The Delve

Session Summary

Wrapping up the experiment

The Delve

• Check in with Baelora Ironscribe before the Delve

  • Tells us she wants to get us ready for the delve and that we know the rules
  • The Crucible -Questions
  • History of weather events and catastrophic events
  • Lorian: Queen’s Rest
  • Gems with magical powers/conjuration powers

• Baelora leads us to the door of Esoterica

Room 1

• Throws the door open to reveal a room with a high domed ceiling with dots of light resembling alien constellations. Orrery in the middle. Room feels like a mechanism itself.
  • Lined with book shelves
    • Astronomy and astrology texts
  • Small shelf with a series of objects
    • One looks like a bottle of ink
    • Other is a glass eye sitting in a bottle
      • Gently rotates as we look at it
  • Moment of awe in this incredible place
  • See something dark rushing towards us
    • Seems we scared it
    • Alien looking thing
• Door at the end of the planetarium

Room 2

• Corridors
  • Seem library-ish
  • Wood paneling
  • Skylight
• Enter a standard library room with lots of cobwebs covering the books
  • Webs aren’t that thick
  • Feels unpleasant
  • Lots of little spiders
  • There is a vial behind a big heavy portcullis

Room 3

• Cozy room with a full english breakfast

Room 4

• Stacks and stacks of papers
  • Display case with lots of interesting objects
    • Old hats
    • Hear the sound of a door rapidly closing and someone leaving the room

Room 5

• Thick door in front of us that we push open with some effort
• Opens to a small room with some side doors and a heavily locked door
• To the side is a tiny chest
  • In the chest:
    • Incredibly beautiful violin made of glass
      • It is very heavy
      • Each sound is very unique
        • Sounds like playing the wine glasses
• Candles everywhere and very, very bright
• Lorian picks the lock
  • The lock hasn’t been touch in a very long time
    • Swings outward
    • Seems like a vault door
  • Inside is covered with piles of saw dust and scraps of died leather
    • Leather is beautiful in color
  • random items with pigments
    • Perhaps 400 gp worth of materials
  • Find another potion
• We back track down another side corridor

Room 6

• After passing through some narrow corridors things become smokier and we enter a huge room with a printing press, but that we don’t recognize as such and it is belting off steam and is connected to the walls. Large fireplace heating the room with tongs to add them and stoke them.
• Lots of doors.

Room 7

• Open a door to a room behind room 6. It is very steamy and full of spiders
• Huge steam pipes exposed here
• Giant valve that controls the steam. It is closed. There is a pressure valve
• All of a sudden a door on the far side swings open
  • We see some figures in there
    • Librarians
      • Red cloaks and yellow cloaks
  • Cosimo asks which way to some stuff on weather events
    • They give us some guidance

Room 8

• We can hear the echoing of steam pipes in the room we are in. First thing we see is a giant skeleton snake poised to strike at us.
  • It’s not alive
    • Lots of skeletons of snakes
    • Lorian steals a fang from a snake skeleton
  • An ominous door at the end
    • Dark wood
• I repeatedly try to smash the door and fail a bunch before finally cracking it
  • It reveals a long staircase down

Room 9

• Descend the stairs and seems like we are traveling the back entrance. Spill out into a dark and ominous room. There is a large, horrible door with Eldritch carvings. Dark wood. Black iron hinges. Horrible sigils that are hard to look at. Whatever is behind, seems intense.
• Above us we hear a whooshing and look up and see a series of glass tubes as we see a pink mist fly from one wall until another
• We hear a deep and ominous knocking
  • We ask who it is and someone comes through
    • They say they come for our sins
      • Huge figure
        • Has a huge pitch fork
        • Has a long forked tail
• Fight with the devil
  • Attacks me
• We strike him down
• During our short rest we hear the sounds of distant battle through the door

Room 10

• We end up at a deeper level of the steam vents
  • Large valve in one of the walls
  • Books in this room are covered in a layer of wax
  • thin layers of metal protecting the books
  • Sudden overwhelming feeling that we are being watched/judged
  • Set into the corners are four dark orbs, each containing a purple mist
    • Ghostly face in the mist
  • We see some papers out of place with a map of the library

