Loge Investigates a Townhouse

Level up!
OK, so now we’re level four, and I can finally take a Warlock Pact.

So, obviously as a Hexblade Warlock, I’m going to take the… Pact of the Tome?
Bear with me here.

Loge’s Patron is a spirit of luck, knowledge, and maybe war. It’s much more likely to give him access to more magic at this stage than a weapon that can play hide and seek.

See the post a while ago to get kind of an idea what happened during levelling, but imagine Loge got stuck in the dream and trained and learned some new spells. And then woke up holding mysterious stones carved with runes in a little leather bag.

First thing’s first, let’s see what the new abilities can do. Hey, remember Loge had a pet mouse called Laufey? Not any more, turns out it’s a familiar, and now it’s an owl! Go Laufey!

Next up, the newly-levelled gang headed out to the Lower Ward on a job for Lord Gwynedd – seems the Godsmen had a safe haven for some of the more powerful barmies wandering Sigil, and recently it got a bit quiet and the doctor who ran the place ended up in the dead book.

Needs investigating. We’re expendable, so…

In the Lower Ward, we find a townhouse with a lot of windows boarded up. Seems the place is almost deserted, though there’s some smoke coming out of a chimney.
Our Eladrin has conjured up his own familiar, a dog, but what we need is some way to take a look at the windows of the upper floor as well and do a quick lap of the building and check it out.

Good thing someone packed an owl!

The chimney is connected to a kitchen, and nearby a recreation room of some kind. After another look in an empty room, things start to get interesting.
In a room with mirrors on all of the walls sits a man, his head in his hands. In the next room, sat in the dark on her bed, is a woman curled up against her legs. In the next room still is a small girl, asleep in bed beside which sits a woman in a nurse’s uniform, also asleep. There are a number of candles in the room, all burned down.
In another recreation room, all the furniture has been tossed or overturned.

That’s all we get from reconnaissance, with other rooms boarded up too tightly to get a look inside. We manage to break into a ground floor window, and find ourselves in the office of the recently deceased doctor. His records list a lot of patients by their first initial, as well as comments about the various staff. Everyone is noted as having had bad dreams at the end of the logs.

We start investigating the corridors, and head upstairs. This is the corridor with all of the rooms on it. One room contained someone desperate to get out. We decided against it, since his window was bricked up and he didn’t give a good reason to let him leave. Another two rooms are empty, one conaitns a very amicable woman called Voreena who wants us all to come in and enjoy her hospitality. It seems her sister is the one curled up in the dark. We manage to promise to come back later.
One room contains three of the nurses. They suggest leaving as soon as possible, but don’t want to come out themselves. We say we’ll investigate and try and find the last staff member – an orderly. They want rid of the new nurse, as it seems everything went wrong after she arrived recently.

The kitchen is horrible. Rotting food, excrement, the carcasses of various vermin, all seem to have been used for cooking recently. Heading down a nearby staircase we find out why.
The orderly is busily force feeding two people, probably patients, tied to chairs. At a far door stands a strange frog-like thing with a long tongue, drooling.

We quickly end up in combat, and lots of other nasties jump out from under the tables to slash at us with paralysing claws. Eventually, we get the better of them, although Loge took out the orderly in one hit in the first round.

When we start to look about the room and try and free the prisoners, one darts for Loge, who had just picked up the keys from the orderly, and is pinned by the door as we try and take the keys back.
The nurses appear down the stairs, having heard commotion and finally deciding to help. They arrive as we try and untie the other prisoner. He claims to be the god of dragons (though looks entirely human), and to prove it threatens to breathe fire.
Which he does.
All over the Aasimar trying to free him.

80 hit points of fire damage, instantly killing.

We were all a bit shocked at that. The nurses blame us and want us to leave, we say helping someone shouldn’t cause instant death.
If they’ll bring us the other nurse from the room with the sleeping girl, we’ll be on our way, to which they agree as they take the dragon man off to his room.

When they come back without the other nurse, things get ugly. When Loge points out she’s not there, they attack.
Turns out they were three hags. The party ends up forcing a retreat out of the room, then breaking the boards on a window and trying to get out of the building as fast as possible.

The session ended with most of us out of the nearest window trying to escape the hags, who weren’t taking anywhere near as much damage as they should have been.