09/08/2026: Burgomaster's Mansion in Berez

In the cellar, Soulfire hisses, “What ARE they doing up there?” Burgomaster's Mansion in Berez

The hammering on the organ far above them has resumed. Crystal merely shakes her head.  

Suddenly, there is an enormous crash from somewhere ahead of them. It is so large, so powerful, that the ground beneath their feet shakes and dust trickles down from overhead.

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Zilk, regretting the series of choices that led him to this place, is in the painful embrace of several tentacles that are tearing at his fur.  The floor beneath him begins to crack and he drops through to whatever is below. 

Shifty also tumbles in, but launches himself away, then wheeling to cast Polymorph. Turning the massive tentacled horror into a  sheep would please him greatly.

Sadly, the creature seems untouched by the spell. Rats.

It rears back, towering over Shifty. He can’t tell but several of its eye pits seem focused on the diminutive kobold.

Suddenly, the lights ignite in the chamber behind them. The massive creature jerks itself around to face this new intruder, and finds itself engulfed in Crystal’s Fire Ball.  It hurls Zilk at Crystal, missing. The bugbear crashes into the wall and falls at Crystal’s feet as she enters this ceremonial space..

As the sorceress enters the chamber, the demon-faced carved reliefs on the walls ignite, gouting flames from between their stone lips. They shed light on an octagon inscribed in red paint on the rough stone floor. Eight coffins arranged to jut from the center, impossibly, begin to  open. 

Clambering from within each rotted box, grey-green skinned creatures pull themselves from within, gabbling and screeching as they come. Ghasts. Rolling before them, the stifling odor that identifies them.

Crystal deploys her Immolation spell, scorching the creature and four of the eight ghasts. The screaming and smell are terrible.

The moraleth has Zilk in an embrace no one asked for. Crystal arrives to find her friend being mashed by several muscular tentacles and decides this has gone on long enough. She answers the only way a sorcerer reasonably can: with fire. The chamber floods with it. The moraleth, still smoking, responds by hurling Zilk bodily into the nearest wall — an insult on top of an injury — and Crystal, unbothered, layers a second blast on top of the first for good measure.

The fire does more than singe the moraleth. It burns the eight ghasts perched around the ring of coffins, freshly loosed and, by all appearances, deeply prepared to greet the interlopers. Shifty gets in close and bites one for good measure — old habits — while poor Zilk, still smarting from being thrown across a demon-lit basement, is clawed as he lay prone. 

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Upstairs, the organ splinters under Biblo's axe before Nike can stop him — not that she tries especially hard. Beneath the wreckage, a blocked tunnel opens to the cellar becomes visible. Blocked, incongruously, by Crystal's portable forge, exactly where she set it, to keep others out. It is exactly as heavy as a full-sized forge usually is, frustrating Nike and Biblo.

Something down in the cellar, beneath Biblo’s feet, begins speaking inside Biblo’s head. The voice is low and coaxing, gently inviting him into the cellar — “Come through the organ, or if he'd rather, the barn.”  Apparently this speaker has no clue about the forge that blocks the entrance beneath the organ. 

Almost shyly, the voice confesses, that it is lonely, that it is gathering others in the cellar. It has already invited two of his companions: the tall hairy one, and the smaller, scaly one. 

Nike, catching him murmuring to what looks for all the world like an empty stretch of carpet, decides her barbarian has finally cracked, and elects to knock some sense into him with the nearest heavy object — which turns out to be a book. It works about as well as swinging a book at a dragonborn usually does.