Artimus Gordon, Kazola, Quinton Smith, and Vesper Cotton meet their friend Burgess for dinner at the Mooncalf, but Burgess is attacked there. Investigating, the party discovers that Cankerblossom's tontine has turned Hollin's rich against each other in a winner-take-all fight. Cankerblossom suggests that Phyla House attacked Burgess, and they find the Moonwell vampire lair under Phyla House's manor, where they kill Lolani Phyla. They take the tontine subscriber list from her, which includes Vesper's brother Christopher, and Vesper says he might kill the other subscribers for Cotton House.
This was the fiftieth Hollin game!
I gave the players a brief introduction to Hollin. Hollin is like an Elizabethan or Victorian London with about a million people. Hollin is ruled by a private company, the Anhault Charter Company - imagine that instead of London sending a British East India Company to rule India, a foreign country operating in London grows to rule the city.
I also briefly described some of Hollin's boroughs: the market and port district Braddock, the Company's administrative district Dunham, the shipyards, the medieval old town Lofton, and the City of the Dead.
I said that the characters, Artimus (Buck), Kazola (Karen), Quinton (Lou), and Vesper (Rob) had a mutual friend, Burgess Banks. Burgess was a patriarch in Lorentz House, an Admiralty supplier, but he retired from day-to-day operations two years ago. Burgess stayed active in retirement by volunteering with the Braddock watch, based at the Mooncalf tavern, and he invited them to dinner there at 8:00. They agreed.
As Vesper was preparing at home, Hollin's secret police chief Durer knocked. Vesper's butler brought Durer to him, and Durer asked if Vesper would come to the Great Council Hall to talk with Helmholtz, Hollin's Master of Revels. Helmholtz told Vesper that several previous Masters of Revels seemed to have died unnaturally, and that his immediate predecessor Ella hadn't been seen for a few days. He asked Vesper to keep his ear to the ground, and gave Vesper his notes on the previous Masters of Revels and his Brief History of the Anhault Charter Company.
A Brief History of the Anhault Charter Company
The characters then assembled at the Mooncalf for dinner with Burgess. They decided to eat in the open-air courtyard of the Mooncalf's merchant hostel, and they introduced their characters. My rough notes:
Rob: Vesper Cotton. Second son of an old noble family that went to seed, but became a mercantile house. Was originally packed off to the seminary then navy, became a naval doctor but then during the purging days of the previous season [The Far Shore], managed to supplant my brother as head of the mercantile guild [Cotton House]. Now running the front, now running the farms, the ancestral lands. Tempest cleric. Mainly specializing in naval combat with a little healing on the side.
Karen: Kazola. I am a smith and fighter. Knows Rob's character because she smithed for his company. [Rob: yeah, contracted her to avoid being stabbed by brother.] So, her family's made goods for the Cottons to sell. Two handed fighter. Abilities of a halfling but human.
Buck: Artimus Gordon, master of disguise. Cloistered hermit but seems to be with this group to help them with their task and keep them healthy.
Lou: I'm James West. Just kidding. Quinton Smith, trade ambassador from the country of Tharldon. Had some business in the city where our paths have crossed.
Vesper was Rob's character from our previous Far Shore mini-campaign.
Thus assembled, they began to order dinner, but Burgess was immediately pulled away.
You're just sitting down with Burgess when a gray-haired man, maybe a businessman, comes into the room. He looks around the room for a few seconds until he spots Burgess, then quickly walks over and asks Burgess if he's the watch captain.
The man says he's Giles Ulm. Giles says when he got home from work just now, he found his wife Selma dead. Would Burgess come right away? When Burgess hears this, he becomes alarmed and says, "My lord, a death at Ulm House? You know Tamir Rabi was found dead just yesterday at House Hanan."
And then:
As Burgess and Giles are talking, you notice a young woman come into the room. She scans the room for a few seconds, then approaches Burgess.
As Burgess replied, the woman suddenly raised a long device from her cloak and leveled it to attack. The party reacted before she fired, and Quinton hit the woman with his sneak attack. But the woman came next in the initiative order and fired, sending Burgess flying back twenty feet. The party could smell sulfur.
