The Upper Tower
General Summary
Excerpt from Seir’s Little Black Book (Session 11/17/21): Penned in Borokin’s hand, via dictation
I investigated around the base of the weird clay creatures, to see if they were powering something like an elevator that I could activate. I noticed that the symbols at the front door seemed to have changed in my wanderings. As I pointed this out to everyone, the temperature in the room started to drop. Upstairs, Zin noticed that the windows seemed to be obscured. Mist started to get in through the door. Khaylen and I agreed that maybe we should have left. Thoradin talks about trying to go around the outside to get to the second floor, but we can’t open the door. I asked the golems politely to lower the lift for us, and that somehow actually works. Seir, Khaylen, and Thoradin all get on the platform, music starts playing, and we ask the elevator to take us to the third floor. There was a battering ram tripwire setup on the third floor, but in the elevator we were pretty safe. Thoradin throws a copper down to the golems and thanks them for the lift. The golem… ate it? We saw some weird glowing marks on the ceiling. We recognized them as having some vague meaning relating to “heat, light, passion, etc” and the other was more like “calm, bitter”. The floor, however, was too weak to hold our weight, and Khaylen fell through. We talked through a few plans on our way down. We decided that Letho, who is the coldest person, will go up, along with some fire supplies. We wanted to have him touch the “heat” rune with the torch and the other one with his hand. O and you join him (because you’re the lightest, I suppose?). Khaylen and I collaborated to carve the symbols into a board so Letho would know which was which. There was some drama to figure out where to ask the golems to send the platform, and O stepped out. They asked to go to floor four. Letho ignored our information to him and touched the wrong runes, putting you at undue risk in my opinion. Letho ignored our requests to switch his hands, and snapped his spear trying to use it to brace against the platform. You grabbed him and bodily made him switch his hands. The platform stopped moving, a hair before crushing you both. The ceiling receded, allowing you two admittance. The fourth floor was less broken-down, and had signs that someone had been there a bit more recently, but it still probably had been a little while. Letho instructed you to check through the room and stash anything of value before Khaylen or Zin could steal it, and Letho tried to put on a suit of armor in the corner. There is a chest at the foot of the bed, and you locate a head in there. Everyone came up the elevator, and I looked through the desk in the top room. We found a poisoner’s kit and an herbalism kit. I also found a map of Barovia in the desk. It has a path marked in the southwesterly section that leads up to the peak to one of the mountains, Mount Ghakis (sp?) with a little symbol marking something called “The Temple in Amber”, with a nearby fort. It also names some of the crossroads. There is also a town labeled as Verez that we have never heard of on a road south of Villacki. There is a hill by the winery labeled Yesterhill, and the windmill we passed by a while ago is “The Old Bonegrinder”. There is also a building? Called Argynvostholt. While we were communing over the map, Zin found the head in the chest. It was embalmed, but not a recognized shape. They were supposedly quite beautiful, so Thoradin decided to take one and wrap it around himself. This upset Letho, who claimed Thoradin was copying him. People talked about taking some of the other tapestries to sell in town. After removing the head, Zin found a couple of hastily prepared first aid kits, as well as some sealed jars of blood. She also found a weird medical device with long tubing and a glass jar. There were also some scalpels and a large jaw around the bed. You pointed out to me that a lot of the ink vials seemed to be filled with water. We tried to see if the papers were written in some form of invisible ink. It actually turned out to be holy water. We lit the stove to try and heat the paper up, and find some silvered crossbow bolts. Khaylen found a piece of parchment stuck in the grating in front of the stove. She sees some phrases on there, like “purifying light of truth and knowledge”, “pack of zombies”, and at the end “bottomless rift”. I wasn’t able to do anything to let me read the papers, but we eventually decided to go to bed. However, we are unable to fall asleep. We discuss tactics for getting out of the tower. Zin volunteers to try and see what happens if he goes out into the fog by sitting on top of the battering ram on the second floor and triggering it himself. There was actually a wall there, so he smacked face-first into a wall. Somehow it seems as though the tower became totally sealed. Thoradin went to the bottom floor, did the dance, and got the door to open. The night outside was free of mist, but there were wolves howling and Thoradin saw a man, clearly wounded, stumbling towards him.
Report Date
08 Nov 2022
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