Session 13: Ending In Blood

Characters involved:

• Amaril, elf cleric of Helm.
• Pisqual “Piper” Dunraven, human rogue and ambitious thief.
• Primeiro d’Pirazzi, human mage extraordinaire.
• Shrain, dwarf cleric of Moradin.
• Tredek, half-orc barbarian and reader-of-books.
• Vaicht, elf monk of Kelemvor.
• Zelder, halfling rogue and pastry aficionado.

Tredek emerged from the depths of the Undercellar reeking of sewage and strange tiding that there was no time to talk about. He joined the others as they emerged onto the Wide, wondering what in the Nine Hells had just happened. The explosion they’d heard had shook the ground and sent debris sailing through the sky. Chunks of masonry crashed into buildings, started some small fires, and even crushed a few people.

Investigating, the PCs found that the Parliament chamber in High Hall had been destroyed. Black smoke and flames roiled out, and the street around it was littered with rubble and broken bodies. Most of the Peers of the Parliament had clearly been slain by the blast. But no simple spell could have dealt that much devastation!

There had been a few survivors, and both Amaril and Shrain were able to save a few of the dying with minor cleric spells.

Primeiro and Tredek ventured closer. The smoke and heat was too intense to get very close, but they were able to determine that whatever had caused the explosion had been donated from a basement level directly below the Parliament meeting hall, and that barrels of some kind had been involved. It certainly seemed no accident.

Outside in the building, Vaicht and Piper found Imbralym Skoond—Duke Silvershield’s right-hand man—sitting up from the rubble, covered in soot but for the most part unharmed. A brief exchange with him revealed further confusion as to what had caused the explosion. Skoond said he had not been inside the meeting hall but just outside it—that’s how he’d survived. He seemed most worried about his boss, Silvershield, but being one of the dukes, Silvershield wasn’t necessarily in attendance of the meeting of the Peers.

The High Hall, minus smoke, fire, death,
and general explosive pandemonium

When they asked about Silvershield, Skoond said he didn't know where he was, but when in doubt, go to the duke's estate.

Thinking that there could be other attacks in other important buildings, Vaicht and Primeiro (the latter augmented by a longstrider spell) ran to the temple of Gond, the High House of Wonders, where they found a gathering at the steps of Gondsman acolytes and guards. At this point, Nine-Fingers approached them (disguised in Gondsman attire) and told them that her agents had informed her that something was happening at the Seatower of Balduran down in the Lower City. Now that the Upper City was closed to the Lower City, the only way to get down there now was through passages in the Undercellar. Primeiro accompanied with her while Vaicht went to retrieve the others. The rest of the group had to argue and bribe their way through the gate.

Imbralym Skoond

Down at the docks, a public execution was underway. A prison break had been staged during the night—so Nine-Fingers explained—and those who didn’t escape were now awaiting the gallows. Many, in fact, had already been hung, strung up along a series of gallows on the long causeway that led to the Seatower. Anxious Lower City residents, already confused by the explosion sound that had issued from the Upper City, now crowded the docks to watch the spectacle. Fear and excitement warred among them.

On the way there, Primeiro had walked with Nine-Fingers and the Lady’s Court, her bodygards. Three of them seemed to disappear as they went, mysteriously. When they reached the wall of Flaming Fist guards that barred the way to the gallows, Nine-Fingers warned the mage to be careful, then melted back into the crowd, unwilling to be seen.

Primeiro, and soon the rest of the PCs, saw how many people were about to be hung, and how many already had been. Musayed, the turbaned Guild affiliate from the Calim Jewel Emporium, was already dead, as was Eldren Needle, the owner of Baldur’s Mouth. Ravengard was marching up and down the line, ordering the executions and being intimately involved. Presently he was speaking to Ariax Rillyn—the patriar judge he’d tried to frame and discredit—who was about to be hung next!

Nine-Fingers

Then they saw that the Ilmatari priest, Brother Hodges, was also awaiting execution. Most of the prisoners strung up were vandals, or even just suspects. Some may have had Guild association, but clearly no trial was taking place.

So the PCs did what PCs do: get involved. Often messily, but usually with positive results.

Through conviction and diplomacy (Primeiro, Amaril, Zelder), riotous distractions (Tredek leaping into the air and warning the crowds about rat swarm attacks, backed by Amaril's audible illusions), and various acts of surreptitiousness (Piper merging with the crowd and inciting them, Vaicht swimming sneakily across the water to rescue prisoners), the PCs were able to quell further death and coerce Ravengard to cease the continual death. Ravengard seemed haunted, seething with anger, and battling spiritual inner conflict. When Vaicht's rescue of Brother Hodges was apparent, Ravengard began to walk toward him. Primeiro seized this opportunity to cast phantasmal force upon the Flaming Fist marshal, and it occupied him instantly. Ravengard started to attack the empty air, believing in the illusion the cunning mage had conjured. Flaming Fist guards surged to their commander's aid but didn't know how to assist him properly, unable to see his foe. Shrain used the opportunity to cast a Detect Good and Evil and was able to discern a cloud of fiendish energy roiling inside Ravengard as he fought the phantasmal spectre. 

