Let's Play Hell's Rebels: The Many Steps Monastery, Session 1

Intro

If you’re reading this, it means we’re officially caught up with my solo Hell’s Rebels campaign. This means future updates will be spaced further apart, but they will still happen.

Anyway, in the previous scene, our heroes completed the first level of Adventure 01’s capstone dungeon. In this one, we’ll begin to tackle the second level.

The entire level will be Scene 14 by the standard of Mythic, though I’ll break it apart into multiple posts so as to not keep y’all waiting for new updates. I’ll play my “sessions” as time and whim permit, and post an update once I have a good chunk of text.

To recap, this is the former hideout of the Secret Order of Archivists, which used the abandoned Hocum’s Fantasmagorium on the surface as a cover for the underground Many Steps Monastery. The whole place has been raided by Thrune’s forces in the Night of Ashes several weeks ago, and is currently being occupied by a force of Asmodean redactor-priests who are mopping up the last vestiges of the raid before abandoning the site. Nox is also here, and our PCs will hopefully get to deal with her in this scene.

[GM] Procedure Review

As in the previous scene, I’m preparing each room as the PCs get into it. You can also refer to this link for an overview of the walls and doors in this level, and of the procedure I’m using to conduct the delve.

This is a single delve, so we start counting our turns from where we left off in the previous scene.

There is a minor update here that I forgot to note in the previous scene: Jania got stabbed by one of the redactors in the final fight of the level, and was healed back to full by the expenditure of the healing gem Rosalia was carrying.

[Player] Delving the Many-Steps Monastery

Turn 12

The party descends the spiral staircase that links the levels. It’s quite long! Urist fondly reminisces that this is the reason why they named their hideout the “Many-Steps Monastery”. Most of the party silently groans at the pun, while Rosalia spends the rest of the descent quietly chuckling to herself.

Turns 13-15

The heroes descend from the stairs into a huge, well-lit library that sadly lies mostly ruined (F1 on the map). The floor is decorated with a rune Urist says is sacred to the god Irori, but it’s also marred by dried bloodstains. Most of the shelves have been cleaned out, with the few remaining tomes piled carelessly in a corner.

Before they can further explore this place, one of the books in the pile opens on its own and rises to the air, letting out a noisy cloud of fluttering pages that begins swarming in the rough shape of a humanoid body, with the book covers as the head.

The group begins to ready their weapons, but the creature raises its arms in a conciliatory gesture.

“Greetings, intruders. I am Yiliv,” it says. “I am bound against my will to stop any intruders such as yourselves from getting through that door,” and then it points to the closed door in the west map-west wall. “However, the one who commands me has neglected to provide any instructions on what to do to those who remain on this room. Would you like to talk for a while?”

They catch on to the spirit’s meaning almost immediately, and then fill Arcturus in. The next little while is spent interrogating Yiliv about his history and what he knows of the complex.

Yiliv is a type of spirit known as a scrivenite. They’re all about gathering and preserving knowledge. They also are not averse to sharing that knowledge (“unlike certain other entities”). He was summoned and bound for a limited time by someone whose identity he is forbidden from disclosing. This person bribed him into accepting the binding with the opportunity to read a rare tome, but his tasks up until now have been mostly contrary to his own nature and disposition.

The spirit aided in the raid against the Monastery (“a ghastly affair”), and used his abilities to produce soul tomes on several captives as a form of interrogation. With the main portion of that work done, he is now tasked with guarding the passage into the next room until his binding expires in a a little under two months.

He can tell the complex currently houses four Asmodean redactors in the artifact recovery room, “playing with a defective dimensional gate”. Five more plus a summoned devil are in the common room, redacting documents. Nox and her pet hellhound are also somewhere in the complex, probably at the meditation garden. Yiliv is bound to raise a telepathic alarm as soon as anyone tries to cross the forbidden threshold, but the PCs have free rein of the room until they try to do so. Should he be destroyed in the material world, he will reform in his home dimension, free of the contract.

Most of the party listen pretty closely to what he has to say, though Rosalia wanders off to look around and spots what seems to be a still-locked secret panel. She makes a note of it for future looting, seeing as they’re kinda busy with an upcoming raid at the moment.

Turn 16

When it seems like the heroes and Yyiliv have exhausted all the possible topics of friendly conversation, the spirit again warns that he will have to fight them should they move to cross the threshold, and that his orders force him to telepathically warn the Asmodeans in the rest of the complex about the party’s coming.

With nothing else to say, the party draws their weapons, Jade makes a dueling salute, and the fight is on.

It’s not much of a fight, really. Jade immediately steps forward and slashes at Yiliv’s book-cover “face”, damaging the spirit. He fails the ensuing stunning and knockdown roll, and then Jania runs in with a somewhat uncharacteristic Heroic Charge and whacks the pile of pages with her stick, which was still charged with that Deathtouch scroll from the previous floor. The direct injury from that is enough to destroy Yiliv’s material form and banish him back home.

