Scouting Iskander's Sanctum--Hazlan

General Summary

This is going to be pretty much just bullet points, since it was 99% recon.

• Thanks to the Tome of Bindings, you know that the magic circle containing Julien is made of chalk and either powdered silver or powdered cold iron, and that the slightest break in the circle will allow him to escape. Apparently, one usually needed the true name of a fiend and some personal effect in order to summon it from within the demiplane, but Preben theorized that if one had an Orb of Augmentation containing the still-living brain of a conjurer, one could simply pull the nearest fiend currently within the demiplane into the circle. (Summoning a fiend from outside the demiplane is much more dangerous and not recommended.) Rose also found plenty of spells specfically geared toward breaking the will of a summoned fiend to make it more pliant, so that's fun.
• You theorized that Iskander's sanctum would probably be in some hidden basement so that it wouldn't be disturbed. Rose wild shaped into an earth elemental and earth glided along underground until she found what appeared to be the sanctum. There was a vertical shaft leading down from roughly the center of Iskander's mansion; the bottom of the shaft branched into three corridors, and the rightmost of those corridors ended in a room that was larger than the other two. It was underneath the topiary garden behind the mansion.
• The sanctum was walled in by five feet of stone on each side and ten feet on the top, under five feet of earth.
• Rose cast eagle eye to scout the sanctum, and rather than awkwardly describe the dimensions I'm just going to put it here:

 

Julien was in the magic circle in the center, and for a moment Rose didn't recognize him because he looked so much like his father. He was a man grown, so handsome that it almost hurt to look at him, with a tail and horns and batlike wings. 

 

 He was slumped on his hands and knees in obvious pain in the center of the circle, bleeding from his eyes, staring into a brazier and saying something that Rose couldn't hear because eagle eye is only visual. Iskander sat at a desk outside the circle, taking notes.

As Rose took in the scene, she saw symbols on the wall behind Julien, and the instant her eye passed over them, her body was wracked with pain so intense that it was difficult for her to form a coherent thought. When the pain cleared and she was able to focus on her sensor again, a tiny winged creature was peering at it, grinning from ear to ear and tapping it with a single claw.

Rose got the heck out of there, turned back into her normal form, and told Vanya what was happening. You're currently trying to figure out how to get Vanya in there, because now that Iskander knows you're coming the original plan seems unlikely to work.

Related Reports

Previous session: "He Chose You"--Hazlan Next session: Rescuing Julien--Hazlan

Report Date

14 Nov 2022

Primary Location

Hazlan

Related Characters

• Iskander
• Julien