Room 11

• After ascending some creaking stairs, we find ourselves facing a very large, 12ft tall door.
• Inside a huge room
  • Everything is double scale
  • Sized for people much taller than us
  • Walls are lined with glass jars, each filled with a fluid
    • Each has a brain in it and they are labeled
  • Finthir is there
    • We chat with her and she recommends we talk to Degan about the library
  • Degan gives us some info about where to go
• A door opens a 6 hunched figures in dark red robes walk in
  • Carrying a large pole with a lamp on the top
  • We see them walk past and enter another door

Room 12

• We take a series of descending stairs
• Begin to hear a large buzzing sound
• Pop our head in and see a room full of bees
• Room is made of paper mache of books that the bees have converted to a bees nest
  • Out of the corners of the room there is smoke and it is keeping the bees calm
• We go through the room quickly

Room 13

• Another horrible heavy doorway framed by various things
  • No tubes
  • Gravity is reduced
• Hear knocking and a bat human hybrid walks in
  • Has a tiny brief case
  • Wearing spectacles
  • Raxafalimoton

Room 14

• We take an exit and end up in a room with bookshelves along the wall with a large sarcophagus with an inscription on the wall
  • The sarcophagus is very small
    • About 1/3rd the size of normal
• Thrainli opens the sarcophagus
  • Tiny corpse skeletong
  • Interred with
    • Tiny suit of plate male inscribed with runes
    • At the feet is a jewelry box with a bunch of gems in it that are glowing

Room 15

• Emerge in a maze like passageway
  • Dust covering everything
  • Feels like we are the first to come here in a long time
  • But, there’s a modern notebook with assorted guidance about where to find books on weather patterns
  • Going deeper will require navigating the maze
  • We lost among the corridors of the shelves

Backtrack to Room 13 and then on to 16

• Air becomes heavier and quieter, eventually can’t hear anything
  • Under a silencing spell of some sort
  • Opens up into a large library room
  • Flooboards are uneven
  • Cobwebs on the floor as if nobody has been here in awhile
• Investigating the books
  • Cosimo notices a flowing black ooze and the black ooze is being chased by flying books which are taking chunks out of the ooze
• A spider the size of a horse tries to grab Lorian
  • It has an nest under the floor boards
  • None of us notice because it is entirely silent
• We decide to run out of the room as we do, we see a spider to try to grab Fleshy

Room 16

• Slam open a door and find ourselves in a room full of a machine with complex machinery. There’s a terminal at the front marked with letters. It generates something akin to a ticker tape. A pen is writing on the paper. Books are all chained to the shelves
• We type “weather book?” into the machine
  • The pen starts to write: “A brief history of weather…”
  • We put in queries it outputs titles
    • The winter of the dragon by marion wexwood
    • The day that dorchester died: dragons, destruction, and the folly of worshipping false gods
• Lorian’s Questions for the Query Machine

Room 17

• Move on from the strange engine room, see some weird librarians maintaining the engines
  • Gray hooded
• We enter some sort of dissection theater
• Room is empty of anyone else
  • But, feels like has been active recently
  • On the table is a huge egg of some serpent
    • Someone has been dissecting the snake inside
    • As we look into the egg the snake partially alive
• As we walk through the far door we hear clicking under the flooboards
  • The ticking sound

Room 18

• Step up the stairs and find ourselves in a chapel
  • Large, airy bright, full of stained glass
  • Dedicated to a foreign religion
  • Rows of pews
  • Pulpit with a beautiful book
  • Things are flickering in and out of reality
    • Including us
  • We hear a laugh
    • A dark figure descends from above
      • Huge fangs and a cloak
        • It’s a vampire
    • He’s too vampire
      • Something that seems unreal
    • He has escaped books
      • Warp the world around them to fit their stories

Room 19

• Out of the chapel we see a room with a huge glass vat connected to plumbing
  • Hatch that is locked
  • Lots of purple phantom things floating inside
  • Holding pen for the purple phantom things
    • I ask about the books and the form into an arrow

Room 20

• Open the door and squeeze through narrow and then wider shelves of books
  • We land at one of those input things with an input device
    • It is much larger and lots of tangled pipes and difficult to navigate
    • But the shelves are lined with books about extreme weather events
      • Find a book titled: The Winter of the Dragon by Marlon Wexwood
        • Brimstorm

Key Lore/Important Info

Loot

• Bottle of magic ink
• Spinning eye vial
• Weird liquid vial with viscous liquid
• Glass violin
• Assorted materials
• Unidentified potion
• Pouch of gemstones
  • Worth about 500gp
• Smoldering pitchfork
• Baby gems
  • 350 gp

Encounters and Interactions

Location and Travel Details