Session #41: The Hellhouse

This week the party found that the chapel they took shelter in was full of mutilated corpses, as the survivors who took shelter here had been slaughtered. They also recovered some loot, and found that the priest they'd encountered earlier, Brellac Monsen, had been decapitated. They took an extended rest, and resurrected Cyrus; afterwards, they cleaned up the chapel, and discovered that the ghouls had disappeared from Hampstead, howling and all...or so they thought at least.

Taking this opportunity to try and make it to Falconia, the party found a large procession of ghouls heading toward the farm that Brellac Monsen had mentioned as the home of a particularly troubled individual, Vrikus. The party followed this procession, and found the ghouls being ushered into a large barn. They found no organizer for this, and the only other building on the farm property was the farmhouse - they entered it, finding mad writings scattered within. Upon trying to read this writing, the house's structural integrity returned to an earlier time, the house filled with blood red fog, and the party lost track of eachother. The encounter then began.

It took awhile for the party to figure out what they needed to do; particularly Vorgym, who was confronted with Vrikus all alone early in the encounter. Vrikus made an effort to rip Vorgym in half, and Vorgym was bloodied early in the encounter- but in the end, the party figured out the illusion, though a few of them went insane temporarily in the process, and broke through to fight Vrikus. Once the illusion had been broken, Vrikus went down easily. They learned that Vrikus had been taken to Elanath's Tower, and a shard of bone pulsing with black light had been placed within his chest - a shard which emerged upon his demise. However, this would not be the end of their encounters in Hampstead...

Outside, the party found that Brellac Monsen, who they thought was dead, and a group of skeletal minions had set aflame the ghoul-filled barn. Monsen took the shard from the party, and then revealed himself as Ctenmiir the Cursed, the villain responsible for most everything that had happened to this point. He then threw the bone shard, which he identified as a Doresannic shard (a piece of bone from one of the Ghoul King Doresain's victims), into the barn, which animated into a swirling, burning mass of wood, metal and bone. We ended there, with the threat of more of these shards being used on Falconia looming.