Lessons from the Mists: Session 3 - The Cellar

Welcome back to Lessons from the Mists! This session, the heroes explore the cellars beneath the Durst manor. Let's get started.

Our heroes descend into the dungeon beneath the Durst house and hear the distant wailing of a baby. They begin exploring the Durst cult initiate’s quarters and the senior members’ quarters. At first, the party surmises that the initiate’s quarters were a prison, but Mary Sue Ann is able to figure out quickly from her time as a servant of a noble house that these were the living quarters of a lower rank than those in the room below. Oonagh investigates the room and finds a log book with notes on the cult’s sacrifices, as well as a ring of keys that unlocks footlockers that contain various art objects, gemstones, and a silvered shortsword.

The heroes find a passageway deeper into the basement, but double back to explore the crypts. Angvar, a retired gravekeeper, has a flash of insight where he is able to tell everyone about the crypts he finds and what they might mean (a sufficiently wealthy family might add graves to their crypts when a new member of the family is added because of their inevitable death). The party explores every crypt and discovers the swarm of centipedes in Elisabeth’s crypt. The heroes believe that Elisabeth may be the villain and the downfall of the family was her doing.

The heroes explore the dining room where they find human bones on the floor. Moving west, they are faced with three passages and the strong smell of death and decay, though they hear the baby’s wailing growing louder. They move into a shrine built to Strahd, and hands burst through the earth to attack them - four ghouls rise from the earth! Kane boosted Angvar’s AC to a whopping 22 with a shield of faith, and the ghouls could not get through the choke point of the tunnels. Angvar comes close to getting paralyzed from the ghoul’s claws, barely scraping by with a 10 on the Con save, and takes some damage, but our heroes escape with their lives.

Angvar and Kane retreat back to the dining room for a short rest where Angvar asks Kane how he came to worship Kelemvor. Kane responded that he was once a field medic in a mercenary company, and that he saw quite a lot of death. Kane explains that the way you cope with seeing it that much is to accept it rather than resist it; In his search for meaning, he found the teachings of the god of the dead. Kelemvor teaches that death is a part of a natural cycle of life; all things must come to an end. Angvar accepts that and thinks it is good that Kane is here with them, wherever here is.

Mary Sue Ann searches the shrine to Strahd, but is very wary of the orb in the statue’s hand, believing it to be the source of a magical explosion that seared the souls of those chained in the room onto the walls. She determines it is an arcane focus, but decides to leave it be for now.

Oonagh continues to scout ahead, and discovers the corpse of Gustav hanging from a beam in his bedroom, with a piece of paper in his coat pocket. She relays this information to the party after their rest, and they all return to Gustav’s corpse. Strangely, the corpse looks fresh, unlike the skeletons of the children found up above. The note is a suicide note apologizing to his children for what he and Elisabeth put them through. Our heroes search the chest and find the loot the Durst cult stole from the previous adventurers they murdered.

Suddenly, an explosion of dirt and earth: a ghoul stands before the party, flesh sloughing off her bones, with bulbous eyes, patchy hair, the remnants of a tattered black cloak hanging from her. They realize this is Elisabeth Durst, now changed into a hateful undead. She isn’t immediately hostile, and so the heroes speak to her. She says that Walter, the bastard, waits below, calls Margaret a whore. She speaks on her quest for immortality that was twisted and corrupted by the “Dark Powers of this land.” The heroes are disgusted by what this mother did to her child, decide she needs to die. She screams at them to get out of her house.

And that’s where we left it!

Though there were some hiccups on the scale of rooms (my fault), I think the graph paper method of dungeon crawling worked really well. It gave the players a concrete idea of how the location fit together which helped them navigate well, gave them a sense of progress, and prevented them from spending too much time in a single location once they felt like they had seen everything.

The combat encounters with the ghouls and the centipedes fell victim to the heroes not being able to roll really well, and so I did have to fudge a few dice rolls on my end or else these low level heroes would get SMOKED. Mostly, however, it was changing their AC behind the screen so that the heroes would hit rather than miss and drag the fight into a slog. The centipede encounter we did in theater of the mind, but I drew out a map for the combat encounter with the ghouls so that the players could use tactical positioning and use the tunnels for a choke point, which allowed them to succeed much easier.

The encounter with Elisabeth near the end felt good. My players were properly disgusted by her, had an immediate instinct to attack, but realized that I had not called for combat yet, and so they talked with her a little bit, which gave them even more reason to attack this wretched creature. I think it worked out great.

For Next Session:

Next session we’ll finish Death House, and depending on how long that takes, advance the characters up to 3rd level, and possibly enter the Village of Barovia to begin the campaign proper. We’ll also get to that secret that I’ve been keeping from some players. No spoilers on that front!

Until next time!