ArcAnjl Adventures

Easter said he'd take them to the gold. Instead the mine opens into a chamber no miner ever dug: a live campfire, an altar to Laduguer - god-king of the duergar - with a glowing green gem set in its head like a third eye, and four invisible guards whose entire position is "leave now." In a side room, black necrotic tendrils are sewing two dead guards back into something undead - the same force that lives behind the ox skull at the tavern, now confirmed to reach the bottom of the mine.

La Maestra bluffs the duergar with a fake vision from their own god, listens politely to their warning that the statue is booby-trapped and that six of their people already died down here - and pries the gem out anyway. The chamber collapses. A duergar dies, Aelion is dug out of the rubble at one hit point, and Easter saves his life with a healing potion hidden in his sock. La Maestra kills the last guard with an insult.

Then the quiet reveals start landing. Aelion attunes to the maul he's carried since the church cellar - and it is a Holy Avenger. Behind the shattered statue, a mirror with no reflection leads one-way into a ruined wizard's lair: the hidden workshop of a mage who had been impersonating a high priest of Lathander, with broken warded jars built to harness and imprison something dug out of this mine. Easter even remembers a name - Alaric Vane, the "priest" who kept sending crews digging away from the gold.

Past a door bolted from the inside: a dead paladin whose sword was melted down to a dagger, living fireflies glowing with shifting magic, and a dozen drow in the dark. An illusory carrion crawler scatters them, and the party corners a straggler as the session ends - with no way back through the portal behind them.

Mourningfall is a homebrew D&D 5e gothic mystery, played on Foundry VTT. An actual-play recap - no dice, no cross-talk, just the story.

https://arcanjl.com/

The party is back in the Last Lantern with a dwarf the town has not seen in thirty years, and the room goes silent. There is no combat this week. There are conversations, and every one of them is a little bit wrong.

Mother Vee hears that Tuul spent three decades asleep in a crystal and that the church was hijacked, and her wedding ring flares at the touch of Aelion's hand. A man thanks the old priest for saving his son, reaches for his pocket to buy him a drink, and stops, because nobody in Mourningfall has paid for anything in years. Roger tells Lavius about a dream the whole town shares: a figure under the mountain, standing in firelight, whispering a name that slips away by breakfast. It is not the bell and it is not the soup, and whoever it is, Roger says, "they care for us."

Upstairs, La Maestra and Owlin search Tamsin's room and find a window that has been quietly used as a door, a chest that was dragged away, and a warm spot in the floor that hums when the eggshell comes near. Aelion sits with Nora, who remembers her children for the first time and tells him how tempting it is to let the forgetting take her back. "The blanket is a chain," he tells her. Then he promises to find her daughter.

Lavius and La Maestra argue in the rain about whether ringing the bell again would be mercy or oblivion, and then the whole party spends the last stretch of the night trying to find Mira before the storm does. They do. She is tending herbs in front of Nora's house, and she does not know any of them.

Mourningfall is a homebrew D&D 5e gothic mystery, played on Foundry VTT. An actual-play recap - no dice, no cross-talk, just the story.

https://arcanjl.com/

The church on the hill is locked, and someone is waiting in the dark beside it. She is Hay-zel, a drow cleric of Eilistraee, lost in the mist and following the sound of bells. She tries to hide, rolls a one, and gets a crossbow bolt at her feet for her trouble. She answers with a sacred flame on her fingertips, and Genji thinks it's neat. Inside, the pews are kindling and Father Donavich is sobbing at the pulpit. Lucy talks the door open on a natural twenty. The priest says Lathander has left them. His holy symbol is gone. Then a voice comes up through the floor: Father, don't tell them. His son Doru came home bitten, and his father chained him in the cellar and couldn't finish it. Now he wants the party to do it for him. In the cellar, Doru crawls across the ceiling like a spider, drops in front of Genji wearing his father's missing sun symbol, and asks for one chance: a test. Somebody cut themselves. If he can smell the blood and not drink it, he can fight this. What follows is the story of a raid on the castle that went very wrong, a knife across a bugbear's arm, and a holy symbol that starts to glow. Then there are the bells. The priest hasn't been ringing them. His bell has been broken for months, and he hears them too. No combat this week, and it's one of the tensest episodes yet. It ends at the burgomaster's door, with a scream from inside. An actual-play Curse of Strahd campaign, played live on Foundry VTT with the 2024 D&D rules. https://arcanjl.com/

THE PARTY

Hay-zel — drow cleric (new this episode)

