|
28 Fierdos 1120
Shadow Hunt
The days following their return from the Moonlands were quite busy for the heroes of the Torchwood. Marhaven's Lord Mayor was so pleased to have his son returned both discreetly and in full health that he arranged for a parade and celebratory banquet to be held in honor of the party. Officially this was in recognition of their defeat of the Fell Armada, but both Ander and Orin made speeches praising the party's selflessness and bravery. To those few who knew the facts, it was a clear and heartfelt thanks. Then there were the mundane tasks that come with an adventurer's life. Vondran took the hide he had saved from the black dragon (The Dragon's Tomb) to an armorer to be fashioned into a superior suit of dragonhide armor. The various weapons and low-level magic items taken from the Commanders, but of no use to the party themselves, were appraised and sold to fund future operations. There were provisions to stock and training to be taken. Then, as things were beginning to quiet down for Marhaven's newest citizens, a messenger arrived with a sealed letter.
None of the heroes had heard of Tarus Belliard before. The quality of the materials and writing in the note, and the garb of the servant who waited for their response, clearly conveyed wealth and high social status. An adventuring party can always use contacts of that sort, so the group chose to accept Belliard's offer. The courier informed them that the Shadowdancer would be arriving in Marhaven the next day at the southwest docks and took his leave. The group used their time to do a little asking around. They found that most people had heard of Tarus Belliard but knew little about him specifically. He was generally held to be wealthy and a bit eccentric, given to lavish parties and hunting of game and inviting only the cream of society to join him in these activities. An invitation to one of Belliard's house parties was a rare honor, it seemed. It was late afternoon the next day when the Shadowdancer pulled up to the southwest dock. The party boarded eagerly and found that the ship was easily the most luxurious craft they had yet experienced. She was a theurgeme, driven by a huge magically-powered paddle wheel at the stern. The staterooms were as spacious and comfortable as the rooms in a mansion and the galley area hummed with activity as Belliard's staff prepared their dinner. Bensonmum, a junior officer, showed the party to their rooms and invited them to explore the ship as they wished. Dinner, he told them, would be on the main deck under the stars. Marhaven had receded into the distance by the time the party was summoned for dinner. Dressed in their finest, with armor and most weapons secured in their staterooms, they ascended to the main deck and met their host. Tarus Belliard was a pale-skinned man with a polished, formal manner. He looked to be in his mid forties, reasonably built, and obviously a man of leisure and class. He greeted each of this guests by name individually and introduced them to his two companions, Amanda and Kantos. Like Belliard, Amanda and Kantos looked the picture of idle aristocracy; they were clearly his proteges. Dinner proved to be every bit as extravagant as the ship itself. Five courses of succulent, gourmet dishes were placed before the group along with exotic fine wines. Tarus and his friends ate with relish and encouraged the group to do the same while Tarus asked polite questions about the party's adventures in the Moonlands and before. His family, he volunteered, had its origins in the area that is now Gross Fell. Family legend says that several of his ancestors were killed by Elizar Branded-Hand, whom the party had destroyed (The Dragon's Tomb) while on their mission. The rest of his family had relocated to Nessen and ultimately worked to acquire the wealth he now enjoys. The group out of natural caution was friendly but guarded. Tika told the story of their battles with the Fell Armada as folklore, slightly exaggerating the threat of the enemy and leaving out most details of the party's strategies and powers. Tarus noted that as most of the Fell Armada seemed to be lycanthropes, the party must have equipped itself with plenty of silver weapons. Vondran began to talk about the Arm of Telomir. Tika kicked him under the table to cut him off but it was too late; Vondran had put himself in the position of having to explain, at least vaguely, the background of his legacy weapon. At the end of dinner Tarus and his friends excused themselves for the night citing the need to rest for the morning's hunt. The deer population on his grounds, Tarus explained, was running a bit high and could stand thinning. The group expressed their desire to accompany him on the hunt and they parted company for the night. An hour or so after dinner the party was still up, some walking around the ship and others quietly meditating in their rooms, so when the night turned unnaturally dark several of them noticed immediately. They convened on the main deck and saw that the stars and moon were now completely hidden in darkness. With almost no natural light the ship and the water took on an eerie sort of look that was ominous even to Loki, who has darkvision. They found the pilot, who agreed that the onset of darkness was unnerving but assured the party that they were still on course and would have no trouble finding the island. The stars may not be available to steer by, he said, but his compass was still working and the ship was on course. Since the pilot wasn't worried the party retired to bed for the night. When they rose in the morning the group noticed two things immediately: the murky darkness was still in full force, and the ship was no longer moving. They put on their gear and went looking for the crew or their hosts, only to find the ship apparently empty and tied up to a dock on a dark, creepy-looking island. A decrepit castle loomed in the distance, its outline barely visible in the shadows. At Tika's urging the party descended to the lower deck where Belliard's stateroom would be. They burst through the locked door to find the room in order: the sheets were rumpled and the closet empty, as if the room had been used and then vacated. Loki insisted on breaking down the doors to the other rooms as well and they looked the same, though slightly less opulent than Tarus's room. There was no sign of a struggle, but also no sign of their hosts. A note tied to the wheel in the pilot house made things more clear.
