Tuesday Knights - Age of Worms

  The party collapses at their Observatory, resting and bathing for a few days while discussing profits and plans. Mesmer animates the taxidermied goblin butler and names him Jeeves, and starts setting up his laboratory and library. Finally, somewhat rejuvenated from their adventures below, they decide to head into town for a warm meal, some shopping, and most importantly, some good carousing. They discuss hiring Kullen as a guard for their new shared home and loot while they travel abroad, and send for him. He arrives the next day, looking somewhat conflicted, and when Mesmer expresses faith and fairness in him Kullen suffers an emotional break and insists they accompany him into town where Smenk is engaging in a power move to seize the Dourstone holdings. Smenk has successfully lobbied the mayor into executing Dourstone for harboring the cultists in his mine, but the party casts suspicion back on him with the use of some illusions, and disavow the credit he claims for rooting them ou

  Having successfully defeated the last overlord of the Temple of the Dead Three, the party set themselves to the task of returning to the surface. They elected to take a long rest to replenish spells, but were interrupted by strange tremors and the sound of distant screams. Finally feeling fortified, they left the Faceless One's chambers and headed south, but not before deciding to check out a few unexplored chambers along the way. One of them, a huge cavern, contained a fiendish looking wizened monkey trapped within a magic circle of protection. Suspicious, they questioned it a little and it introduced itself as Torgrodd the Wise , summoned to reveal secrets of divine animation. It bantered a bit back and forth, until the previously seen Crawling Claw snuck in to disrupt the protective magic, upon which Torgrodd reverted to a more demonic form and attacked. It managed to fell Mesmer but was ultimately brought low by attacks, including a rare thornwhipping from a non-beastformed A

Mesmer rejoins the party outside the laboratory of Vecna, and they cautiously open the door to the inner sanctum of the master of this underground cult. It's a spare chamber, reflecting an obsessive ascetic who clearly cares little about finery. A thaumaturgical voice booms across the walls: “If you’re here, then the rest of my brothers and sisters must have fallen. They were always going to die, we all will, but you denied them the chance to die for something better, something greater. “You will hinder the Ebon Triad no longer. Your corpses will be the final submission to the slumbering aspect, to awaken it in the glory of murder and in its wake I shall rebuild this world anew.”  The party offers their thoughts on that and begins exploring the room, but when enough of them line up, a vicious lightning bolt arcs from wall to wall, doing considerable damage to the front line. Dravej charges the source of the bolt to discover that one of the walls is illusory and the Faceless One him