SotDL Campaign Diary: Dreams of the Dead God - Sessions 0 - 4

 Session 0 - 1/12/21: Thriller Night

The current "lotus blossom crisis" that has engulfed Edes has impacted nearly half of the city's population.  An organization called the Dream Merchants has dominated the city with it's lotus drug trade.  Many businesses have had to close or have been abandoned.  The Lamplighters have mostly disbanded, and those that remain are either overwhelmed by the lawlessness, or contributing to it. 

The University of Edes, known as the Lyceum, has closed it's doors at the Winter Solstice break due to drops in attendance and enrollment.  The headmaster provided refunds to it's reliable students and also provided funds to it's faculty, to go home on break and to return for the Spring Semester.  The characters took advantage of this to leave Edes for their own personal reasons.  A few days prior to the start of the Spring Semester, the characters take the train back to Edes, but while en route, they all fall into a deep sleep and have vivid and highly unusual dreams.  They have to be awakened by the conductor to depart the train at Edes.

The characters are the only ones on the train platform when the train departs, and due to the late hour, they must walk the a ways to reach the city gate.  However, on the train platform, they find a man slumped over, poorly dressed for this cold and foggy night, and clearly in a stupor.  The goblin of the group, Dir-tay, inspects the man and finds a lotus petal in his mouth.  From the man's identification, they learn that he is a merchant that was supposed to depart on a train headed to Azul two days ago.  Not wanting to leave him there to freeze, the warrior known as Ravnir the Red picks the man up and carries him with them towards town.  

However, as the group strolls down the street, the priestly man called Kirrian spots a person in the street walking in an awkward manner.  When the person comes into better view, they find him to be a walking corpse, who promply moves to attack them!  

The four move to defend themselves, dealing with the dead man and then a walking skeleton further up the road.  Using their combined skill, the group dispatch the undead and realize that they must have come from the town cemetery, known as the Graves, as the entrance is on this very street.  

The group resume their trek to the city gate and find that the gates are wide open, apparently having been abandoned altogether by the Lamplighters.  The group deposit the man at his home to a grateful wife and head on to the Lyceum.

 

At the end of this last session, I'm assuming you dropped the guy from the train station off at the gate to let the guards deal with him.  Then you all head to the Lyceum.  It's assumed that you all have either a dorm room if you're a student, or you have an apartment on campus if you are employed.  It would be a small room with a cot. You can pay for nicer accommodations if you want.

 

A couple of days later, you receive notification that the campus will remain closed until further notice.  Students are encouraged to go home, if home is away from Edes, otherwise stay on campus.  Faculty is to remain.  However, each one of you, student or faculty, receives a note from the headmaster, Professor Abraxas, to meet a specific place and time and you are given a passcode.  The note vanishes in a puff of smoke after you read it.

 

ADVENTURE N1

Session 1 - Horror in the Cellar pt 1: 01/19/21

Your group is summoned to a secret meeting in one of the least trafficked part of the Lyceum to a meeting chamber.  There, you find a few of the faculty and some others that do not appear to be affiliated with the university. Professor Abraxas brings the meeting to order and starts by reminding everyone of the dire circumstances the entire city is facing, driven mostly by the drug trafficking of the Dream Merchants - a goblin organization that moved in and began selling a new and highly addictive drug known as the lotus petals.  This drug spread through the city like wildfire and soon half of the population was in it's grip.  The headmaster then explains his concern and confusion as to why the city's Autarch, Martonius, had not done something about the problem. In fact, his lack of action has resulted in the Lamplighters falling apart, many becoming corrupted by the Dream Merchants.  It also led to the mob that ransacked St Timothy's Cathedral and killed the priests and acolytes within.  

Once finished with the painful background, Abraxas introduces Munder Boley, a man who was a business owner until the loss of customers and his children to the drug, caused him to give up his business and seek out others who have had enough with the city's plight and were determined to do something about it.  Boley explains that he and his "Wakened" have done what they can to chase the Dream Merchants down and to try and petition the Autarch to bring law and order back to Edes, but these efforts have failed as Martonius has remained reclusive and silent.  Boley believes that there is a possibility that he is actually dead, or worse, under the influence of the lotus petals himself.  

