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Nothic's and Flameskulls

Curse of Strahd
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Session 57 – 2022-04-30

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Session Summary

We begin this session after having fought several flame skulls and are taking a lot of damage after having tried to look into some of these amber chambers with Amber sarcophagus’, three to a chamber. We start sprinkling holy water on the flames skulls that we haven’t sprinkled on, yet! As we sprinkle them with the holy water they steam up this weird greenish smoke and collapses into dust. Ezmerelda is is still standing in the southernmost chamber looking up into the shaft above her.  Rinn asks if Ezmerelda sees anything coming out of the shaft above her, she confirms there’s nothing there. Rinn enters the chamber to see if he can figure out how the doors and unlock. It’s determined that there is no visible locking mechanism leading him to believe that the locking mechanism is magic based. Haldar moves out into the main room and doesn’t see anything moving around. He moves across the room to the other side. Misty moves to a location where she can watch Haldar, until she can’t, and then she listens for him. Rinn closes the Southern door to prevent Flameskulls from coming into the room behind us. Kyanna applies some more healing to Dain.

Haldar makes it to the archway on the other side, and beyond that to another large room. The room is another room with walls coated in amber and black marble floor with multiple doors leading out. There are ledges down one wall with life sized statues various animals. Many of the status have fallen and broken. An amber door stands open in the north wall. Four other amber doors to the West and South are closed. He can also sees stairs going up. Misty stealth's across the main chamber and moves through the archway waiting and listening, prepared to lend assistance if needed. Rinn has followed but is still further back. The others are starting to across the main chamber but laying back so as to not cause issues for Haldar’s stealthing. Haldar checks one of the fallen statues of a frog. Finds nothing special about it. He takes an arrow and pushes one of the statues a little, it moves but there is nothing special about it. 

He moves to the northern door that is open. Haldar looks in the open door and see’s a room with more of these amber sarcophagus’ inside and four loathsome creatures in the back, behind a fallen sarcophagus which lies shattered on the floor. The creature each posses a single baleful eye. They all look in his direction, not necessarily right at him but in his direction. In his mind, he gets a sense of questioning, as if they want to know things, like multiple voices asking him who he is, what he is, where he is, why he is here. He hears them only in his mind, they don’t appear to see him though. He stealth's away. He returns to the archway and the rest of the party. He explains to them what he saw. Zanfyr recognizes them to be Nothic’s. The main thing he can tell us is that they read minds. Ezmerelda tells us that they are cursed resentence of wizards. Once he returns to us, he no longer hears them in his mind. Haldar tells us about the statues in this room and the stairs going up. 

Snoggly was a little worried about leaving these creatures at our backs. Rinn suggested that we should close the door and maybe that would be enough. He sneaks down that way until the door is just within range. He notices one of the creatures looking in his direction. He uses a mage hand spell to push the door shut. After that he starts hearing voices in his head, reciting his full name, following that saying sneaky. When Rinn tells the others what is happening, he hears them saying something about him talking to others and then identifying that there are more than just Haldar and I here. At this point, the door reopens. They don’t come out. If anything, they seem to retreat a little. Rinn asks Ezmerelda about them, she we do something about them of just ignore them. 

Dain starts sensing that they are probing him mind. He hears, like Rinn did, his name, Paladin, Dwarf and Clangeddin. Dain forces himself to think about mundane things like lollypops, fluffy clouds, rainbows, and unicorns. As he does, it seems to confuse them a little. Rinn asks Ezmerelda if we should worry about them. They don’t seem to be hostile or threatening. Should we just leave them alone? Her reply was, “Are they acting aggressively. Kassamir suggest that they may have gifts to give. Ezmerelda cocks an eyebrow at that remark. Snoggly moves down there and basically says, “Do you have anything to give us? If not, we’ll be on our way!”. Snoggly gets the same feeling, they don’t really communicate but he seems to pick up that they are reading his mind. They seem to understand that he is a wizard. They seem to be more interested in that, but they don’t turn violent or anything. 

Dain attempts to determine if they give off a sense of evil, but the evil is so strong from all around him that he can’t really draw a sense from them. Snoggly moves closer to get a better look at them, they seem to move a little closer to him, curious about him. They show no signs of aggression. Snoggly asks them what they did to themselves to end up like this. They seem to probe deeper into his thoughts, drawing out old memories. They draw out thoughts about his family, where he grew up, his childhood, his youth, his education at academy where he trained and various experiences, they also find out he drinks a bit. They come a little closer, but they don’t leave the room. Snoggly offers them a drink. Misty moves forward and asks them who they are. She is confident and strong and that seems to make them back off a little. They try to red her mind as well. She attempted to block it but was unable to. She tries to engage them some more, but they aren’t talking to her, simply gathering information. Dain tries to get closer to the room and look up at the ceiling in the room. As he moves up there, he can see there is no break in the ceiling. Two of them seemed to get bigger, puffing up as if being threatened. One of them seemed to damage Dain. He backed up and tried to let them know that he isn’t trying to hurt them. They back up to.

