Session 2 — The House Wanted Them in the Basement

Session 2 — The House Wanted Them in the Basement

The nursery specter was already dead. The DM confirmed this before the session started, as if worried someone had misremembered. She had not survived. The party was simply being reminded that they had killed her, and could now proceed to the next horrible thing.

What Happened

The hidden staircase behind the servant's bedroom mirror led up, not down, which was unexpected and immediately suspicious. The attic contained four doors and an amount of dust consistent with decades of neglect. One of the doors had a padlock — old, imposing, the kind of lock that implies someone wanted to keep something in rather than keep people out. Sable produced the iron key that had been sitting in the library desk since Session 1. The lock opened.

Inside: two small beds, a toy chest painted with windmills, a dollhouse, cobwebs, and two small skeletons wearing the tattered clothes of children the party had met at the front door. Thorn was still clutching a stuffed rabbit with very long ears. Celeste immediately observed that they had been dead the whole time.

Sable removed the roof of the dollhouse to inspect the layout. Two small ghosts materialized next to their bones. The smaller one told her not to touch the toys.

A reasonably civil conversation followed. The party learned that Rose and Thorn had been locked in the attic by their nanny, for their protection, before the family's arrangement with the basement monster went fully sideways. The nanny never came back. The children waited. They starved. The house, being the house, kept resetting the lock so no subsequent visitors could find them. The dollhouse had been their only window into the floors below — accurate to the inch, which is a haunted-house amenity that provides more dread than comfort.

They also mentioned a third sibling, Walter, who was not in the attic because their mother had not liked Walter. The party correctly identified this as foreshadowing for the basement.

Merich found the nanny in the storage room across the hall — or rather, found her skeleton, in a trunk, wrapped in a bloody bed sheet, with a pair of rusty scissors on the floor beside her. Someone had murdered the nanny before the nanny could come back. This was, in the DM's words, fucking awful.

The ghost children were lonely and wanted the party to stay. The party offered to fight the monster instead. The children pointed out that nobody who had ever said that had come back. Sable bargained: they would have a sleepover first. The children accepted. Rose indicated the location of a secret door by pointing at the dollhouse's attic. The party took a long rest while Thorn tried to pet a rabbit that was not quite solid. Celeste summoned her familiar — a Sphinx of Wonder that emerged in skeleton form, bones arranged with decorative accuracy, licking itself in the middle of the room. The children were overjoyed. Thorn brought a creepy doll from the storage room. Everyone had ghost popcorn.

In the morning (or whatever passes for morning inside a house with no functioning windows), it was time to go. The children protested. Rose demanded that one member of the party stay behind — two of them, actually, one per child. Thorn disappeared into Sable, who failed a wisdom save, and received a new character flaw written on a slip of paper by the DM. Merich's eyes went green. The room got noticeably quieter. Thorn gooshed back out of Sable. The kids sat down on top of their skeletons, told the party they shouldn't go, and then disappeared.

The secret staircase confirmed by the dollhouse descended 50 feet through the full height of the house into something that felt like a dungeon. Thick cobwebs, stone, clay, earth. An incessant chanting from somewhere that could not be located. The floor was thick with dust and old footprints, none of them fresh.

Sable scouted ahead while the others held the torch 40 feet back. She found two rooms off the main hallway: a crypt with stone slabs bearing the names Rosavalda Durst and Thornbolt Durst, coffins atop stone biers, and a rotten dining hall with bones on the floor. She came back, reported a bunch of dead people and a cool statue she was scared to touch, and the party regrouped to move deeper.

In an alcove off the hallway, something slithered out. The party rolled nature checks. All four produced nat1s and nines. It was a scary snake, according to the DM. It was actually a Grick — a worm-thing with tentacles and a beak that had no business being a snake — and it hit Moro with a tentacle before anyone could do anything about it. Moro deflected the damage through his monk training and reflected it back. Sable, unable to get far enough from the torch to reach full darkness, shot the Grick from the dim edge of visibility. Celeste eldritch-blasted. Moro punched it in the flurry of blows. Merich eldritch-blasted it in the ass. The Grick had one hit point remaining when Sable's turn came back around. She switched to her longbow, described the killing arrow as entering through the open beak, and the Grick coated the dining hall wall in viscera. There was a Moro-shaped silhouette.

Farther in, Moro triggered four ghouls that rose out of the floor the moment the party crossed the intersection. The ghouls were not armored, which was the only thing going for them. Sable moved her Hunter's Mark, shot from darkness, and opened the fight. Merich dropped a Nat20 Eldritch blast on a crit. Moro punched relentlessly and used his push mechanic to keep ghouls out of advantageous positions. Celeste discovered that chill touch works fine on ghouls and necrotic does not. All four ghouls ended up as gloop.

Celeste sent her skeleton familiar into the room with the statue to see if anything would come to life. The familiar sat in the middle of the room and licked itself. Nothing came to life. This was encouraging enough that the party entered.

The room: moldy skeletons hanging from shackles on the walls, a painted wooden statue of a gaunt pale-faced man in a black cloak, his left hand resting on the head of a wolf, his right holding a smoky gray crystal orb. Celeste found a hidden door in the east wall that crumbled to reveal a stone staircase leading up to a trapdoor welded shut from the ground-floor side. She then, with an arcana check of 12, determined the orb could function as an arcane focus but was not magical on its own. She touched it anyway.

Five shadows emerged from the walls.

Shadows drain strength on hit. They are resistant to bludgeoning. They are immune to necrotic damage, which Celeste established for the table through direct experimentation. They can be turned, which nobody present could do. Merich activated Radiant Consumption — green eyes, 10-foot aura that dealt radiant damage to everything near him at the end of each turn — and cast Protection from Evil and Good on himself, giving him disadvantage on all shadow attacks. Moro took eight necrotic damage and then twelve more, putting his strength at single digits. Celeste misty-stepped to the staircase landing and got some elevation. Sable moved her Hunter's Mark around the combat and shot from the dark.

By the time the transcript ends, shadow four and five were down. Shadows one, two, and three were still in the fight.

Key Decisions

NPCs Met

Locations Visited

Items Found

Loose Threads