After a surprisingly peaceful night at The Welcome, our heroes sat down at the lovely breakfast, Adolfuns, the animated—or possessed—cauldron that was the owner of the tavern, had prepared for them.
Here the party shaped a plan for hiding two of them in Kaari’s Portable Hole for Pestilence to Teleport through the main gate and into the open centre of Castle Rostak itself.
In the process, the party decided to move closer through the Softworks the northern funnel wall where The Welcome was located. They planned to go to the Butchers pretending to look for work.
The name Softworks came from the fact that long ago the wall would have been buzzing with grocers such as Fishmongers, Greengrocers, Butchers and Breweries.
Ding!
Just as the party set out to leave, they all heard a tiny bell ring. It was so delicate they weren’t even sure they had heard it safe for the fact all three of them had heard it and that all the undead patrons of The Welcome suddenly left with haste.
“It is the Knight of the Bell!” disclaimed Adolfuns before hastily retreating to the kitchen.
The Hellbenders sensing danger retreated quickly. Thorga rushed back to their room while Kaari stayed at the top of the stairs able to look out the trapdoor and Pestilence hid behind the stairs themselves at groundfloor.
In came a medium sized male figure clad in heavy armour with a strange pointy helmet.
The figure sat down at table and started drumming his fingers on the table.
Suddenly his glowing face and piercing eyes started at Pestilence, then Kaari, but nothing further happened and a few minutes later, the Knight of the Bell got up and left and the tavern once again filled up with undead customers.
Entering the Greengrocers
Sneaking along the wall, the party entered the Greengrocers, which they found long abandoned. The wall between the Greengrocers and the Fishmongers had collapsed and the combined room had a terrible stench of rotten fish and rotten veggies that seemed to come from the foul-looking mutated mushrooms with fish scales and slime that was everywhere to be found.
A door led into the Buthchers and Thorga investigated the wall to see if there was other more discreet ways in. He found a crumbled part of the wall that he, with some strength and finesse, loosened to reveal a hole into the Butchers, where he saw Ghoul butchers busy chopping up horse carcasses.
Moving away from the hole he also discovered a dehydrated husk of a Mindflayer. The party decided to leave it alone before entering the Butchers through the door.
Entering the Butchers
The three strong-looking (and smalling) Ghouls stopped to look at the heroes, who tried their best to look nonchalant and just walk to the opposite door… it almost worked had it not been for one particularly alert Ghoul who found a Tabaxi walking around too odd and decided to chop up Pestilence for good measure.
The plan had failed and combat was upon the party.
Pestilence retaliated and the howls from the wounded Ghoul alerted nearby foes (DM note, I rolled a 1 on the time dice).
Kaari formed a plan of running to the opposite door and block the path between the Ghouls and the party with a Wall of Wind, but timing was not on her side and the Ghouls got some hits in before the Wall of Wind pushed them violently away.
The Wall of Wind was up, but the door the party was hoping to escape through opened up and a massive Ghoul capable of speaking opened the door and angrily swung a mighty cleaver at Kaari only missing narrowly.
It was Bracken the Butcher the leader of the Softworks.
Bracken realised the heroes were too much for him to handle so he fled further into the room he came from, but Kaari quickly let loose two arrows piercing his skull from behind and sticing out each of his eye sockets.
Bracken the Butcher was no more.
Looking around the big room, the party saw horse skulls with the skin removed neatly lined up next to stacks of freshly dismembered horse legs.
In a corner of the room the remaining parts of the horse had just been discarded in a huge pile of rotten horse carcasses.
The Unlucky Horseshoe
Leaving the big storage room, the party was faced with two doors right in front of them. Looking at their map of the Castle, one looked to lead to the Stables and one to the Breweries.
But they also notice a corridor leading to a doorway with an upside down horse shoe above and a couple of saloon swing doors. It was the entrance to The Unlucky Horseshoe.
Weary from the fight with the Ghouls, the party decided to go to the bar in the hopes of finding a cool drink.
As they entered, they saw the saloon was largely empty except two skeleton gunslingers sitting casually at a table playing cards and drinking shots of whiskey.
The two skeletons slowly turned to the party:
“What do we have here, partner?” said the first skeleton Billy the Wight.
I’ll be damned if I know, but they look like fun” said the second skeleton, Calabanshee Jane as she skilfully started spinning her revolver in her skeletal hand.
