We got up bright and early, and after a breakfast of the local pastry and tea, we headed out to the haunted house on the cliff. A few local children followed us for a while, but when it became apparent we were serious, they scurried back to the village.
As we approached the house, you could hear the waves crashing against the cliff it stood on – none too sturdily. It looked like it had been abandoned for more than a year or three, with some damage to the roof line and some of the cliff undercut by the waves. The gate was open, and the surrounding wall was collapsed in several places. Some of the more paranoid group members went through the gaps in the wall, but I marched through the front gate. After all, my mission is a good one – to recover and protect any information which might otherwise be lost.
Laddie – clearly a nickname given to a person who doesn’t wish to share too much about himself, approached the well, hoping to refill his waterskin. I’m not sure why he didn’t do so at the tavern or the well in the town, but ok. As soon as he gets close – two giant snakes come out of the well and attack him. Tearmann shoots one of them, and that one slits off and attacks him after one bites Laddie – who cries out and says he feels poison in their bite. Which makes sense, as despite their large size, I can clearly see large venom-injecting fangs, as opposed to the more normal shaped teeth common to constrictors. After a brief fight and a few more bitten companions, the snakes are slain, which is something of a pity, and we enter the house.
The place seems deserted, and we move to the main entryway. Tariq goes into a sitting room he had looked at from outside, and a swarm of larger-than-normal spiders comes out of the fireplace and climb up his legs, biting him repeatedly. Jikra attacks them, sweeping many off Tariq’s legs and more off the floor. I freeze a bunch of them, and the remainder scurry away, frightened off. We decide to go through the ground floor a little more methodically, and next enter the kitchen. Four giant centipedes come out from the woodwork, and attack Tearmann. After another battle, they are defeated. We seem to be finding all poisonous creatures, but so far the gods have smiled on us, and we’ve managed to avoid getting poisoned.
We made our way back to the entry way, and to two smaller chambers – there we find a stack of discarded books. Tragically for many of them, we have arrived too late – they’ve moldered beyond recovery. I take the three in the best condition and slide them into my backpack, which Tearmann takes the next best, and we leave the remainder to be recovered at a later time. Perhaps the House of Knowledge may be able to use magic to recover them, but it’s beyond my humble powers. The books I take are “The Magical Properties of Gemstones”, “The Magical Properties of Herbs and Flowers” by Archmage Tenser, and “Metaphysics of Mathematics” by Nysal.
Thrace tells us she’s sensing a person in the floor above, so we head upstairs, and find a man tied and bound. We release him, and he tells us he was captured by a group as he attempted to take shelter on his way to Saltmarsh – and that he says he’s a merchant. I loan him a blanket – as he was in his underclothes, and we proceed. We hear some sounds in the attic, and Llewella goes up for a look, and we see four stirges. We tried to avoid them, but as we were heading downstairs to rest, they ambushed us. I got bit by one on the thigh – disgusting things, but manage to kill it with my dagger. The others take care of another, I use my Magic Missile to take care of the last two, and we go outside to rest for an hour.
I spent a few minutes meditating, I recover a little bit of power. We had found the merchants clothes, so he takes a few minutes getting dressed. We also examine a potion I found, and I detect magic – find it is magical (and of the evocation school) but nothing else we have is. Laddie checks it for poison, and finds it is not poison. Tariq spends a few minutes poking around and generally getting himself in trouble. He discovers that the screams the locals hear, is actually some sort of alarm system. We proceed downstairs, where we find a body dressed in splint mail and with a long sword to hand. As Tearmann investigate the body, two groups of rot grubs come out and attack us. It takes a few minutes, but we manage to destroy them. The merchant asks to borrow the sword, which we lend to him.
Thrace tells us quietly that there is a group of people on the other side of the wall, but Laddie, and Thrace can’t find a way through. Tearmann finds a hidden handle, and the doorway opens. He strides in and is struck by an arrow.
Three people apparently ambushed him, but Jikra joins him and one of them falls under a barrage of missile fire and spells. The other two flee when I Magic Missile one of them, leaving her sorely wounded. At this point, the merchant was apparently preparing to stab me in the back with the blade we’d loaned him, which he had applied fresh poison to. We disarm him and bind his hands. We also find what appears to be a captains quarters off the main barracks, and find a special lantern, instructions on how to signal a boat, and the tide charts.
After this, we decide we had better pursue the fled smugglers. As we entered a rougher area of the basement – raw caverns it seems, we get ambushed again, and manage to slay one bandit. A large armored and armed hobgoblin attacks us, and Jikra gets enchanted by a spellcaster, and starts asking everyone to put down their weapons. We briefly do so, but they start shooting at us again, and hostilities resume despite Jikra’s pleas. After several minutes of exchanging missile and spellfire, and Tariq rushing through the melee like a dervish, we are victorious, and search the miscreants. To my delight, I find a spellbook on the spellcaster, and immediately claim it as the rest go through and divide their arms and armor. We take a few minutes to recover, as Tearmann and Jikra were both knocked unconscious, and I detect magic on all the loot. A smoking pipe the wizard had on him glows, and I tell the party I’ll hold onto it until we can identify it’s uses. We find some trade goods and a small boat on a beach inside the cavern complex, a goodly amount of silk (5 bolts), and eight casks of brandy.
We retreat to the barracks room, and decide we will rest there for the night. Judging from the quiet, introspective mood, most of us are digesting the lessons learned with the days conflicts as we prepare to rest.
