunnel some distance into the dark, it began to narrow further. Sieghard paused, suspecting a dead end. At the edge of the torchlight up ahead, he thought he could see a side passage branching off to the left, a crooked crack in the rock barely wide enough to squeeze through in single file.

Ludo

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Walking 'safely' in the centre of the group, Ludo had been idly trailing his hand along the rock wall, the way he'd used to on visits to the mineshaft back in Sermena. As he approached where Sieghard had stopped, he felt his fingers brush against what felt like worked stone. It could just be structural, there to brace up the cavern roof or the remains of some obstacle that had been removed - but he could have sworn he felt a seam.

OOC:

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Never know when Trade (Miner) will come in handy!

[Erulasto]

Once safely down, Astoria lit up her own torch and held it aloft. For now, she kept her sword sheathed at her hip - but her polished shield was held tightly in hand. Copper eyes narrowed at Adelbert's statement of being watched, and as calmly as she was able, she let her gaze sweep to and fro.

"If something does dwell down here, I do not suspect it would be living. Not by any stretch of the imagination."

A simple nod was all the knight gave to Sieghard as she fell in behind her companions, occasionally turning to cast a cautious glance behind her. As they approached the end of the tunnel, Astoria set her torch down on the ground behind them to set a perimeter of light while her hand fell to the pommel of her blade. Her spear would prove to only be a hindrance in such tight confines.

"I do not like this..." she muttered softly.

[LeSwordfish]

"Um", Ludo said, sudden in the quiet of the cave. "Someone's done something here."

He was carefully moving his fingertips across one section of the wall, brow furrowed in concentration. "This rock here is worked stone. Someone dug this out, or shored the tunnel up, or something. Or... feel this." He drew his dagger and started tracing the wall with it's point, trying to follow something up and around. "There's a seam here. Like a doorway or something." Ludo paused, then brought his lantern as close to the wall as possible, inspecting the stone closely.

[RossN]

Adelbert

Despite (or maybe because of) his unease Adelbert's mouth quirked in amusement. 'Secret rooms in ruined fortresses... I feel like in the Nuln Players production of The Desolate Prisoner of Karak Kadrin.'

The priest glanced thoughtfully at Elsa. 'Can you sense if this door - if that is what it is - would be trapped by sorcery?'

[LCP]

By the close light of the lamp, the seam in the stone was more clearly visible. Some effort had clearly been made to disguise it, the rock to both sides doing its best to blend in with the natural walls of the tunnel - but to Ludo's eyes it certainly seemed like it traced the outline of a door.

Searching its surface with the lantern, Ludo could find no sign of a handle or keyhole, just a few symbols scratched shallowly onto the stone. They were not any letters he could read, but reminded him of the symbols on the wavy-bladed dagger they had found on their last visit to the ruins above. Primitive and ugly, Elsa could not sense anything out of the ordinary about them. Perhaps they might once have held some glamour or curse, but if they had the magic had long since leaked away.

[-Sentinel-]

"No magic," said Elsa, sounding disappointed.

She brought the torch closer, her brow furrowing, and ran her fingers over the symbols. Was there a password? A spell to cast? If so, it would mean the door was magical, but it felt perfectly mundane to her. Perhaps this was no door at all, but a wall that had been put in place to block off a passageway.

<Open up, stupid door,> she whispered half-heartedly in the language of magick, not believing for a second that it would work.

If only I had charcoal... oh wait, I do!

She used the fire of her torch to light up a second torch, which she handed to Sieghard. She then put out the first torch with the contents of her waterskin. She pressed a sheet of parchment to the symbols and used the charred stub of her first torch to print the symbolst. Perhaps she would one day find someone who could translate the language, or at least identify it.

[TheSummoner]

Sieghard

"Waste of a perfectly good torch," Sieghard grumbled. Once Elsa had finished, he handed the other torch back to her. "If it's a door, I doubt it's very thick. Let me try..."

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And if it's a magic door with no magic holding it in place anymore, I doubt it's very sturdy either.

(1d100)[34] vs 51 str to try to just cut the knot and knock the door down.

If this doesn't work, we still have the pickaxes.

[LCP]

The crunch when Sieghard collided with the doorway came from his shoulder, not the door. That was real stone, alright - Sieghard could already tell he was going to have a champion of a bruise.

[LeSwordfish]

"I've got wax, you know." Ludo said as Elsa tried her trick with the charcoal - though he didn't press the issue as he suspected it had long ago disintegrated somewhere at the bottom of his backpack.

That reminded him, though - he drew the crowbar from his bag and tried to insert it into the gap. "Maybe we can lever it."

[LCP]

The crack was too narrow to easily admit the tip of the crowbar, but Ludo was able to widen it by chipping away at the limestone to either side. Finally managing to work the crowbar into the gap, he braced his feet against the wall of the tunnel and pulled with all his might. He thought he felt something shift, but the door remained firmly closed.

Sometimes you did need the big people. Wiping his brow and handing over the crowbar, Ludo let Sieghard take a turn. As Sieghard grimaced and strained, they were rewarded with a groan of tortured metal from behind the door. Whatever lock or latch held it shut, it was starting to give.

