The Valley #35

Please keep up the positive comments.
Believe it or not, it helps for me to continue writing (in a semi-timely manner).

Also, if you’d like me to link you I only ask two things; a link to here and to update your blog occasionally.

These two sessions will be the last of Jacob’s. He’s too busy, and although he had fun while here, I don’t think he felt like part of the group (though I personally think he did quite well).

Our group itself always seems to need new players.
Dale, Aaron and I are pretty consistent.
Scott was mostly consistent, but is a foster parent now. So his attendance is a bit random.
Joy is also at a busy point in her life, so she has pretty much disappeared from the game.
Glenn I don’t know enough yet. I fear he may prefer a group that role-plays a bit more than we do or is a bit closer to his home.

And then there were the holidays. They destroy gaming opportunities for us adults. We played twice in November and not at all in December.

Given that Dale’s campaign still has two more sessions, I won’t be running another one until in late January at the earliest.

Now this session was played on Halloween night. Yeah, I’m that slow at getting this stuff out.

For Halloween I wanted to do something that fit the day and I just couldn’t think of anything that would do the job of WTF (look it up) that I wanted. Until I remembered a story I listened to (MP3 player FTW (look that one up too, or leave the internet)).

At the time I couldn’t remember the name of the story or the author, but it turned out to be The Boogey Man by Stephen King.

(Yeah I know…I feel kind of dumb for not remembering that.)

But the story contained things that affected me only because I’m a father. Had I heard the story before that, I would have been less revolted than I was.

So I took the story, and rewrote it with a D&D and Valley feel.

Dale even said I should submit this module for publication.
That would be cool, but since I borrowed heavily to design the module, I’ll just post it here and let you all use it to your preferences so long as you don’t make any money off of it either.

And I do suggest you read or listen to King’s original story. It’s better than his other stuff I read. (Note: Other than The Stand…I’ve not liked King’s other writing. It starts off good, treads water, and then flounders horribly at the end.)

Session 35
Edward (Aaron); level 14 human paladin of Brekaneth
Ander (Dale); level 14 halfling storm sorcerer
Lindorial (Jacob); level 14 elven rogue
Adrie (Joy); level 14 elf cleric

A week had passed since the previous session, allowing for the repercussions of that day to settle in.

First off, the city’s populace has thinned quite a bit. What the city has lost, Theven’s Wharf has gained.

Edward Wootenmorgan the VII has concluded that since he is the last of his line he needs to “get busy” and make some heirs to continue the family name.

As expected he has high standards and only wants a chaste woman with the same beliefs he has.

Adrie decided to help him. Not really.
She decided to turn his search for a wife into a VH1 dating show.
She went to the Crags and found every tramp and gold digger she could and told them that the new Elder Paladin of Brekaneth will be at the Roaring Bull Inn tonight and looking for a wife and he was rich.

Edward attempted to be nice, but these girls were in no mood to take “no” for an answer. Aaron also rolled a natural 1 in an attempt to nicely tell the “ladies” “thanks, but no thanks”.

So while Edward was having drinks dumped on his head, a 12 year old boy entered the bar and went mostly unnoticed thanks to the fun Adrie was having at Edward’s expense.

Ander did notice the boy. He also noticed that the boy appeared to be genuinely scared, but not of what was going on in the Inn.

Ander asked what was wrong and the boy asked him to come see him and his father, because he doesn’t want to die.

That certainly woke Ander up, so he and the others went to the boy’s house. Adrie didn’t want the fun to end and Edward couldn’t leave fast enough. (Lindorial joined them too, but since Jacob won’t be coming back, I’m not going to focus much on him.)

The boy and his father (Billy and Richard) told them their story.

About 10 months ago they bought this house and all was well. (No they didn’t buy the house for cheap. That’s a little too cliché.)

But a few days ago Billy started hearing distant, whispered voices and he told his father about them.
Richard panicked.

When they moved in they found a handwritten book in the house, but thought it to be a bad attempt at writing by the previous owner.

Now he fears that the book was a diary of the last moments of the house’s previous owner.

For the past few days they’ve slept in other places, but the whispers did not go away.
With each day the voices seem to get closer and clearer.

Note – Hallowed Saints Day is an obvious rip-off of Halloween, but the party (through skill checks) knows it to be to a special day to the believers of Brekaneth; A day when the early saints cast out the evil mages of Valley. Those outside the church see the data differently. It’s a day when the Valley’s strongest mages had enough interference from the Church of Brekaneth so they attacked killed the leaders of the church and then fled the Valley to never be seen again.

