Ghosts of Saltmarsh - Firewatch Island (Day 8 continued)

It feels like it has been a while since the last session of D&D online. Real life has got in the way a little recently but we all managed to meet up again online Thursday night for a continuation of the adventure.

We picked up from where we left off...

Day 8 - continued

After searching the main room we found nothing of value; most everything was smashed as a result, we assumed, of a bloody combat. The only thing of interest was a tall copper column or tube that ran way up into the ceiling with a small hatch in it. The smell emanating from it was overwhelming, so we decided not to investigate it at that time.

Navda, the party's rogue, used his skills to listen and check each of the four sets of doors in the main room for trap or anything to be wary of. As nothing was heard or appeared to be particularly suspicious we decided to enter each room in turn in a clockwise manner to see what we could find.

Screenshot from Fantasy Grounds - our progress on the ground floor so far

 

The first room, in the east wall with the double-doors, appeared to have been the scene of yet another bloody skirmish. A large table in the centre of the room was broken as if a heavy weight had fallen onto it from a great height. All signs of the remains of an unfinished meal were scattered about the broken table; mouldy food scraps and broken crockery intermingled with more blood stains. The ceiling above was gone, so we could see the windows of the level above; the east windows to the outside were open, but those pointing inwards towards the west were made into makeshift arrowslits.

For some reason we decided to skip the second room for now as it was heavily barricaded as if to keep something within. We would come back to it later.

The third door, to the south, had been pulled off its hinges and re-hung. The construction of this room led us to believe that it was what appeared to be a later addition to the hermitage; the walls were not as well made and the roof was made of thatch. The whole room was hung with ragged curtains as if to make individual cells - almost like a barracks - with old bedrolls and so on in each cell. The room was in an absolute mess and there were piles of gore in addition to the usual blood spatters. As we progressed into the room, we heard lots of skittering and squeaking before several piles of rags and bedrolls erupted into hordes of rabid rats.

A short fight put paid to the vermin, but not without a few of us taking a few bites and scratches. A quick search of the room after the rats were dispatched revealed a couple of small vials with a burgundy liquid in them and within one of the curtain poles, a small green charm.

The other door in this room led to the outside. After removing the barricade put in place to stop someone or something entering from the outside, we passed down a small flight of steps and onto a beach covered in flotsam and jetsam. There was a wall to the east which we assumed enclosed a garden (something to investigate later), and other than a large hill/mound all we could find of interest was a set or two of footprints leading up and down the beach and more blood stains.

We made our way back inside the hermitage to the main room to continue our investigations of the lower floor. On our way to the second door in the east wall we decided that we would investigate the smell coming from the copper tube after all and wished we hadn't - it turned out to be a rotted, toothless humanoid head of indeterminate origin. We left it in place and closed the hatch on it.

The barricade into the room was dismantled and we made our way inside what looked like a library of sorts. There were several tables with books strewn all over them and chairs positioned at them, shelving the length to the east wall with many books, and two huge tapestries depicting sea scenes and a sea hag on the north and south walls. A brief search through the blood stained remains in this room revealed the symbol of a sea god within crashing waves on a blood stained green rug and a small piece of damp paper on the table that looked like a map which we grabbed for later perusal.

Happy that we had cleared the east and south walls we decided to take a look along the corridor to the west. It appeared to be a dead end, but the plasterwork turned out to conceal a door at the end of the corridor. We quickly knocked down the false wall and opened the door into what turned out to be a circular tower. The ceiling was around forty feet above us but was covered in a green slime similar to that we encountered in the smugglers' caves further up the coast past Saltmarsh. The barrels and crates within the storage room were severely rotted and decayed, most likely as a result of the actions of the green slime. We quickly gathered some dry, broken furniture from the main room and lit a small fire outside the room to stop the slime from spreading; we surmised the false wall was built to stop its inexorable spread.

The final door we investigated was the last one in the main room on the west wall beside the corridor we had just returned from. The door opened smoothly into a kitchen area that showed signs of fairly recent use. There was nothing of interest to be found in this room except for a small flask of oil that had a hand-written label upon it saying Slipperiness.

The other, locked, door exiting from the kitchen led into what seemed to be a winery. Unfortunately, all the bottles were either empty or smashed and all the other caskets and crates in the room were full of rotten vegetables. Beneath one pile of rotten potatoes we espied a hatch. We pulled up the wooden cover to reveal a crude ladder leading down into the darkness.