House of Conti - Session 4

I ran Session 4 of the House of Conti on Saturday the 8th.

House of Conti - Session 3
House of Conti logs

Cast of Characters

• Luca Conti - A swashbuckler
• Raphael - A capable wizardly spy
• JD - a Sorceror
• Baradiel - A half-fallen angel

Companions

• Goldie - Raphael's familiar, a special rat
• A Swarm of Fancy Rats - Raphael's other Allies

Out of the Sewers and Back In Again

Luca, having been Geased to leave, dropped his weapons and headed to the initial entrance.  Once they got upstairs, they looked for the mage they had tied up on the surface but she was gone, and also found a silver piece Raphael had dropped in her pocket as a Seeker target.  They went to her apartment nearby, and found a dead man on the bottom floor, as well as bloody boot-prints leading out of the building.  Searching the room upstairs, they found a room conspicuously free of treasured possessions, stray hairs, or anything else that could be used to Seeker her easily, like it had been swept clean by a woman with Paranoia...

Goldie, Raphael's rat familiar, tracked the boot-prints to a tavern across the street.  The Golden Rooster, famous locally for its high-quality pasta.  They asked the bartender if they had seen anyone suspicious, and he admitted a man went into the basement earlier, but that his bar didn't even use it for storage any longer, having moved everything to a shed outside as worms kept coming up from the sewers and spoiling the food.  At this point, the group was suspicious of the bartender, as he gave them lots of grief, but they went down anyway.  They found the very cultist meeting place they had just left.

An Unwitting Donkey Kong Reference

The cultists they had left sleeping were missing.  The dead ones were still here, so they started to search.  As they were walking north, a lit barrel of gunpowder was thrown at them by the stone ape statue, hidden in the prison cell. It didn't even occur to me that this was totally Rock Donkey Kong until the players pointed it out.  Baradiel and Luca both tried to cut the barrel in half as it flew past, but they had no such luck.  They wanted to cut the fuse, but it was too far inside the barrel at this point to even see.  Both Luca and Baradiel took considerable damage from the blast, Baradiel being taken down to a death check and Luca being taken below 0 HP.  As they were reeling, the missing cultists all came from the north, with the Berzerk spell active on them.

For a couple of turns, it looked really bad for the party, as the cultists were All-Out Attacking and landing hits because of the reduced defenses.  Baradiel also failed a Consciousness Check and passed out.  Raphael saved the day with a timely Terror, which all the cultists failed to resist.  This stunned them long enough for Baradiel to be healed and Awakened, whereupon he failed a Bloodlust Self-Control roll and started choppin' off heads.

In the midst of this, Raphael located another bomb, even bigger than the first, on the roof of the room.  He ducked back, then on the next turn Luca leapt up using Baradiel's back as a footstool, cut the fuse with a single stroke, and landed perfectly with a critical success on Acrobatics, and was promptly annoyed when he realized literally no one in the room saw that.

After the cultist were taken care of, JD used Telepathy to send a message to Sazano the Wizard to get him to contact the Inquisition.  They went back upstairs to check out the tavern and found it burning down.  Luca used Leadership to organize the people around to put out the fire and save whomever they could.  After all this Sazano and Inqusitor Fedduchi arrived.  Fedduchi was a man both Luca and Raphael had met in the affair of the Bishop's murder, and they remembered him as as a just and reasonable man from their prior dealings.

An Agent of the Inquisition?

Back in the cultist temple, Luca made such promises and boasts that it had Sazano worried; Raphael took the lead from Luca and used Diplomacy to convince the Inquisitor to make Luca an agent in this affair, so they might freely track the Gath cult down.  Fedduchi agreed, and promised to send a letter granting Luca authority in the matter complete with the local Bishop's seal.  The day being complete, the party rented out the top floor of a local inn and partied until dawn.  Or dusk, perhaps, as by the celebration's end they could only agree that in some way the sun was shifting positions with the moon.