The Mythic World of Urd: Ghouls, Ghouls, Ghouls!

The following is none other than the Arcane Alienists' post-session summary from our private social media group.  This esotericist has lots of great ideas about roleplaying games in general, and has been hard at work turning out episodes of his podcast, titled (aptly) The Arcane Alienist!! Check out the podcast here on Anchor.FM!

** Mythic World of Urd Campaign Page **

The party returns to the castle after executing the necromancer Viktora Ash. They bring the stone head of the orc chieftain to the wizard Olivere who informs them that if they had the rest of the petrified body he might be able to restore the orc to life. 

Harald suggests that this might go a long way towards keeping peace with the local orcs and getting information about what the necromancer has been up to. Roderick and Harald also suspect that the gunpowder was being manufactured for an assault on the keep, perhaps even to blow it up from within or below.

Moved to the OSE engine on Fantasy Grounds!  Love that graph-paper chic!

The party decided to return to the necromancer’s lair to retrieve the rest of the “statue” and also clear out the ghouls that remain there. Hagle is sent into the cave to scout and reports that after a short tunnel it opens into a wide chamber. There is a green glow coming from somewhere at the back.

The party cautiously makes its way into the cave. Suddenly they hear growling and movement in the darkness around them. Three ghouls come at the front different directions along with a pair of zombies (all are orc corpses). From the side chamber emitting the green glow, a ghast also emerges and sets upon Hedemar’s retainer, Volker. Volker falls dying.

Hedemar is able to turn the two zombies and the rest of the party slays the ghouls, but the ghast proves to be a bigger challenge. It is able to resist all attempts at turning by both Hedemar and Roderick. Fortunately everyone it attacks also manages to resist its paralyzing effects. It is finally slain by Dolly and Dominique.

The turned zombies had fled towards the green glow. The party catches up to them and kills them. The glow is coming from a crude alter marked with Chaos runes and set with a large jade gemstone. The party destroys the altar. Copper and electrum coins are scattered about the room along with a sword that turns out to be magical. Dolly claims the sword as a new weapon.

Filthy Harald patiently awaits a clear line-of-sight...

The party then obtains the headless statue and takes it back to Olivere, who tells them they can expect an audience with the Castellan to be forthcoming.

The next day, they are invited to a luncheon at the Castellan’s manor within the inner walls of the castle. The room is decorated in the maroon and gold colors of the Castellan’s banners and her family crest bearing a chestnut tree. They are first greeted by the elf, Maravek, who is the Castellan chief advisor. Maravek then introduced them to the Castellan herself, Lady Diomira Kastenienbraun. 

Lady Diomira asks them to recount their exploits thus far. They do so and also share their concerns about an attack on the castle itself. She tells them that her soldiers will be rescuring the tradeway and that she’ll look into any places where gunpowder could be smiled into or below the castle.

She would like to retain them for the time being to track down the final destination of all the gunpowder the goblins had manufactured. She also wants them to help the kobolds find their queen so they can return back to the underworld. 

Roderick suggests that they might make good trading partners and prompts Hagle to tell them what his tribe can trade with. He reports that the only other thing they had been doing besides mining sulfur was collecting guano from a cave in the forest. He also admits that he is not sure he can find the exact location of the passage back to the kobold’s home. They had never come to the service before and were herded out into the forest under duress and marched to the sulfur mine. Others of his tribe might remember more details.

The party departs the luncheon on the Castellan’s payroll and with two objectives. It seems they will be once again heading into the forest/ and caves to the north.

The Mythic World of Urd: Necromancy and Undead Orcs

The following is from GameDoc's session notes, which are posted in our private social media.  You can listen as the Arcane Alienist describes the diplomacy style of his player characters...

** The Mythic World of Urd Campaign Hub **

THE BANDIT’S LAIR

(AKA “Necromancy and Undead Orcs”)

Having killed most of the mercenary bandits and captured the few survivors and camp followers, the party decides to lay an ambush for the bandit captain, Serne Raxor. In exchange for clemency, two captured bandits agree to draw the captain out of his chambers, assuming he is there.

