The Vampire’s Domain

The Weak Disguise

Turning away from the Grell they had just put down, the party pressed on in the opposite direction until another door stopped them. Red Ear eased it open a crack, and he and Karis peered through. Arrayed beyond, arranged as if they had been waiting some time, stood a group in elaborate, dated dress. Red Ear closed the door and described what he had seen: vampires, by all appearances. Pale, waxy skin. Bat-like wings on a few of them. But the details didn’t sit right with him. Deliberate tears cut into the cloth. The same waxy pallor missing at the base of a neckline here and there. He was not convinced a single real vampire stood among them.

Arthur saw an opportunity to out-perform a performance. With thaumaturgy he chilled a handful of grey dust gathered from the floor and began painting it onto his skin, instructing the others to do the same. The cold settled into their bodies and lent them the same corpse-pale cast.

Now with Arthur in the lead, the party stepped into the room proper. “Ahh, finally. We had been expecting you for some time now.” The most elaborately dressed of them spoke in a thick accent. “We would like to offer you our protection as you adventure through our domain.”

Arthur answered in a mirror of that same accent, asking after the limits of this domain and what exactly they would need protecting from. The leader implied that everything deeper than this threshold fell under their care, and that monsters of every kind pressed at their borders, ever threatening to slip through. Arthur was unimpressed. Others in the party were already eager to push on, with or without the offer. “I don’t believe we’ll need the protection. As you can see, we are all quite the same as you.”

At the same time Red Ear began pulling a mirror from his bag and using to subtly to inspect and find the reflections of the company of vampires. The leader spoke up again, “Ahh, but of course. Normally I would not press, but things are more dangerous than ever. You will find this protection quite mandatory.”

At that, Red Ear prickled, his namesake burning through the cunning disguise. “I think you will find that we are more than capable. Say, it’s odd that your reflections show.”

With the threat now on the table, the party watched sweat bead and carry the makeup down with it. With barely veiled rage and more than a flicker of fear, the leader relented. “Very well. We will make an exception. Move!”

With a flourish he spun on his heel and herded his cohort down a hall, shouting at them all to return to their chambers. By then the party had already begun picking over the large room, the whole troupe failing utterly to feel threatening once Arthur held the conversation. The contempt the others bore their leader was palpable. BUD33 found a short looping corridor and the peephole lookout where the “vampires” had lain in wait.

Pressing onward, they followed a dead-end hallway they weren’t convinced was truly a dead end, and found a door, barely visible and stubborn to open. Red Ear was called over to put his strength to it. Inside lay a long, narrow room dominated by a fresco of a giant bat terrorizing a village. Beyond, in an adjoining chamber, a raised stone slab held a coffin of dark hardwood, a small hole bored neatly into the footboard.

Arthur lifted the lid to find it empty: a layer of grave dirt across the bottom, a vial of holy water resting in the center. He pocketed the water and took a dash of the dirt for himself.

Bone Throne Room

Leaving the vampires’ haven behind, the party entered a great vaulted room and found themselves standing on a marble dais, a throne of bones rising at its center. Before it lay the skeletal remains of a manticore amid long, thin shards of crystal. Two doors waited at the far end of the room, one in the opposite corner, the other set in the middle of the far wall.

Studying the wreckage together, the party pieced together a story: the manticore had once been sealed within a crystal sphere, and at some point adventurers had shattered the prison, slain the beast, and left it all where it fell. They noted too that the throne’s arms had been carved into intricate serpent skulls.

Hallways and Snaking Corridors

Through the door in the far wall they came into a very long hall. Life-size granite statues of human warriors stood atop two rows of pedestals, all of them facing inward. Arthur walked up the wall to inspect the web-choked ceiling and flicked a flame across it; the hall flashed bright for a moment as the webbing burned away. Further down lay the curled corpses of giant spiders, riddled with arrows and bolts. Choosing the direction away from the dead spiders, the party turned into another hall lined with pock-marked pillars. In a room off to the side they discovered a corpse, fresh enough to crawl with maggots, its wounds black and necrotic marking it as a victim of a giant spider.

They left him where he lay once they’d checked him for anything of worth and carried on past the pillars. The hallway zigged and zagged before a door revealed itself in the wall. When they opened it, a cascade of humanoid skulls spilled out into the corridor, clogging the path and making the footing treacherous. They pushed through and found a small room: a green, tarnished copper throne at its center, and on the floor by the door a matching helm with a transparent visor. BUD33 ritual cast identify and learned that the helm had to be worn while seated on the throne to give up its secrets. He donned the helm and sat. As he did, a hatch opened in the ceiling above his head and dropped a wand square onto his skull, the helm sparing him the worst of it. BUD33 picked up the Wand of Secrets.

The Acid-Trapped Chest

Backtracking all the way to the hall of statues, the party worked their way down toward the spiders. Halfway along, a door waited in the wall. It opened into a sloping room, the far end a full twenty feet below where they stood. Descending carefully, they came to an adjoining chamber where the ceiling rose into a dome, and at its center a statue of a Sahuagin Baron held a locked stone chest. Pooled across the dome above, like water that had forgotten which way was down, a sickly green liquid sizzled where it touched the stone.

Set on the chest and unwilling to test the trap themselves, the party sent in Phiish, the clockwork companion. He charged the statue and slammed the chest from below, knocking it free of the stone hands and catching it in his mouth. The acid, no longer held aloft, obeyed gravity at last and came down across the statue and Phiish both. The stone hissed and sloughed away, and what had stood frozen was suddenly a living Sahuagin Baron, roaring as it struck.

Arthur answered with sorcerous fire while BUD33 moved to support Phiish, still planted beside the thing that had been a statue. The Baron’s trident found the clockwork companion again and again, and Phiish buckled under the assault and crumpled. At this casual disrespect toward machines, something in Red Ear gave way. He roared, and struck with a speed and violence the Baron could not answer, his first blow cleaving through an arm and burying itself in the creature’s midsection, his second sweeping the legs and toppling it like a felled tree. It was over almost before it had begun, Red Ear left standing over the corpse, breathing hard. The Baron’s trident would serve him as a trophy from here on.