Richard hands the diary to the party and they read it. It is a small book, but most of the pages are blank.

(Beginning of writing)
I will surely pay for what I’ve done, but I pray that these words will save another’s soul from the damnation I have succumbed to.
An evil resides within this house. I do not know where it came from, but it is most definitely here, though I have never seen it.
It only exists as a voice in my ear and hot breath hovering above me in the darkness.
Every year for half a decade it has come. For a week prior to the…incidents I can hear the voice as a faint whisper. As each day comes and goes and the moon emerges over the Valley, the voice grows stronger.
On the Eve of Hallowed Saint’s Day, the voice is strong. I can only describe the voice as a deep, smooth, oily, and wholly malevolent. I could almost hear the smile in its voice the last time it threatened me.

It was this monster that took my first son.
My wife was concerned that he had been having nightmares of the monster in his closet.
We accepted the stories as nothing more than the bad dream of a child whose mind is dealing with the realities of the world he’s beginning to explore.
The perceptors wrote his death off as crib death, though he was a bit old for that.

A year later I began hearing an odd thing or two, like the edges of a conversation around the corner, but nothing was there.

Though my wife was doting over our second son, born shortly after the death of our first, her thoughts kept returning to losing him a year ago.
On the night of Hallowed Saint’s Day she decided she would sleep in his room in a vigil for him while I watched our second child in our room.

At midnight I awoke from a nightmare of something in the blackness of my dreams hunting me down.
My son began crying moments after I awoke. After soothing him back to sleep, some kind of dread in the back of my mind pulled me to check on my wife.

Her eyes were open, hands clutched to her heart.
She was still warm, but there was no pulse.
I felt a sudden coldness in the wind, could swear I heard a deep voice say “So delicious”.

Once again the perceptors claimed it as “one of those things”.

As we had tried with our first son, I handed my hard earned gold over to the priests of Brekaneth to have her raised back to life.
As with our son, it did not work.
They claimed that there were many reasons for the failure of the ritual.
“Perhaps she’s happy to be with your son and can’t bring herself to be away from him.” said one of the younger priestesses, hoping I could see the wisdom of her idiocy.

Rather than rebuke the girl, I smiled and returned home.

The next year was very hard on me, raising a son, keeping the business running, and keeping the household from falling apart, but I managed.

My son became the pride of me.
I did everything to give him what I felt my wife would have wanted.
There was nothing I would not do for him, and our bond of father and son was unbreakable.

As the year came around to the anniversary of the deaths, I felt a horrible dread grow inside of me.

I contacted priests of Brekaneth, and even those dwarven and elven priests.
I told them my story and asked them to assuage my fears.
Each in turn checked my home for any signs of evil, but found nothing.
Per my request, they each blessed my house.

A week before Hallowed Saint’s Day, my beloved son had a nightmare and asked to sleep in my room.
I agreed.

The next evening he didn’t want to go into his room at all.
“Monster in closet.” he cried to me.

I pulled him into his room and showed him that there was nothing in there, and even checked his bed for good measure.

But I could deny him nothing, and allowed him to sleep in my room.

Each day his protestations of sleeping in that room became more desperate.
Each day I relented to him.
Each night I had dreams that turned into nightmares.
Each night I awoke from the nightmares, sweating, and terrified.
Each night I awoke with the words in my head “I will be sated”.
Each day I convinced myself that this was all just foolishness caused by stress.

On Hallowed Saint’s Day we repeated the routine.
That night I awoke from the nightmare with “I will not be denied! I will be sated.” clinging to my thoughts.
I could hear something else in the room as I awoke.
I heard something hovering above me. I could feel something’s hot breath in my ear, coming from the closet.
I felt hunted; like a rabbit from a wolf.

Then, in a panic, I committed myself to damnation.
I took my sleeping and trusting son, and put him in his bed.

I will not recount what I heard that night.
I heard things that no man should ever hear.
But I had done something that no man should ever do.

I was different after that night.
Everyone knew it.
Another crib death in my family was the news.
They said that my children had inherited their mother’s weak heart.

People looked at me with pity.
Each night I would return to my empty house, and mourn my lost world and hate myself for what I became.

Heavy drink could not mask the emptiness where my soul used to be.
My attempts at socializing were sad affairs of a man who is obviously not what he pretends to be.

The change in me was obvious to anyone who knew me, and once the pity wore off, people simply avoided me.

No aspect of my life went untouched.

