Still looking for Laurel, the party discovers Coven catacombs underneath Ulm’s Monument. They find the encoded spell tomes Detect Fey and Fey Extinction Event there, and kill the witches Annabelle, Beatrice, and Clementine. The party wonders about Rowan when she has deja vu in the catacombs and the witches don’t attack her. They find Laurel, and Detect Fey shows that Laurel and Casca are fairies. Laurel tells them that a Lady of the Coven, Astrid, is planning to kill all of Hollin’s fairies with Fey Extinction Event and the Penance Stone.
Before the game, I asked the players if I could send some or all of them private text messages during the game, and we confirmed everyone could receive my messages.
Near the end of the last game, Beale outperformed Cankerblossom at the Black Cabaret, and as a reward, Cankerblossom pointed out the Duchesses of the Wake to him. During the fight with the Duchesses, Cankerblossom had learned Fairie Fire by watching Beale, and now offered to teach Beale his Counterpoint spell in return.
Counterpoint: as a reaction, interrupt any spell that’s a song, and replace it with your own spell, by beating the caster in a Performance ability check contest. See PH p. 174, Ability Checks, Contests.
The party hadn't found Laurel (the witch who was a fairy changeling and didn’t know it) at the Black Cabaret, but Aurelian and Aurora had said that Ulm’s Monument might be a Coven location. Ulm's Monument was on the same square as the monument that Hughe maintained, so the party headed there.
Thanks to Hughe’s Urchin background, the party moves to Hughe’s monument twice as fast as you normally would. You travel west from the Whipsaw bar where the Black Cabaret was, on Quay Street, until you return to Market Street. The Mooncalf hostel where you talked with Kasskar in the afternoon, and Braddock’s Shambles open-air market, are there at Market and Quay. Shops here tend to cater to sailors, like one that sells ivory artificial limbs for amputees.
You turn south on Market toward the City of the Dead. After a mile on Market you reach Foundling Gate in the ancient city wall, which the city outgrew a thousand years ago. After another mile and a half, you reach Red Gate in the newer (but still ancient) outer city wall between Braddock and the City of the Dead.
Ulm’s monument and the monument that Hughe Lane maintains are both in the Red Gate courtyard, on the Braddock side. There’s also a community brick oven there.
After their fight at the Cabaret, it would have been around 1:00 a.m., so they traveled in the dark and took a long rest when they reached Hughe’s monument. Waking up in the morning and going outside, they found a large crowd of people waiting to bake their bread at the community oven.
They went across the courtyard to Ulm's Monument, and found:
Ulm’s Monument is a stone building 1.5 stories high, with an ornate dome that rises another story. It has a front door facing the courtyard, which is heavy black iron, and has 12 iron panels with relief sculptures on them.
Since the courtyard was crowded, they decided not to break in the front door. There were narrow, more secluded alleys on the left and right of the monument, so they went around to the left and found another iron door and a couple windows. The windows were too dirty to see through.
Rowan picked the lock of the side door; the door opened in and was blocked by something inside. On a Strength check, Hughe forced the door open about a foot, and looking through, he found that the door was blocked by a mass of skulls inside, going up to about head level. There was about two feet of clearance above the skulls, so Hughe gave Rowan a hand up and she squeezed through the 1'x2' opening at the top of the door. Sitting on the giant pile of skulls inside, Rowan saw that there was an old, dust-covered casket on a platform in the room's center, under the dome; and a 2'x6' iron plate near it on the floor, which seemed to be the the source of the skulls.
Rowan opened one of the windows and the rest of the party climbed into the skull-filled monument. They inspected the casket and saw there was a 1-inch layer of dust on it that suggested the casket hadn’t been disturbed in a long time; they opted not to investigate. They looked up at the dome interior, which had an elaborate tessellated pattern in black and gold. Beale found a lot of calligraphy about Ulm inside the monument:
Ulm started the trading house that introduced both whaling and opium to Hollin. The young Ulm was a golden god of a harpooner, and he landed his harpoon Hosingen in the primordial bull whale Huhner. But Ulm couldn’t finish Huhner off, and Hosingen is still in Huhner’s side, waiting to be recovered by an even greater harpooner who can bring the immortal whale down.
They opened the steel plate on the floor and found narrow stone stairs going down; beneath was a basement with caskets of more junior members of Ulm’s family.
In one wall, there was a crudely broken, man-sized hole in the wall, leading to a long tunnel beyond, lined with neatly stacked skulls.
As a chronicler of Hollin’s graves, Beale knows in olden days, there was a salt mine under Hollin, but when Hollin’s cemeteries filled up, the salt mine was converted to an ossuary and tons of old skeletons from the cemeteries were moved there. Possibly that’s where you are.
They can follow a tunnel like 1/4 mile long lined with tall organized stacks of skulls and bones the whole time.
At this point, Rowan felt a sense of deja vu - received via a text message from me - and immediately told the party. Casca had also noticed Rowan's deja vu - again by text message - but kept her observation to herself.
They went down the skull-lined tunnel about a quarter of a mile until they found a door on the right. Looking in, they saw a bedroom or barracks with two bunk beds (4 beds total), some bear skins with blankets on them on the floor, and some incidentals like end tables with glasses of water.
They continued down the tunnel. In another quarter-mile they found another room on the left and went in. Inside, they found a forge with some unfinished jewelry and two short swords.
The Shank of Banishment is obsidian, chipped into a wedge. A fine, cruel-looking edge has been chipped out along one side for slashing, and there’s a fine point at the end for stabbing. There’s no hilt. It functions as a +1 short sword that crits on a 19-20. Once a day, on hitting a target, the bearer can cast Banishment on the target as a bonus action.
The Blade of Inflict Wounds is granite, chipped into a wedge. A fine, cruel-looking edge has been chipped out along one side for slashing, and there’s a fine point at the end for stabbing. There’s no hilt. It functions as a +1 short sword that crits on a 19-20. Once a day, when you damage a target with the Blade you can also cast 3rd level Inflict Wounds on your target as a bonus action.
At this point Rowan again felt deja vu and Hughe noticed it, both by text message. Hughe asked Rowan if she had deja vu here and she said yes. Rowan and Hughe claimed the Blade of Inflict Wounds and the Shank of Banishment, respectively. Looking at the jewelry more, the jewelry seemed reminiscent of the Ring and Girdle that the party had taken from Golnaz and Ursula, and seemed to be worth about 100 gold pieces.
They continued down the hall, which turned right. Soon they found yet another room on the right, apparently a spell lab. Inside they found a bunch of material spell components, including a circlet worth about 1500 gold pieces. They also found, on one desk:
For the tomes:
Hollin spell tomes are typically bound books with 1 or 2 pages being the actual spell, and the rest of the book logging the research and experiments performed developing the spell, and the ongoing history, lore, and apocrypha of the spell. Often loose notes are glued or stapled into the tome like a scrapbook. Developing some spells requires a wizard’s entire career, or multiple wizards’ careers, so the books can grow to hundreds or even thousands of yellowed pages.
On a second desk, they found:
It looks like someone was using this desk as a workstation to copy spells from tomes to scrolls. Among the loose scraps of paper and quills and ink, you see two scrolls, three tomes, and a curious little circular device.
They asked about the circular device first. It had a large outer disk and a smaller inner disk that rotated relative to each other, with the alphabet around the circumferences of both disks. It was clear that for any relative rotation, you could encode text by replacing letters on the outer disk with the corresponding letter on the inner disk. It was also clear that if you had a cypher word of say five letters, those five letters would give five rotations that you could loop over to create a more complex encoding - one that could only be decoded with the cypher word.
Then they looked at the scrolls and tomes:
The party made a few guesses about what the cypher word could be, including "laurel", "flora", "luna", and "violet", but didn't guess correctly. But they realized that they had two decoded scrolls of Detect Fey, so if one of the encoded tomes was Detect Fey, they could figure out the cypher word.