The heroes took stock of their options. From what their eyes could discern the island offered three choices: a flat, open section to the south; a creepy wooded area to the north; and the castle itself, due east. They quickly dismissed the south side as indefensible territory. The woods seemed more likely to provide a hiding place of some sort, but Tarus would know those woods and any likely position of advantage far better than they would. That left the ship and the castle. The implied sneer in Belliard's second note made that choice simple. With weapons in hand the party disembarked and prepared to take the fight directly to Tarus. Only Loki could see naturally in the semi-darkness, so Vondran invoked the hunt by night power of the Arm of Telomir and Tika cast ebon eyes on the rest of the party. Then they formed up and hustled to the front door of the mansion. Time was short, as the ebon eyes would last less than an hour and a half, so the group simply kicked in the front door and invaded the mansion. A grand foyer led them directly into a receiving room and into the arms of a waiting enemy. Vondran spotted a pair of shadowy, indistinct figures hovering overhead and threw his harpoon at one. The blade passed through the creature doing no observable harm. Tika noted enough of this to deduce that there may be incorporeal undead in the room, though she couldn't see them herself, and held aloft the holy symbol of Pelor. Sure enough, three shadows retreated to the far side of the room and hovered over the cold fireplace. As Tika turned the shadows a cloud of misty vapors swirled behind her and coalesced into the form of Amanda. A silvery blade of energy formed in her right hand and she plunged it into Tika's back. Ash responded with a scorching ray but missed the mark. Loki charged a psychic strike and rushed forward to engage the rival soulknife. She dodged his thrust and returned it with a psychic strike of her own. The sly smile left her face, however, when she was hit by Vondran with the Arm of Telomir and then by magic missiles from Ash. Amanda fixed her gaze on Vondran for a moment and stepped aside. The darfellan readied his weapon, remained in place, and threw it expertly at Ash. The harpoon caught and held in Ash's side and the pain of the wound caused her to lose the scorching ray spell she was preparing to cast at Amanda, as well as a large portion of her health. Karu lunged at Vondran to restrain him but failed and received a nasty bite from Vondran for his efforts. The spritual weapon Tika had conjured up earlier managed to connect with Amanda but her immediate worry was the damage Vondran would to to Ash if he pulled out the harpoon as he normally did to an enemy. She cast magic circle against evil, which freed Vondran from Amanda's control. Between the vaporous entry and the blatant use of a dominate gaze effect it became obvious to the party that they were dealing with a vampire. Loki swore under his breath at the realization that Amanda was immune to his psychic strike ability but could still inflict psychic strikes on him and his allies. He also grew irritated at how difficult the vampiress was to hit and how his mind blade was unable to do more than trivial damage because of her vampiric resistance to wounds. Amanda seemed to realize this too. Despite Loki's position in front of her she threw her mindblade at Tika, who was moving to help Ash even as her spiritual weapon scored another hit. Tika managed to work the harpoon out of Ash's side without doing any further damage, which allowed Ash to cast a scorching ray that hit solidly and wounded Amanda. The vampire responded by throwing her psychic-strike-empowered mind blade at Ash. It hit the mark and put Ash on the floor unconscious. Karu realized that he had no effective weapon against a vampire and used his next move to help Ash by feeding her a cure light wounds potion. This enabled Tika to cast silver weapon on his luck blade, along with her +1 shortspear and the gauntlet they had taken from Bartolus (Plague on Moorfield). Now they had some more effective weaponry to use. Consecutive hits from Vondran and Loki caused Amanda to dissolve into gaseous form. The mist flowed quickly through a doorway and out of the room, but the party would not call the encounter over just yet. While Loki led the group in chasing the gaseous Amanda, Ash took a moment to fireball the shadows out of existence before following. The gas moved swiftly through the house, but so did the pursuing heroes. They chased the gas through the kitchens and down a winding stone staircase to the basement, where it disappeared through a steel grate in a stone wall. Loki banged on the grate with his mind blade and opened a hole big enough for Ash's familiar Tak to pass through. The weasel crawled down a passage too small for any of the party to follow and then came running back in a panic. The evil lady, he told Ash, was in there and had tried to attack Tak. Knowing that Amanda would be healing by the second, Tika quickly cast stone shape to enlarge the opening. Loki lunged down the newly-widened tunnel first and took a blow from Amanda's mind blade as he cleared the far end. Vondran and Karu followed, with Tika next but choosing to remain in the tunnel mouth, where she readied her cure serious wounds wand to use against the vampire if she could reach. It proved to be unnecessary, as hits from Vondran, Karu and Loki did enough damage to turn Amanda back into gaseous form. She had no choice but to flow into one