Having defeated Gideon and his undead, we took our time looking around the cemetery.
The first and most obvious devilry was the large ditch with foul smelling yellow-green liquid bubbling inside it. It contained several corpses; throwing another one in did nothing. Many footsteps were there coming out tho, so we signalled the base to send people to fill it in.
We also talked to the mad mage who had helped us with some fireballs, and we finally convinced her to go to High Hall and cooperate with the survivors.
The building itself was wrecked, but two stained glass windows miraculously survived, one with an illustration of Torm placing the helmet on a paladin, the other Lathander among dead soldiers collecting souls. Next up: the basement.
In the basement, we collected and cleaned up several soiled holy symbols, to be given to the quartermaster at High Hall. A large leather bound tome was obviously devil propaganda, exhorting the evils of demons and the virtues of devils. Reading it only made us roll saves, so I burned it to ash.
A staircase led down into the catacombs, and we obviously explored every nook and cranny. We passed by defiled statues of gods, and Daramin's detect magic felt a necrotic aura building up, so we ran through.
In the last room, we saw a meditative pool, now defiled with demonic ichor and a swirling portal open on the far wall. Barbosa tried dispelling the portal, but it turned out to be a temporary solution. So the dwarf felt around for any weak points in the rock, and I aimed a couple of shatter spells to collapse the room.
Heading back, we were once again confronted by the necrotic energy buildup. Silka and I acrobatics'd across the room, but the slow moving tanks were blasted with a damage effect. In response, we tore the statues apart.
As we left the graveyard, the corpses impaled on the fence posts still moved in sync with the Companion. We left them be, and headed to the wizard's tower. Just in time, as the workers had finished clearing away the rubble.
The wizard's tower turned out to be a short exploration episode. We started with Silka breaking the arcane lock on the front door. The ground floor held the wizard's and apprentice's living room, and the next floor had the alchemy lab. We collected a bunch of useful potions.
The top floor was protected by a cute puzzle: the stairs leading up only had footprints coming down, and going up teleported anybody back down. Silka realised that we had to walk backwards to reach the wizard's library. We looted the spellbook and scrolls, and decided to let the rescued wizards in High Hall come and walk through the tomes discussing teleportation magic. Maybe they will be able to reconstruct the teleportation circle.
After reporting to Duke Ravenguard and some more haggling with the quartermaster and blacksmith, we made our way towards the second survivor enclave.
A random encounter had us notice a starved looking halfling about to make a deal with a devil. I offered him food and sanctuary for his family, free of charge. The imp had some choice words to say about that, but Silka shot him down.
Finally, we reached the ragtag barricades of the other survivors. Having perfumed myself in advance, I convinced their overseer to let us in and take us to the big boss, who turned out to be a former merchant prince. He was easier to convince than expected, and he gave us a sending stone to take to Ravenguard.
On the way back, we met a frightened priestess of Tyr who we agreed to take to High Hall. Fortunately, Silka was highly suspicious of her and caught her in a lie. She turned out to be a rakshasa and escaped through a plane shift spell. Immunity to counterspell saved this particular fiend!
We wrapped up the session by once again reporting to Ravenguard, and, having nothing else to do in the city, deciding to leave for the plains of Avernus the following morning. The duke and his people gave us any and all necessary equipment, including lots of gold, armor, food and the like. We inspected the chains holding the city down, and found a nice spot to land in between the chain heads where any guards wouldn't spot us landing. We will use a combination of feather fall and fly spells to get down as cheaply as possible.
But first: level up!
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