Once Boley wraps up his speech, the headmaster takes the podium again and states that the Lyceum faculty and the Wakened have joined forces to try and resolve this threat to Edes.  Their first order of business is to seek out the secret headquarters of the Dream Merchants, who are believed to hide in the sewers, but the Wakened have lost members who tried to search the miles of monster and hazzard ridden passages beneath the city streets.  Taking a more subtle approach, the Wakened have been following the Dream Merchants and discovered that they are using several key people in town to aid in their business.  The headmaster then begins to hand out assignments to investigate these people to try to learn the whereabouts of the Dream Merchant's lair.  To your group he assigns the task of talking with an alchemist that is suspected of helping the goblins prepare their drugs for street distribution.

The following day you meet up and start heading towards the alchemist's shop.  You quickly notice that a Lamplighter is following you, and soon another joins him.  You decide to confront them, and they begin acting like they will start a fight, but soon another Lamplighter arrives and sends the other two off on false orders to allow you to escape.  

While this altercation is happening, Dir-tay sees a bunch of alley cats and they all suddenly stop what they are doing, line up in marching order and march up the wall, disappearing into a fog bank.  Nobody else seems to have noticed.

As your group proceeds to the alchemist's shop, you hear a scream coming from that direction.  You round the corner to find the alchemist being harassed by a crooked Lamplighter and two goblins.  You try to get them to stop, but they attack and you are forced to defend yourselves.  This leads to the deaths of the Lamplighter and one of the goblins.  The other goblin flees into the fog.  You hide the bodies in trash heaps and join the alchemist in her shop.  There, Emma the alchemist explains that she is forced to help the Dream Merchants with preparing the lotus blossoms for them to sell.  She tells you where she is usually taken and provides you the address.

After providing this information to the headmaster, he asks you to find the drug house and try to locate sailors that escaped from the ship that delivered this shipment of lotus.  The crew of the ship had killed each other in fits of madness and the headmaster wants to know why and what connection that may have with the events in Edes.  He asks you to return them and anything they may have taken from the ship, such as the captain's log book. 

You depart for the drug house and find it in a rather delapidated part of town.  A goblin guards the front and another the back.  You try to sneak into the house through the 2nd story window, but something happens when you pass through the window that transports you to the front entrance of the house.  Dir-tay did this and caught the attention of one of the goblin guards, who believed him to be his relief.  That goblin departs, leaving only one goblin left in the back yard.  You enter the house and find the interior in bad shape as well.  Stairs leading up to the 2nd floor also transport anyone trying to access the 2nd floor to the front entrance. 

Session 2 - Horror in the Cellar pt 2: 01/26/21

You find the stairs to the basement and head down to a locked door.  You decide to see if the goblin in the back yard has the key, so Dir-tay attempts to fool him into giving him the key, but the goblin is not easily fooled.  He does offer to take Dir-tay into the basement though and as two enter the house, the rest of your group attack the goblin.  You take the key off of the fallen guard and head down the stairs, through the locked door and into the basement.  In the first room you find supplies and a crate full of unprocessed lotus blossoms. The next room has two goblins working on processing the lotus petals.  You interrogate the goblins but don't get much out of them other than they work for something called the "filth mother", who seems to lead the goblin clan and the Dream Merchants ("weavers").  

Ranvir the Red decides the whole place needs to be burned down, but just as he prepares to do just that, the goblins ask if they are going to inform the humans in the next rooms.  The group overlooked the door in the room and you all proceed to enter. You find woven bedrolls and sailor's packs in the next room and another door.  Beyond this door you find two sailors chanting in a strange tongue to a metallic object on the far side of the room.  A mist wafts up from a pit in the center of the floor and the sailors turn and charge at you with their weapons.  You fight the sailors, killing one before the other throws himself into the pit.  An ominous humming rises from the pit and the mist takes shape into that of a mist demon.  You fight the demon, thankful that the mists hide it's horrific features and unsure if your weapons are capable of harming it.  But your attacks do seem effective and you manage to drive the creature back into the pit from whense it came.  You grab the strange metal object the sailors were praying to, find the captain's logbook underneath, and prepare to leave the house.  

