I received an invitation from one Ikthgild Emdger, a self described Dwarf of Culture, asking me to join him for an evening of relaxation and discussion. I went on the assumption that it would be about a job, probably not an entirely legal one.
The other invitees to the soiree included Davrim, Dubhan, Jae, Williaml, Xeviouz, and Zil all of whom I've had the pleasure to travel with before. Mr Emdger spend the evening between extolling the virtues of his no doubt extremely expensive statuary garden and asking us to retrieve "family property" from before the scourge.
As we left I suggested that I had my doubts about hoe much of what he wanted recovered was actually part of his family fortune, and that maybe we should just sell whatever we found at "his" estate in the Grand Bazaar instead. The others weren't keen on making an enemy out of someone so powerful in Throal so we decided to settle for checking his claims.
We pooled money for access to the library and sent Dubhan to do research, which to my surprise confirmed his story. In the meantime Zil asked his contacts in the local artist community and it seems the statues are the real deal.
We set out with a wagon (provided by our employer) and a lot of thick felt suitable for wrapping statues (courtesy of one of Zil's contacts) and made good time to the Emdger lands. On the way we saw the beginning of people settling in the land, a comforting sight for the future. The estate lands on the other hand looked untouched since before the scourge, filled with overgrown woods and, closer to the manor, statuary in various states of disrepair.
It is among these statues that we had the first unpleasant encounter of the trip (excluding the one with our employer): about ten creatures that looked like a chicken crossed with a cobra, covered in white feathers and about as big as Dvarim. Aggressive too, the moment they spotted us they charged hissing and honking. The bit and then tried to latch on, while buffeting you with their wings, annoying and distracting to say the least, however they weren't very tough and we made short work of them after the initial surprise. Still their bite is quite strong, strong enough than in trying to remove one from my arm, I ripped the body off the head. At some point during the melee two crocodiles popped out of the nearby pool, but Jael convinced them to relocate quickly, so they weren't a big issue.
After the fight, Jael befriended one of the crocodiles, pronounced the cobra chickens edible and found us some of their eggs, claiming some of them were actually fertilised. We decided to see what cobra chicken meat would taste during the evening dinner.
But before sampling probably not horror tainted meat of creatures we murdered, we explored some of the manor. The building looked in reasonably good shape, the front door was unlocked but stuck closed, and the interior dusty, but not too much. We wandered around the rooms finding a lot of ancient stuff until we got to the dining room. There we founda "family" of cadavermen having "dinner", they seemed distressed by our presence and even more once we started killing them. I'll admit that killing cadavermen looking like children was extremely unsettling.
After the fight we searched the corpses for identifying objects, Jael found some preserved drinks in a side room (deliciously aged even if the alcohol was mostly gone by this point) and we left to make camp some way away.
The next day we returned and, after a quick check of the ground floor, headed into the basement, which was full of the things you'd expect in a rich family manor: casks of wine, space for ageing cheese, and so on. As we looked around we heard some noises, more cadavermen playing at being people, in this case servants, a pair of ghouls, and what looked like mother's bread dough if it had been tainted by horrors.
The fight was short and brutal, we made good use of our numbers taking the ghouls down first, then the cadavermen, and finally the monstrous dough. With this we were free to explore and loot the mansion, we picked up several items we believed to be of interest to our employer and started back towards Throal.
As a final reflection on this adventure, I've always assumed cadavermen were mindless horrorspawn, at best capable of animal cunning, but seeing them act as a family, as a small society even is unnerving. Were they keeping the house clean(ish) and observing rites like dinner because some remnant of the Namegivers they once were lingered in them, or is it all a sick joke the horrors are playing on us?Statistics:Posted by sigfriedmcwild — Wed Mar 25, 2020 11:13 pm
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