Session 02
General Summary
Facing a choice between fighting and killing what was apparently a demon or an angel the group
took the only choice they felt they could and opened the door into the room with the Horrid
Timber demon. They moved out onto the platform at their end of the room and far away across a
latice of shaky looking wooden planks the large tree-like demon began to move forward off its
platform onto the lattice work. The tree demon's roots entangled the lattice and propelled it
forward with some speed and balance. The group arrayed themselves and readied on the event of
the demon reaching their platform where they would unleash hell upon it. However it stopped in
the middle of the room and waited them out, beyond the range of their best spells and missile
weapons. The group, therefore, were forced to move forwards to fight it on the lattice.
As they advanced the Horrid Timber suddenly rushed them, trying to knock Gotrek off the lattice
and into the room below, but dwarves are steady folk and Gotrek was not for being pushed
around. The group surrounded the demon and with Braken's spritual weapon prayer aiding them,
the slowly beat the demon to a woody pulp. It fought with flailing branches, lashing and lacerating
our heroes, but ultimately was no match for their combined power and tactics. As the demon fell
through the lattice work, breaking up into splinters, Harley felt a surge of anger and
disappontment from Alakast - and he realised that through the whole fight with this powerful
demon, he had not even drawn the artifact whose sole purpose was to destroy demons.
The group found a magical throwing axe and some bracers on the shelf at the far end of the room
and distributed them up as they berated Harley for his mistake of not drawing Alakast. Beyond the
far ledge was a door and the party continued on through it and along a corridor where they came
into a large room with a staircase ascending to a dais. Entering that room from a side passage was
the mummy who had challenged them with the Test of Judgement on behalf of Adimarchus. It
congratulated them on passing the Test, though they were clearly not sure why they had
succeeded. It then handed Morgan a lantern which was suspended from a pole and held up on the
dais. It told him this lantern would shine the way to the next test, the Test of Resolve and that they
should follow its lead. The mummy then disappeared in a bright flash of light and the group
decided to follow where the lantern lead. It lead them back through the room they had fought the
demon and back to the stairs up to where an excited Kaurophon still awaited them.
The group told Kaurophon of their success and said what they had to do next, so they followed the
lantern light as it lead back outside the Cathedral of Feathers, which they noted now seemed to
spend more time in the Celestial plane that previously, and on to the north. Following the lantern
the group headed out across the area of celestial rubble on which the Catheedral rested and back
onto the plains of Occipitus. They travelled on for the rest of that morning and some time in the
early afternoon, as they were passing through a small field of bloody ulcers they were ambushed.
A group of four lesser mezzodaemons rushed them from behind the ulcers, in a group coming
from all sides. The group wasted little time battling and defeating these lesser demons and this
time Harley drew Alakast and used him to battle the demons. The demons breathed poison and
used tridents to trap and impale the party but ultimately they were never going to be a match for
the well drilled and experienced group and within less than a minute all four demons were slain.
Two even tried to run away but Gotrek decapitated one as it fled and Harley and Morgan chased
down another and killed it.
The rest of the day and the whole of the next one were spent moving onwards across the plains of
Occipitus, following the lantern light and wondering what the Test of Resolve would entail.
Around the end of a day's march on the second day they came to a strange sight. Ahead was a
huge open area full of strange opaque lumps in the ground. Kaurophon called it the Plain of Cysts.
There were bones and discarded weapons and all sorts everywhere. Kaurophon told them this was
the site of a massive battle between the Angels and Demons when Occipitus was still part of
Celestia and when it broke off to fall into the Abyss. He said that once the layer had come to rest
in the Abyss the bodies of the demons were quickly absorbed back into the ground but the bodies
of the celestials and other good aligned objects took much more time to be "consumed" by the
earth. And the demons of this land believed that each celestial absorbed made the plane a more
dangerous place for a fiend to be. Inside some of the near cysts, the group could see dark shapes
which looked lke they might be bodies. The lantern light pointed forward into the Plain of Cysts.
The Test of Resolve lay in or beyond the battlefield...
Report Date
11 Apr 2024
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