Genji — bugbear monk

Lucy — tiefling bard

Remi — forest gnome artificer

Beowolfe Scornbow — human ranger

Nashkan Silverwing — dragonborn barbarian

The bats land in the middle of Madam Eva's camp and fold themselves into Baba Lysaga, and she wants her gem back. The first person to stand in her way is Ireena. The second is Gesch, a four-foot kobold with sparks popping off his shoulders from the witch's own magic. Then Baba Lysaga looks past him, goes pale, and falls to her knees in the mud, and for one glorious second Gesch believes he did that. He didn't. A grey wolf walks out of the treeline behind him and becomes Count Strahd von Zarovich. The witch calls him master, and son. He calls her mother. He offers the party a deal: keep Ireena safe, and the village lives and the witch keeps her hands off them. He tells Helliax his wife is alive and his son is closer to Strahd than to him. He tells Fiadh her mother was one of the few who could walk through the mists. Then Madam Eva, who didn't want the exorcist anywhere near her, reads the cards for all five of them. A soldier with no face. A storm-caller. A priest in a ruined chapel. A shepherd with something tall behind him. And a road north to a caravan that will know Fiadh's mother's name. The party carries the jade crystal back to the bullywugs, twelve standing stones start to sing, and a dead river begins to run clean. On the road back to Barovia, something with thorned knives is waiting to see how well they can keep Ireena alive. An actual-play Curse of Strahd campaign, played live on Foundry VTT with the 2024 D&D rules.

https://arcanjl.com/

Episode four of the Rusted Fist's Draw Steel campaign opens in the bones of the arixx's nest. Hank digs Orson's amulet out of the acid, takes Trian's flute in his honor, and becomes the Monster Bane. Alecs grieves, then signs Ellery a second autograph and earns bacon for life; Mia inherits a family recipe written in Kalliak and a vial of demon honey; and Alecs and Hank become blood brothers through Trian's old Bloodbound Band. Orson catches his amulet a little too nimbly for a humble coal burner, and Abbott Loric blesses Trian with a great deal of holy water and promises him a grave. Then the party heads into the Silver Wood at night, finds a burned wagon and a roll of very fine leather, and follows the trail to an old wizard's tower where frightened people hide on the second floor. Behind the door: the stolen leather, the stolen food, draped mirrors, and glass spiders that crawl out of the lights. Khanarch's spear, Hank's arrows, Mia's back-to-back criticals, and Alecs's brand-new Flashback just barely win the fight. Then the captives panic, the ogres come down the stairs, and the Rusted Fist does the only sensible thing. An actual-play heroic fantasy recap of MCDM's Draw Steel, played on the Codex VTT. No dice, no cross-talk, just the story.

Three graves on a hillside, a fire down to coals, and a stranger snoring over the ridge. He turns out to be Nashkan Silverwing, Balasar's cousin, who came to Daggerford to meet him, walked into the house first, and got spat out into this place instead. He learns about the funeral about a minute after he learns his cousin is dead.

Then the road: a man lying face-up in the water with his arm pointing into the trees, dead about a week, his shoes worn through to the skin. A horse ridden until it dropped. An unsigned letter that says I'm sorry, I can't handle it anymore, I have to leave. And a wall of fog that separates them, burns their lungs, and walks them in a complete circle back to the same corpse.

What they find in the dead man's fist is a compass. It steadies and points down the road, and then a skeleton walks up, looks at the body, and strolls into the fog untouched, and the needle starts spinning again. The compass was never pointing north.

Past a shallow grave with a hand that heals itself, past a zombie ambush, over a rise, and there it is: a town with a castle standing over it. Villagers with pitchforks. A woman begging for pies. A raven with blue on its feathers. A burgomaster's son trying to hold a siege together while everyone tells him he cannot. A missing priest's son, a missing girl, and a friendly bartender with a bite on his neck he cannot remember getting and a reflection you can see through. Three hours until six o'clock.

An actual-play Curse of Strahd campaign, played live on Foundry VTT with the 2024 D&D rules. New episodes on Tuesdays. arcanjl.com

THE PARTY
Nashkan Silverwing — dragonborn barbarian (new this episode)
Lucy — tiefling bard
Remi — forest gnome artificer
Beowolfe Scornbow — human ranger
Genji — bugbear monk (absent)

The party is standing at the edge of an underground river, and something in the water is charging the elementals like a battery. Nobody wants a fight. So they try diplomacy by body language, a bard's song that sets the elementals' teeth on edge, and finally an ambush on two drow digging up an old canal with their bare hands. For once the dice cooperate: a natural twenty, a smite, a dagger through the eye at long range, and a drow mage chased around a corner straight into a nest of carrion crawlers - where he keeps casting while being eaten.

