Labyrinths of the Lost - Session 3

The party descends into Grimstone’s lair beneath Perdoli Manor, destroys undead pirates, bluffs and kills a human guard, and finally defeats Grimstone and his stone constructs.

Timeline

• Oct 18, 1748 DR: The party descends below Perdoli Manor, destroys undead pirates and a guard, defeats Grimstone and his stone constructs, and strips the laboratory of research and treasure.
• Oct 19, 1748 DR, morning: The party escapes Perdoli Manor, and parts ways on the road.

Cast of Characters

• Grimstone (he/him, human): masked alchemist in the laboratory.
• Pikeia (dog): Dilion’s living dog.

Places

• Perdoli Manor (pehr-DOH-lee; ruined manor estate in Western Cymea, Cymea): ruined Western Cymean manor and former Perdoli estate whose lower pirate hideout now contains Grimstone’s laboratory and petrification operation.
• Grimstone’s lair (hidden laboratory complex in the Perdoli Manor, Western Cymea): hidden laboratory complex beneath Perdoli Manor, reached through the old pirate hideout and used for petrification experiments.

Combat

• Distraction and Shade Ambush: pirate shades, pirate shadows. The party turns magical light and tinkering into a distraction that covers the rope ladder descent, then destroys the pirate shades and shadows in the lower cavern.
• Human Guard Ambush: human guard. After Grimstone refuses to be lured out, the party stops the returning guard from raising help; he chases Gaudin into an ambush and is killed by the steampup.
• Grimstone’s Lab Fight: Grimstone, stone spider swarm, stone wasp. The party kills Grimstone, survives his animated stone spider swarm and stone wasp, and prevents Acescale from fully petrifying.

Narrative

In the master bedroom where the ghost of the pirate captain left them, the party descends the trapdoor leading into the old hideout beneath Perdoli Manor. Below the room, they find a square stone vault from the manor’s older construction, with one wall smashed open into a rough pirate tunnel. The steampup leads the way through the dark until the corridor breaks at a ten-foot gap over a long drop. Acescale drinks his flight elixir, confirms the upper passage dead-ends in rubble, and spots a rope ladder to a lower cavern. Descending, he sees seven pirate shades guarding the exit.

To avoid being attacked while descending, Dilion suggests using bright light to distract the shades before anyone commits to the descent. The plan sharpens into an invisible Acescale carrying both a magically noisy, smelly, glowing bag of distractions and the steampup down, while Dilion hooks the rope ladder for the others. When the shades notice Dilion at the bottom and call out, the bag goes off and the party seizes the opening: Acescale drops acid from above, Loria lands badly but cuts into the shades with her swords and swarm, Gaudin blasts from the rim, and Dilion and the steampup join from below. After a short fight, the party defeats the shades. In the cavern, they find seven burned pirate skeletons, plus melted swords and a silver-and-gold ingot. Recent tracks suggest that one or two people passed through towards a strange wooden door; the party takes a brief breather before pressing on.

The strange wooden door swings into another natural corridor, where the party hears someone working out in a torchlit chamber. Loria rides in on the steampup and tries to pass herself off as a lost traveler looking for the wine cellar, but the guard only grows more confused. Gaudin steps in from behind her, still disguised as an elf, and kicks Loria, treating her as a prisoner. He claims he was told by a goblin to bring these “ingredients” to Grimstone. The guard relaxes slightly after the bluff, but is wary: the delivery is a day early, he has never seen Gaudin before, nobody is tied up, and Grimstone usually wants victims petrified before seeing them. Afraid of Grimstone’s wrath, the guard rummages out his last green vial and smashes the petrification dose onto the steampup so at least one prisoner will be delivered as stone. When the construct resists the effect, the guard decides not to be responsible for the mess, points the way onward, and leaves toward the cavern entrance while Gaudin deals with Grimstone.

With the guard gone, the party searches his bedding and crates, finding clothes, moldy food, a half-drunk bottle of brandy, empty vials, and a usable set of alchemist’s tools. Acescale proposes using the clothes and Gaudin’s magic to repeat the deception: Gaudin will impersonate the guard, warn Grimstone that the basilisk has escaped, and draw him into a prepared corridor ambush. Instead, Gaudin finds Grimstone absorbed at an alchemical bench, masked, muttering over a potion, and surrounded by stone animal statues. Grimstone snaps at the interruption, hits Gaudin with an exploding potion, dismisses the basilisk as someone else’s problem, and goes back to work.