We finally decide to stop fooling with them and begin trying to check the other doors and such. They are locked and we haven’t found a way through them. They move to the steps, Rinn checked for traps and found none. He moves to the first landing and finds more stairs and checks them. He then moves up to the next landing. Then moves up to the second floor. There is an amber door here. He checks it and then opens it. There is more hallway and then another door. He uses the mage hand to open the next door in the hallway. As he does, a flameskull floats into view. He tries to close the door but wasn’t fast enough to avoid the fireball. The explosion catches several of Rinn, Haldar, Dain, and Snoggly in it. Haldar casts Zepher Strike and charges the door, opens it and runs through it. Rinn follows him and he does. As he opens the door, the room ahead has a green haze. There are three flameskulls and Haldar takes one out quickly. The other two flameskull fires magic missiles at Haldar. Kyanna casts Deathward on Snoggly. If he would normally have been reduced to o hit points or more, this will stop the loss at 1 hit point left. It’s going to last for 8 hours.   

Ezmerelda says, “Great, more fire!”. She moves but is unable to engage this round. Misty runs up and opens up a can of whoop-ass on one of them. Zanfyr moves but isn’t able to get any of them into view so he holds his action. Haldar takes down the second one. Rinn moves up and attacks the third one. The last flameskull sets off another fireball. Catches Rin, Misty, and Haldar in it. Dain runs up uses his crossbow to fire twice at him and kills it. They douse them in holy water. Looking through the arrow slits, we see the main room below. After a little looking around, we determine the south door leads back to the chamber where Helwa is. The flameskulls must be responsible for the flames beyond the northern door where Helwa is. 

Rinn checks the door near the southern door and opens the door with his mage hand. It looks like an alchemy lab Everything is so old that there doesn’t appear to be anything that isn’t broken and or dried out. There are ladders to reach higher shelves, but they are rotted. Rinn pulled down a couple of bottle ion the shelves above. Rinn pulls some down with his mage hand and finds nothing useful. He checks the walls for secret doors and finds nothing.  Misty is checking more of the niches to see if she can find anything. She doesn’t. We close the door, sweep away enough debris to be able to rest. Dain blocks the door with pitons, Snoggly casts the tiny hut spell and we all rest inside there. During our attempt to rest, we are assaulted in our nightmares and only some of us actually complete a long rest.  Rinn, Snoggly, Kyanna, and Zanfyr achieve a long rest, everyone else gets no more rest that a short rest. 

Rinn checks the chamber outside the room first, it’s still empty. He steps out and we start moving down the chamber. He stops and looks out of the arrow slits again and this time, he sees flameskulls moving around in the main chamber below. Rinn checks the door just north of the door leading to the stairs and opens the door with my mage hand. In this room is a model of a castle, some ruined furniture and a chest. He starts looking at the castle model trying to see if he can determine if he knows what the castle is. Dain looks at it and is pretty sure it is Castle Ravenloft. He starts studying it. Rinn checks the chest in the back and pulls out a tubular case, he opens it and there is nothing in it. The model is solid stone so it offers no help with understanding the inside layout of the castle, only the outside and the cliffs and courtyards. Rinn checks the chest some more and finally gets Dain to break up the chest. He finds a secret compartment and lets Rinn finish opening the compartment and finds a book. He uses his mage hand to open the book to find the writing on the first page. Snoggly does an identify spell and determines that it is a very rare magical item called “A Tome of Understanding”. The book can increase your wisdom by 2 and your max wisdom by 2. We don’t have time to deal with this now so he hides it in the room in case we can come back and get it later. 

Kassamir and Ezmerelda confirm he model is a pretty accurate model. We search the model for any possible entrances other than the main entrance. We do spot an opening in the cliffs below the back side of the castle, about 100 feet down, there is a window in the model. We really make note of it! We leave this room and make our way to the north door of the chamber. Rinn checks the door and then uses hi mage hand to open the door. Inside is a large dining table, well lit, with a feast ready to eat. Zanfyr checks the food for poison and disease. There is a double door on the east wall of this room and  we decide it probably leads to the balcony that has fallen in the main room. Rinn checks that door and cracks it carefully It is the broken balcony behind the main statue. Its about this time that we realize that a flameskull has appeared behind us, in the chamber outside this room. Kassamir and Snoggly notice that there are two flameskulls in the chamber just outside this room. Snoggly fires a magic missile at one of them.  They both turn in our direction.