Mattsters of the Mattiverse Session 22

...last episode

• The party heads back to Wydmoor and makes it to the Cathedral, where they find that things are pretty creepy and fight some oozes and wraiths.

Vox ex cathedralis

• The party moves quickly to scout the cathedral, to make the most use of the magics they have placed on themselves. Gokar keeps a detect undead spell up.
• All of the (many) stained glass windows continue on the disturbing narratives from before. Those, and some statuary, are all described below, loosely grouped by location.
• They veer from the nave into the choir to the East, and from there into the various supporting chambers. They are greeted with more of the same: Perfect analogs to the church Yoa knew, but with a sinister twist to their decoration, which Yoa and Edi all dutifully note for clues. Not a speck of dust or any other sign of disrepair is in evidence.
• They detour briefly into the Vicar's Vestry. A mannequin stands in its center, empty.
• The party heads through the choir, past a large kitchen and an open-air courtyard cemetery, and past two small chapels, each with a statue. The sky above the cemetery is a mass of dark clouds, in contrast to the clear skies they entered under.
• There is a chapel at the end of the corridor that draws notice. Inside are six human figures, all saying the Alexandrian Rosary in (seemingly eternal) penitence. The three in range of Gokar do not detect as undead.
  • This later turns out to be because they were (very unexpectedly) resisting the spell, which is discovered when Edi addresses the group and is immediately attacked by the group, who are all wights (dispatched handily). The party does not spend time ruminating on the implications of this discovery, but Gokar drops his detect undead spell.
• The party meets a set of double-doors that appear to lead to the outside. While Gokar picks the lock, Russ scouts ahead
  • He enters the sacristy, which is completely full of all the usual vestments of faith. When he enters, his mind is suddenly assaulted by cries of pain and suffering, pleas for forgiveness, and supplications for mercy. The world seems to shift, and where there was before just a closet wardrobe appears a ghostly, roiling vortex of darkness and screaming faces. It reaches out a ghastly tendril and the screaming rises to a cacophony in his mind, sapping his will (4 wisdom damage)
  • Russ retreats and casts shield, which is largely ineffective against this creature (but is useful later).
  • The rest of the group catches up. Yoa summons a Hell Hound, who breathes relatively ineffective fire before joining Gokar in being engulfed by the creature. The Hell Hound fails its save and spends the next four rounds in despondency (Gokar succeeds, but takes Wisdom damage from its attack).
  • Everyone tears into the ectoplasmic form, a strange sensation made familiar by repetition. Russ is engulfed, and also succumbs to despondency--he spends the rest of the fight on his knees, staring at the floor.
  • The fight is soon over, the last psychic scream bleeding away past sensibility.
• The group gathers around Russ, trying to encourage him from his stupor. After some seconds, he comes to his senses, and, surrounded by a concerned Edi and Yoa, immediately rushes off to escape their focus.
• Edi inspects the windows lining the cemetery, and the rest of the party makes its way through to the library.
  • Gokar is the first in the library, and he scans the shelves. The first book title catches his eye: MAD GOKAR WILL DIE HERE
  • Yoa finds: YOA WILL LET YOU DOWN. It disturbs her, deeply.
  • Russ grabs his own book: THE LONG EXTINCTION OF THE LIZARDFOLK. He opens it to find it is completely full of portraits of... himself. He tears out one of the pages and stores it in a pouch.
  • Yoa looks at the same book, but sees a different title: HE WILL EAT YOU WHILE YOU SLEEP. She appears even more disturbed and glances fitfully at Russ, who doesn't seem to notice.
  • The library adjoins some reading rooms, but is otherwise just a library. Yoa casts detect magic, but finds nothing apart from the general background magic of the area that was already detected, which is interesting all by itself, indicating that its disturbing quirks are all choreographed by the same enchantment that binds the entire cathedral.
• Before setting off to the North, the party checks the door they had opened. As expected, it opens to the outside, but the only thing they can see is thick, roiling fog.
• Next are many, many apartments, all unremarkable except for their windows. Some are more well-appointed than others, but none particularly stand out.
• The party makes its way near the front of the cathedral. They find some stairs into a tower, and decide to take a look.
  • At the top, all that is visible is fog. In addition, a stark chill fills the air, and they note that they would need to take precautions against the cold if they were to attempt venturing out.
• They come back down and resolve to finish exploring the sanctuary

The Puppet Master

• They pick back up in the section of the nave that they left off. As they approach to the South, they once again hear a childrens' choir, and additionally hear hoofsteps. In the Eastern wall is a gateway to what appear to be stables. Russ, nervous, drinks an extract that causes his arms to lengthen.
• As the party moves past the gateway, all hell breaks loose
  • The unearthly chorus reaches a crescendo that attempts to push itself into the minds of the party. Gokar is most affected, and he dashes off through the ambulatory, avoiding the choir area. The rest are shaken, but do not flee
  • A dark form bursts through a stained-glass window--it is a nightmare, who rushes into melee with Russ before breathing dark, noxious smoke (the movement triggers an AoO from Russ's claws, which connects) over Russ, Try and Edi. The smoke sickens Russ and Try, but they do their best to ignore it.
  • Russ engages while Edi pulls away. Edi is immediately attacked by wights, and more erupt from vestibules near Gokar to cut him off from the party (eight in all).
  • Another nightmare leaps into the melee with Russ, who does what he can to keep their attention.

