View source for Log7th Sea: The Search for Salvation-2012/10/11-Jason-1

{{Gamelog
|Session Date=2012/10/11
|Campaign=7th Sea: The Search for Salvation
|Author=Jason
|Session Title=Flashback: Glows and Ghouls
}}
Special Flashback Episode!

We're Reginald's old explorer team, exploring the Catacombs in Charouse many years before the game starts. We've broken into Lame Laflamme, thinking it would be a useful path into the catacombs. We stumble across a priest, who [[Mario Altuzzi]] tries to KO. Unfortunately the priest had been a soldier, and resisted quite effectively, inflicting a dramatic wound on the scholar. We also stumble upon a ghoul, who takes a chunk out of [[Cameron Long]].

The catacombs are cramped, creepy, and thick with bones and detritus. Also rats, and periodic ghouls. We briefly discuss the importance of quiet, and then ghouls show up. Anna hammers one down. One of others gets past Cameron's guard and bites him savagely, and a third ghoul does him a glancing blow. Going first with a torch in your hand? Not such a great idea, if you have the option. Cameron reaches the same conclusion and drops his lantern on a stick so he can draw his sword. Reginald knifes one of the ghouls, but doesn't put it down, and neither does Mario despite some solid sword work. Luc jumps forward and stabs both with his rapier and main gauche, but still hasn't put one down. Reginald stabs one again. Anna hits one and manages to make it feel it, but these ghouls are monstrously tough. With Luc between him and the ghouls, Cameron tries to pivot to help Anna, but doesn't connect. One ghoul attacks Anna and misses, one attacks Mario and cripples him, and the third attacks Luc, doing him a dramatic wound.

Anna takes a chunk out of the ghoul she's fighting. Reginald stabs his hard enough to make it feel it. Mario holds his hand up and sings a high note, and an intense white light fills the corridor. scaring but not blinding the ghouls. Cameron, unfortunately, is also surprised by the light and misses his swing. One attacks him in return, but fails. The other two both go after Mario but can't do jack. Mario slashes the ghoul nearest him but doesn't bite deep. They attack Cameron but wiff, and do another dramatic wound to Mario. Luc, abrubtly worried, kills one of the ghouls attacking Mario. Anna outright decapitates her foe. Luc slashes the "surviving" ghoul and gives it a dramatic wound.

Cameron gets between the ghoul and Mario, and the ghoul runs away. Mario, Reginald, and Luc all rush to get it before it can escape, bringing it down.

Luc takes point as we leave the scene of the fray and get to a place where we can bandage our wounds. Mario explains that his light-up thingy is an artifact he found. He also does what he can for Cameron, which is not much. Mario gives Luc a direction, and we lead off. Mario accidentally leads us right back to the ghouls. We backtrack, take a different turning, and figure that we must be getting toward the center of the city because the smell is just ghastly. Many of the passages we walk past are grated or bricked up. Eventually we see torchlight, and Anna and Luc go to check it out. It turns out to be three ratters, hunting. One of them, Pierre, was a sailor on a ship that Luc once sailed on. Clearly he's fallen on hard times. Luc gives him a couple pennies and reminds him that he never met anyone. Unfortunately Reginald also knows Pierre... because he was the one who cut the hand off. Pierre doesn't recognize Reginald, though, perhaps distracted by Mario's verbose quackery. Mario also asks if he can give them directions. Pierre will do so... for a price. Luc offers him another penny and reminds him that however bad things have gotten for him, they could get worse.

Pierre agrees to lead us further into the system. It gets louder as we go south, then backtrack toward the center. At one point Pierre warns us of a sinkhole, and Anna and Mario both notice a symbol carved into the walls to warn passers-by. Mario points it out to the rest of us. Eventually we come to some cisterns where people have built shacks and cookfires, so now it smells like filthy humans and cooking vermin along with sewage. Reginald mutters about how he misses the sea air, and Pierre suddenly realizes that it was Reginald who took his hand. Luc reminds him that things can always get worse, Mario hurridly tells him about someone who can make mechanical hands, and Reginald threatens to cut him up some more. Pierre runs off... to get his friends.

Mario asks one of the denizens whether we're headed in the right direction for the catacombs, but gets only a muttering in response. As we try to find out way, Luc notices some more symbols in the walls, which he points out to the team. Mario and Reginald can't easily decode them, but they make notes. As we get to the area under the market and the old palace, the tunnels get deeper, and we find a cut into an unflooded lower level. Anna gets a rope out of her pack and hands it to Cameron, volunteering to go first. Luc practically skips down, gliding down the sloping tunnel without apparent effort. The only problem is when Cameron brings up the rear - he falls, drops the hatrack, and breaks both lanterns, which of course go out under the water. Anna has a backup torch, but Cameron is now without light. Luc takes up the point again.

This lower layer was hewn out of the rock but never improved, so it's quite a bit rougher. Luc and Reginald hear a distant rattling, like wood bouncing on rock. After another 30-40 minutes of walking, we emerge onto dry ground. Around the next corner, as the tunnels turn north, we come across a dead body. It's a man, in rotted clothes that might have been new when he died. He's wearing an Explorer's Society pin, and Mario knows him. The man seems to have died from being stabbed in the back with a sharp wooden stake. Alas, poor Hans Van Pelt of Eisen, whose team vanished some years ago. Reginald looks around in a way that suddenly makes us aware of the possibility of traps. As we make our way past, Reginald steals Hans' jaunty hat.