of two stone sarcophagi that were the only contents of this small chamber. The party assembled in the tiny room knowing that their enemy would be helpless in her coffin for the next hour. Loki and Vondran shoved the stone lid aside to reveal a wooden coffin inside, then pried open the lid of that to reveal the still form of Amanda. Loki borrowed the Arm of Telomir from Vondran and sliced her head off, causing the vampire's body to disintegrate into vapor and then vanish for good. Left inside the coffin were her clothes and jewelry, including a fine silver ring that Amanda had worn on her weapon hand. Loki took that ring and noticed that it gave his mind blade a silvery sheen. With under an hour of ebon eyes left the party took to searching the house. They now assumed that both Kantos and Tarus were also vampires and would be waiting for them somewhere with reinforcements. A hasty run through the upper parts of the house turned up the ship's crew and the domestic staff, all hunkered down in their quarters and unable to help because they were under the control of Tarus but at least no threat themselves. They found and took valuables from what looked to be the vampires' rooms and noted in passing that there was no third coffin in evidence. It was upstairs in Belliard's trophy room that they found another ambush waiting for them. As Vondran and Loki burst through that door they were brushed by long, shadowy arms and felt a nasty chill run through their bodies. These were different from the undead shadows in the entry, however, and Tika's instincts told here they were not undead and so could not be turned. Instead she conjured a spiritual weapon to pound on one. As the party moved to engage the enemy a stream of hundreds of bats flew in through an open window and swarmed around them. The mass of bats were annoying and potentially sickening but not a deadly threat; the party stood their ground or shifted just a little to stay out of their path and continued to fight. Figuring there was likely a vampire in the room along with apparently a pair of evil elementals, Tika cast a holy storm in the room. The rain did some damage to the black creatures -- shadow elementals -- but had no affect on the bats. Once again, however, a misty form coalesced behind Tika and favored her with a flanking attack. This time it was Kantos, and rather than a weapon he simply reached out and touched her with a finger. Tika felt intense pain from the wracking touch and was barely able to alert the group to Kantos's presence. Fortunately Ash saw the attack and was able to send a scorching ray his way. Loki also noted his appearance and moved to help Tika, though his first attack went wild and actually hit her with an accidental psychic strike. The vampire's response was nearly devastating to the party. He backed up a few paces, ignoring the spiritual weapon which was now directed at him, and cast a stinking cloud on the spot where Ash stood. Ash, Tika, and Loki all succumbed to the toxic vapors and were nearly incapacitated by intense nausea and vomiting. There was nothing they could do but crawl out of the cloud and wait for the effects to pass. That left Karu and Vondran to engage the vampire. Vondran let the holy storm finish off the shadow elementals and ran up to Kantos with the Arm of Telomir ready. Kantos hit him with a vampiric touch and backed away again up the hallway. Karu was on the other side of the stinking cloud but took the calculated risk of running through the cloud while holding his breath. He managed to get through the cloud without succumbing and joined Vondran in front of Kantus. The vampire faded back again and hit Vondran with a ray of enfeeblement that sapped his strength and enraged his spirit. Vondran hurled his harpoon and got it stuck in Kantos's body. As he pulled it free Kantos cast protection from good and drew a black iron rod from a sheath at his belt. He flailed at Karu and then scored a telling blow against the weakened Vondran, but the Arm of Telomir hit one more time and forced Kantos into gaseous form. Kantos retreated down the stairs, but the party was in no hurry to follow him. They knew where he was going and that he'd be helpless there for the next hour. They waited a few minutes for the effects of the vampire's spells to fade before returning to the coffin room. As they had expected, they found a helpless Kantos in the second coffin. This time Vondran did the honors and separated the vampire's head from his body. He reached for the iron rod, which was clearly a magical weapon of some kind, but as soon as he gripped it a deadly cold shock ran through him and he felt himself become weaker from a negative energy attack. The rod was clearly evil and would drain the life from any non-evil who held it. They carefully transferred the rod to Tika's bag of holding and resolved to destroy it later. With one more vampire presumably at large and ready for them, the party took stock of their resources. Tika was nearly out of spells and would have to resort to using the party's valuable cure serious wounds wand as a weapon if they faced Tarus that day. The ebon eyes spells were about to wear off as well, and she didn't have enough spell power left to recast them. Vondran needed a rest to restore his damaged constitution and several in the party had wounds that needed healing. So Tika used her last spell slot to cast stone shape again, sealing the coffin room so that even a gaseous creature could not enter, and the group settled down to rest.