• • Gokar snaps to his wits, and leaps madly through two of the wights to try to get back to the party.
  • Edi targets a fireball to engulf both nightmares and the two wights next to him, immolating himself in the process. Unfortunately, he isn't able to completely commit to the plan, and he does relatively little damage (although this is still substantial when added among all the targets).

• • Russ and Try beat on nightmares, while Yoa, mostly tapped out, mostly just tries to stay out of harm's way.
  • Gokar manages to get to Edi before being surrounded. Edi takes the opportunity to smoke the six wights he left behind, and demolishes all but two of them.

• • Finally, the eerie choir coalesces into jeering laughs, and a towering, spectral man, tall as an ogre, corpulent and wreathed in sickly vines appears. He shouts words at the party in an unnatural and appalling tongue that only Yoa can understand. She waits until after the battle to provide a translation. ("My children will come back to me, won't you stay and play with them?")
  • He floats over to Edi and strikes him a severe blow, doing 5 points of constitution damage.
  • A channel from Edi, and more arrows and blows from Try, Gokar and Russ finish up the chaff, and the two tanks move to block the puppetmaster. He cackles with a strained, mirthless rictus covering his face and strikes Russ, but does not manage to drain his vitality.
  • Another round of focused blows, and the giant wraith falls, disappearing among his final words (translated by Yoa: "You have not escaped, I will return!")
• Everything settles, and the party, nearly spent, takes a breath before deciding their next move.

Iconography

East Choir

The stained glass window in the Choir is of a humanoid figure with a blank, expressionless face. Smooth and almost featureless. It's mouth is the faintist of lines, but two small incisors are visible. Between his two eyes, which are closed, is a blood red crystal rose. Around him in the background is an aura of black swamp roses.

• Those knowledgeable of nature in the party note that these roses are a common feature of the Wydmoor Swamp area

The Vicar's Vestry

The windows here are notably strange, completely monochrome in blacks and grays in an impressionist style completely at odds with that of the other windows. They invoke eveloping darkness, menace and shadow. In the bottom corner, about 10% of the total area, is a small man huddled in the corner of the pane. He wears tattered robes and clutches a miter in his hands.

The Chapel Statues

The chapel directly east of the East Choir has a statue of a hanged woman. A crow on her left shoulder is eating one of her eyes.

The chapel east of the Kitchen is a statue of a woman in recline, being pressed by stones.

The Kitchen

The kitchen has a pair of identical stained glass images, except mirrored. They are of a figure dressed in a pile of stiched together grey and brown and red rags. Their backdrop is of broken toys and plush monsters. Unique to this stained glass window is that it is the only one that shows stars, or any source of light at all. Above the rag-man, small but perceptible, are six stars - five white and one red.

The Chapel of the Penitents

The windows in this room all depict the same figure: a withered and almost corpselike old man wearing the robes of a scholar. His arms are extended and his hands open and raised upward. Below each hand is a smaller, kneeling figure. They also wear the robes of scholars, though one wears and iron crown and the other wears a jaunty cap.

The Cemetary

The graves are all well maintained, as is the lawn. There is no roof above this area, but instead it is open to the sky. However, the sky above is rolling grey clouds, not the clear skies you entered under. Cool, clear water stands in a large fountain in the center of the cemetry. There is a statue of Alexandria in the center of the fountain, but if water bubbled forth once from the statue it currently stands quiet.

The Cemetery Corridors

One of the windows has two figures. The lower half of the window is dominated by a scowling dwarf wearing a crown of fingerbones. He has a thick black beard and his glaring eyes are just pinpoints below a shadow brow. He wears a breastplate with the sigil of a black swan. Above and behind him is a figure so dark as to almost be lost into the shadow background: an ashen skinned young human young woman holding a black wooden staff topped with a heart made of amber.

Next to that window is a stained glass window of a young woman. There are no shadows here - she radiates light like the sun. Her hands are pierced and bleeding, blood pours forth from her mouth, and from her eyes, as tears. The blood pools at the bottom of the image, where hundreds of ant-sized people gather around it, drinking. In one hand she holds a book -- the Canon of Orthodoxy -- but it is stained and ruined by her bloody grip.

Next to that is a stained glass image in the style of an alexandrian fortune card. It is of a austere, elven woman. Her face is half in shadow, giving her face two aspects: One half is rosy and beautiful, with sun-blond hair, while the other half is so cloaked in shadow that she appears ebon black, with her hair bleached into ebon white. A thunderstorm gathers in the figure's backgdrop.

