Session 25: Hemlock Horrors Report

General Summary

Unsure of Feugelhaig's intentions, the party decide to wait for him outside of his home in the Quay Ward to have a 'friendly' chat. When he walks straight past them without recognising them, they grow suspicious and step forth, demanding to know why. After some initial hesitation (and death threats from the party), the dwarf allows them inside, where it reveals it's a doppler, as well as the previous Feugelhaig they talked to when they first entered the city. In fact, Feugelhaig had been gone for years due to being a liability to the project. It elaborates, claiming that the boss of the operation, the mad Rakshasa Ryokai, had begun to impersonate the artificer almost a decade ago in order to get his hands on his machines, and when Feugelhaig found out, the demon had him disposed of, down some dark alley in the East Ward. Ryokai apparently started to meddle with his machines, tainting the Genesis Project into something malicious; something he could use against the city and Mayoress Blythe to have Sota at his mercy. Ryokai wasn't building Octane as a guardian to the people, he was building it as a guardian to his rule. All he needed was a power source strong enough to fuel a whole city's worth of machines. With the pieces starting to fall into place, the party ask the doppler the location of its boss, but it claims that it doesn't know, in fact, nobody does; the demon uses his dopplers as mere foot-soldiers - mules if you will, who only followed him blindly because he promised them a place in an unforgiving world. Sly Tony promises the creature that if it helps the revolution stop the Genesis Project then he will give it the life it so desires. The doppler thinks for a moment, and agrees. All it knows is that it was speculated that Feugelhaig was the only person to ever get close to discovering the truth about the mad demon, so finding him is their best bet. Whether he's still alive, only Neryn knows. The party thank the doppler for its time and set off to the only alley in Sota they know that a demon would dispose of someone in: Hemlock Street. As the night falls and darkness thickens, it becomes increasingly unlikely that they can find the shifting street before dawn by themselves, and so they enlist the help of a local roadman to find it for them. He flat-out refuses at first, but then Tony calls him out for attending a private school, at which point he grows quiet and reluctantly leads them towards the alleyway. They pay him a small sum for his services but as they turn to face Hemlock Street, it soon becomes apparent that they aren't where they need to be at all: the tiling is green instead of blue and they can hear a strange Irish cackling emanate from the darkness. The party shudder as they realise they stand before the only thing scarier than Hemlock Street: Shamrock Alley. With no other leads, Rostliem decides to investigate, and ventures into the darkness coiled in rope held by Donevan at the other end. Soon he becomes surrounded by crazed leprechauns chanting and singing in the void. He is brought to be tried before their leader: Shamrock McGuinness, who presents the druid with a green overcoat and top hat, telling him he has no choice but to join them, to become his inner Shamrock. He awakens again in a darkly lit grass field, after living 300 years on the farm with his wife Leanne and his two boys, Shamrock and Shamrock. As the party, after finding their own way through to Hemlock Street, approach him, he begins to remember reality and becomes good old Rostliem Mythorn once more (granted now with a slightly ginger twinge in his stubble). Directly in front of them, piercing into the astral sky is an imposing building, left derelict and abandoned at the cold shoulders of time. A sign on the rusted front gate reads 'Hemlock Asylum' in faded writing. Upon entering the institution, they split up to cover the most ground, finding a whole matter of cracked porcelain dolls, the small fortune of the Warden, and a serpentine staff, though they eventually reconvene when they discover the location of the Male Ward. Following the signs through flooded corridors, they quickly learn evil roams free here. Bodies litter the floor and walls, and the whole building reeks of death. In the Western corridor, they stumble upon a man who has had his skin removed and laced with salt as punishment by the warden, Mister Kister, and his ward, Dr. Qhasrel. He begs for only death. The party deal with a number more of these monstrosities before they enter into the Male Ward, at the end of which lies what they were looking for: the room of Auldron Feugelhaig. They find it empty and abandoned with tapes on the floor that outline his slow descent into madness, and upon realising the only escape from the madness of the asylum was death, an attempted suicide. Whilst Ondor and Elkas explore the other half of the wing, the rest of the party locate the matron's office to learn if Feugelhaig still lives. She toys with them, but eventually confesses that he does, but a few days ago he was taken downstairs to be lobotomised by the doctor for his failed suicide attempt. When they try to leave, she demands payment in the form of living flesh, which they lovingly grant in the unorthodox form of chopping her fat head off. All that's left to do is descend the