The five of them froze in place as another sound swelled up to fill the caverns in reply. Echoing down the tunnel from the same direction they had come came the keening wail they had heard the first night they camped in Harmugstahl, far louder and clearer than before. There was no breath of wind down in these damp tunnels - the sound had come from something living. Something large.

[RossN]

Adelbert

Adelbert shuddered, whispered a prayer to Verena, Sigmar and Ulric and drew his shortsword.

[TheSummoner]

Sieghard

"Have you gone mad, Scrieber?" Sieghard snapped when he saw him reaching for his weapons. He pushed harder to pry the door open. "Help me. If it's as big as it sounds, it won't be able to follow."

He glanced towards Elsa. "If any of them up top have any stupid ideas about checking what the noise was, have the bird stop them."

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(1d100)[49] Another strength test if you want it.

Narrow pass.

[LCP]

With a metallic pop, the door finally gave way. Swinging out under the leverage of the crowbar, it revealed on its other side the rust-streaked remnants of a fairly mundane-looking iron bolt, its mountings pulled out of the four-inch slab of stone that constituted the door itself.

Beyond it was a dark, cramped passageway. Wide enough to admit only one of them at a time, it twisted like a snake, following the contours of whatever natural fissure had been here before the door was installed. There was no telling where it led.

[-Sentinel-]

Elsa shivered at the scream. It had come from behind them. This meant they might have to deal with that thing on their way out.

But you always knew this wasn't going to be that easy, didn't you? Don't lie to yourself.


"If any of them up top have any stupid ideas about checking what the noise was, have the bird stop them."

"Will do," said Elsa. She called Morrslieb: If any of the people we left outside try to follow, give them a few warning caws. This would do little to stop them if they were determined, but it was the best the raven could do, short of serving as a conduit for a spell.

She peered at the darkness ahead. "I'm not wagering everything on that thing being unable to follow. Let's keep Astoria at the back of the group, just in case, and our less skilled fighters in the middle." She inclined her head towards Ludo and Adelbert. "No offense intended."


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"Waste of a perfectly good torch," Sieghard grumbled.

Hardly wasted. We can still light it again if we have to.

But I wish I'd known Ludo had wax.

[Erulasto]

”What in the name of Myrmidia was that?” Astoria hissed, turning fully to face the darkness of the tunnel behind them. A gauntleted hand gripped at her blade tightly, while she squinted into the darkness as if it would part for her to reveal whatever threats lay shrouded therein.

”Hopefully whatever it is cannot find its way through the hole we opened to get down here in the first place.” muttered the knight.

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Perception!

(1d100)[63] vs INT 47

[LCP]

Astoria could make out nothing waiting for them in the shadows of the secret passage, but then, she could only see a few yards before the tunnel twisted around a bend.

From the passageway behind them, subtle sounds of movement were growing louder. It was difficult to tell from the noise what kind of creature was making it – it sounded like the slithering of a reptile, like the scuttling of an insect, like the slow scrape of a wounded man dragging himself along the ground. Most of all, it sounded like they should be somewhere else. Leading the way, Sieghard hurried into the tunnel; Astoria brought up the rear, closing the stone door behind her.

The tunnel was a tight squeeze, even for Ludo. It meandered back and forth, following only the whims of stone and water; at one point its ceiling dipped low enough that the tall folk had to crawl. Thankfully, it was not long – before they had gone too far, they came to another door, far less cunningly disguised. Its iron lock was rusted solid, but the crowbar made short work of breaking it open. With a squeal of long-unused hinges, it swung open.

Ludo had to take back his assessment of the second door’s disguise – on the other side, it was a bookcase, its shelves still stacked with a number of mouldering books. It opened onto a chamber about the size of his father’s study back in Sermena – like the passageway, clearly a part of the original caves, but unlike the passageway, extensively worked.

The left side of the cave had been levelled out into a smooth dais, complete with a short flight of steps. On it stood more shelves, a wardrobe, a lectern, even a desk with a fine high-backed chair. Whoever had so thoroughly destroyed the ruins above clearly hadn’t found this place – its books and furniture had not been disturbed. The damp had done its best in their stead, the close air filled with the musty smell of rotting wood and parchment.

Directly across from where they had entered stood a larger door, this one making no attempt to conceal itself. On the right-hand side of the room, where the floor was lower, there were far fewer furnishings. A couple of free-standing iron braziers, the ashes in them long cold and solidified, and a rusted torch sconce on the wall were all that Ludo could see.

Between them, a circle had been carved into the rough limestone of the cavern floor, as perfect as if it had been drawn with a compass. Around its edge, characters were chiselled into the rock, similar to the scratch-mark glyphs they had seen on the door. Nothing stood within it – only blank, uneven stone.

Elsa Only

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The scent of old magic was rich in the musty air of this chamber. Those runes of the floor were some kind of circle of protection, their strange lines still clinging to some dregs of power. It was odd though that the lectern stood outside the circle, facing it. As far as her studies at the Bright College had taught her, such circles were always supposed to be drawn around the caster.