The party continued attacking the woman, with Vesper using Destructive Wrath and Kazola using her Action Surge and Sweeping Attack. The woman drew her sword and summoned Moon Shadows and Luna Moths to aid her, but the party did bring her down in the third round. Although the party said there were doing nonlethal ("subdual") damage in the last round, the woman turned into a Moon Shadow when she reached zero hits and dissipated before they could interrogate her. Her sword remained, clattering on the ground as she disappeared.
Defending Burgess in the Mooncalf
The party went to Burgess and found him still alive, and they took a short rest to tend to him. They asked him about the attacker, but he said he didn't know her.
During the short rest they also inspected the woman's sword and found:
Bat's Head Sword
Kazola claimed the sword for her two-handed fighting, and we changed it to a scimitar, which suited her better.
Since Burgess didn't know anything about his attacker, the party decided to investigate Selma Ulm's death. Giles Ulm was still at the Mooncalf, and he led them to Ulm House in northern Braddock.
Selma's body was still on the kitchen floor there, where Giles had found her. They looked at her carefully but struggled to find any clues or signs of foul play. I think they asked Giles if he saw anything strange and he said that Selma looked pale. They commented that "pale" could mean bloodless and indeed they found bite marks on Selma's neck.
While they were looking at Selma, a businessman in a green banker's visor came to the house, and asked the party to confirm that Selma was dead. The party asked who he was, and he said he was Mr. Burbage from the Garlington, Helmin, and Gibb bank - but Vesper immediately recognized him as Cankerblossom, the emcee of Hollin's underground Black Cabaret.
When they asked why he was interested in Selma, Cankerblossom said that Selma was a subscriber in a tontine he'd organized for the bank. He explained that a tontine was an ad hoc insurance policy where several individuals each invest and receive annual interest payments. If a subscriber dies, their subsequent interest payments are divided between the surviving subscribers. Eventually, when only one subscriber remains, that subscriber receives all of the tontine's capital. So, the tontine could be very lucrative for the last survivor.
Cankerblossom also said that his tontine had become extremely lucrative after he invested the tontine's capital in buying Volstead House's coca powder business and started giving out free samples - and he gave Quinton one.
Coca Powder Sample
Cankerblossom also said that since the tontine's coca powder business had become so lucrative, "wolves" among the tontine subscribers had suddenly come out attacking the other subscribers, hoping to be the last survivor. He said the tontine subscriber list had been stolen from his office, so presumably one of the wolves had it and was using it to take out the "sheep" on the list. The party got the distinct impression that Cankerblossom wasn't alarmed or saddened by this turn of events, but that the tontine might be working as intended.
I believe at this point Kazola and Vesper each got an inspiration point for an inspired summary of the situation with Cankerblossom and the tontine.
The party questioned Cankerblossom about the tontine. They also asked about Burgess, Selma, and Tamir Rabi, but Cankerblossom said that the bank's privacy policy prohibited him from discussing the subscribers. They showed him the bat's head sword, and Cankerblossom said that speaking generally, again without reference to the subscribers, that a bat's head could be a symbol of Phyla House, who imported bat guano from Hilde for making the Admiralty's gunpowder. And I think Cankerblossom told them that Lolani Phyla was the head of Phyla House.
I believe that Vesper and Cankerblossom also discussed Helmholtz, the Master of Revels, and that Cankerblossom repeatedly showed scorn for Helmholtz.
They decided to look for Lolani Phyla and the tontine subscriber list and Phyla house, but it was late night, so they decided to long rest first.
The next day they went to Phyla House at Quay and Drew, in the Foreign Quarter west of Braddock. Like other Hollin trading houses, Phyla House had a fine townhouse with a marble facade. The house had two stories, and Quinton went to the back and climbed up to the second story on a drainpipe. Looking in one of the windows, he saw a small guest bedroom with no one in it. His initial impression of the room was that it was overly ordered and unused.
Quinton went in the window. He searched the second floor, and found that every room there was a bedroom, all immaculately made up and unused. There was a thin layer of dust everywhere. No one was there.
He snuck down to the first floor, which was again lifeless, and found a well-ordered kitchen, living room, and library. He let the party in the front door. They gravitated to the library, where they found a desk with Phyla House's business ledgers. The bookshelves had many business books - business law, accounting, shipping, and navigation. On a Medicine check, Artimus saw that one book seemed out of place, Hemophilia and Other Diseases of the Blood, and he claimed it.
Hemophilia and Other Diseases of the Blood
When Artimus pulled the book from the shelf, the library shelf swung backwards, revealing a dark spiral stair going down, lit by silver torchlight.
