After 62 sessions, it was at last time for the PCs to confront Gellert the Gruesome by accepting his generous invitation to drinks. Here’s what happened.
You can read earlier posts here. This post contains spoilers for Scarlet Citadel.
After returning to Redtower, the characters spend a couple of days making plans for the meeting. First Clairmont attempts to scry Gellert’s monolith champion butler without success. Then, he casts commune to learn some useful information. Meanwhile, Tunde performs a weird ritual to gain a Baleful Eye from Baba Yaga, her patron.
Lastly, Clairmont casts a fireball spell into Tricksy’s ring of spell storing, and the characters visit Zula to purchase potions of greater healing and hill giant strength.
With their preparations complete, the party return to the Scarlet Citadel, call the Boatman, and ask him to take them to Gellert’s Landing where the monolith champion is waiting for them with a tray of orange drinks.
Tricksy casts identify on the drinks, learning that they are potions of augmented reality. Everyone drinks, allowing them to see Gellert’s chambers as he sees them.
They enter the kitchen where unseen servants are chopping vegetables and sweeping the floor. After some poking around, the characters spot an arcane eye watching them from a high shelf and find bottles of scarlet mead.
Tricksy knocks on the door to Gellert’s living room and the party are invited inside. Gellert the Gruesome is sitting in an armchair in front of the fire, his pale skin covered in sores. He talks to the characters but never looks directly at them.
Gellert proposes that the characters head down to Level 6 to investigate the “disturbances”, explaining that the Scarlet Citadel is built on top of the confluence of three ley lines and a shadow road. He offers the party some items to help them but when the characters don’t agree to his proposal quickly enough, he teleports them to the Howling Halls!
The adventures find themselves in the middle of a furious sandstorm in a very hot chamber. They rope themselves together and blunder through the sandstorm. Only Tunde who has a pair of goggles can see – everyone else has to keep their eyes closed.
To make matters worse, the group are attacked by a salt golem. Clairmont and Maya both cast spirit guardians, and the other also use magic, triggering chaos magic surges. After defeating the golem, the group withdraw up the stairs to Brutwer the blood hag’s gallery on Level 5 to cast healing spells.
When they return downstairs, Tunde leads the way south through the whirling sand into an even hotter chamber. Here, the characters are attacked by a pair of salt devils, with two more appearing when the first two are killed. Clairmont and Maya’s overlapping spirit guardians prove very effective again and three of the devils are killed; the fourth vanishes.
During the battle, Tunde suffers a deadly critical hit with from a devil’s water-draining claw, while a chaos magic surge allows Clairmont to contact one of Khors’s fiery angelic servants in the Celestial Realms. He learns that the sphere at the centre of the level is the source of the furious wind and that the characters must destroy the voidling inside it to close the rift.
The characters return to Level 5 to rest. Tunde and Clairmont have two levels of exhaustion each; Tricksy has one level.
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Main image by David Auden Nash
Richard Green | Game Designer 