Session 6 — The Windmill Was Also Doing a Murder

Session 6 — The Windmill Was Also Doing a Murder

Celeste's dream featured a doll with four mismatched faces, a woman whose teeth couldn't commit to a direction, four cracked stones leaking dull light, and an enormous eye at the bottom of a hole. She drew a 13 on her Wisdom save, which the table agreed was not good enough. She lost one sanity point and one spell slot until her next rest. The DM offered this as character development. Merich suggested this might be the DM's fault for deciding Amber's character needed a dream.

What Happened

The party rose from their night at the Tser Pool Vistani Camp and, before leaving, Celeste consulted Madam Eva about the dream. Madam Eva spread the cards and Celeste drew the Queen of Hearts. Eva's eyes went wide. There was a woman who had three sisters, the reading said — the Queen of Diamonds, Queen of Spades, Queen of Clubs — and they wanted their missing fourth returned to them. Either bring her back or silence all three. The dream was a message. Celeste received a point of inspiration, which was either encouragement or compensation.

The party departed the camp with Ireena Kolyana and Ismark Kolyana riding up front. The road was long enough that Merich took a nap in the cart. By late afternoon they reached a valley: a fog-filled town on a dark mountain lake in the distance — Vallaki — and a branch in the road leading west to a promontory. Sitting on top of the promontory, leaning forward slightly as if trying to turn away from the sky: a dilapidated stone windmill with warped wooden vanes stripped bare.

The party recognized this as the Durst Windmill, which technically they owned, and which Toma had confirmed was a hag bone-mill. A raven perched above the door, hopping and squawking. Behind the windmill, more ravens circled. Sable suggested camping until morning and approaching at first light. Brother Moro asked if they would rather do it in the dark. The raven squawked.

They sent Ireena and Ismark to wait in the trees. Then they knocked on the door.

An incredibly elderly woman with stringy hair and terrible teeth opened the upper half of a Dutch door and smiled — not at one person, but at all of them, making eye contact just a little too long with each. "Oh, you all made it. Come in, come in. The pies are warm on the rack. They just came out of the oven."

Sable said they were there for flour. The woman called upstairs that the sisters had customers. Cackles drifted down.

The ground floor had been converted into a makeshift kitchen: filthy baskets, old dishware, a peddler's cart, a chicken coop, a heavy wooden trunk, and an oddly pretty wooden cabinet with flowers painted on its doors. An open barrel in the center of the room emitted an odor that, charitably described, was not pastry. Warmth came from a brick oven against one wall. The stairs creaked. The chickens clucked. The toads croaked. Sable shut the door.

Merich tried claiming to be from the patent office to learn what was in the flour. He rolled a 13 on Deception. The woman looked at him the way you look at a small child who has just said something they think is clever.

Sable decided she would rather shoot than negotiate, stepped toward the shadows of the staircase, and opened with a shot. She rolled a two and a one, spent a Lucky point, and got a 21. Then she spent the initiative she'd earned on that Lucky use to hit a 21 total. Combat had started.

The coven was three hags: Ulrika on the ground floor, Bella and Ofelia on the second floor, dancing around the central gear shaft. All three revealed themselves immediately for what they were. Ulrika disappeared into the Ethereal Plane as her opening action. Bella and Ofelia cackled from upstairs.

Merich went up to find them and spent his turn failing to convince two hags in flesh-stitched gowns with needles in their hair that he was there to shoot a scene. His board was heavy. He had given it leather polish.

Sable opened on the second floor with a 23 to hit, did 10 damage, then used Vex and rolled a Nat20 on the follow-up for another 10. Merich cast Bless on three party members. Brother Moro grappled Ofelia and drove her prone, keeping her locked down for most of two rounds before she used her heartstone to shift planes and escape.

Celeste reached the second floor and Eldritch Blasted the red hag for 13 and then 9 damage. Her cat came along and missed everything, which was consistent with being a cat. Brother Moro had the idea of punting Ofelia out the second-floor window — the DM confirmed a medium creature could fit through it — but he was standing on the millstone and the angle was wrong, so he had to settle for continued hitting.

Bella summoned two small cackling dolls and tossed them out the window. The dolls scrambled down the wall, climbed back through the broken ground-floor window, and appeared behind Ismark's position. Sable saw them and failed a Wisdom save; she was Frightened until the end of the doll's next turn — couldn't move toward them, disadvantage on attacks. They missed her anyway.

Ulrika returned from the Ethereal Plane downstairs — this was her action, so she just stood there having used her turn to come back. Merich, who had gone downstairs to check on Ireena and used Lay on Hands, spotted her and used his Celestial Form, beginning to deal 3 radiant damage to all creatures within 10 feet at the end of every turn.

The fight ground forward. Brother Moro's silvered short sword and monk attacks did most of the work on the second floor; Sable's crossbows kept the hurt moving. Merich dropped a Green Flame Blade — hitting Ulrika while the secondary fire splashed onto the gray hag — for 19 damage with an extra 7 splash, plus a Divine Smite on a fiend for 3d8 that rolled out to 8 additional radiant. Bless got concentration-checked off when Ulrika's claw hit Merich for 19 damage; he rolled under the threshold and lost it.

Ofelia escaped. Bella was looking increasingly unwell. Ulrika kept trading claws for silver short sword to the face and coming off worse each round.

On what turned out to be the crucial turn: Sable moved back downstairs, shot Ulrika for 12 then 13 damage with her main attacks, and the first hag died. The earth rumbled gently outside. Then Sable went back upstairs and shot Bella for 12 damage. The earth rumbled louder.

Merich finished the remaining hag — Ulrika's black-token compatriot on the first floor having been cleared — by leaping off a dead dretch's face and cutting her throat mid-air. Blood sprayed. The earth cracked open behind the windmill.

The dretch deserves its own sentence: Ofelia's ghost hag had summoned it from the barrel. It farted. This was a mechanical action. The resulting Fetid Cloud filled the entire ground floor in a 10-foot radius, required a DC 11 Constitution save at the start of every turn, and poisoned Brother Moro, Riri, and Celeste. The dretch had 15 damage worth of hit points. Merich killed it with a silvered sword doing 15 radiant damage. "You have murdered a dretch," the DM said. The cloud remained briefly. The window was broken, though.

Brother Moro, on his turn, went upstairs and found three wooden crates stacked in a closet. The top one was empty. The middle and lower ones each held a captive child — a girl about five and a boy about seven, their crates lined with food crumbs. He herded them to the window side of the room, away from the fart cloud, and slow-fell them out the window after the fight ended.

Celeste sent her cat to open the ornate cabinet on the ground floor. The cat rolled a 13 on Dexterity. The cabinet opened. Inside: dozens of locks of hair hanging from the inside doors, and three labeled containers — Youth (golden syrup), Laughter (red liquid), Mother's Milk (greenish milky liquid). Celeste took them. No judgment was issued. It is Barovia.

Each dead hag carried: a soul bag (stitched flesh), a heartstone, and their bone-dust flour. Sable looted the bodies.

Merich checked a Nat20 on a bird's nest in the attic — "a domed chamber filled with old machinery and bird's nests" — and earned himself a reward the DM said she'd think of, since she hadn't prepared one and he'd earned a proper answer to a Nat20.

Celeste found a ring in a different bird's nest. Unknown properties.

Behind the windmill: standing stones. Four large megaliths and two shorter ones. One of the shorter stones glowed silver. The other five were cracked and dark. Fifty feet further back, a large earthen mound — formerly completely overgrown — now had a rent opening in it. Brother Moro rolled a 25 perception and heard growling from inside, and saw eyes glinting in the darkness just past the opening.

He told the party. The party agreed to get out of the windmill immediately and take cover in the trees until next session.

Key Decisions

NPCs Met

Locations Visited

Items Found

Loose Threads