Going down a few steps, they found some arches on the right-hand side of the stair, and looking down through them, they saw the stair spiraled around a kind of inverted tower or dry well, the Moonwell.
There were about twelve turns to the spiral, and the staircase had three or four landings on each turn, with doors. There was a floor at the very bottom of the well, with a shallow relief of the moon's face carved in it, about ten feet across. Occasionally on a lower turn of the spiral, they could see people coming out of one door and going into another, going about their business.
The Moonwell seemed to have about fifty doors, and they didn't have any clue where Lolani might be. They asked if any doors seemed to be more actively used than others, and I said there did seem to be a few doors that were very actively used - no dust near them, arcs ground into the stone floor from doors repeatedly opening. They went into one and found it to be an empty living quarters. They found a mysterious circle on the floor there but failed the Arcana check to identify it.
They exited back into the Moonwell stair and went to another door. Quinton listened at the keyhole, but as he did so, the door swung open and an unsuspecting man bumbled out. They grabbed him, pulled him back into the room, tied him up, and gagged him.
Inside the room, they found an iron cage with a haggard man inside it. Both inside and outside the cage, there were tables with books, chemicals, and other experimental equipment. The man inside the cage was startled to see them.
They talked with the haggard man and initially he insisted they were members of Phyla House. But they slowly brought him around, and he told them he was Manfred Unger, a member of the Quaternion Society and friend of Gregor the Naturalist. He told them Phyla House had taken him prisoner seventeen years ago when Phyla House had been struck with a rabies epidemic on Hilde, and forced him to do experiments on rabies even though he was a mathematician, not a biologist.
They questioned Manfred about Phyla House and Lolani, and Manfred told them that one of the Moonwell landings had two doors, and that Lolani's quarters were one of those doors. Manfred also told them that their attacker in the Mooncalf was Tamara Marshall, Lolani's enforcer. They let Manfred go, and he gave them his seventeen-year-old ragged shirt - his only possession - in thanks. My notes say "+1 NATURE SHIRT" here, although I don't think any party member explicitly claimed it.
They snuck further down the Moonwell stair to the landing with two doors. Artimus listened at the first door but failed the very stringent Perception check. I believe they then looked through the first door's keyhole and just saw a long hallway inside. Looking in the other door's keyhole, they saw an apartment, and they entered.
Inside they found two bedrooms, Roman-style dining couches, Luna Moths inside two cages, a coffin full of dirt, and another mysterious circle. They passed an Arcana check and learned that the circles were for meditation and for having waking dreams. They desecrated the coffin so that Lolani couldn't return to it if they beat her.
By the Luna Moths, they found a side tunnel leading to a door. Before going in, Artimus Bless'ed the party, and Buck described the effect as "Glimmering light starts floating down. Radiance, warmth, and the strength of invulnerability courses through their bodies." Vesper cast Protection from Good and Evil on himself, and Rob described it as "Arcs of lightning go across Vesper's body from the maul. Vesper says, 'OK, let's do this.'"
They opened the door, and on the other side they found Lolani Phyla kneeling and praying in a small chapel. They attacked. Kazola fought with the Bat's Head Scimitar, often scoring psychic damage with the scimitar's Waking Nightmare. Vesper scored a critical with his maul, which Rob described as "lightning crackles and arcs through her body." Artimus hit with Guiding Bolt, when Kazola gave Artimus her inspiration point for a re-roll. For her part, Lolani struggled, failing her own Waking Nightmare attacks and summoning Luna Moths too late.
When the party reduced Lolani to zero hits, she turned into a Moon Shadow and dissipated, just as Tamara Marshall had done in the Mooncalf. As she dissipated, she left behind a piece of paper that floated to the ground - the tontine subscriber list.
Vesper looked over the list. He noted that many of the characters from the adventure there - Helmholtz, Burgess, Lolani, Selma, and Tamir. I pointed out that his brother Christopher was on the list, and Rob surprised me by saying that Vesper might hunt down all the surviving subscribers except Christopher. We talked about whether that was for Christopher's good or Vesper's, and I re-read the description of Vesper's questionable morals from the Far Shore write up. Later Rob told me it would be for Cotton House's good.
The main differences between this playthrough and the first playthrough with Glen, James, Mo, and Tracy are:
