Munasukaru's Penance

Upon reaching the heart of the Forest of Spirits, the party had learned that the oni of the Five Storms had been imprisoned for centuries inside an ancient pagoda called the House of Withered Blossoms. Somehow most of them had escaped over 150 years ago, and the kami guarding the pagoda had no idea how. Since the kami were prevented from crossing the threshold as long as even one oni remained inside, they asked the party to enter, learn what they could, and kill any oni still inside. Complicating things, a band of spider-like creatures called aranea were also occupying the pagoda, and had been at war with the oni for decades.

When the party entered the House of Withered Blossoms, they found most of the ground floor web-choked and gutted, with a deep pit leading down into darkness. But before they could investigate, Bella and Nicki were ambushed by a group of aranea, swinging down on strands of web from the ceiling, and an hairy giant spider began scuttling up out of the pit towards them.

Bella slashed at the aranea who had dropped down on her, trying to maneuver for advantage. Nicki, wanting to even the odds, cast a Wall of Force horizontally over the pit in the floor, trapping the giant spider where it couldn’t threaten anyone. Sawyer charged into the fray, joined by Marie, and the battle was on.

Several of the aranea were swinging around the room on strands of web, closing with their victims just long enough to deliver a venom-soaked bite before arcing gracefully away again. Luckily, their venom didn’t seem to be having its desired effect, especially when they bit Nicki. Two more aranea, previously undetected, launched themselves down from the ceiling to attack Shinjiro and Bella before swinging back out of reach. Another giant spider appeared in the bottom of the pit, scrabbling against the invisible barrier holding it down.

Sawyer, in mid-backswing, suddenly discovered that these cute aranea were just the most charming things ever. The way they swung around so gracefully, the iridescent color of the venom dripping from their fangs – they were surely the most  beautiful things he’d ever seen. Even the screams of pain from his friends as the flying arachnids tore chunks of flesh off of them weren’t enough to make him want to try to harm them.

Shinjiro wasn’t nearly so enamored. He unleashed a Flurry of Blows that sent one of the aranea skidding across the floor, the light in its hundreds of eyes going out. Zhustin decided the room was entirely too gloomy, and decided to lighten it up with a little Fireball. He noticed an aranea clinging to a web near the ceiling, waving its many arms in a distinctly arcane manner, and centered his blast on it. It quickly shifted its motions to trying to beat out the fires burning on it, and to his surprise, Zhustin noticed a similar commotion in the far corner behind it, where yet another unseen aranea had been caught in his blast.

Sandoval began singing as he neared the room (having been delayed by the little matter of having to extract himself from a bunch of blades that had shot up out of the floor and impaled him). Bella regained her composure, and slipped in behind the aranea that was threatening Marie; with a flash of her blades, it collapsed to the floor, legs twitching spasmodically. Nicki fired off a blast of Maximized Scorching Rays, and two of the areaneas went up in flames. As they died, one of the giant spiders in the pit suddenly vanished.

The tide of battle quickly shifted. Another aranea swung down and delivered a nasty bite to Nicki, but Shinjiro swatted it down before it could escape again. Zhustin hammered one with a volley of Magic Missiles, and Sandoval used his Shout to kill one and injure another. Bella’s Spring Attack took out the last remaining ground-level threat, and Sawyer, who suddenly found that these disgusting creatures weren’t nearly as charming as he’d thought, Air Walked up to the final survivor, and sent it plummeting back down to the floor. As it died, the last giant spider also disappeared.

When they were sure nothing else was going to try to kill them, Marie dished out some healing and they began to investigate the ground floor. Nicki Levitated up to the ceiling, but could see nothing else hiding or hidden up there. There was a narrow stairway leading up, and Nicki was all in favor of exploring the upper floors of the insanely tall pagoda. “Cmon! It’ll be fun!” he urged. But the others refused to play along. They’d been told their objective was below ground, and that’s where they’d go first.

Once Nicki had dispelled his Wall of Force, they checked out the pit. It funneled down to a vertical shaft, some 10’ across. A warm breeze carrying the unpleasant smell of decay wafted up from this web-choked shaft, and its sides were unnaturally smooth, likely the result of Stone Shape or similar magic. Bella tried burning the webs, but found the aranea webs would not burn (probably lucky for the party, or else Zhustin’s Fireball might have ignited the entire room). They tied a rope to Bella, and Sawyer still had his Air Walk running, and together they hacked away the webs clogging the throat of the pit.

After about 20’, the webs stopped, and the walls of the shaft lost their polished smoothness. A set of narrow steps spiraled down into utter darkness. Ferrying the others down to the top of the stair, the party began a careful climb down. After a dizzying descent of at least 100 feet, the seemingly endless shaft finally ended. The tortuously narrow steps descended sharply into a wide, smooth-walled chamber. The air was hot, and smelled of sweat and toil – and death.

