Play Report 35 — What’s In The Closet

Hant thinks quickly, and starts enlisting the other two’s help in throwing canvasses into the staircase, in order to make it harder to traverse. A group of six of the painted figures are trundling up the stairway, hindered slightly by these new obstacles. Hant and Akela take a stand at the top of the stairs and Almuund keeps back.

The painted figures begin swinging at the party as they reach the top. A painted sword strikes Akela’s shoulder, blurring her armor and flesh like a photoshop smear tool. She grits her teeth and bashes one of them over the head with a canvas. Hant jams a lit torch into another one of the painted figures, and it goes up in flames. When it crumples, it lights other canvasses and bodies, and soon the stairwell is enveloped in fire.

Almuund looks for alternative escape routes. The door with bloodstains leading to it easily opens, and he looks through. What he finds is 10 feet of closet flooring upon which sit a ritual circle, five candles, two severed heads, and a black leatherbound book, and past that in place of walls a vast plain of gray shale-like rock. In the distance he can see a gazebo, spiky mountains, several pits in the earth, and a vast ravine. The stars shine white and red and a strange shape swoops past high in the sky, blotting some of them out. Paint-textured mirages dance on the horizon, of a boreal forest, a cathedral, and a village in a dust storm. Almuund was not expecting this, and closes the door.

The conflagration on the stairwell spreads. All but one painted figure currently present has fallen to the fire, and Akela bashes the last one backwards into it. The nightmares defeated, the party is left to deal with the much more mundane threat of “hey the house we are in is extremely on fire now.” Almuund shares the new escape route, and the party scrambles out of the smoke and into the grey landscape.

Akela investigates the book by gently flipping it open with her hatchet. It is revealed to be a journal, belonging to a man named Bashir. Much of it documents work he has done as commissions, starting of slowly but drawing the notice of King Runalt, who commissions a number of portraits. With this patronage Bashir’s fame spreads, and it becomes fashionable for many figures to have their portraits done by him, even as far away as the kingdoms of law. His newfound success swelled his ego and tension grew between him and his wife Yasmina, so he poisoned her. Between this misdeed and a growing war in Runalt’s kingdom, he decided he would be better off working his art in other realms, and so sought to cast a spell that would open the way to another world. He powered it by convincing two engaged friends of his, Daveed and Zarina, to poison each other. He decapitated their bodies and used the heads in the summoning circle to help power the spell that opens this portal. The spell formula for the portal (as well as Locate Object and Featherlight) is recorded here.

The party takes in this information and prepares to explore the gray plains.