Into the Gray

Session Summary

Our party arrives at a warehouse and enters it, finding a note on a locked door. They pick the lock, and Arachne detects magic within. They hear a faint noise beyond and find a hallway leading to two sets of stairs, one up and one down. Following a wire of electricity down the stairs, they find another set of security doors, which they pick to find a hallway in disrepair, with three doors on each side, two of which are broken. They speculate that the warehouse was the birthplace of owl bears and that Kelderheim is involved, but Wash cannot detect any familiar enemies. He can, however, detect three monstrosities on the levels below us.

Log

We arrive at the New Dawn Warehouse. There is a boarded window on the second floor. 

I try to open the main door. It appears locks. 

Star tries to open the door. He does it! 

I look in the window on the ground level. It looks into the same area. It’s an entrance lobby area. There’s a desk to the side. There are seats around the edges.

I don’t see any obvious creatures. 

We are both standing ready to walk into the building. Arachne sticks her head in to see what she can see. She can see that on the door leading into the building deeper, there is a note on the door. She beelines to the door. 

I follow.

Once inside, Arachne detects magic. 

Star starts looting. He doesn’t find much. There is a locked drawer. Everything else looks filled with basic office supplies. He does so! Inside are paperwork records, visitors to the building, who they were, reason for being here. 

He hands off the paperwork to Elzira.

The only recognizable name would be Marvin. It’s not there.

There is no magic Arachne can detect. The note reads “This door is locked for your safety. Go beyond it at your own peril.” 

I put my ear up to the door to see what I could hear. (CRIT.) It’s not so much that I hear anything, but that I feel there is a soft low level vibration. #clues

I slowly step away and announce that I felt vibrating. 

Elzara wonders if it’s a portal. We all try to remember whether vibrations were involved in our past portal encounters.

Elzara, Star, and I remember that when we were close to it, the air felt like it was vibrating. We also heard a slight hum.

I check the handle, it is locked. 

Wash reappears. 

We want to open it. Star will try to pick it. Wash offers thermite. Star is just barely able to pick the lock. I have prepared a fire bolt. 

He opens the door. Once he does that and Arachne steps through, she can immediately see in the walls on the hinges there are little beams of magic in the walls that travel through to the door. School of magic, it’s just general magic. It’s “electricity” magic. #clues

When the door opened there was a faint noise in the distance.

There’s enough light to see a hallway. There's a branched hallway that goes to the right and left. The hallway goes down and slopes down quickly. After another 20 feet is a T section off to the sides. 

Arachne looks for hoofprints. She sees none. 

I yeet a chair down the hallway. I can’t throw it super far, about 10 feet. It makes a lot of noise, falls on the ground. It echoes a little bit. That’s it. 

Star asks why I did that. I explain I was checking for traps. 

Arachne walks into the hallway. She walks to the T section and says “Hello?”

Past the first cross section, there are stairs on the right side. They go up. On the left side are stairs that go down. 

At the T section she can see both sets of stairs lead down. The call of hello is not responded to. 

Arachne waves me over to say “I can’t remember.” 

I suggest we were in a basement in our vision.

“I think something is alive in here and if they locked this place, it’s probably violent whether because it’s scared and upset or it might be a demon.” #clues

Arachne can see the electricity wires in the wall goes down under the floor and continues down the stairs. 

Our party joins us as we follow the electricity. I keep Fire Bolt ready to go. 

As we travel down the stairs, we find another set of security doors. We suggest Star pick one of the locked doors. Star does it so well he would even be able to fashion a duplicate key if he wanted. 

This one leads into a hallway that looks to be in a sorry state of disrepair. It seems almost like a bear raged through it. Most of the doors are closed. A few have been broken open. 

The hallway has three doors on each side. Two are broken open. 

Arachne suggests that Owl Bears might have been invented here. We all ponder this possibility. Elzira remembers that they’re connected to Kelderheim. They started existing there around the time of the war. #clues

Elzira asks Wash directly about their origins and whether they came from here. 

Wash does not sense any favored enemies he is familiar with nearby. Because of his familiarity with monstrosities, it would appear there are three new ones he’s never sensed before. He gets a response from inside his own arm, it’s a Slaad egg. There are two monstrosities one floor down, and another even deeper than that, likely two floors down. “Fun fact, there’s three of them. Two are one floor below us, and a third two floors below us. I don’t know what they are but they sure seem monstrous. But no owl bears around!” #characterlore #clues