Then they count heads, and Easter Ashwell is missing. The miner who saved the paladin's life twice tried to sneak around the elementals and steal their javelin for Aelion, against Aelion's orders. They found half of him at the water's edge.

Owlin rejoins after three weeks away just in time to get knocked out by lightning. The heist fails. And then the real discovery: the gold the drow were digging for isn't a vein at all. When La Maestra holds up her eggshell fragment, a glowing trail lights up under the floor - the marks the golden egg left when someone dragged it through the mountain thirty years ago, with stonework mortared over the top. The trail leads through the forge, through a gathering room full of dead goliaths and murdered priests, into a collapsed wall - and when La Maestra blows it open, out onto the mountainside above Mourningfall. “Welcome home,” Aelion tells Tuul. “Such as it is.”

There's a Zhentarim banner on the cave wall. La Maestra has a history with them she has never mentioned. And on the walk down into town, tiny flowers bloom in every footprint the old priest leaves.

Mourningfall is a homebrew D&D 5e gothic mystery, played on Foundry VTT. An actual-play recap - no dice, no cross-talk, just the story.

arcanjl.com

The plan was a heist, and nobody expected it to work. Fiadh goes invisible into Baba Lysaga’s walking house, past silent ravens and a cradle holding a little vampire doll, and pries a glowing gem from beneath the floorboards with two swords used as chopsticks. Outside, Gesch sits in the swamp making small talk with the witch.

The party escapes with the gem and the bullywugs’ stolen ritual scroll, but not one of them lands a hit on her. Then she walks across the water and whispers three words to the paladin.

The road home brings a werewolf’s abandoned clothes, a buried silver locket, and a dead adventurer still giving orders. At Tser Pool, the Vistani explain what the party actually saw in the swamp, and something moves beneath the full moon.

An actual-play Curse of Strahd recap, played live on Foundry VTT with the 2024 D&D rules.

Episode three of the Rusted Fist's Draw Steel campaign, and the tutorial is over. The party walks Violet home to Broadhurst, where Abbott Loric grabs Alecs by the arm to make sure the famous Violet's Savior is real, and Alecs responds by commissioning twenty signed headshots of himself. Then the town opens up: breakfast with Targon of the Gilded Hand ("A chef?" "Mercenaries, please."), a barmaid whispering that the butcher's meat keeps shrinking, and Reeve Rosamund, over a glass of milk, handing the heroes a list of every problem in Broadhurst. They pick the old charcoal burner, Orson, who confesses he ran from a giant bug and lost his brass amulet, then Ellery, who is burning what is left of her prize pigs. The trail leads to the party's first montage, a maze of acid-wet tunnels, and then to the lair of an arixx: a horse-sized mantis that drags Khanarch underground, drops half the party into pits, and, at the end of a long battle of attrition, kills Trian Redleaf, the troubadour who had kept everyone standing for three sessions. Hank lands the killing blow. The treasure will have to wait. An actual-play heroic fantasy recap of MCDM's Draw Steel, played on the Codex VTT. No dice, no cross-talk, just the story.

The drow standoff turns into the worst fight the party has had. Two drow casters, two giant ape-shaped fiendish spirits, and dice that will not cooperate: Lavius's javelin skids off the floor, La Maestra's mockery bounces off everything, and Aelion goes down under an ape for the third session running. What saves him is Easter Ashwell - a miner with no training and a pickaxe - throwing himself over the body and working through three death saves with first aid so bad it becomes the joke of the night. Aelion comes back on one hit point, gets up, and kills the last ape with his final smite.

They barricade a storeroom to sleep and a drow picks the lock anyway. Beyond the second door: a chamber lit green, a ruined forge, and a man sealed inside a pillar of jade with Lathander's sun on his chest and Draconic and demonic sigils holding him. The forge's instructions call for magical fire. A melted breastplate in the corner turns out to be fake paladin armour. As Aelion raises the hammer to smash the prison, the green gem from last week's shrine starts to hum in La Maestra's pocket. She plays it like a theremin, chooses a song of freedom, and sings the man out of the crystal.

His name is Tuul Oakencask, a dwarf cleric, and Easter knows him: one of the head priests of the Morning Rise church, who vanished thirty years ago when the church's reinforcements arrived. Tuul's last memory is the miners finding a giant golden egg, his report to the church, and the church turning up two days later on a journey that should have taken a month. When La Maestra shows him her eggshell fragment, the forge lights itself.

Aelion briefs the new priest on everything the party knows. Easter chooses to stay. The way west is drow, and the way northeast is an underground river full of water elementals - one of which has just noticed them.

Mourningfall is a homebrew D&D 5e gothic mystery, played on Foundry VTT. An actual-play recap - no dice, no cross-talk, just the story.

arcanjl.com