Notebook

Undday

In The House

Red Door

Zelda opens the RED DOOR and she finds it is closed again in front of her.
So she opens it again.

First Experience

She finds herself in a burning city and wanders in it for an hour
holy shit, this description!

This time the door feels firmer, somehow more real. As you turn the handle and feel the soft lumbering clicks of the spindle and latch, a warmth spreads across your fingers. Looking down, you see a thick, blubbering secretion of blood seeping from the cracks and crevices of the handle. The door swings inwards, and a wave of hot air sweeps out and around you, filling your nose with the pungent scent of iron, ash, and burning flesh. You close your eyes against the heat initially, so you hear the screams first. As you blink your eyes open again, you find yourself on a wide city street, lined with tall stout buildings wrapped in steel bindings and inlays. Everything is burning. The smooth cobblestone bubbles, cracks, and explodes from the heat, like popcorn in a fire. The buildings all around you, shelters, homes, businesses, workshops, for friends and families, seem to almost droop and drip their way into ruin, the intense heat weakening and melting the steel that supported them. And the people, oh the people, everywhere around you, upon the crackling road and the dying buildings, people die gruesomely and screaming. Not all of them are dead yet, though you wish with all your heart that they would be. The unlucky survivors subjected to this torture stumble through the molten streets in search of an escape that doesn’t exist. A family bursts from a collapsing home nearby, their clothes wetted to stave off the heat. The father points towards you - through you - down the road to gates that you know, deep down, have turned to molten metal already. They make it three steps before the billowing steam of the evaporating water gives way to screams. As the cloud clears the man, the loving father, is ablaze, his skin turns black and red under the insatiable flames, under his arm you see his wife and their child, huddled and crying. They stare at you out of their final refuge, granted by a father who even in his love can’t help but to scream in agony, and they cry, deep choking sobs, their last moments bleeding away in molten tragedy. The tears on their faces boil and steam away, their cries turn to wails of agony, and in a moment there is nothing but ash and bone bubbling into the rivulets of steel creeping out from the ruined home they’d built a life in.

Wisdom Save DC 20

You walk past the lump of burning family, compelled by something irresistible in your intuition. There is no turning back. There is no looking back. Your eyes refuse to close. Your nose relentlessly embraces the acrid air. The ash of melting families fills your lungs and stings your eyes. You walk on. For an hour you walk these streets. The flame and ruin don’t harm you, don’t touch you. You see great and magnificent steel foundries turn to lakes of molten death, spreading and engulfing entire neighborhoods in waves of hellfire. You see churches and bakeries and schools collapse and drip inward, smothering the pained screams as they devour the people who built them. This suffering, at once unfathomable and real, pours into you, every inch of you. Your hopes, your dreams, your annoyances, your enemies and friends and lovers, they burn away from you like liferafts sinking into dark water. Your mind becomes one with the tragedy, and you walk in this place. Your dream, your world, the only place you belong. You accept the suffering, you accept the death. You know you shouldn’t. A piece of you screams, gagged and smothered somewhere in your heart, but what is that pain compared to the death rattles of a melting city? The truth of this place subsumes you, and you find yourself in a kind of raging peace, a turbulent billowing ocean held tightly in a jar with no room for movement. And then the jar breaks. The city vanishes, the heat and the smoke and sounds of children wailing - all of it. You step into a circular study, the air relaxing and cool, if not a bit musty. Tall bookcases filled with old tomes and scripts line the walls around a desk and comfortable looking chairs. On the far wall the pleasant blueish light of a glowing arcane sigil radiates a sort of sturdy calm that smashes into your broken mind like a freight train. The pain and suffering of the last hour washes through you, like a rebounding arrow, and in a single breath the entire experience lurches through your soul in a devastating echo as you realize you accepted that disaster, that you came to peace in it, that in some sense of yourself you allowed it.

Then, She finds herself in a circular study

• Failed save = 2 levels of exhaustion and 10d6 damage

Deuce and Pim are informed that Zelda went through the Red Door, so they race upstairs to check on her and find a sticky, wet room filled with men... and women... and wolves?

Pim ties a rope around himself, hands it to Deuce, and opens the door, same thing happens and Deuce gets pulled in too

They go through the Red Door and have the same #First Experience.

Pim fails the WIS save, Deuce passes and can choose EITHER the exhaustion or the damage. Choose Damage and he maintains some level of steadfastness.

Magnia Everstorm's Study

We then find ourselves injured and distraught in a study (we would learn later belongs to Magnia Everstorm.

We see a Sigil, that appreas to be two sigils combined is encased in a floating sphere, radiating an aura of tranquility.

The Red Door is there behind us.

Desk

Deuce gets a 23 investigation

Crowded with high-academia books, magic texts, wizard tower things.
Valuable, but not relevant

Parchment

• Parchment Fragment - Drawing of a narrow rock outcropping and text: “Spire - root? But who?” #WSS/To/Deuce
  some dust, but less, maybe the last thing that was done on it
  a torn piece of parchment, with a drawing, narrow rock outcropping
  recognize as shallows written: “Spire - root? But who?”

Invitus Memoria

• Book: Invitus Memoria (Memories Book, need a key) #WSS/To/Deuce
  One of the books looks different, a big black book with a key lock on it
  slight misty fog pouring out of the pages
  On the cover, "Invitus Memoria" old common (Pim knows it means something like unwanted memories? reluctant histories?)