Once the group was fully rested and the spellcasters had replenished their minds, Tika reopened the tunnel with another stone shape and the group set out in search of Tarus. They prepared as before with ebon eyes and, knowing what Tarus would be capable of, another magic circle against evil. Tarus was not in the house, so the party opted to hunt for him on the castle grounds. They found a graveyard full of ancient, worn stones in the back and worked their way through that until they were surrounded by a trio of familiar-looking canine shapes: shadow mastiffs. Loki in particular had vivid memories of the panic-inducing power of a shadow mastiff's bray, but the magic circle against evil gave them all confidence. They charged to attack, figuring Tarus would show himself soon. After a day of fighting incorporeal creatures and vampires the shadow mastiffs were relatively easy to hit, and the party hit almost unfailingly at first. The mastiffs retaliated with bite attacks but only Vondran was hit. His enemy leveraged the bite and threw Vondran to the ground with a trip attack. Vondran looked up from the ground in time to see Tarus standing over him. The vampire was grinning and brandishing a rapier with a wispy black blade. The blade plunged into Vondran and seemed to explode in a burst of profane energy that sent intense chills through his body. He managed to tumble away and stand up in time to see Ash target Tarus with a magic missile volley and Loki close in with his now-silver mind blade. The crucial blow came from Tika by way of a new spell, moon bolt. A beam of light flew from Tika to Tarus and rendered the vampire helpless. Loki took pleasure in delivering a coup de grace, which caused the remaining shadow mastiffs to abandon the battle. To the party's surprise the gaseous form of Tarus flowed away from the castle and out toward the dock. They followed it on to the Shadowdancer and down into the bilge area of the ship. Vondran and Karu pried open floor boards to discover the form of Tarus lying at the bottom of the ship. Loki stabbed it again with his mind blade, but the body only dissolved into gas and flowed to another part of the ship. Ash was the first to realize that the Shadowdancer itself was Tarus Belliard's coffin -- in order to truly destroy Tarus they would also have to destroy the ship. Knowing that Tarus would be unable to act for an hour, the party quickly offloaded anything of value from the ship and cut the ropes tying it to the dock. They hit Tarus with one more blow to ensure he would stay down, set the ship on fire, and watched the remains of it sink below the water. Tarus hovered in his gaseous form, unable to flow into the water and unable to form a material body again. The party watched as his time ran out and the cloud decomposed forever. This left the party with a long list of unanswered questions, chief among them being how they would return to Marhaven. The vampire's slaves, now freed from his domination, confirmed what Ash had suspected, that the magic ship had transported them not just across water but across a planar boundary -- they were now on the Plane of Shadow, a plane that occupied the same space as the Material Plane but in a separate dimension. They not only had to find Marhaven again, but they also had to find a way to cross the planar boundary without the magic of the Shadowdancer to help them. The books and papers in Belliard's library provided some answers. Ash and Tika examined a black cubic gem they had found in the house, something Tarus had valued enough to keep in a locked and trapped drawer. In the library they found notes describing it as a cubic gate, a powerful magical device created to enable a user to travel instantly and accurately to any of six planes. This particular cube, judging by the runes on the faces, would allow access to the Material Plane, the Astral Plane, the Plane of Shadow, the Negative Energy Plane, the Outlands, and the first layer of the Abyss. Most of these places were unwise destinations for a living traveler, but the Material Plane would do very nicely. Also in the library they found evidence of Belliard's motive for the hunt. According to journals they found, Tarus Belliard was not a descendant of people from Gross Fell; he was himself born in the Moonlands and was turned into a vampire by Elizar Branded-Hand some 300 years ago. He had escaped the uprising that left Elizar sealed in his tomb and, freed of his old master's influence, had set to gathering wealth by all available means in order to fund a comfortable eternal unlife. His hunts were a sporadic source of entertainment, deliberately kept quiet and few to avoid undue notice. The party deduced that news of Elizar's demise had brought them to Belliard's attention and probably roused some desire for revenge. After gathering their things, their new treasures, and the captives from the house, the group activated the gate for the Material Plane. They stepped through and found themselves in a cool, swampy area that seemed roughly similar to the terrain of Tarus's island but there was no castle in sight. Ash looked at the coastline and the sky and deduced that the party was on the edge of the Swamps of Tierthas, a marshy no man's land south of the Tumari Coalition. They recalled that travel on the Plane of Shadow is faster than on the Material -- apparently the Shadowdancer had covered some 300 miles in a single night by plane shifting. Since even returing to the shadow plane would not enable the group to walk on water, however, they put the cube away and started walking. The nearest civilization, as near as they could tell, would be the Tumari city of Survale ... a mere 80-mile trek. At least they a good cook with them.
<MR> This adventure was inspired by reading Tarus's Banquet, a free downloadable module by Sean K. Reynolds available from Wizards of the Coast. |