There was something else, too, a faint pull on the Aethyr from among the clutter up on the dais. Before she could locate it, however, she was distracted by the way the shadows in the room seemed to flicker at the edges of the torchlight, circling fitfully around Adelbert. If she let her imagination roam, they almost looked like avian figures, crouching in the darkness.

You bring others, hissed a cracked voice that she knew only she could hear.
He will not understand, came the second voice, faint as the rustle of falling ash.
He will seek to take it from you, whispered the third.

Adelbert Only

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Something about this hidden room didn’t sit right with Adelbert. The cold metal of his owl talisman seemed to press against his breast, the sense of the profane he had felt by the water rising up stronger than before. Every way he looked, the same pattern seemed to repeat itself, whether in the spines of books, the texture of the rock, or the random fall of shadows. It was the twisting, fish-tailed symbol of Cacophrax’s god.

[TheSummoner]

Sieghard

”Hopefully whatever it is cannot find its way through the hole we opened to get down here in the first place.”

"I doubt it," Sieghard said, already making his way down the passageway. "The hole's older than the grate over the top and there wouldn't be any reason for a doorway if the wizards who used to haunt this place weren't using it as well as what's up top. I can only guess they were using the creature as some sort of guard." One that hasn't wasted away despite the countless years that have passed since then...

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Sieghard took a few steps around the perimeter of the room, trying to think of what could be so important about this place that it had been kept so well hidden. "Did you know something like this would be down here?" he asked Elsa.

[RossN]

Adelbert

Adelbert looked like he'd been punched in the stomach. The priest looked around himself, eyes wide, skin pale and mouth opening and closing of its own accord. It took him many moments to recover enough to speak and even then his voice was faltering.

'This is no mere library ladies and gentlemen.' He looked at Elsa. 'That symbol - can you see it? You realise what it means? We... we have to alert the Temple. That or burn everything here on the spot.'

He turned to Sieghard. 'I strongly advise everyone keeping as far far as possible from that circle.' Adelbert gestured at the ground.

[-Sentinel-]

"Well, would you look at this," said Elsa smugly as they entered the room. "There was something left for us to find, after all." The circle in particular seemed to intrigue her.

"Did you know something like this would be down here?" asked Sieghard.

"Not specifically, no," admitted Elsa. "But I knew there was bound to be a place that the tower's attackers couldn't touch. We wizards are a resourceful lot. Living like we do, we have no choice."

For a moment she seemed to be staring above Adelbert's shoulder. Then the priest spoke, and she snapped back to reality.

"Burn this?" she half snarled; for once, adamantly opposed to the notion of setting fire to anything. "What are you, a witch hunter? I thought you Verenans were about gathering knowledge, not destroying it blindly. And no, I don't know what that symbol means," she added, not even looking at it.

They were only starting to explore! For a start, what was that thing tugging at Elsa's mind, on the dais? She headed in that direction to have a look at it, though she kept Adelbert on the edge of her vision in case he tried something.

[TheSummoner]

Sieghard

"Not a lot of places for the smoke to go," Sieghard pointed out. "Set a fire now and we're likely to end up choking ourselves and stumbling into the thing while trying to catch our breath." That possibility concerned him far more than some rough markings cut into the floor.

[LCP]

The shelves on the dais were heavy with books and papers. Much of the exposed parchment had crumbled into fragments, including a whole grid of wooden pigeon-holes that looked once to have been stuffed with letters. Those sealed in scroll-cases or bound behind leather covers had survived better, but the smell of mould and mildew was still strong around them.

There might once have been a good number of loose papers on the desk too - now all that remained of them was dust and sprouting fungus, a lead paperweight sitting vainly amid the decay. A brass inkwell and bottles of ink that had long ago dried to purplish flakes sat alongside a number of metal canisters etched with curling floral designs. Opening one, Elsa squinted at the contents. It looked like some kind of incense - what kind, she had no idea, but it smelt expensive.

A cursory examination was enough to satisfy her that none of these objects were what had attracted her attention. That left only one thing that she could see - a tarnished silver hand mirror, its rim fashioned to resemble the folded wings of a bird. The glass was unblemished, but had a curious tint, throwing the colours of what it reflected slightly out of true.

Elsa Only

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Examining her reflection in the mirror, Elsa saw a different woman looking back. It was still her... but where she wore her dusty travelling clothes, the Elsa in the mirror wore magisterial robes of countless splendid colours. Her hair had grown back full and lustrous, and on her head sat a silver crown, its points crafted to resemble twisting flames. The rest of the cavern was reduced to shadows behind her splendour, their grey shapes conspiring to suggest the outline of a throne...

[Erulasto]

The study was..surprising to Astoria, and she walked slowly around the room as she took it all in. Steel-clad fingertips trailed down the spines of several books upon the shelves as she passed, eyeing them with a fair bit of curiosity.

”What symbols, Brother Adelbert?” Astoria asked, pausing as she made her way past the bookshelves. ”Is this the abode of a wizard?”

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Any books that would catch Astoria’s attention?

Here’s a Perception test.

(1d100)[92] vs INT 47