Adventure 11: The Ennethdor HQ
The Calund district of Eversham is a well off part of town; a place where those that have the money choose to live. Not a place where you would expect to find the lifeless body of a Vampire. Yet here the party are - they know where The Valtannarin Ennethdor are hiding; this place looks like their headquarters, it's teeming with wizardry and magic.
And nobody notices.
The neighbours turn a blind eye - they're too involved in their own lives to pay any attention. Casting magical spells in the back garden causes people to choose not to notice, they turn away... 'Sorry dear, what lights did you say you saw again...?'; 'Oh, nothing dear, must just be the neighbours lighting a barbecue.' Of course, if you drop a cigarette end on the pavement, you can expect the full wrath of an octogenarian's umbrella "You pick that up young man", bop, bop, bop...
So the party arrive here in full regalia; armour, axes, material components, doves in the armpits... And they fit in to this leafy suburb not one jot. You can almost feel the curtains twitch along the lane as they case this (rather large) house out. Of course, there are many good reasons why the smaller magic sects choose such buildings as a base. They are large houses, so there's plenty of room; they usually have a good sized cellar which is handy for practising your magic missile all night long, and they have neighbours that wouldn't notice if your latest fireball blew all the windows out and lifted the whole house several feet into the air, scattering it over the garden. "Sounds like a storm is coming", they'd say.
Back to the story. The party were now doing their best to nonchalantly walk up and down this poorly lit road through afternoon and evening, being as inconspicuous as you can with two plus three swords hanging from your belt, or a mighty hammer or axe strapped to your dwarfish back. They'd picked the address up in a neat raid on the sects administration office only the night before, and with the help of their friend Magnus Elberman (who was nowhere in sight, but known to be watching too) were preparing a raid. They knew they had to act quickly. The Valtannarin Ennethdor who were inside the house, knew they were coming; they knew they'd acquired the address the previous evening, but they couldn't move quickly like this. No matter what they did - if they had the vampire's body here, the party would either see it leave, or capture it on the premises. A win-win scenario.
A day and a night and all the following day is spent watching the goings on here. The party do not want to leave any of this to chance; and neither does Elberman - he too has worked hard to find this place, and he couldn't have done it without the party's help. They plan to try and get in on that evening - the 18th Ulunacon.
The approach was straightforward enough. Elberman was coming with them, and he was more than capable of a Dimension Door from the neighbours garden into the house; this worked nicely despite the anti-magic field. They scratched around quietly then, trying to keep out of site and at the same time find any way that would lead them down into the cellar. They are fortunate; the way down is easy to find, the doors to the cellar run under the stairs leading to the upper floor, so they headed through.
There are two floors of cellar under this house - it looked like someone had extended the original cellars and made an extra room beneath. This is a standard tactic of wizards, however, particularly those that have access to some really powerful spells. As the party made their way around the upper cellar, they found storage areas, and, much to their surprise, a temple to the elemental god Asdreth.
They made it to the lower cellar without raising any alarms. The lower cellar contained the main working area where the vampire slept. They tried to be quiet right up until they entered the room, which they achieved with some success. The door into this lowest chamber is solid steel, very solid and can be bolted from the inside. They did well keeping quiet here, they'd have struggled if this door had been closed. Inside the room were three coffins spread along the eastern end of the room, as they entered through the door opposite them, the party entered combat with the junior wizards that were working in here. The middle coffin, they noted, was occupied by a pale and rotten corpse. From its chest protruded a rotting wooden stake. The party brushed aside the wizards closest to the door - they were no match for Formil. The remaining wizard watching this grabbed the stake in the vampires chest and pulled it out.
Time seemed to slow down. Elberman had already moved into the room next to Formil, and together they watches as the vampire sat up from his long slumber. He blinked twice, and looked over to Elberman, who he seemed to recognise. "Yanneg, my friend", he said, "what have you come here for? Who are these people?" Yanneg leaned over, grabbed the recovering vampire by the arm, and activated a magic ring on his finger. The two disappeared.
Formil, stunned by what he had seen, was rooted to the spot. Reality crashed back in on everyone; now the sound of booted feet could be heard coming down the steps outside. The last wizard trainee died quickly, and the party tried to bolt themselves in. It now fell upon Randy to get everyone out with his Dimension Door spell; not as capable a sorceror as Yanneg, he could not take everyone with him, and had to make two trips. His first attempt worked, he got Jim and Fax to the garden, and then tried to go back for his other friends. The spell fizzled and died. Meanwhile, inside, the door was being beaten open by an angry mob of fighters and wizards. The Knock spell was employed to good effect by the party's enemy. As Randy returned, the enemy guards closed in. Randy barely managed to get his friends away from the danger - but it was a close run thing. And it was not over. The enemy wizards had Dimension Door too. Now, however, the party were outside; they were fighting in the open, and laid into the few guards that had chased them. They were much easier to defeat out here alone. Next, the party ran. They went to the church of Danethrae and to the Pale Flame. It was important that the alarm was raised; not only was Charles Derren loose, but his mortal pupil, Yanneg the Mighty, was at large too.
And it was all the party's fault.