Run 2 - 20210116

We’ve killed 2 of roughly 11 “lifestealers” - look like elves, have filed teeth. We’ve just entered a door into an interior chamber in this moathouse, and there’s a door out of this chamber - wooden door, part of a wooden dividing wall. The door is barred on the other side; D.va opens it up with mage hand. I try to sneak in but make a bit of noise. On the other side, there’s an old table that would probably collapse under the weight of a few backpacks, a broken chair in one corner, more arrow slits, and a set of stairs going up in the far back left corner. Shelves with cases of bolts or arrows line the walls. 

D.va gets a sense that things in this place are old, maybe in a magically relevant kind of way.

I can see that a bunch of people have walked through the dust on the floor up the stairs. But, I don’t think the two people in the previous room ever made it in this room; it looks like they were sacrificed and the door barred behind them. 

The nine other lifestealers clearly came in here, ransacked the room, probably armed themselves with spears from a rack near the door, got a few packs of arrows from the shelves, and went up the stairs.

I head over to the stairs (which are very steep - 60 degrees incline - and about 5’ wide) and creep up them, to try to get a little bit of information on who might be waiting for us. 

Room at the top is 12’ x 15’. Another wooden internal wall, door is closed, opens away from us. I call the rest of the group up the stairs. D.va makes a little light, because only she and I can see in the dark, and then she starts to work on the door while I listen at the door. I do hear something on the other side, but I think it’s a bit further along than just right at this door. D.va pops the bar on the other side of the door again just like the last door, and places the bar on the floor and … hits something. We look for traps and such, but can’t find anything, so we very carefully open the door and I slide through, with Chad and Caleb standing in the back corners of the previous room.

I barely manage to not run into a huge pile of rusty armor. Armor stands line the sides of the room, 15’ x 15’, and there’s another internal wall and door on the far end of the room, also closed. I move up to search the far wall and door, to see if that’s where the voices were coming from. Caleb, Nyla, and Chad are meanwhile covering our rear when Nyla hears a loud, chewing sound from behind us. Apparently crabs have come out of the river and are eating the bodies of the lifestealers we killed and left behind us.

I listen for the enemy and for a bit don’t hear anything, but then I hear a sneeze from right on the other side of the door, but up a bit. I go back and recruit Caleb for door-opening duty and prep the door with my crowbar, and then Caleb runs through the door and perfectly pops the door out of the frame, sending it into the room as we force the entry.

There’s nobody in the room. Guess the sneeze was…. upstairs.

Room is 15’x12’ and there’s a steep and twisty staircase in the far left corner. We’ve already lost stealth because I guessed wrong, so I light a torch and head up the stairs in a defensive posture, to tease out all those ready stabs from these fuckbags with their spears. I figure I can go up first, not get hit, and then the wrecking crew can come in behind me.

This room is tiny. 10’ deep x 8’ wide and full of fuckers with bows and murderhole firing slits, and two fuckers with swords, I dodge most of the arrows, grab one that was going to hit me, and stab one of the swordwielders with it, and then bail back down the stairs. Chad preps to stab anyone that comes downstairs, and D.va moves into position to toss in a thunderwave. It doesn’t do too much damage to the enemies, but it does jumble them up a bit. She then steps into the room and gets a deep cut from a scimitar. 

With D.va up in their filed-teeth-having-grills, one of the bow wielders in the back drops bow and pulls swords and slashes at D.va, and another of the lifestealers drops a sword while trying to attack her. Caleb runs up the stairs, puts his maul into the head of one of these dudes, and then thinks ’need to make some room in here’ and nearly beats down another one. I head up the stairs and drop a dart through the mouth of the guy Caleb just almost took out, dropping him, and then I jump over, step on them, and kick one of the dudes in the back in the nads hard enough to kill them. Chad comes up the stairs and stabs his halberd the length of the room, hitting the last dude but not quite dropping them. 

That last dude manages to stab D.va again, and then tries to gnaw on her, but doesn’t quite manage to bite through her armor. Caleb removes him from the equation and finishes the fight.

From the other side of the interior wooden wall we hear a loud buzzing and a scream and a door slam. We harvest the ears off of these lifestealers, and I stab out the eyes of all of the recently dead, because we figure the buzzing in the next room is from eye wasps.

After a quick conference we have Caleb ‘finesse’ the door to the next room. This room is actually large, for once. The ceiling goes up quite a way - there’s no drop ceiling between us and the rafters. Through two big windows we can see the causeway below, the forcefield around the island(?) and the island itself. The room is 50’ across and 30’ deep - this may be the ‘top’ or ‘bridge’ of the moathouse, not the ‘legs’. There used to be a lot of bunk beds and shelves, but they are now pretty decrepit, and to our right there’s what looks like a wasp’s nest built out of a bunch of bunk beds (at least 3). The buzzing sound is coming from there. There’s another door in the wall to our right, 15’ from us. 

A wasp’s head the size of a dog’s head pokes out of the nest and looks at us. I guess these are eye wasps. That’s a bit larger than I expected.