*not this much smoke

Identify Spell:
Unwanted memories of History
magical
a true history written, and then a spoken history
author's memory key must be inserted to reveal the spoken history

Appears to be a history book, with timelines and history of at least the eastern part of the continent, with smoke coming off the actual words.

Zelda's detect magic goes off and book has illusion magic

Sigil Binding

• Sigil Binding Book #WSS/To/Deuce
• open to a page with a sigil to the hovering sigil.
• Sigil binding, additive is more than the sum of their parts
• Handwriting matches, piece of paper and is Magnia Everstorm

Desk Drawers

Z finds

• Blur spell scroll #WSS/To/Zelda

a piece of paper with a potion

• Potion of Dreamless Rest #WSS/To/Zelda
• Potion of Dreamless Rest Shopping list? #WSS/To/Deuce

Loot

• coins 120gp (40gp each) #WSS/To/Party
• [-] broken glass (potion spilling) potion of advantage
• Spell Scrolls
  • Arcane Lock spell scroll #WSS/To/Deuce
  • Heat Metal spell scroll #WSS/To/Deuce
  • Erupting Earth spell scroll #WSS/To/Pim
  • Magic Circle spell scroll #WSS/To/Deuce
  • Shield spell scroll #WSS/To/Zelda
  • Protection from Evil and Good spell scroll #WSS/To/Pim
• Empty Spell Gems (quartz= holds a Level 2 spell) #WSS/To/Pim
• Empty Spell Gems (quartz= holds a Level 2 spell) #WSS/To/Deuce

Pim Identifies and Finds a Book

Pim takes time to ritually cast Identify around the room

Orby Thing

• Not a usable magical item, barely an item, a hardened core of pure conjuration magic
• fuel cell of the entire magical mansion space

Door

• strongly conjuration door, slows time, shows you a vision (an experience) no attunement, infinite number of charges, created by a great working of magic
• going back the other way, you get "the second experience"
• appears within the mansion when they are told about or want to use it.

Gems

• quartz spell gems, hold a level two spell
• quartz spell gems, hold a level two spell

Potion

• potion of dreamless rest (sleep at will, no dreams, spells that would affect your dream fail automatically)

Magical Giants and their Giant Wands

• Magical Giants and their Giant Wands #WSS/To/Pim

We Long Rest

Zelda is now a winter Eladrin
black hair, skin is blueish brown

Second Experience

Rested, we exit through the Red Door to find

"You step through the door again, steeling yourself for the worst. When your foot hits cobblestone you are relieved - maybe? - to find cool air against your face. Your vision blurs and resolves into a shining sun set in deep blue sky, intermingled with fluffy white clouds like the ones in paintings. The city around you is young but growing. All around you laborers bustle about with their tools, building towers and buildings, reaching up into the dreamlike sky. You’d feel at ease if not for the people. Standing in the streets, upon the rooftops, in the windows and doorways, mangled and ruined corpses stare at you grimly and silently. You walk from the great fortress of this city, set against the sparkling ocean, through the streets and thoroughfares, over bridges and running rivers, past churches and schools. Everywhere is filled, end to end, with silent corpses of melted and ruined people, every man woman and child a grotesque offense to your senses. You know intuitively that these are the victims of the burning city you saw, and you feel deep in your heart that they knew the peace you came to in the wreckage of their lives."

they see that you found peace in the wreckage of their lives

We all SAVE!
no pain this time

Back in the house

Zelda

• Zelda goes to take a bath.

Deuce

• Deuce goes to find Marynn and a butler gives him a note from Marynn, she's going to camp to get the refugees.
• Deuce meditates on the scale and scope of the trauma.
  • He is "pedal to the metal" on saving and helping people and has an innate sense that he will always be able to find a way to help. This was a horror beyond any imagination and he wonders if a tragedy like this is possible, what could anyone do to help. He is disturbed to know that he isn't capable of helping in a "cosmic-level" or "god-tier" apocalypse.
  • Could he though? Could he become capable? What would it take? How would he do it?

Pim

• Pim considers how deep his repression well is and whether it is healthy for him to continue to push hard feeling down there.

Fugee-La

• refugees outside
• Marynn, Aldric, Lyric (eladrin ranger) invited in for a quick brief
  • while Finley Styx, Seraphina Ironclad stay outside
  • We are clear that this house is a big positive, but
    • We have enough Angel Blood for several weeks (a month and change)
      • We give a few recharges worth to Marynn.
    • It will kick everyone out every 24 hours
    • the Red Door MUST be avoided. It WILL kill anyone that goes through.

Aldric is curious and Z Eladrin fey steps in front of him and frightens him

Aldric, on Magnia Everstorm: she and angels repelled demons

Sowerday

It is now the morning of Sowerday

We find the Stagweeds and mount up.

meh Survival check and we run into a group of 5 Crocodiles

• P Booming Blades to scare off 2
• D Toll the Deads one and the last 2 retreat

ADV on INIT

serrated-beak raven

Copmora

Speak to Lillithene and Geraldine

Father -
oh yeah, she has parents...

We'll leave before dawn.

Z with Geraldine

but sneaks out to Jesse
frightens him with fey step
stole his money
takes 1/3rd and gives the other 2/3rds to the Inn's register.

PUT A SPELL IN A GEM before bed
1d6 Bardic (how long does it last?)