Zelder set out to assist Vaicht and Hodges (who refused to leave until he could help the other innocents escape the noose).

Meanwhile, Piper had a disturbing encounter with Rilsa Rael. She had appeared to him from amid the crowd and seemed as haunted as Ravengard. She pointed him to an empty spot on the gallows, where he saw a spectral figure of his own—Rilsa's own father, a rotting corpse hanging from a noose and not swaying to the winds affecting the other hanged dead. "That's what started it all," she said creepily. She then stated that she had things to do, and Piper began to follower her. With a glare of warning, she convinced him not to. In her eyes, he saw reflected the skull-and-halo-of-blood-drop symbol of Bhaal. Piper let her walk away, opting not to get stabbed to death.

Ravengard collapsed, a broken man. Eyes red, he stared at the many hanged prisoners and became wistful and shaken. It seemed whatever had possessed him had released him, but he refused to do anything but try to right his wrongs. He did tell them, though, that there were "two others," and he looked vaguely up toward the city above. Already, the PCs figured Rilsa or Nine-Fingers, was one of them—likewise possessed or spiritually dominated in some way.

By way of assistance, Ravengard handed Shrain one of his favored weapons, a magical dwarven defender, a powerfully enchanted warhammer capable of being thrown and dealing exceptional amounts of damage.

Marshal Ulder Ravengard,
formerly a candidate for Bhaal's favor

So the PCs ventured back into the city, intend on finding Silvershield in the Upper City.

On the way up the almost emptied streets of the Lower City, they passed through a street where they found all six members of Nine-Fingers' bodyguards, the Lady's Court, lying dead. Throats slit, backs stabbed through.

Around a bend they then saw Rilsa Rael, knife still dripping with blood, standing over Nine-Fingers herself. The Guildmistress was bleed out, and Rael—formerly her protégé—was looking at her dying friend trance-like. She turned and stared at the PCs, her face blank. Before Shrain could attack her, which he was more than inclined to do, the others approached her. Tredek plucked the dagger from her hand, and she let him. When they tried to speak to her, she turned and looked once more upon her friend...then turned away and collapsed against the alley wall, weeping for what she had done. She, too, seemed to have been released from whatever violent power had occupied her and Ravengard.

Rilsa Rael,
formerly a candidate for Bhaal's favor

Amaril was quick to use a minor healing spell to keep Nine-Fingers from dying.

Rilsa Rael didn't say much, but she admitted that Bhaal's power was to be found somewhere else. The PCs knew, they needed to find Silvershield, for he seemed like the obvious next candidate. Rael offered them her rapier, a fine enchanted blade. Meanwhile, the group hurried both women back down the streets to the Water Queen's House, temple of Umberlee. While the faith of the Bitch Queen was not a benign one, they recognized both women, and the priestesses accepted them. When they saw the gravely wounded Nine-Fingers, they called Lady Keene.

The PCs ventured back to the gate to the Upper City, and bargained and intimidated and ultimately convinced the Watch guards to let them by (which had been kept shut on orders from Duke Silvershield). Soon after, they hurried to the High House of Wonders, where evidently something had happened. The Watch ran with them. There they found that the heavy bronze slabs that served as the temple's front doors—which normally hung suspended above the threshold—had been dropped upon a group of people. Several tons had pupled them, and blood pooled out from the door. A line of fire in the street at the base of the temple steps and debris on the cobbles suggested some sort of fight and retreat had occurred.

The final confrontation occurred at Silvershield's estate, a walled-in compound in the corner of the Upper City. Servants were seen fleeing, but most of them lay dead where they'd been running. Slashed, clawed, heads crushed. Just inside, a child's scream made the PCs' arrival more urgent. Zelder sprinted for the entrance to the manor itself, but Piper saw traces of smokepowder sloppily scattered along the porch. When they heard the scream again, Shrain threw caution to the wind. The moment the front doors opened, a small explosion rocked burned both the dwarf and the halfling, though both fared well enough against the heat.

When they heard the screaming coming definitively from the north end of the compound, they ran around the house into the lush orchard of the Silvershield family. There they found Duke Torlin Silvershield himself standing there, with Imbralym Skoond lurking behind him. Before the duke was a cloaked man who was ritually presenting himself—this was the cult leader, Azevell, who'd written the letter to Viekang, who manipulated the last two Bhaalspawn to die, thereby releasing the divine energy of the Lord of Murder. Now, as the PCs watched, Silvershield drove a blade into the man's chest.

The cultist died horrifically, twitting, and then his head broke free from his body, flesh sloughing off it and a corona of blood swirling around it—a physical manifestation of the symbol of Bhaal.

Meanwhile, Silvershield himself underwent a hideous transformation into the Chosen of Bhaal. He now towered several feet higher now, his body has stricken and fiendish, swollen with Bhaal's favor. His armor was now fused to his distended form, which had become albino white, cracked, and bled foul black ichor. He immediately tore free the holy symbol of Gond that he'd been wearing, trading one god for another.

