Curse of the Crimson Throne 9: Saved by the beets

As always, there will be spoilers.

Saul - Bard

Torg - Fighter

Saturnine - Sorcerer

Veegor - Barbarian

Lars - Paladin

Raiche - Avenger

We began where we left off, with Lars opening a door in the basement of the clinic.

Okay, I forgot to take pictures until the end of the session, and was not really able to sit down to write this thing *last* week, when it was still new. So, some things are gonna be a little sparse. Sorry.

In the basement we run into Lars and Saul. They had beat us down here. . .somehow. The next room is full of more patients. These don't appear to have the plague, instead they look like they were unconscious, but perfectly healthy. At the end of the room two doctors hover over two patients with daggers raised. Their implication is clear. If we enter, they will try and kill their hostages.

Of course we enter, because we are heroes, and the doctors go down fast. A couple of Gray Maidens try and stop us, but we defeat them as well.

We burst into the office at the end of the room and confront its occupant, Doctor Davaulos. He and a few more of his Doctor cronies put up a weak fight, but we defeated them. Of course, since it is our Modus Operandi, we kept him alive.

We discovered that he was holding a lever that operated a lift on this floor, linking it to a second basement. This basement was decorated in a horrible, torture, disease, undead motif. We encountered some priests who had evidently heard us coming and prepared. Again, we didn't have too difficult of a time defeating them, and kept one alive to interrogate.

We did some more exploring. There was a room with glass walls and a glass floor with zombies or skeletons trapped behind it. We deduced that it was an attempt at art.

The final fight was a bit more challenging. We opened the outer door to a room, but discovered that the inner door was ice cold. The last time we had encountered this we fought chillborn zombies. We would have had a tougher time then, but we had a good controller. This time, we had no controller.

The fight began with Raiche using a power that allowed him to teleport into an unseen room with a nova of energy. He was almost immediately overwhelmed and dropped. The rest of us burst in. . .kinda. Besides the three chillborn zombies, there were three vampires.

The vampires clustered in the corner and did their vampire thing, while the zombies ran interference and made it tough to get to their masters. Saturnine, with resist cold 5, is immune to their aura, but too squishy to just run by the zombies to get the vampires. It was a tough fight. In a twist on the usual, the final vampire stopped fighting and we chatted with him.

He was amoral, but not needlessly cruel, and revealed that he was working with the queen's physicians to develop a cure. Their goal was to find a cure, and then use it to make the disease more virulent. He was nearly finished anyhow, and was just missing a key ingredient. It seems that in its current form, the victim would likely not survive the treatment. Add beets, however (beets featured in a session I missed. Apparently an old perfume maker was using beets in a hoax cure, and that was also the missing ingredient in the real cure).

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That was most of it. We discovered that the cultists, the queen's physicians, and a group of vampires were behind the plague. Who would have guessed *that*? The cultists were using a plague demon, imprisoned in glass, and distributing its filth to infect people. The vampires were working on this cure to help make the disease worse, and the doctors were the face of the operation, tracking down immune people and doing their hideous experiments on them.

We let the vampire go in exchange for his help. If you can't tell, most of the group is unaligned. One of the prisoners (the cultist) had his eyes stabbed out, and died due to massive soul loss. In character, we don't know why. Out of character, Saturnine did it. We brought Field Marshall Kroft in to clean up, and relayed all that we had learned, omitting the deal with the vampire. She brought us back to the Citadel, and showed us a gift from the spirit of Beor. . .magic items.

From beyond the grave Beor had felt our need of moar crit damage, and we each chose a magic item, our first and only magic item in this campaign. We got our standard between-book email, that told how even though we had significant evidence against the queen, we could not move against her. She dissolved one of the guard organizations in the city to make room for her own, the Gray Maidens, headed by her companion. The guard is pretty whimpy now. During the ceremony transferring power to the new commander of the Gray Maidens, the old Sable Company commander shot the queen in the head with a crossbow. Nonplussed, she yanked it out and drove it through his head.

This city is messed the hell up, and the module will keep us here until we have been sufficiently tentacle raped. I'm glad I play a warforged.