The party finds the Moonwell, a large colony of vampires underneath Phyla House's manor. They initially plan to exterminate all of the vampires there, but after an alarming fight with the first vampire, they refocus on just finding Lolani Phyla. They free Quaternion Society mathematician Manfred Unger from his seventeen-year captivity there. They follow the Moonwell's spiral stair down to the Temple of Night, where Lolani and her wingman attack; Marina saps them with the Shareholders' Shafts of Sigrid and the party kills them.
The party finished the last game talking about Phyla House and vampires, with the Company Stakeholders and Kasskar. Now they wanted to do some last preparations to actually go to the Phyla House manor.
Most or all of the characters had some kind of magic weapon, but they went to the Winter Wolf to complete their magic weapons arsenal. I think we said that they could find any +1 weapon they wanted there for the price of the normal weapon plus 50 gold, and we'd assume +1 meant magic.
They also wanted holy water, and I believe Hughe created some for each of them.
They also went to Gregor the Naturalist's house by the Braddock docks, to ask about vampires and the Globster. As in the Wunderfauna Arkiv, Gregor's house was a hive of naturalist activity, with graduate-student-like assistants working everywhere, making chalk drawings of specimens, repotting and tagging pea plants for genetic experiments, etc.
Gregor didn't know about vampires, so they focused on the Globster. Gregor said that Company sailors had pulled the Globster out of the water in a net, and brought it to him to study. He said he'd kept it in the big saltwater tank he normally used for coelacanths, or to keep giant squid tentacles alive. He said he had the Globster for a few days, and could feel it trying to reach his mind. But the secret police Inquisitors soon came, unexpectedly, and took it away.
They discussed whether there could be more Globsters. Scott's notes say that Gregor said "there must be more of them," which might reflect Gregor's or my suggestion that creatures generally come from other creatures. But Marina and Gregor worked together on a Nature check, succeeding, and concluding that the Globster was one-of-a-kind and possibly self-created.
Before heading to Phyla House, they discussed what their goal was. Hugue asked if their goal was to kill all the vampires, and Roland said yes - the vampires had killed a bunch of people in town and attacked the party. Marina also pointed out that there were still some people alive on the tontine list who might need protection, like Burgess and Miss Miller.
They finally headed to Phyla House manor, on Quay and Drew streets, between Braddock and the foreign quarter. It was morning, and Quay Street was busy with sailors and others going about their business. Each party member disguised themselves, and Roland sent his owl Oz to look for activity in the Manor's windows.
Oz could see a living room, two kitchens, and library on the first floor and bedrooms on the second floor, but no activity. The party let themselves into the main kitchen through the back door. They found the kitchen well-stocked, but with dry goods and canned food, and a conspicuous lack of fresh food. There was a barely perceptible layer of thin dust everywhere. The situation was similar in a servants' kitchen nearby, and in the front living room.
Marina used her Ranger Primeval Awareness to see if there were "aberrations, celestials, dragons, elementals, fey, fiends, and undead" within one mile and determined there were. However, we discussed how many of those things were already known to be "all over" Hollin.
In the library, they found shelves with books and ledgers relevant to a company importing bat guano and gunpowder - books about guano and gunpowder themselves, but also accounting, sailing, and the like.
They noticed that while there was a thin layer of dust on everything in the house, on the floor at the base of the bookshelf, the dust had been swept away in a semi-circle. They looked around for a switch of some kind, and found a book that looked out of place among the others - Hemophilia and Other Diseases of the Blood.
Hemophilia and Other Diseases of the Blood
They took the book from the shelf and the shelf swung open towards them, revealing a stair down, lit by a silver light. Geoffraie had the highest Medicine skill and claimed the book.
Gwyneth cast Detect Evil and Good and sensed eight undead below them, some of them moving. Undeterred, they ventured down the stair, and found a wide spiral stair going down about ten turns - the Moonwell. There were 3-4 doors off of each turn, or about 30-40 doors total. The floor at the very bottom was a big bas-relief carving of the moon, which lit the Moonwell with silver light.
The Moonwell
Marina cast Pass Without Trace on them and they moved down. They went into the first door off the spiral stair, where they found a closed coffin. They briefly discussed how to open the coffin without waking the vampire, but then just whipped the lid open and attacked, with Gwyneth commenting, "if you can stab it while it’s asleep, that’s a boring way to kill it."
Scott's notes describe much of the fight:
"1st door – Coffin in room. Vampire in coffin. We attack, hurt it, it gets out of the coffin, does his psychic damage, fears Gwynith, and she runs out of the room, he fights us, marina splashes the vampire to stop it regenerating, Gwyneth Smites it. It transforms to moonshadow, enters its coffin, Roland stakes it. Hughe Blesses the coffin. Hughe and Gwyneth chant a prayer to Ajana.
Scott's notes don't mention that when Gwyneth first attacked the vampire, she rolled a 1, and Karen described the failure as the sword getting caught in the hinge of the vampire's coffin. When Gwyneth ran out of the room, the vampire took her sword from the hinge and used it again the party. Alarmingly, the vampire rolled 19 twice with the sword, which weren't criticals only because we'd nerfed the sword in game 2.