Peering in, they saw a vast room that widened as it sloped upward to the northeast, ending at a vast wall of huge stone blocks. The wall extended 20’ from floor to ceiling; the upper section of the wall bulged outward, overhanging the lower wall, and was pierced with arrow slits. Rusting double iron doors, bristling with bloody spikes, offered the only passage through the wall. Several figures were impaled on the spikes of the door. One was an aranea, its body obviously old and desiccated. The other two were humans, and to the party’s horror, they could see they were still twitching weakly.

Marie started to dash across the open floor to help the poor wretches on the door, but the others held her back. “There’s bound to be someone watching through those arrow slits – we don’t want to let them know that we’re here,” Sawyer reasoned.

Nicki took matters into his own hands. He cast a Greater Invisibility on himself, followed by Gaseous Form, and began to drift slowly and invisibly across the open killing field towards the wall. When he reached the iron doors, he oozed through the gap below the doors. On the other side, he found an open courtyard. Two sets of double doors led off to the north, and a heavy single door led to the east; all were closed. A 5-foot wide walkway ran along the wall some 10-12’ over his head, and he could hear rough voices talking softly from above. The gates opened outward, and were barred with an immense iron bar; a chain, attached to a windlass, could be used to lift the bar, but Nicki wasn’t sure he’d be strong enough to raise it, and he was sure that it would be a noisy and time-consuming effort.

Satisfied that he’d learned enough, Nicki drifted back under the doors and returned to the party. When we reported what he’d seen, a long debate began about the best course of action. No one wanted to attempt a full frontal assault. They discussed various options for getting a few people inside to open the gates, but ultimately decided to ignore the gates altogether. Zhustin and Nicki would use Dimension Door to teleport themselves and everyone else to the far side of the wall.

This was one of those rare occasions where they actually had time to prepare for a battle, instead of being dropped into one without warning. It was almost like begin back in the Tournament (good times!). Bella quaffed a Potion of Vanish and Sandoval cast Good Hope on the party. Zhustin debated about using Haste, but decided they might need it more at a later date. Both spellcasters focused on their planned arrival destinations (hoping that the wall wasn’t thicker than they expected, which would cause at least some of them to potentially materialize inside it), then, on the count of three, cast their spells together.

Everyone arrived on the far side of the wall, and no one was encased in stone. They heard low voices from the parapet above; the guards were unaware that they had company. That lasted about 5 seconds, right up until Sandoval started singing full-throat, and cast Mirror Image on himself.

With howls of surprise and rage, the guards realized they had intruders inside the walls. These Withered Blossom Warriors were grotesquely-muscled hobgoblin fighters, armed with wicked morningstars and longbows. They immediately turned their bows on any targets they could see. Most of the party were still out of sight below the walkway, and the hobgoblins were so surprised that several of their shots went into the ceiling or into the floor between their feet, but Zhustin found himself quickly pincushioned by a pair of shafts. Marie did a quick healing on him, but he decided that Nicki had had the right idea, and cast a Greater Invisibility on himself.

Bella, still temporarily out of sight thanks to her potion, took up a position at the foot of one of the stairways leading up to the parapet, waiting to ambush the first Withered Blossom Warrior who rushed down to attack. Unfortunately, they seemed to be willing to stay on the high ground, raining down arrows on the intruders (albeit pretty ineffectually). Wanting to take the fight to them, Shinjiro got a running start, then vaulted up onto the walkway, landing between two of the defenders. Sawyer reactivated Suishen’s Air Walk and climbed up to slash one of the hobgoblins with the ancestral sword. Sandoval unleashed a Sound Burst between two others, Stunning one of them.

Nicki prepared an Empowered Scorching Ray and fired all three rays into the same target, confident he would be blasted to smithereens. Instead, he screeched with rage and attacked Shinjiro. The monk responded with a Stunning Fist, and the warrior was so stunned he actually stopped breathing. Nicki, annoyed that his souped-up spell hadn’t taken down even one of the creatures, conjured up a Maximized Flaming Sphere that bounced along the parapet to try to engulf one of the creatures facing Sawyer, but it managed to dodge the bouncing burning ball.

Bella realized that it didn’t look like any of the warriors were going to come down off the walkway, and time was running out on her Vanish spell, so she sprinted up the stairs and took one by surprise as it was aiming an arrow at Marie. Marie Teleported into position behind it to give Bella flanking, that was pretty much all she wrote; Bella’s next slash took the distracted hobgoblin right in the liver, and it tumbled off the parapet.

Unfortunately for Marie, the Withered Blossom Warriors had one secret weapon at their disposal. A metal track ran along the walkway, and a pair of rolling braziers with cauldrons of boiling oil were prepared to pour down through murder holes on anyone attacking from below. Now the warrior Sandoval had stunned regained his wits, and toppled the cauldron over, splashing boiling pig fat onto Marie. Fortunately, she skipped away from the worst of it.

