DW Session 32: The Lighthouse

General Summary

7/2/897

• The party finally arrives at Filip Vikander’s lighthouse, situated on a small rock between the Myltevian islands of Potemkin and Nevsky
• Helena’s super excited to meet him, she’s heard stories about all the powerful feats of magic he performed in Oakengaard before leaving in the 820’s during the Hakon Dispute
• The party decides to bring her and Christopher to the island for backup
• Filip greets them and gives them a tour of his little island
• There’s an impressive orchard for somewhere so far south, and there are animated coat racks that perform most of the menial tasks on the island
• Filip has a giant library full of books about every subject imaginable, and he grants the party full access to them while they stay
• The one condition is that they respect his privacy and don’t go into the lighthouse
• Cereus and Flora try, but the door’s locked by some spell
• Over dinner Filip agrees to create a Scroll of Reincarnate for them if they allow three weeks for him to complete the process
• The party’s fine with this, but some like Beleren are suspicious of Filip’s experiments
• To reassure them, he takes the party out to a barn at the end of the island to show them what he’s been working on
• Filip explained how he isolated the components of the Reincarnate spell and discovered that there are ‘micro-parts’ of a person’s body that are activated and transformed when the spell takes effect
• Filip noticed that most transmutation spells affect these ‘micro-parts’ when cast, so Filip decided to see if he could activate these micro-parts on his own
• Inside the barn the party finds a giant jar connected to different wires and cable boxes around the room
• Filip offers to pay them generously if they’ll let him use the jar on them and see if they get transformed into a different race.
• Jax agrees, and so does Christopher. Both get paid 1,500GP
• Jax ends up as a hill dwarf, and Christopher becomes a hobgoblin!
• After this adventure there’s three weeks of downtime while the party waits for Filip to write the scroll
• Jax and Christopher haven’t noticed any adverse effects from the transformation
• Just to be safe, Jax decides to cast a ritual spell (?!) to speak with the local seagulls and ask about the lighthouse
• After a day they come back to say that there’s a giant jellyfish inside Filip’s study, but that’s all he can get from them after copious amounts of seafood
• Helena spends most of her time reading through the books in Filip’s library
• Jax, still trying to get in her pants, helps her out by finding some of the books on her reading list
• He reads about some books about the battles of the Ostry Apocalypse, she reads about the monstrous deities that invaded Ekal alongside the Sunken God
• Beleren decides to converse with the Shroud and his contact Frobert to see if they can give him any more intel about the Sunken God or the Man in Black
• He read in a book that Helena recommended to him that the Man in Black was part of the horde of monstrous deities that invaded Ekal, so he wants some reassurance that the Man in Black’s purposes aren’t nefarious
• Frobert can only give him so much intel, says that he’s only met the Man in Black once when he was first recruited by the Shroud (same goes for Beleren)
• But he does arrange a meeting between him and Medraad one evening, where Medraad is able to explain how the Man in Black grew disgusted with the predatory and chaotic nature of his brethren and decided to stake out his own organization against them
• The Shroud isn’t a cult so much as an anti-occult organization tasked with observing and eliminating dangerous cults all over Pescaliat
• Beleren has concerns that the Sunken God’s influence has grown and his number of disciples increased, so he wonders if the Man in Black can help in the upcoming fights
• Medraad says that the Man in Black works on a more person-to-person basis and doesn’t like open conflict, but the invitation is open if Beleren wants to enter a magic contract with him
• Beleren demurs, but keeps this intel in the back of his mind
• Flora finds a good book about the saints and martyrs of Erivo, one of whom sacrificed her life to save an entire village from a Myltevian pirate invasion.

8/1/897

• On the last night at the lighthouse, Filip gives the party a Scroll of Reincarnate as they decide to try and investigate the lighthouse one last time
• Cereus wild shapes into a seagull to fly up and peek inside, but after a startled squawk he transforms back into a human and plummets to earth
• Nearly unconscious, he looks startled and unable to recognize any of the people around him
• A quick Greater Restoration from Flora fixes this immediately
• The party goes back to their cabin on the island to regroup and decide what to do next
• Jax volunteers to take his Broom of Flying and look inside the study to see what Cereus saw
• The rest of the party will wait for him to return before confronting Filip about all this
• Jax flies across the island, getting a bird’s-eye view of the inside of Filip’s study
• The skylight windows under the lighthouse's light reveal a scene of dissected sahuagin corpses and surgical tools
• But what catches Jax’s attention the most is a giant brain sitting in a jar in one corner of the lab
• It takes all of Jax’s mental will to maintain his sanity when the brain tries to probe his thoughts, and another will save to escape after a spell attempts to hold him in place
• Jax returns to tell the party about all he saw, and Beleren gives a told-you-so look to Helena
• They decide to go ask Filip about all this, but he’s already outside waiting to explain the whole situation to them
• After Jax takes Cereus back to the Castellan II, Filip takes them all up to his lab in the lighthouse and explains to them what he’s been working on
• You see, for the past few months Filip has been noticing unusual occurrences ever since the Sunken God came to power amidst the ruins of the Elflands
• Several sahuagin tried to attack his lighthouse and his coat racks, but he dispatched them with ease
• When cleaning away the corpses of the attack, he noticed that there were some strange polyps forming inside the sahuagin’s heads
• He managed to isolate and grow the polyp in his lab, and after several days it grew into a brain the size of an average human’s
• After two months, it was more than fifteen feet in diameter
• Filip pleaded with the party to allow him to study the brain in peace, this brain is incredibly powerful and unseen since the earliest days of the Ostry Apocalypse
• A finding like this may never be available again
• Jax and Beleren are worried that Filip will be unable to control the brain’s psychic power, they try to convince him to allow some Myltev or Gamerian forces to come to the island and help him out
• Filip refuses, skeptical of government interference when he has centuries of magical learning on his side
• Finally, Jax says that for Filip’s own safety he should let the party check in on him just in case he needs some help down the road.
• Filip agrees to this, saying he’ll set up a teleportation circle that’ll let them return during the last week of the year to see how he’s doing
• If he still has everything under control, they should let him complete his studies on the brain in peace
• The party agrees to this, and everybody leaves on amicable terms over breakfast the next day.
• Next stop, the Free State of Thorvald to obtain an Iron Flask that can contain the Sunken God

Report Date

27 Mar 2020

Primary Location

Filip Vikander's Lighthouse