This session was played on June 17, 2010, featuring Halafa, Jorge, Mathieu, Pritchard Hood, the Scarlet Centurion and Vassily the Scout.
The session was run by guest DM Sternum.
Summary
[Note: This summary was provided by naked_samurai, the player of Handsome Hans and Halafa. Some statements may not be entirely accurate.]
The adventure began with first level characters Halafa, Vassily and Pritchard Hood in Glantri City grousing about their lots as barely-members of the Crossed Swords, when a portly Spanish-sounding butler named Sancho enlisted their help with a tower in one of the posh areas of the city that was sinking into the ground. They were later joined by Jorge, Mathieu, and the Scarlet Centurion.
The mage tower of Seamas du Blanc was indeed being sucked into the ground. A police cordon separated off the gawking public as the heroes dropped a length of rope to reach the minaret roof, some twenty-five feet down. Suspecting it had not hit bottom, they marked on the rope where the building's tip was.
Good adventurers, they took their time ransacking the rooms as they went. The top floor - the first they entered - was the mage's cozy study, and they flicked through the shelves and broke open drawers. In the laboratory below, they fought off two shadows springing from beneath the alchemist's table and then torched a bush of white vampiric roses in the greenhouse. Still sounds of awful screaming and demonic howling came from below. They checked the rope above and saw their profitable dithering had cost another forty feet in the tower sinking.
They met the mage's footman, a sniveling goblin hiding beneath his master's bed. His name was something like Gascoyne. They stole the mage's clothes, bedclothes, and furry undergarments, and fiddled with what turned out to be an elevator shaft blocked by portcullises.
In the kitchen they found three ghouls looking for food. Two adventurers — Scarlet Centurion, who rushed into their midst, and Halafa — were paralyzed by their grace before dispatching. The heroes went to the surface to wait out the frozen friends and discuss whether they had enough treasure — whether it was worth it to discover what happened to the wizard.
They made it down to the sitting room, filled with paintings of the luxury-loving dabbler and a bust of the Glantri City mayor. The sounds of unearthly howling were considerable, coming from below. And then scraping and bumping: a fey form was approaching.
A demon with a beaked face, leathery wings and claws in abundance came up the stairs. But proved no match for the adventurers, who took out what must have been decades of frustration in a furious round of everybody hitting. They chopped off the creature's head as a trophy.
Downstairs they found the servants' quarters, confirmed by the goblin they had in tow. And at the end of the corridor was a privy bursting with flames and shrieking. The cleric, peering over the edge, saw a hideous hell-scape and nearly lost his mind.
They resolved to leave it at that. Their purpose, given by Sancho, had been to find his master and perhaps stop the sinkhole. Convinced the wizard had been sucked into his commode and demon-commode was too much to handle alone, they went back to the surface and enlisted help at the nearest temple.
It took the sacrifice of a living creature to plug the portal to the abyss. They left this to the priests since they weren't about to sacrifice themselves and thought it cruel to sacrifice the poor goblin. They pretended not to notice the yelping ball of fur the priests hid under their garments as they decended. In a flash of light, soon after, and a swirl of dark energies, the portal collapsed and all was returned.
Losses & Loot
The party defeated two living shadows, three ghouls, a vampiric rose-bush and some sort of winged demon. They gathered up a number of the du Blanc's possessions, most of them no better than mediocre in value; these included several interesting books (the most notable being a compendium of antique goblin pornography), a treasure map, a cheap jeweled flask, a brass telescope, silk sheets and ornate robes, a marble bust, a spellbook containing the invisibility and mirror image spells, and four potions labeled "Antidote," "Aqualung," "Bug Repellent" and "Gas." Between these items and Vassily's acquisition of a hidden hoard of coins, the party acquired a total of 1,710gp.
For creatures defeated and wealth acquired, each party member received 380xp.