At the other end of the walkway, the fight was furious but tipping in the party’s favor. Two hobgoblins had converged to swing at the airborne Sawyer with their morningstars, but the big fighter quickly killed one and badly injured the other. Shinjiro delivered a devastating Flurry of Blows to another who had charged him, leaving him wobbling on his feet until Nicki’s Flaming Sphere finished him off. Sandoval unlimbered his bow, and fired an arrow straight through the eye of one of the defenders, impaling him to the wall behind. Zhustin fired off his own Scorching Rays, but two of the three rays went wide of their mark. Deciding it might be wise to conserve spells, Zhustin fell back to zipping off Acid Darts at the remaining defenders.

And those didn’t last long. Sawyer kept carving his way through opponents, and Bella tumbled through the slippery oil to come up behind the one who’d burned Marie. She and Marie both took hits from the pair of Withered Blossom Warriors, but Nicki moved his Flaming Sphere down to help (narrowly avoiding igniting the sheen of oil covering the walkway). Sawyer charged in, Bella did her thing, and the last of the Withered Blossom Warriors tumbled off the walkway.

Shinjiro and Sandoval moved to watch the doors from the east and north, but no other threats emerged. Marie was already working at the windlass to raise the bar to the gates, and as soon as they would open, she rushed outside to see if she could help the victims impaled there. They were as near death as could be, and it took some effort to gently remove them from the spikes without killing them in the process, but as soon as they were off, Marie began invoking healing magic, and they began to revive. In addition to the wounds from the spikes that had held them to the doors, their bodies were covered with bruises and scars, some recent, some clearly very old. As soon as they could talk, they began to gush thanks to Marie for saving them, interspersed with pitiful pleas not to torture them further.

“Who are you, and how did you get here?” Marie asked gently. Their story poured out, and though each was different, they were the same. Both had been farmers, living on farmsteads near the edge of the Forest of Spirits. One day, with no warning, a band of hobgoblins had appeared from the Forest. Their wives and children were raped and murdered, and they were drug back here, to serve as slaves and playthings. They had lived in a vast pit, along with scores of hobgoblins. The hobgoblins were ruled by a cruel overlord named Buto. He lived in a stone keep on the far side of the pit, and when he emerged, he rode on a huge boar. His followers called him the Swine Shogun, and it was a title of respect and fear, not mocking.

The hobgoblins treated the slaves horribly, often torturing or killing them for sport. But there were far worse things than the hobgoblins. The hobgoblins whispered of fearsome creatures living in the lower depths, who they feared and worshipped as gods. Many of the slaves were taken down to those levels, and none ever returned.

The slaves had lived their entire captive existence in the hobgoblin pit, until yesterday when, for no apparent reason other than their masters’ amusement, they were dragged up here and impaled on the gate. In response to the party’s inquiries, they said that the door to the east led to a large room, and beyond was a narrow north-south hallway that led to a ledge overlooking the hobgoblin pit; a very tall ladder was used to climb between the ledge and the pit.

As she looked up at the bloody gate, Marie noticed an inscription in Tien that had been etched into the iron surface. “Enter The Penance of Munasukaru - Once The Least, Now The Greatest”. She shuddered. Who was this Munasukaru, and why would this horrible place be his or her penance?

For the time being, there was nothing to do with the slaves but to leave them here; even if more araneas hadn’t returned to guard the pit again, there was no way they could climb the last 20 feet to freedom. And the slaves would die before they would take another step back into the hell they’d left behind.

Now that they knew that the door to the east led to the hobgoblins' home turf, they were still unsure about the two sets of doors to the north; the slaves knew nothing of them. Bella carefully checked both doors, and found them unlocked and apparently untrapped. She cautiously opened the west-most door. Inside was a dusty room, empty save for another door on the west wall. She started to go check it out, then had second thoughts. Just to be safe, she carefully checked for traps in the room itself. Sure enough, she could detect tell-tale signs of a pressure plate in the floor of the room. She started to try to disarm it, then had a better idea. “Hey Sawyer – give me a hand!” Together, they lifted one of the Withered Blossom Warriors’ bodies and heaved it into the room. For perhaps ten seconds, nothing happened. Then the doors suddenly slammed shut, and a loud grinding could be heard from inside, lasting for half a minute. When they could finally reopen the doors, the walls and ceiling were coated with a disgusting puree of hobgoblin, and countless spinning blades could be seen protruding from the floor and walls, now motionless. Opening the other doors, she found a similar empty room, this one with a door in the north wall. Without bothering to check for traps, Bella repeated the process, with the same osterizing results. Feeling certain (well … pretty certain) that the traps were no longer a threat, Bella crept inside to check the other doors. Both were nothing more than a façade affixed to the wall, there simply to entice unwary invaders to enter the trapped rooms.

So that just left the door to the east – leading on to the hobgoblins’ breeding grounds and the dark mysteries of Munasukaru’s Penance.

The PCs earned 4,400 XP for the evening, putting them at 171,262 XP, with 220,000 required for level 12. We’ll be at Leo’s next week, but Roger will be on vacation.