Ghosts of Saltmarsh (#23) - The Isle of the Abbey IV

Thursday last week, we were able to continue with the online Saltmarsh campaign. It has taken a little longer than normal to get the session written up as a lot of real life got in the way over the weekend. Anyway, on with the show...

Day 52

We rested well for the rest of the day and then overnight but everyone had a nagging feeling that things were still going to be rough for us. We retraced our steps back to the large crystal minotaur and continued to follow the southern corridor.

We wound up in a twisted maze of corridors with many more traps. Again, even though I trod as carefully as I could, I fell into a poison-spiked pit. Navda also fell foul of a trapped door that shocked him with a bolt of lightning when he tried to open it. It needed Gladreth to Dispel Magic on the door to enable us to get through it.

The other side of the door revealed a large, square chamber full of chests and scattered treasures. It was presided over, from the centre, by a jade green statue of a beautiful elf maiden.

Navda made a lasso and managed to cast it at one of the treasure chests scattered about the floor, so he would not have to enter the room to retrieve it. Unfortunately, even though his first cast was successful and he began to draw back the chest, it was too noisy and the jade statue's head turned. The elf maiden's visage turned into a hideous be-fanged vampiric demon.

Gladreth swiftly cast a Lightning Bolt at the jade being but it had little effect - maybe we should have heeded what happened to Navda when he attempted to open the door? We would be in for another tough fight again. This time I had the foresight to Bless our main fighters, which helped them in the combat. The statue was damaged severely, but not without it causing carnage on the fighters that required a Prayer of Healing to restore.

Unfortunately, the bites of this vampiric demon led to the blood of several of our party to begin to boil. Luckily Dharion and I were able to arrest its development before it caused serious issues for those affected.

With the demise of the jade demon we were able to search the room, but it turned out that all of the treasure was false - all the coins were base metal painted to look like gold and silver, and all the jewels were paste.

The open way northwards just led back to where we had come from, so we looked for another way out of the room. It had previously been affirmed by the acolyte Odim, although he had proven a liar with other things he had said, that there was a great treasure here, so we kept our hopes up that we would eventually be rewarded for our efforts.

Navda was rewarded for his efforts whilst searching the room for secret exits by finding a false door in the eastern wall. He disarmed the dart trap and opened it to reveal a corridor with a fine granite floor with golden veins running through it. We initially avoided the room directly ahead of us when we found that we could not open the door, but the door that was ajar at the southern end of the corridor looked promising.

The door was slightly ajar, so Navda and Gladreth carefully approached it. After listening intently at it for a while and checking it for traps, they pulled the door open only for the ceiling above to collapse upon them. I used up pretty much all the rest of my spells Healing them. It was only when things quietened down a bit that we began to hear a ticking sound coming from along the corridor.

A bit more of the dungeon below the ruined abbey

Navda and I thought that it may be yet another trap on some kind of timer so we advanced along the corridor as quickly as we could, narrowly avoiding another pit trap set in the south-eastern corner.

The northern end of the corridor ended at a wooden doorway from behind which we could hear the ticking sound. Navda disarmed a trap set on the door and when the portal was opened the ballista behind it was also permanently put out of use. The ticking sound came from a large clock that had a second hand that was ticking but the pendulum was not moving. Gladreth realised that the pendulum needed to be restarted in order to activate it again, so Drakkon reached out and got it back into motion.

Just as the pendulum began to swing, we heard a shout from the rest of the party still at the unopenable door that the door had actually just swung open. We hurried back to join the rest of the party and found that the chamber beyond the door contained two massive pillars. The floor was covered in bags and stuff but what mainly caught our attention, were the two shimmering figures that were moving around.