I was alone in every sense of the word.

Until the year went by and that damned holiday returned.

The nightmares returned.
The voice returned.
The dread returned.

It was coming for me this time.

Unless…

Unless I gave it someone else.

It did not take much to find someone easily fooled and easily forgotten by society.
There are many in town that beg for copper and spend it on drink.

I never knew his name, though I’m sure he told me in his ramblings.
It was easy enough to act as the nice yet lonely man to someone so drunk.
I told him a simple story that my wife and children of were gone, and that this time of year I needed a companion for drinking.
He was eager to help me drown my sorrows and tell me his stories.

He out drank me with abandon.
I even had to slow him down on his drink for part of me knew that it wanted its food to be aware; to know what was happening.

When it was late I led him to the room.
He was immediately beset paranoia and began to make excuses of having to be somewhere else.
I struck him with a rock and bound his unconscious body in rope.

Later I heard him coming around and he yelled for someone to help him get untied, I stayed in my room and waited with dread in my stomach.
Then I heard the “other kind of scream”; a scream that erupts from a person who has seen his doom.

“So delicious.”

When I knew it was over, I returned to the room and saw the same expression on the man’s face I had seen on my wife’s.

A trash-well is just a few dozen feet from my door, so it was not hard to dispose of the body and hide the evidence of my guilt.

I returned home and no longer felt dread. I did not even feel guilt. I felt relieved.
In time I had even convinced myself that I had done the city a service by removing a vagrant from its midst.

By the time the year came around again I had actually begun looking forward to being a secret hero and using evil to defeat evil and thus I was doing a good deed for all.

This year the drunkard was another middle-aged man who had let his life get away from him.

No one ever came to my door asking about him.
No one ever mentioned anything anywhere.
Just another vagrant had gone missing and presumed dead.

When I attempted to lure a third victim from the gutters to my house, no one followed.
This holiday had become a bane to them, as each year for the past two; one of their numbers had gone missing, and no one cared.

The dread returned to me. I needed to find someone or my damnation would consume me.

Luckily for me society has many who will one day become a drunken drain on the coffers of humanity.

A young man named Harold had been receptive to a benefactor helping him drown his sorrows at that dwarven tavern.

When he was sufficiently inebriated, I made up a story about my sister being a good woman needing a good man to keep her company.

He eagerly agreed and followed me to my home, telling me many a tale of his lost loves; tales that rang familiar to my ears from the two drunkards before him.

But damn his youth!

He recovered from my assault before I could sufficiently bind him.
In the struggle he managed an act of the cruelest irony.

My leg, now broken from my fall in the struggle, now prevents me from leaving this accursed room.

Read these words and heed them.
Evil lurks in this house.

I am soon to be taken by it, though I know it would prefer someone else, someone whose soul is…cleaner.

I hear the whispers now.
And I think, yes, footsteps.

Footsteps are coming from the closet.
(End of writing)

The party just had a few days until the All Saint’s Day, so they went to work.

They studied and experimented.

Ander believed that whatever was in the closet was in another dimension and each time this year the two dimensions synch up for a day. This was why there was nothing wrong detected before and why voices were so distant at first but became closer.

They found out that the house was built where Lord Velserrad’s tower used to be, but the general populace knows nothing of the evil that man possessed, so there was no PC information there.

They tried having the boy and father sleep in the church for a night, under armed protection and observation, but it changed nothing.

If anything the father and son were even more terrified. They had gotten the best protection the Valley could offer and it wasn’t helping.

The party had only one option left – return to the house with the father and son, and protect them from whatever comes out.

They place both father and son in the son’s bedroom and the party blocks the closet while keeping an eye on the father’s bedroom as well.

They are not disappointed.

As the cheers and other noise from the celebration outside, the party can hear faint footsteps walking up some stairs…coming from inside the closet.

A deep and greasily cheerful voice says, “I see that you have prepared extra guests this year. A pity. I guess I shall wait until next year.”

Then the footsteps begin walking down stairs.

Inside the closet is the faint red-glowing outline of a door. Edward pushes it open and is rewarded with a foul, rotten meat stench.

The party, one by one, walk downs the stairs. At first the stairs are made of stone, the same as the house is, but the farther they go down the five hundred feet of stairs, the stairs turn into a solid mass of flesh that barely feel like they can support a person.

At the bottoms they’re in a large “room” complete with rotten fleshy walls and columns, and a pillar in the center that they notice is covered in thousands of fine hairs.

There is also a thin membrane in the room that reminds the party of a door to another room.