After torching the place, you all head back to the Lyceum and present your findings to the headmaster, who is pleased and fascinated with the object you bring.  He dismisses you, saying that he will summon you again when he has more information regarding the connection between the cursed ship and the troubles of Edes.

End of Adventure N1.

 

ADVENTURE N2

Session 3 - The Tower of Sorrows pt 1: 02/02/21

After two weeks of downtime, the group is called together again by the headmaster, who sends a page to bring you to his tower.  Once there, you see the headmaster has been busy trying to figure out the strange object you brought him and he explains that the log book also has strange, undecipherable (so far) writing along with a diagram of the machine that this part belongs to.  He says that he has been working diligently to try and figure out the meaning of the object and the writing and what it may have to do with the issues in Edes.  

However, that is not why you were summoned.

He says that he was suprised to receive a request from none other than Lady Beatra, the Autarch's wife, asking that the Lyceum send agents to help her with a dire situation, for which she is willing to provide fair compensation.  He asks that you go on his behalf and accept the offer, and while there, ask her what the status is of the missing Autarch in a subtle manner, so as not to offend her.  

You go to the Autarch's manner and are eventually escorted to the audience chamber where the Lady Beatra is awaiting your arrival.  She says that there is a man by the name of Puhl that is being held in the Tower of Sorrows (the Edes prison) that she wants to have liberated.  The man is a close friend and advisor to the Autarch, and was falsely imprisoned.  Since the Lamplighters stopped obeying orders from the Autarch's office and started taking orders from the Dream Merchants, they have stopped staffing the tower and have left the prisoners to die of thirst and starvation.  She wants you to sneak in and liberate the man (and anyone else you see fit).  She offers 5 gold up front and 5 gold upon the man's return, dead or alive.   As requested by the headmaster, you ask about the Autarch and she responds cooly that he is in Kem (the City of Gold) seeking the aid of the sister cities, and securing funds from The Vault, to gain new security for Edes and rid it of the Dream Merchants. She subtly glances at a side door while talking. 

You accept the offer and depart with the 5 gold crowns and a picture of the man Puhl to help identify him.  You spend the next several hours shopping to better equip yourselves for the task at hand.  Upon completion of this, you head to the Tower of Sorrows and find it surprisingly open and unguarded.  But when you enter, you find several undead wandering aimlessly about.  The undead attack you, but are quickly dispatched.  But you notice a person in the shadows wearing a hooded cloak and you move after him, but as you enter the rear of the tower's first floor, you find another undead waiting - this one apparently a Lamplighter. 

End of session.

 

Session 4 - The Tower of Sorrows pt 2: 02/09/21

The undead Lamaplighter attacks with more precision and skill than the undead things you fought in the front part of the tower.  Despite that, you manage to stop it's attack and put it down rapidly.  Dir-tay moves ahead and sees a figure in the dark, a cloaked one that pulls off his cloak looks at the goblin.  The figure holds a shovel in one hand that has glowing runes down it's shaft.  He mutters to himself, "Gotta make these things tougher..." before disappearing before Dir-tay's eyes.  The rest of your group catch up and are not quite sure what to make of Dir-tay's description of the situation, considering the goblin's drug habit.  The group moves on into the stairwell and up to the 2nd floor.

Upon opening the door to this level of the tower, you smell the stench of body waste and rotting meat.  As you move along the dark floor, you find a prisoner in a cell. She is very emaciated and has clearly been without food and drink for a long time.  Even in her weakened state, she responds fearfully to your light and begs you not to kill her.  Despite your reassurances, she continues to shy away from you.  You provide food and water and move on deeper into the tower.  At one point you find a figure wandering the halls.  The figure turns and charges you, teeth gnashing and claws anxiously swiping ahead of it.  The ghouls fights fiercly but is killed by your coordinated efforts.  Three other ghouls then emerge from the darkness and attack, visciously cutting down Ranvir and nearly killing him.  But your teamwork pays off and you manage to kill the three monsters. 

One of the prisoners in that part of the tower gets your attention and asks that you feed him part of the body across the hall.  He is clearly insane, but does say the name of the person you are searching the tower for - Arvis Puhl.  He claims that he is running the tower and won't be happy with you killing his men.  When asked, the man says that he is in his office down the hall, pointing the way.  

End of session.