Scarlet Citadel Session 4 – Scar’s Revenge

Here’s the write up from the 4th session of my Scarlet Citadel campaign. Hopefully these accounts will prove useful to others running the adventure. 

You can read earlier posts here. This post contains spoilers for Scarlet Citadel.

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Allia’s player kicked off the 4th session with a campfire story about the origins of the alliumites as the party took a short rest in the ruins, earning herself inspiration. I got this idea from SlyFlourish’s blog – hopefully a different player or two will come up with a tale next time.

Joined by Farthrum, they went back down the stairs in the keep to the first level of the Scarlet Citadel, carefully disabling the tripwire on the steps. 

I decided that the Gaoler would make good use of Scar’s body after the characters killed him in session 1, so the party found the dead ogre hanging from the chains in the Oubliette room along with two other corpses. All three animated and were defeated. They threw the human-sized zombies down the hole, but Scar’s body was too big. I’d used the new ogre zombie from Level Up 5e’s Monstrous Menagerie for Scar and he kept reanimating! 

The characters entered the torture chamber only to find themselves under attack from the iron maiden, the horse and the unstoppable Scar. When things started going badly wrong against the animated instruments, they decide to flee FORWARD and ran into the Gaoler. Three characters were making death saves at one point but all were revived with goodberries and they managed to escape.

After a long rest in the ruins, the party returned to Redtower, then came back to the Scarlet Citadel with picks and shovels and dug out the buried staircase. 

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Entering the dungeon by this alternative route, the adventurers explored for a while and worked out where they were when they made their way into the cell corridor. They disabled the trap in the storeroom, prised the gems from the eyes of Chttrk’s statue, and killed the mud mephit lurking in the water torture chamber. 

I’m looking forward to finding out what happens next. Will it be third time lucky when they face the Gaoler and his torture devices again?  

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Main image by David Auden Nash