stairwell into the basement of the asylum, though when they do, they are wracked with terrible nightmares of a bedroom and a daycare that only ends in darkness. A voice calls out to them, a horrible piercing voice that scratches at the back of their minds. It explains that they are now a part of a 'dream world', in which they have been detached from their bodies and diminished into their weakest, most vulnerable selves, put at the mercy of the institution. Should they perish inside of this dream world, their body will remain intact, but their consciousness will die, leaving them empty husks to wander the corridors at night, just like the rest of them. They wake up at the bottom of the stairwell, reduced to almost nothing inside of someone elses dream. Just then, they hear a lullaby echo from behind them, and turn to find a young woman with straight black hair and a silk kimono, almost exactly like the porcelain dolls they gathered. It lets out a horrifying shriek as it transforms into some demonic wretch and chases them down the narrow, lamplit corridors of the basement floor. They barely hold her off with a makeshift barricade made of gurneys before the ceiling collapses and crushes her between the beds and the rubble, allowing them to finally catch their breaths. The party figure the place they'll find Feugelhaig is the Operating Theatre, and so they warily amble through the darkened passageways until they finally approach a set of metal double doors that lead to their destination. Inside waits a thin, abberant creature by the operating table, dressed in a stained doctor's coat that covers its grey, rubbery skin. It turns and meets their eyes, staring into their deepest fears with dark holes the colour of void, as four slimy tentacles twitch in anticipation. With that same sharp, grating voice that maimed them once before, the Mind Flayer introduces itself as Qhasrel, resident surgeon of Hemlock Asylum. It berates them for having let him invade their minds so easily and laughs. Averel asks him what would happen if he were to kill himself willingly to escape the confines of the dream world, but the mad doctor only responds by inviting him to try it and find out. It continues, saying that all that led them up to this point has been a fantasy, and to truly grasp the confines of reality, they need to wake up. And so they do. Averel awakens an old man in a penitentiary in Terren. He has lived his whole life in the shadows, never showing his true self to anybody, and has wasted his life, like everyone else around him. At night, he dreams of what it could've been like to be an adventurer, of forming a party with his best friend Tony and the other members of the asylum. He sadly smiles imagining the fame as he defeats the evil Emperor, who he imagines being Mr. Barontyne, a benefactor and frequent visitor of the sanitorium. The nurse escorts him to the cafeteria, when Mr. Barontyne, a tall, well-fed man in his early thirties, visits once more with a story book detailing the very adventures in Averel's head. As he reads, his face becomes older, and his eyes become yellow with hatred, exactly as he imagines them in his dreams. Barontyne looks up at them and asks 'Why do you fear me?' to which Rostliem retorts that he's tall and scary. The visitor warns them of living their lives inside their heads, wasting away in their own little fantasy world as reality forgets their names. And as Barontyne's features slowly melt to become grey and rubbery, the doctor tells them that living a life hiding from the truth of reality only gives somebody else control. They wake up to the sound of ravenous eating, piled in a corner of the Operating Theatre. The eating stops as the party notice a skull at the other end, the top half of its cranium missing and a dying flame, green in colour, flickering in its eye. Just as Tony recognises it to be Cindy, the Flameskull, between strained breaths, thanks him for treating him like a hero, before the flame dies out. The doctor returns and taunts them once more, reminding them that they have no control; he is their master here. Qhasrel grows cocky and challenges them to beat him - if they do, he may just let them go. They accept, and one by one, realise their power over the doctor and break out of the mental constraints he trapped them in, fighting well and hard. He realises his mistake as they destroy his avatar and force him back into what they take to be the real world, in which Ondor quickly puts an end to his pitiful existence by bashing his head in with his shield. Having dealt with the threat of the doctor, the party backtrack to the rubber rooms of the basement, where they finally find Auldron Feugelhaig, alive and well. Upon realising that they're here to save them, he thanks them profusely and implores that they get him out of this place. The party agree, though as they leave the room, the whole asylum begins to crumble, as without Qhasrel's magic keeping it stable, the entire demiplane begins to collapse in on itself. Feugelhaig screams to run and so they bolt back up the stairwell and to the nearest exit in the common room. Though just as the door comes within reach, a tall figure stops them, dressed in a black top hat and long overcoat. He introduces himself as Mister Kister, and beckons them to stay a while longer.

Campaign

The Fall of Avaløn

Protagonists