A bodak and a pair of devourers live here, waiting for their time of year to feed.

I thought the bodak would be a tough challenge to the party. But my poor rolling and the party’s good job of keeping him off-balance prevented him from using his Death Gaze (encounter power to reduce a weakened target to 0hp).

The column covered in cilia was just an obstacle for the party to avoid, which limited maneuverability.

And the last little bit of fun was when the “room” was damaged, it would squirt some acid into the room. But the party never stood where the acid blasted.

Now the spirit devourers were nasty for the party. With their ability to trap a party member inside of them while draining the PC of life, they could (and did) keep two members of the party out of combat a lot.

The party did learn how to deal with the devourers and took them down, but it took some time.

The party did not like this room. They likened it to a giant intestinal track.

They were not happy in the slightest about having to cut open the membrane door either.

The next room reeked of vomit rather than rotten meat, and it was slightly more “alive”; a stomach to the party.

This “room” was about the same as the last one except there were no undead and there was woman in her mid-twenties, whose hands and feet were bound at the floor and ceiling by fleshy manacles, and surrounded by five demonic, winged statues holding hands in a circle.

“Please help me. Once these things awaken my soul will be stolen from me. There is a creature in the room next to this one that refuses to help, but it has a key that can free me. Please hurry; I’ve seen what these demons can do to a person.”

The reasonably suspicious party asker her questions while trying to find other ways of freeing her. The answers to their questions led them to believe she was the mother in the story. The attempts to free her ended in failure.

They did find one thing odd. When they cut her hair, it changed color from blond to black (this occurred before the movie Tangled came out.)

So they did as she suggested and cut open the membrane to the next room and proceeded.

Other than the PC’s footprints, this room was immaculate.

The room was large with polished marble floors, with a sphinx at the far end laying in front of a small chest.

It yawns then opens its mouth and says, “The choices are many. The results are simple. Flip a coin, or trust your instincts, or trust your logic, or trust nothing. Fight once, or fight twice, or flight nevermore. A key you seek. A key I have. A key to a lock that is not a lock. Whether your hearts are noble or greedy the results will be the same. You may not ask questions. You may only commit to action. Success will grant you a key. Commit to an action and challenge your prey.”

I repeated that statement at least half a dozen times.

After each repetition the party would attempt to pick it apart to figure out clearer what was truly being said.

“The choices are many. The results are simple.” = blah blah blah

“Flip a coin, or trust your instincts, or trust your logic, or trust nothing.” = also blah blah blah

“Fight once, or fight twice, or flight nevermore.” = The number of fights the party wishes to have, or they can flee and die in the process. One fight is if they make the right choice. Two is if they don’t.

“A key you seek. A key I have. A key to a lock that is not a lock.” = He has a key to a non-standard lock.

“Whether your hearts are noble or greedy the results will be the same.” = The reason you’re here is irrelevant.

“You may not ask questions. You may only commit to action.” = exactly what it says. Whenever the party asked a question, I repeated the whole speech.

“Success will grant you a key.” = If you win, you get a key.

“Commit to an action and challenge your prey.” = Make your choice.

Quite simply the sphinx gave his challenge to the party (see the MM1 sphinx entry) and the party had to make a choice to either trust the bound woman or not. If they believed her and attacked the sphinx, they made a bad choice as they would have failed the sphinxes challenge and would have to fight him while he was much stronger. And then they would have to deal with a death hag and her friends (vrocks).

But the hair thing clued the party in the right direction and they returned to talk to the lady…who then attacked them.

Sadly the fight was not really that difficult and the party freed the souls of the innocent people (both sons, mother, and both men) as they were freed from the statues and flew away as tiny balls of white light, while a sixth soul, a black one, fell to the ground never to be seen again.

When they returned to the sphinx’s room the sphinx was gone, but the chest remained.

Inside was a bronze disc (the key), some other treasures, and a level 17 magic item to choose from:
Red-tinged Glowing Robe: Robe of Bloodwalking +4 (chosen I believe)
Golden Ring of the Saint’s: Ring of Protection
The Bard’s Opening Number: Horn of Blasting

They also were able to choose one of the items below from the fight with the hag:
The Witch’s Silver Circlet: Headband of Insight (chosen I believe)
Glenda’s Pulsing Red Glass: Orb of Mental Dominion +4
Glenda’s Clawed Gloves: Shadowfell Gloves (Level 16)

Afterwards the party walked back up the long flight of stairs, never to see this disturbing place again.