The window next to that one is of a long figure, almost lost in the middle of a black backdrop. Rather than being a bust or a portrait, this figure is full-bodied, but small, directly in the center and roughly 20% of the total area. He is bearded, with slightly pointed ears. His vein structure all over his body visible as dark, icy lines. More dark lines, almost as dark as the backdrop, extend out in eight directions. Looking more closely, what appears to be just a misty black backdrop is -- in fact -- dozens of hungry, leering faces with bulbous noses and thick beards, many wearing lenses.

The next window is of a halfling woman with a kindly smile. The backdrop of this painting is handprints in rainbow colors.

• The above image was first noticed by Edi, and he was given this editorial:

As a halfling, you see a menace and a malace that a human might not. She smirks at you and her eyes seem to follow you around the room as you move.

The final window is of a child, lost in the woods with a blue blanket in his hands. The perspective, you feel, is that of the woods itself, as you are seeing the child from the front, peering in with eyes wide in terror, rather than his back. His eyes are mismatched -- one brown and one green. The child himself looks slightly different than the rest of the figures you've seen; his section of the window is broken up into many, many more panes than the others, giving the boy a broken and segmented quality. Behind him, as is common, the dark backdrop conceals another image: a black dragon, wings extended and roaring.

The final window in the sequence is of a brown skinned, tattooed man in red robes. He is bound lengthwise by his hands and by his feet with crimson silk textiles, and he his blindfolded and gagged by the same. He is shaved bald and small horns protrude from his scalp. His head is untattooed except for a single sigil in a language you do not understand or recognize. The backdrop here is of fire, not darkness, and though you get the impression the flames are meant to be a background, you cannot help that they somehow twist into the shape of batlike wings behind the bound man.

The Church Apartments

Each of the windows in this room show an individual splayed out and nailed to a wall: Edi, Yoa, an Gokar

Each of the windows in this room show an individual splayed out and nailed to a wall: Edi, Yoa, Gokar, and Russ

These stained glass windows are a close up of a mans face, broken and bloody. One eye is collapsed rom violence and the other stares at you with an accusatory stare. It takes a moment for you to recognize it: It's Apt.

This is a picture of Russ, hanging upside-down by his feet, mid-butchering, as if he were livestock.

These each feature a hanging tree; a large, sad willow. Visible in each is a small, hanged figure, but with subtle variations: One you recognize as Astlan Mead, one of Sena Essa, and one as Honel Oedi. Standing in the bottom corner of each, holding the other end of the rope, is a second figure. Always the same in all three - The Affable Soldier.

Two images here, both of Gokar. One is of gokar as he looks now, behind him a wall very much like any of the walls here. He stares outward, hollow eyed, and the viewer seems to be looking at him through the bars of a prison cell. The second image is identical, except gokar is an old man with a long beard. The walls behind him are also identical, except now the once pristine walls are filled with endless, countless hashmarks

An image of Russ, being eaten alive by Yoa, Gokar, and Edi

The north room has a pair of images: One of Yoa being torn apart by Try, and another of Yoa dead on the ground, riddled in the back with arrows

The room in the south is of of someone you do not recognize: a handsome but late middle-aged gentleman in nobles' attire. He has a corpselike palor and protruding incisors are visible in his mouth, which is open in a scream. He is picture on the edge of a balcony, reaching down frantically to grab at a woman whose head can be seen as if she were falling. You notice she is not reaching up to grab the hand being offered. Her hair is brown. The picture next to it is identical, except the woman's hair is red. The images in the next room is also identical, except the woman has, respectively, blond hair and a lighter brown hair.

These are of a figure clad entire in black plate armor. His visor is down and a pair of red embers burn were eyes would be. He carries a large two handed sword. The emblem on his chest is of a blood red rose.

The only thing that differes in these portraits is the background. One is of a palatial estate, and the backdrop is a trio of beautiful elves in dresses of red, black, and white. The second portrait is the same, except the women scream in horror. A large flaming mountain can be seen streaking from the heavens in the background. The final features a background of waste and ruinm and the three women have an ghostly, banshee-like look to them.

The images are of the vampire and lady you saw elsewhere, only the hair is slightly different colors. The windows are taller, and it's more of a profile shot. The woman is clearly falling to the rocks at the base of the tower.

5xp for exploring the tower

The image here is of feral dogs eating your recently killed body. Your corpses seem to have been drained of blood before they were dumped here.

Awards

• 2800xp to all for fourteen Odessan penitents (wights, six in the chapel and eight from the vestibules near the sanctuary)
• 1600 xp to all for the Hadriarch's Regret (the whirlwind of souls and screams)
• 800 xp to all for two nightmares
• 500 xp to all for the abuser wraith/puppetmaster
• 25 xp to Yoa and the Bastard! achievement to Mattie, for finishing off one of the nightmares.
• 5 xp to Gokar, Russ and Edi for exploring the tower
• 50 xp to Yoa for Mattie remembering the story of Adrillathellior Teldandilion, a likely subject of one of the windows