The bandits knock on the door, yelling about intruders in the cave complex and calling for Raxor to come help. Meanwhile, the party waits around the corner of the darkened corridor. Raxor’s lieutenant, Lirrit, answers the door and questions the two bandits before emerging into the corridor with another bandit.

Dolly approaches, greeting Lirrit and explaining that there’s been a misunderstanding. She is searching for a lost friend that she thought may have wandered into the cave. Raxor appears in the doorway, armed for battle, including a finely wrought shield. He is suspicious and although Dolly is emphatic in her bluff, he orders her killed.

However, the distraction is enough to let the rest of the party take them by surprise. Harald is able to shoot the bandit captain with an arrow. The party easily defeats Lirrit and the other guard, but Raxor doesn’t go down so easily. He drops Dolly with a blow from his axe, but Roderick is able to heal her before it’s too late. Harald plants two more arrows in him before he finally surrenders. Celestina indicates that his shelf is magical and Dolly claims it. 

"Nothing wrong with shooting - as long as the RIGHT people get shot." - Filthy Harald

When questioned, Serne Raxor reveals that he was hired out of the Northern Kingdoms by a woman named Viktora Ash. She is some sort of dark priest or necromancer, and is responsible for the ghouls that the bandits work alongside. Their mission is to raid along the tradeway. His only dealings with the goblins was to hand over any captives taken. He doesn’t know what kind of deal Viktora Ash made with them otherwise. 

Raxor will lead them to her to avoid the hangman’s noose. He then reveals a secret door leading to a hidden chamber where he meets with her from time to time. There is a second secret door on the other side of the room, but he has never gone past this room. He tells them that she stays somewhere in the caves beyond. 

The party ventures through a passage and comes to a door. There is no discernible sound from the other side. Dolly kicks the door open and is confronted by two undead warriors - the animated corpses of yet more orcs Further into the room, Dolly sees a cloaked figure emerge and begin to chant a spell. 

Dolly, Roderick, and the retainer Dominique briefly battle with the undead in attempt to breach the doorway before Hedemar is able to turn them with his holy symbol. The warriors cut down the stunned undead. The cloaked figure unleashes a spell obscuring the doorway in darkness. 

Roderick and Harald rush into the darkness and Harald finds his way through and comes face to face with Viktora Ash. The amulet hanging from her neck bears an  unholy symbol of Chaos. In the meantime, Dolly lobs a bomb into the room, hoping to hit their foe, but overshoots and the bomb explodes without harming anyone. 

Harald jabs Viktora Ash in the shoulder with the spike of his halberd and in return she places her palm on his arm and drains away a sliver of his life force with an unholy spell. He overbrears her and pins her to the floor as Roderick emerges from the darkness and piles on.

The party interrogates the evil priestess. She confesses that her cult slaughtered a local band of orcs to use their corpses to create undead and  She doesn’t know what was promised to the Troll King by her superiors, only that the goblins were to clear the forest and manufacture gunpowder. When asked about the kobold’s queen, she replies that she was taken back to the kobold’s original lair for safekeeping. When asked what her ultimate goals are, she only replies “Chaos!”

Searching the room, the party discovers a magical rope of climbing, which Jessup (the thief) stows in his pack, a page apparently torn from a book on the history of the region, and a stone head that appears to have been broken from a statue. The head is that of an orc and the details are uncannily realistic. Harald conjectures that it must have been a monument to some great orcish hero, to which Viktora Ash laughs aloud and says “He was brave to end, for sure. Didn’t even cower when the time came.”

Suddenly, the kobold retainer Hagle gasps “The queen!” Revealing that the kobold’s queen can turn people to stone. The party agrees that they need to find the queen as quickly as possible, but Viktora Ash taunts them again, asking if they think they can rescue her before everyone the humans hold dear “explodes”. It seems they also need to figure out what the bugbears did with all that gunpowder. 