They looted the vampire's body and found an amulet, but I don't think they that identified it or that anyone claimed it.
Alarmed by the vampire's strength, the party decided that instead of trying to kill all of the vampires, they would refocus on just finding Lolani. They didn't know what Lolani looked like, and Roland sent Oz back up to the manor to look for any portraits there. Oz did find a portrait of Lolani, and of the vampire they'd just killed, Maddox Phyla.
They left Maddox's room, back into the Moonwell stair. Here they saw another vampire coming out of the next door down, but apparently he was weaker than the first vampire, and Gwyneth and Hughe intimidated him into submission. They tied him up, then took him back into his room. In that room, in a cage, they found a haggard man, an astronomical clock, and a bench covered with tools and mechanisms. The man whispered them over. They questioned the man and he told them that Lolani Phyla was the head of Phyla House, and that she'd likely be in the Temple of Night, at the bottom of the Moonwell, to the south; and her coffin would be in the Hall of Dreams, to the north.
The man said he was Manfred Unger, a mathematician with the Quaternion Society, which typically worked on topics of interest to the Admiralty - timekeeping, navigation, mapmaking, and computing trajectories, for instance. He said Phyla House kidnapped him seventeen years ago and forced him to work on a rabies vaccine, but he never succeeded, so eventually they put him to work on astronomical clocks instead. They freed Manfred from the cage and he fled the Moonwell.
They locked the vampire in Manfred's cage and interrogated him. The vampire assured them that he hadn't alerted the other vampires. He confirmed what Manfred said, that Lolani would be in the Temple of Night. In addition, he also warned the party not to enter the temple's sanctum, and said that would be fatal not just to the party, but to everyone in the Moonwell.
The party went down to the Temple of Night at the bottom of the Moonwell.
Coming out of the stair, they crossed the moon carving on the floor and went into the south room. Immediately to their right on entering, there was a table stocked with devotional candles, and devotional candles were lit throughout the room, burning with silver flames. As they moved in more, they saw the room had tall walls, which carried the eye up to a three-story high ceiling, like a cathedral. Two rows of tall pillars ran down the length of the room to the far end, where there were three circular alcoves.
As they moved deeper in, they found six open coffins. Gwyneth and Hughe started to desecrate the coffins by blessing them, while Roland went down to investigate the alcoves. In each alcove, he found a circle of glyphs on the floor. On a DC 15 Arcana check, Roland determined:
However, Roland expressed scorn for waking dreams and moved on.
Gwyneth and Hughe finished their desecrations/blessings and the party left the south room, back to the moon carving. They wanted to explore more, but wanted to avoid the sanctum. From the moon carving, they were able to look down the north and east corridors and see some of what was beyond. To the north, the room had a high ceiling, tall pillars, and three alcoves like the south room; they could also see an astronomical clock like the one Manfred was working on. To the east, they could see some pillars leading to a black curtain. On a History check, they decided that was like a classic sanctum.
They entered the north room and went to the alcoves at the far end. There, instead of glyph circles, they found a small devotional statue in each: one androgynous standing figure, one standing woman, and one sleeping figure. Hughe (I believe) concluded that the androgynous standing figure could be a representation of Ajana similar to the necklace he'd taken from Coven witches in the Far Shore. The suggestion that the vampires might worship Ajana caused a little audible surprise or dismay among the players.
As they were examining the statuettes, three vampires strode into the room - Lolani and two wingmen. The party immediately attacked, and Lolani and one of the wingmen moved forward and attacked; Lolani's other wingman held back in an apparent betrayal of Lolani.
The Shareholders hadn't actually told the party what the Shafts of Sigrid did, but Marina used her two attacks to fire one at Lolani and one at the non-traitorous wingman. Both hit, and the Shafts created a spotlight of sunlight above each, which moved around as the vampires moved around. (Sunlight causes multiple acute problems for D&D vampires, e.g., preventing them from regenerating hits each round.) Since Marina had hit both, Geoffraie saved his Shafts of Sigrid.
With Lolani and the wingman sapped by the sunlight, the party defeated them, Lolani first and then the wingman.
As the party finished Lolani's wingman, several more vampires came into the room. The leader introduced herself as Gunita, Lolani's second-in-command, or now that Lolani was dead, Phyla House's chief. They recognized another vampire in tow behind Gunita - Phyla House's enforcer Tamara Marshall, who'd attacked Burgess Banks in the Mooncalf in the first game.
Gunita told the party that their fight over the tontine was with Lolani, not Phyla House, and that they could go. Tamara Marshall nodded toward her Bat's Head Rapier, which Roland was carrying, and said the party had won it fairly. The party left, but made a point of first recollecting their Shafts of Sigrid from Lolani and her dead wingman. As they left and crossed over the moon carving, they noticed that the east corridor leading to the sanctum was now well-protected by many vampires.
Here are Scott's notes for this game.