Casca took the scrolls and tomes aside for a few minutes to figure out the cyper word, and was surprised to find (via private message) that the cypher word was "casca". She kept this to herself, but she did tell the party that two of the tomes were:
I believe we didn't talk about the third tome at the game. Casca set the Fey Extinction Event tome on fire immediately, although she knew there could be Fey Extinction Event scrolls in the wild, previously decoded from the tome.
Hughe had been watching the hall outside the door, and now he saw three witches approaching - one ancient and two less ancient. Wendy named them Annabelle, Beatrice, and Clementine.
The party hid behind cover in the spell lab, surprising the witches when they came in, and they nearly brought Annabelle down in the surprise round. Annabelle ran back into the hall to get help, but the party finished her before she could escape. In a few rounds they'd killed all three, although the witches did get off two Banishment spells that temporarily sent Hughe and Casca to demiplanes. Keith and Wendy describes their respective planes as:
After the fight, Beale realized (via message) that the witches hadn't attacked Rowan at all. The party talked about healing, and Rowan said that she wasn't damaged at all, to which Beale pointedly replied that the witches hadn't attacked her. The party now started to wonder aloud what was happening with Rowan, and Casca confronted Rowan by asking if she was Laurel. Rowan said no, although she did have red hair like Laurel was supposed to have and Casca pointed out that “Rowan” was a nature name like fairies have. Hughe felt that something was going on between Rowan and the witches but that Rowan was an ally.
The party continued, still looking for Laurel. The party cast invisibility on Rowan, and she snuck further up the tunnel, coming to a four-way intersection. There was a tunnel to the left and an apothecary room ahead. To the right, there was a room that sounded like there was religious service happening in it, with one person talking.
Looking in the apothecary room, Rowan saw a pale, red-haired girl preparing some potions. She reported back to the party, who decided the girl was Laurel and that they would kidnap her.
The whole party now went forward to the apothecary room. From the room on the right, they could now a hear little more from the service, which seemed to be a black communion, and the speaker was saying that witches did Ajana’s evil because Ajana couldn’t be seen doing it, and that the witches found confused souls in Hollin and guided them to hell. Casca went forward and silenced Laurel and they dragged her out of the catacombs, out of Ulm's Monument, and into the back alley behind the monument.
They Charmed and interrogated Laurel. Casca cast Detect Fey, which showed that Laurel and Casca were both fairies. We briefly discussed why Detect Fey detected that Casca was a fairy, but Aurora, Aurelian, and Barley hadn't recognized her as one. We decided that fairies can't just recognize each other as fairies, they have to know some other way.
Casca asked Laurel about the relationships between the Coven, the Circle, the Company, and the harpy Wake. Laurel said:
Laurel wasn’t easily convinced that she should leave the Coven for the party or the Circle. But the party argued that as a fairy, she’d be killed when Astrid cast Fey Extinction Event, so she tentatively joined the party.
The description of Ulm, the whale Huhner, and the harpoon Hosingen in the Monument was correct, but outdated: Steve's character Beowolf pulled Hosingen out of Huhner seventeen years ago, in Game 17 of the original campaign.
The deja vu that Rowan felt in the Catacombs was originally intended as a puzzle, with the answer that the Coven and Catacombs magically cause paranoia and suspicion. But after the game Carrie decided to retcon the Coven into Rowan's story, which the party explored more in Game 4.
I was really interested to see what Casca would say when the party asked her what the cypher word was, or if shit would hit the fan if they found out the cypher word was "casca". But the party never asked Casca what the cypher word was.
Wendy's suggestion that Rowan was Laurel caught me by surprise - I hadn't noticed that Rowan had red hair like Laurel and that "Rowan" was a nature name like fairies had. But it would have been an awesome plot twist - if I'd been a little quicker during the game I would have made Rowan Laurel and/or asked Carrie to decide.