Ghosts of Saltmarsh - Firewatch Island (Day 9 continued)

Day 9 - The Hermitage (continued)

After "seeing" the invisible entity escape towards the distillery tower, we followed to see what it might do there, and to see what might be cackling. Navda followed the invisible being thinking that it had gone up the steps of the distillery, only to be frightened out of his wits by what we assumed to be a demonic being contained within. We could not get a word out of him and he was frozen on the spot with fear.

The rest of us got closer to see what was in the distillery that caused Navda such a fright, and we espied two hideous, sea-weed covered, blue-skinned women. I asked them where they came from, but they just laughed at us. I was pushed to the ground by the, again, invisible entity so the rest of the party attacked the hags.

Dharion attempted, via one of his spells, to befriend them but they just laughed at his attempts and attacked Druss, who was nearest to them, instead.

Sea Hag - courtesy Fantasy Grounds

Outside, Gladreth swung her staff in vicious circles and managed to connect with the invisible entity which caused a hiss to come from one of the hags in the distillery. This caused the being to become visible, so I Sacred Flame it and Drakkon finished it off with his trusty sword. This caused the hags inside to curse and snarl; we had caused them to become incensed by destroying their servant.

Invisible Stalker - courtesy Fantasy Grounds

Navda, was just beginning to come out of his frightened daze when the hags cursed him again. I pushed past the frozen Navda and cast Guiding Bolt on one of the hags, which caused her a great deal of harm. This encouraged my companions to re-double their efforts. Dharion managed to pull Navda out of harm's way, which in turn allowed me to pass by the vacated spot, run up the steps to the distillery, and finally kill one of the dreaded sea demons. Gladreth and Drakkon managed to slay the other entity, who, using her dying breath muttered "Why did you not let us return to the sea?". We all had plenty of answers to that question but we turned our attention to Navda who was now slowly returning to normality from his afeared state.

We quickly returned to the pool to see what we could find within its depths, but the items turned out to be just wish-pennies. We stuffed the few copper coin into our pouches, declaring to ourselves that the wishes would have been granted, or not, by now.

Time had begun to run away from us by now, the sun had passed its zenith a number of hours ago, so we returned to the kitchen to collect Morley and Jenna. We headed around to the south side of the island where we had espied a small rowing boat the day before in the hope of escaping the island as soon as we could. Unfortunately, when we got there we noticed that it was half full of water and had a net draped over its gunwales that seemed to be pulling it down.

We pulled the net out of the water to see if we could unsnag whatever was causing the boat to ride low and realised that it contained several of the hermitage's religious monks. It was only when the net was fully pulled from the sea that the bodies began to move. We hurriedly collected a mound of driftwood and set to bashing the un-life out of the corpses. We then burned them in a pyre. It was then that we realised that there were eight of us but the boat would only carry six. No matter how we thought about getting off the island we couldn't work out a way without splitting the party too much and have the boat return for us before it got dark. We decided to settle in for a second night in the hermitage.

It was decided we would barricade ourselves in on the third floor of the tower. It was a good defensible position and we would be forewarned in plenty of time of any attempt to get near by a new wave of sea zombies.

Tower - third floor

Navda, being the most acrobatic amongst us, did most of the climbing and sent back ropes that would make the path to the third floor (across that burnt, unstable wooden flooring of the second floor) easier for the rest of us. Dharion had a slight mishap with a fall through the floor, but was able to save himself from too much harm.

In the chamber on the third floor, we cleared out all the rubble, filled the hole in the tower wall, wedged the tables and chairs against points of egress, and set watch at each of the windows. We doused all lights in readiness for a long and fretful night.

Day 10 - The Hermitage (continued)

An hour or two after sunset we began to hear noises similar to what we had heard the night before; doors being forced open, movement to and from the sea and around the rest of the hermitage. We kept as quiet as we could be in the hope that the night would eventually pass without us being found as there was no sign of the undead passing this way the previous night.

Then, about halfway through the night, there was an almighty crashing sound as if something extremely heavy had smashed something. Then there was silence.