Viktora will tell them no more and seems willing to die rather than let anything else slip. The party briefly searched the remains caverns, finding and destroying several more undead orcs before heading back to the castle with their sole prisoner (Raxor and the remaining bandits having ran off), who will presumably be hanged for both banditry and heresy.

Upon examining the torn page, Dolly sees that it tells of the deaths of Zelligar the Unknown and Rhaegan the Fearless along with their companions in the collapse of the tower while confronting the orc warlord Azhug III centuries ago. She notes that Roderick’s ancestor and namesake was among the heroes to fall that day. The page also makes a passing reference to Rhaegan and Zelligar’s secret base of operations - Quasqueton - thought to be hidden somewhere in the area

The Mythic World of Urd: "Orc" Hunting

The following comes from GameDoc's session notes on our private social media.  You can also check out another recap of the game at the Arcane Alienists' Podcast, where he goes into much more detail...

** The Mythic World of Urd Campaign Page **

After their battle with ghouls made from dead orcs and human bandits disguised as live orcs, the party returns to the dwarves' mine to rest and reclaim their mounts. The next morning they set out to track the “orcs.” The trail leads them to another cave in the forest.

The entrance is decorated with a row of skulls and severed heads mounted on a ledge above. As they scout the vicinity, Roderick discovers another cave obscured by the undergrowth of the forest. It emanates the stench of rotten flesh and a grave chill not unlike that of the ghouls encountered the day before. Roderick’s clerical attunement also senses the presence of chaos. He retreads back to the others.

Meanwhile, Dolly senses a brief movement from one of the mounted heads and moves forward to get a closer look, but it remains still. At last she hurls a stone at it to which it cries out in pain  and falls back into a small opening that had been unseen behind it until then. 

But before anyone else can react, a trio of orcish ghouls emerge from the second cave. Everyone is able to react with ranged attacks before the ghouls can reach them and Roderick then calls upon the power or Saint Cyrus to turn them. The ghouls retreat back into their cave. 

Dolly moves back to inspect the place where the severed head had moved. Seeing nothing there, she lights a poster bomb and tosses it up into the hole. A few seconds later all can hear the explosion from within. Dolly climbs up and through the opening while everyone else enters the skull-lined entrance.

Dolly finds herself in a small alcove where there is gray curtain, a dead human, and a charred, shattered stool, both the handiwork of her bomb. The human had painted his face to resemble an orc so that he could sit on the stool and rest his chin on the ledge with the stone-colored curtain behind him so as to appear to be a severed head perched on the ledge and keep a lookout. 

Beyond the alcove is a large cavern set up as a crudely furnished dining hall. A passageway exits to the east, seemingly in the direction of the cave entrance. To the west is a pair of large curtains covering another set of exits. Dolly peeks behind one and sees several bandits readying weapons. There are about 20 or so camp followers and children as well. She backs into the dining hall and crouches behind a table.

Meanwhile the others are immediately confronted just inside the cave entrance by four human bandits. They quickly kill two and capture the others, but not before the alarm is raised. Harald looks back to see the dining hall and Dolly waiting there as more bandits emerge from behind the curtains. The party converges on the dining hall as yet another group of bandits appears from somewhere deeper in the cave complex.

Despite being surrounded, the party holds their own. Roderick falls to a bandit's sword, but his kobold retainer, Hagle, quickly applies a healing potion and the revived Roderick rejoins the fight. All but two of the bandits are killed. The captives (now numbering four) explain that their mercenary company was hire to raid along the tradeway disguised as orcs.

Their ghoul allies remain in the nearby cave until called on to joint raiding parties. They don’t know where the ghouls came from. They were already here when the bandits arrived to set up camp. The ghouls have helped ensure there were few survivors and that the attacks were so quick that those who escaped had little time to realize their attackers aren’t actually orcs. 

When asked about the kobold’s queen, the bandits know nothing. The bandits suggest their captain knows all the details of who hired them and what other plans may be afoot. They agree to help lure their captain out of his quarters if he’s there. It seems he has some means of coming and going from the cave complex undetected when he wants to.