Luc and Cameron all miss the weak spot that Mario steps on, but Reginald and Anna manage to stop short. Mario ends up below us, OK but very damp. He illuminates the area with his artifact and sees that it's narrow but tall, leaving him hip deep in water. When he looks behind him, he sees two glowing spots at eye level. Anna and Cameron jump down to help, with Anna between Mario and the thing. Mario turns the light up and sees that a dead body is coming toward them. It makes an angry-sounding rattle. This body: not as dead as it could be. It goes underwater. Cameron thrusts toward where he saw it last, and sticks it to some effect. It doesn't seem to like that. Anna also goes at it with her sword. Luc tosses one end of rope down to Mario. Luc and Reginald begin trying to pull Mario up, but they aren't exactly chock full of leverage. In the short term Mario is sort of dangling in mid-air. Anna hacks at the crypt ghoul again and does what you never do with enemies - delivers a small injury. The ghoul ignores her to strike at Cameron, but he blocks it with his buckler. Reginald and Luc keep hauling and begin to find some technique. Mario gets an arm over the ledge and then pulls his legs up, but leaves one arm hanging down so he can keep illuminating the scene. The ghoul hits Anna a glancing blow but she's tough and can take it. With Mario safe, Luc grabs the edges of the hole and uses the leverage to kick the ghoul in the head with both feet, knocking it down and twisting its head around unnaturally. Mario suggests that we make sure it's dead, and Anna chops its head off.

Mario then suggests that we use the lower tunnels, since we're trying to get low. Fine - it's waist deep water, but what could go wrong? As we prepare to descend, Mario bandages up Cameron's wounds. It sounds like a waterfall down here. Mario realizes that it's a mining shaft, but it's too clean to be an old Numan mine. It's something older, and it's built to the golden ratio. Eventually we come to a spot where a cave-in has eliminated both the floor and ceiling. We can see the walls widen out, but not the bottom of the shaft. Mario uses his toy and we can see that there's a thirty foot gap between us and the continuation of the tunnel. Mario throws a rock down and it goes plunk, not sploosh. It's a good ways down but there's enough drainage down there that the water is going somewhere. He throws a rock to the other side and hears a sploosh that time, so the water's going to one side. Reginald's going to have to go down and check it out.

We lower him down to a ledge, from whence he cannot see the bottom. The tossed rock test shows that it's not too far. He asks us to lower him another three feet, and we do, but he can't find the bottom. We go to bring him back up, and the knots in the rope give way. Reginald and a fifty foot coil of rope go thwa-boosh into the water. He starts to get sucked down by the current, so he thrashes over to the wall and tries to lift himself out of the water. Cameron immediately begins climbing down after him, and rescues him. Reginald and Cameron then search the rest of the ledge. Anna lowers her spare torch down to them so they can see what's down there. Mario hears a rattling noise from behind us, so up above, Luc takes up a defensive position. Meanwhile, Cameron and Reginald think they've found an intact skyway section, possibly offering us a path forward. Reginald uses the buckler and rope to improvise a sort of grapling hook and begins to climb.

Meanwhile, Luc can see three sets of glowing eyes coming, and Mario tells us all to climb quickly. Anna immediately agrees to take the rear guard, so Luc climbs down after Mario. Once we're both down, Anna (who has already tied the rope around herself) jumps. She jumps just as one of the zombies dives, giving Mario and Luc a brief window to haul in the rope before the weight hits. Also, the three zombies jump in after her, which gives us a lot of motivation to haul on the rope. Anna climbs franticly away as they swim toward her. Luc takes the time to pour a little lantern oil on them and throw a burning rope segment there, briefly lighting them on fire before they dive to extinguish the flames.

Briefly free of the ghoul menace, we climb up to the alternate tunnel and get to the central cylinder. We encounter a door made of a translucent orange material. Mario fiddls with it, opens the door and we go inside. There's light here, being filtered down a long tunnel. There's an intense bright light emanating from the center of the cylinder, around which there's something like stadium seating. Since it's rumoured that the origin of the light might be connected to the new palace, we decide to start exploring from the bottom of this central gallery and work our way up. It's super weird down here, with something like machines made our of the same amber-ish material the door was made of.

Then the ghouls return. Mario runs. Anna, Cameron, and Luc form a fighting line to buy time. These ghouls move fast and we have trouble connecting. Reginald runs. Luc sticks one of them, and so does Anna. Luc takes a crippling injury from one, and Cameron, already crippled, takes even more punishment, leaving him on the edge of falling over. Anna tells Luc to get the rest out of here while she holds them off. Before Luc can actually get away, he takes another dramatic wound. Cameron takes another nasty blow, and Luc goes down, falling into the water. Mario keeps running, though Reginald has gotten in front of him. In his haste to catch up, he trips and goes headfirst into some sort of artifact. Whatever he hit irises the central portal closed, throwing Cameron and Anna into darkness. Cameron begins to sing a song of battle, though he's beginning to realize this doesn't end well for him. He misses his target. Anna, never phased even by being trapped in a dark room with angry crypt ghouls, strikes home and does one a dramatic wound. Cameron urges Mario to jump into the water. Mario shouts for him to go first. Anna demands that they hurry, so Cameron says "auf weiderschein" and jumps. Mario pens a quick note signing off, leaves it behind for the next explorer to find, and jumps into the water. Reginald, as he runs for it, sees all the irises all the way up open, revealing guys at the top with muskets, and some sort of armature, like a giant brass stalactite, tipped with a giant orb of pure blackness. The shaft of light is being drawn into the blackness.

Reginald picks a different skyway than the one we used before and runs for his life, alone.