What Happened Last Session
Carmin Returns from Bureaucratic Hell
Two days of bureaucratic detention finally ended, and Carmin rejoined the party on the eroding isle where Brugatha’s hut still stood above flooded ruins. His administrative punishment—consequence of overzealous carousing that left a building burning and officials furious—had cost the party their strongest fighter during their previous, disastrous attempt to explore the sea hag’s underwater lair. Silenar and Dral had paid for that timing with their lives.
The group welcomed a new face: Dolitan, a bard whose musical talents and social graces had impressed Zahlie enough to recruit him. With Carmin back and the party reinforced, you faced a decision: return to the deadly chambers that had already claimed two companions, or continue to Dvergheim with Adagar as promised. The choice was made when you looked at the trapdoor leading down into cold water and remembered what waited below.
Into the Flooded Dark
The underwater chambers beneath Brugatha’s hut beckoned with promises of treasure and answers. The gold-and-marble architecture wasn’t the crude lair of a sea hag but ancient construction repurposed for darker purposes. You descended through knee-deep water into eroding passages where time had worn stone into treacherous sinkholes and crumbling floors.
The dungeon revealed itself in chambers: burial vaults with stone coffins, pillar rooms where gold leaf still clung to unstable columns, and a fountain where a mourning woman statue poured endless water despite every logical source having failed centuries ago. But the ruins weren’t empty. Something had claimed these chambers since Brugatha’s death, and it didn’t welcome explorers. The wraith that emerged from shadow hit with cold that burned worse than fire, and the combat became a desperate scramble for survival in flooded rooms where footing meant life or death.
The Price of Exploration
You survived, but survival came with costs measured in blood and silence. The encounter pushed the party to its limits—Carmin wielding the Axe of Nine Eyes with renewed fury, Zahlie’s arrows finding targets in darkness that should have hidden them, allies fighting with desperation that bordered on frenzy. When the wraith finally fell, you stood breathing hard in cold water, the victory feeling less like triumph and more like narrow escape.
The chamber yielded treasures: a noble’s signet ring worth 60 gold pieces, scattered coins, hints of greater wealth deeper in the complex. But the ruins extended further than you’d explored, and every passage promised more guardians, more dangers, more chances for the kind of losses that had already cost you Silenar and Dral. You marked the chambers explored, noted the passages untaken, and made the calculation adventurers always face—whether the potential reward justifies the certain risk.
Looking Ahead
Brugatha’s underwater lair remains partially explored, its deeper chambers holding secrets about the civilization that built gold-and-marble architecture now claimed by erosion and darkness. The magic that powers the endless fountain, the purpose of the burial vaults, the reason a sea hag would claim such ruins—all of it waits in flooded passages you haven’t yet dared. But Adagar still needs transport to Dvergheim, and the dwarf’s patience with repeated dungeon detours may eventually wear thin.
The divine silence persists, the double experience continues mysteriously, and you’ve now confirmed that even without the sea hag, her former lair poses lethal threats. Dolitan’s bardic talents add social options the party previously lacked, but whether songs and stories will matter in submerged ruins filled with undead remains to be seen. The sailboat waits at anchor, capable of reaching destinations across the Isles of Andrik, but every choice to explore means delaying other missions, and every mission delayed is another community adapting to life without divine guidance while forces you don’t yet understand move in the shadows.
The dead leave more than empty bedrolls—they leave questions about what you’re willing to risk for those still breathing.