The spirit did fully intend to fight to the best of his ability, but the dice were not with him this time. Even if he had survived turn 1, he wouldn’t have much chance by himself against the whole party, though he might have inflicted some difficult-to-remove penalties on them.

Jania is glad to be rid of the active spell. That thing was unsafe! She’s also itching to check out that hidden panel which is surely full of goodies, but that will have to wait. Despite not lasting even a second against the party, Yiliv did raise the alarm, so everyone in this level knows they’re coming. Time to go loud.

Turn 17

The party proceeds through the door Yiliv was guarding, going down a long flight of stairs and turning to the left. They keep going down a wide hallway and stop when it branches to their left. The branch is a narrow corridor with three doors, which Urist knows that leads to a couple of closets and one of the sleeping chambers for the higher-ranking archivists (F3a), and he goes down and opens the doors to confirm that the corresponding rooms are empty.

Rosalia does the same with another door on the main corridor (F2), which leads to a smaller bedroom that shows signs of recent use but is currently empty.

Turn 18

The party proceeds down the wide hallway, and turns left again to what Urist tells them is an artifact vault where the Order kept dangerous and cursed items (F4). The scene here is quite grisly. Most of the shelves are empty and smashed, and the room is dominated by a massive web of chains and shadows that emerges from a metal cube at the center of the room. Impaled on some of the chains is a corpse wearing redactor robes, and which is smelling quite ripe.

It looks as though the chains exploded outwards from the artifact, and that this happened quite some time ago given the victim’s advanced state of decomposition.

Jania believes the artifact is a cubic gate, which opened to some chain-themed area of the outer planes - there are several of those. The thing is probably broken now, but even in this state it would be quite valuable to the right collector. Urist confirms it’s a gate.

Carefully, Jania approaches the cube at the center of this mess and by twiddling with the runes on its surface manages to deactivate it. The chains disappear with a poof, causing both the body and the gate to fall to the floor, the artifact’s magic now completley burned out.

And then, suddenly, ninjas!

[GM] Preparing the ninjas

The original adventure places four asmodean redactors hiding around this room, despite their stat blocks having no stealth skills. They wanted to see what the PCs would do with the gate, and they attack once it’s disabled.

I want to spice things up a bit, since standard redactors don’t feel like they’d be a challenge to this group. Let’s replace one of them with an Asmodean Dark Adept that I first used back in Scene 2.

[Player] Back to the Delve

Turn 19

The heroes hear a loud finger snap and suddenly find themselves surrounded by redactor monks! One of them has more elaborate robes, and is the one who snapped his fingers to dispel the invisibility that concealed the enemies. “Get them!” he shouts, and battle is joined!

This lot manages to make a better showing than the ones from the upper level, mostly because they start out surrounding our heroes. The Dark Adept ensnares Urist with his Dark Tendrils spell early on, and most of the other PCs have to turn to engage the redactor closest to them. Art is free, however, and since he has the Move for hit he decides to run all the way across the room and slam into the adept, disrupting his concentration and his spell as well as injuring him.

The rest of the fight is marked by a series of backstab maneuvers of varying effectiveness. A redactor tries it on Art but fails to penetrate his armor. Rosalia stuns a redactor and then Jania kills him with a knock to the skull from behind. Rosalia then runs down and backstabs the Dark Adept, who as a final act of defiance runs to flank her and then backstabs the bard. Urist kills the adept with a Sunbolt spell, and then Jade, having dealt with her initial opponent, approaches the grappled redactor and backstabs him.

This happened over the course of about four rounds in total, and it really underscores the importance of positioning, particularly when we’re doing Lancer-style initiative. If someone walks up behind a character, and then manages to activate again before that character, they’re going to get that free attack from starting their turn behind the opponent. Everyone here was pretty mobile, and the redactors got to use that for once instead of getting bogged down against a solid defense formation.

Urist heals Rosalia back to full health with a Major Healing spell. There’s probably loot to be had here (the ruined gate is still very valuable), but the party presses onward for now.

[GM] Intermission

Our group went through rooms F1 through F4 in this post, and it took me about 8 hours to do everything from drawing the dungeon map to statting up Yiliv to running the combats on Foundry, with a good hour or so of that being dealing with Foundry updates. There’s an incompatibility between the Lancer Initiative module and GURPS Game Aid that forces me to dive into the later’s code and make some hacky edits whenever it’s updated.

We have a couple more big fights coming up on F6 and F7. The F6 fight was against yet more redactors and an ogre, but I thik I’ll spice it up a bit with variant stat blocks. F7 is Nox and her hell hound, and there’s a big chance both fights might blur together as the F6 folks retreat into F7 or Nox comes out to help. I’ll need to “compile” both before I run them.

Our PCs are in raid mode right now so they’re just marking found loot for later retrieval. After we deal with Nox we’ll have a whole scene about collecting and tallying the loot.