Steve and Kelly weren't at the last game, and we decided based on their alignments that Beowolf and Prosper would and wouldn't (respectively) attack Hogarth's homeless gang. Steve and Kelly now said that this decision was okay and didn't need to be reversed.
After Game 9 the players felt that the party needed a healer badly. Kelly suggested making Prosper a non-player character and instead playing the runepriest Ord Redding, whose backstory involved Prosper. The switch happened during the game and it's described below.
At the end of the last game, the party defeated the electrically-power test subject Ignatius, but during the fight the experimenters Haas was looking for came into the room, took a body on a gurney, and disappeared again into another room. Now the party could hear the experimenters doing something to the victim in the next room.
Now that the din of battle has ended, you can hear intense screaming coming from the opposite door - the door the two necromancers had run through and locked behind them. The screaming person is saying: "Oh my god! Don't cut my skull! Please don't cut my head open!" You think those two guys are maybe cutting another patient's head open to make another controlled zombie like Ignatius. Of course Haas is totally focused on the screaming and going in to attack the necromancers.
Kasskar picked the lock to the room the screaming was coming from and they entered.
When they get into the room, it looks like another lab. There are twenty gurneys or so scattered around the room, with many along the walls, and most have bodies on them. Wires run from the room's windows to several of the bodies. The disturbing men are necromancers working together around a gurney against the far wall with the screaming man on it, and there are several orderlies assisting them.
The disturbing men were the Volker brothers - Alaric, Gerholt, and Harlan. Hoping to finish their experiment before the party could interfere, the Volkers sent the orderlies against the party. There was one orderly for each party member, and they attacked with improvised weapons they took off the tables nearby - a leather strap, a big respirator tank, and a bone saw. They had these statistics and the additional powers Grab Disturbed Patient and Syringe Attack.
But, as the party fought the orderlies and started to get them under control, fate took a hand.
As you're fighting, you're momentarily unsettled by a thunderclap that seems to be right outside the building, and lightning lights up the windows around the top of the room. An electrical charge lights up a bundle of wires going from one of the windows to a body on one of the gurneys, and the body is racked with the electricity and rattles on the gurney. A few seconds later, the person - a woman of about 17 with girlish dimples - wakes up and swings her legs over the side of the gurney, sitting up.
You see that she's dressed in a one-piece white lace dress that's close to her body with spaghetti straps, almost like a slip or even a negligee (but it's a dress). She looks down at her own body as if it's not her own. She touches her face, and she looks at her bare arms and hands. She notices that there's a bracelet of flowers on her wrist, and stares at it, not knowing what it is. Then her stare seems to start it on fire. It burns to a crisp and the cinders fall away, leaving a black burn mark on her wrist.
Then she looks up at the scene around her. The characters can do an Arcana check to get a little information about her (e.g., level). Then, one of the orderlies makes some minor body motion or something and with a look she sets off a shock wave that sends everyone and everything in the room blasting against the walls. The characters all go unconscious.
Of the party members, Beowolf woke up first. He saw:
Beowolf:
But then, getting up on one elbow to look around, you're disturbed to notice that one of the experimenters you're hunting is lying only about 5 feet from you. Simultaneous with you,
You both look down, and see there's a cruel-looking bone saw exactly half way between the two of you, just out of reach. Roll initiative to see if you can get the saw before the experimenter, Alaric.
Beowolf was delayed a few instants while he searched around his body for his own weapons, but they had been thrown around the room by the blast. But, he still beat Alaric to the bone saw. Beowolf used it to kill Alaric, who was otherwise an even match for him.
Beowolf roused the rest of the party, and they found that the other Volkers, the orderlies, and the girl-demon Lebrecht were gone. To their shock, Prosper was also gone, presumably kidnapped by the Volkers.
The victim that the Volkers had originally wheeled into the room, Warren, was still here. He was on death's door, and when the party questioned him, he said he wanted to die and go to Hereward, the restful plane. Haas told the party that Hereward was a rumor among Hollin's ghosts, and that they all wanted to go there, but none of them knew how. Haas said that after hearing Warren talk about Hereward, he also wanted to die again and go there.
As they finished talking with Warren, a strange foreigner came into the blasted room. He carried himself like a fighter and wore fighter garb: scale armor, a shield, and a bastard sword. He introduced himself as the runepriest Ord Redding. He was looking for Prosper for his own mysterious reasons, and had come to this location following a series of runes that Prosper had carved.
Ord joined the party in searching the rest of the hospital, but they were unable to find Prosper or the Volkers. Without any other clues, they were forced to temporarily give up on finding Prosper.
I originally intended to stop about here in Game 10, but we opted to continue into the next game's material, which is described in Game 10, Part 2.