In his hands was a gore-caked morning star, with which he'd clearly murdered a number of his own house servants. Lying nearby was a noblewoman, quite dead. Silvershield's own wife. Behind him his two daughters cowered against the wall of his estate, awaiting their fate. In one of the orchard's trees a small boy was crying—Silvershield's son. His death-dealing seemed indiscriminate.

Of the three selected by the Lord of Murder as the most ambitious—the most willing to use violence to advance their agendas—Silvershield had come forward as the most successful. The sumptuary laws, the dueling laws, the class division and elevation of the patriars above the Lower and Outer City residents. The elimination of rivals and the murder of the Parliament. All of it had come to a head. While had once been an honorable, if arrogant man, he always believed that his wealth was a sign of the gods' favor, and therefore he deserved to govern others. This philosophy carried into the populace itself; the patriars had been blessed by the gods as evidenced by what they had. Those in the Lower or Outer City should remain in their place. And the Parliament had, in his eyes, become corrupt. To purge the city of influences beyond his own, Silvershield had simply removed it.

Now, he needed dealing with. Several members of the Watch were still serving Silvershield despite his transformation, as were some crossbow-wielding Gondsman acolytes. But Watchmen had also arrived with the PCs and did not balk.

Amaril called out a challenge even as he launched into a divine spell of his own, citing the irony of the cleric of one dead god (Helm) battling another (Bhaal). Primeiro, Vaicht, Shrain, and Tredek waded quickly into the fray with spells and weapons. Zelder responded to Silvershield's son in the tree, and climbed it to go and guard him. Meanwhile, Piper drank the potion of invisibility given to him by Rael and worked his way around the battlefield, intent on taking out Imbralym Skoond.

The Chosen of Bhaal formerly
known simply as Duke Torlin
Silvershield, High Artificer of Gond

The battle was ugly, bloody, but fairly brief. Silvershield used both claws and mace against his foes, nearly dropping Primeiro, who dared venture close to use spells effectively. Amaril's divine magic took out several of the duke's underlings. Tredek raged, with his twin axes, attacked the floating Bhaal-skull—which seemed to fuel Silvershield's power and heal him with necrotic energy—as often as the villain himself.

Silvershield moved frequently around, fast and capable of jumping great distances. He leapt into one of the trees and the PCs gave chase, and finally even launched himself up the three where Zelder had been guarding his son, peppering him with arrows. Tredek and Vaicht followed, climbing up among the limbs (or in Tredek's case, jumping with totemic power!) to continue the fight. Zelder grabbed the child and dropped to the ground when it seemed like Silvershield was intent on the boy's death.

Piper and Amaril used arrows, spells, and blades to take Imbralym Skoond down. Blurred by magic, Skoon was nevertheless held by one of Amaril's spells and rendered far more vulnerable than he would have liked. He'd launched magic missiles into the PCs, but in the end was impaled on Piper's fancy new rapier. Skoond, the ambitious and amoral right-hand man of Silvershield, the man whose apprentices had cooked up and secreted smokepowder beneath the city for many days in anticipation of the removal of the Parliament of Peers....was dead at last. Although he'd had no personal care for Bhaal's murderous agenda, backing Silvershield meant he himself would rise in power. That's all he'd wanted.

Eventually, the Chosen of Bhaal was surrounded, and the floating blood-skull that supported him was cracked nearly in two by one of Tredek's axes—which in turn destroyed the axe. Weakened, he fought to the last and continued to pursue the murder of the boy Zelder kept safe. It was a simple ray of frost—a cantrip of elemental cold—which finally ended the villainous duke. Primeiro delivered it with a one-liner, citing his intent to be one of the new dukes!

It had been the PCs actions when working with both Ulder Ravengard and Rilsa Rael that had kept them beneath Bhaal's favor in the end, and it had saved them. Silvershield, largely unchecked, had therefore been the only remaining worthy of the Lord of Murder's choice. But to what end? The Chosen of Bhaal had not survived, so the question remained: What does this mean for Bhaal? Is he free to look elsewhere or is his presence diminished in the Sundering to come?

And what next for Baldur's Gate? The government is in ruins (to some extent, quite literally), and only two of the four dukes of the Council of Four remain, and they're both getting on in years. What will become of Ravengard? Honorable discharge? Will he be tasked with cleaning up and making amends for his overzealous sword-rattling and rushed executions? What of the Guild? Can Nine-Fingers and Rael work things out? Will anyone face trial?

And what of the PCs? Will Primeiro campaign for duke? Will Amaril restore the shrine to Helm? Will Vaicht return to his city roots or establish a shrine to Kelemvor? Will Piper become Baldur's Gate's best cat burglar? Will Shrain restore honor and dwarvitude to the Flaming Fist? Will Tredek find another library to get lost in or found one of his own?

Will Zelder start up a successful muffing-making business?

Thanks for playing, guys!

— Jeff LaSala