Dreaming of Dylath-Leen

We have returned back to the old infirmary in our game of Strange Aeons so that our colleague Winter, a cleric of Pharasma, can consecrate the place and put the souls here to rest. My character, the spiritualist Costian continues to record what happened.

Moonday 28th Pharast, (continued)

Along with Winter, we headed up to the alchemy lab where the strange skin floated in a jar labelled as “61”. It made strange burbling whispers of wanting to be helped, but previously we hadn’t wanted to touch it since we couldn’t decide whether it was to be feared or pitied. Winter doesn’t think it’s evil, so Ray opened the jar from a distance and it burbled a “thank you”. It then asked us to kill it.

It seemed to be the skin of a person, its face eyeless and without a tongue, the rest of its skin floating behind it. Somehow it managed to speak, and told us that Mackien Mun had done this to him. He had been a sailor, but wasn’t sure how long ago that had been. Mun had been here, along with another man who the skin identified as Count Lowls when we showed him a picture. They had been talking about a book, the Necronomicon, which was kept in the Mysterium in Katheer. They had spoken about using bribery to get past the guards and into the part of the library called the Soul where the book was located.

Lowls had been afraid of the Mysterium’s guardian, the Keeper, but didn’t seem to know much about it. Lowls also mentioned an old gnoll companion named Biting Lash who seemed to be a slaver, who was going to help them get to the slaver city of Okeno to acquire slaves to use as porters and guards in their quest.

After No. 61 had given us this information, he requested that we kill him with the liquid from one of the blue poison bottles. Before doing so, I asked him his name, so that I could bid Llirk Istes to sleep well as I poured the poison into his jar and put him out of his pain.

Visiting the loft for the final time, we counted 60 skins there, so Llirk Istes was obviously destined to join the rest of them. Winter was horrified by what she saw here, and decided to talk to her colleagues at the Church of Pharasma to make sure that everything here got a decent burial before she left to head back north. I handed her the deeds to the place, in case that helped in allowing them to strip it of the evil, and maybe burn it down.

Toilday, 29th Pharast, 4716 AR

We need to head off after Lowls, but before we do so we wanted to try and gather together the items we had found whilst in the Dreamlands. Erasmus now had a way to directly shift us across planes from the Dreamlands back to the real world, and we believed that in doing this we would be able to bring back what we had there.

So we went into our dreams again, which for Sheena was the first time. We dreamt of the dark city of Dylath-Leen, one of the greatest (in size, for it was not a pleasant place) cities in the Dreamlands. Not only were we able to find our items, but we were also able to frequent the shops and marketplaces of this city.

Player’s Notes: Basically, we levelled up (now level 11), and went shopping. Using Plane Shift we were able to bring the items that our dream selves had back to the real world so that we could use them there. As is the case in these situations, it took most of the rest of the session for us to level up and figure out what we wanted to buy, so we could close off the spreadsheet of items for the previous section of the game.

After we had finished there, we plane shifted back and found ourselves in our bodies. We now need to figure out the best way to get to Katheer – by boat or by teleport. The latter will be much faster, and will probably help us gain on Lowls. Whether we need to go to Okeno though I don’t know. Hopefully not, since it’s a long way out of our way, and we have no use for slaves ourselves.