Before the party can simply rush the lab, they hear the human guard returning from the cavern entrance, where he may uncover their meddling and fetch hobgoblin reinforcements. Gaudin tries one more deception, disguising himself as Grimstone, but the voice is wrong; the guard grows suspicious. About to be attacked, Gaudin runs, and Misty Steps back to the party’s hiding place. The guard charges into the ambush, takes several hits, decides it is not worth dying for, and tries to flee. Gaudin’s Eldritch Blast drops him to his knees, and the steampup kills him before he can escape.

With the guard gone, the party stops trying to draw Grimstone out and plans the direct assault. They discuss the flammable lab, Grimstone’s potion bandolier, the steampup’s ability to pin him down, and the risk that the two intact stone statues might animate once the fight begins. The plot sends invisible Loria into the laboratory while everyone else follows close enough to rush in when she becomes visible. The plan fails before the first strike: Loria creeps across the cluttered floor, kicks a glass vial, and Grimstone looks up, grabs a potion from his belt, and prepares to attack.

Gaudin opens with a risky Eldritch Blast at the potion in Grimstone’s hand and misses; Acescale uses Ray of Sickness to poison him, while the steampup leaps the bench and Loria, still invisible, gets under the table to slash at his legs. Grimstone fights from inside the cluttered laboratory, throwing fire at Acescale, dropping poisonous smoke around himself, and hurling animation potions at the stone spider and stone wasp statues. The spider breaks into a swarm of tiny stone spiders that mob Gaudin, while Loria keeps cutting into Grimstone and Acescale lands a point-blank crossbow shot. Grimstone sets off another fire potion at his own feet and wakes the wasp, but Loria’s perfectly placed Zephyr Strike cuts him down before the constructs are finished. Gaudin blasts most of the stone spider swarm apart, while the wasp’s petrifying stinger drops Acescale to zero twice; Dilion’s Cure Wounds reverses the first petrification, and Acescale resists the second. As the party destroys the wasp and crushes the last spiders, the lab goes quiet.

With the constructs destroyed, the party searches Grimstone’s laboratory. They try to revive Acescale with one of the apparent healing potions, but the potion is poisoned and leaves him unstable again. Fortunately, Dilion identifies a real healing potion and gets him back up; once conscious, Acescale sorts the rest of the lab supplies. The usable finds include two anti-petrification potions, a potion of growth, a potion of advantage, a vial of oil of slipperiness, a glowing-poison recipe, and at least 50 gold worth of alchemical materials.

After a short rest, the party checks the west room and finds Grimstone’s bed, notes, maps, and basilisk research, all circling what he called the Prime Arcana: Grimstone believed that petrifying the right living victim might create the substance needed for immortality. In the east storeroom, Dilion finds his dog companion Pikeia tied up alive, and two chests, one locked. Searching Grimstone’s corpse provides the key, and an old Draconic book, The Way of the Stone, whose recipes for invulnerability, youth, and immortality all require the Prime Arcana. Unlocking the locked chest, the party recovers some of Grimstone’s treasure, along with their stolen items. When Gaudin opens the second chest with Mage Hand, it lunges with teeth, so the party marks it as a mimic and leaves it alone.

The party rests overnight in Grimstone’s lair. Early the next morning, they slip out of Perdoli Manor by the back way. The hobgoblins are angry and distracted after finding the eight dead guards, and the goblins flee when Grimstone fails to appear for the usual Sunday ritual. The party escapes in the chaos, then divides the treasure on the road down from the mountains.

Acescale shares part of his loot with the others, partly in thanks and partly to stay on luck’s good side. He keeps the strangely weighted die, for gambling, but imagines turning his new alchemy gear into steady work making potions. Gaudin treats the adventure as his first real test as a warlock, and imagines the smuggling possibilities inherent in the information about old pirate hideouts from the maps he found. Dilion leaves relieved to have Pikeia back. He returns to the wilderness with both Pikeia and the steampup, still looking for a place to settle but comfortable on the road. Loria apologizes for her wavering courage and decides that combat is not really her path unless she is forced into it. She sets out south toward the kingdom of Orenlas, hoping to be admitted, and disappears in a soft flurry of wings.