Demons in Greyshire

A shepherd and his fluffle, a battle master and his bunnies, a warrior and his hares, call it what you want, but this quest was to be completed by a human and three harengons: Conan Renart VII, a fierce fighter with a dangerous combination of bloodlust and rash decision making; Snuzzle McPuzzle, the jack-of-all-trades cleric/warlock/wizard with his familiar called Muzzle; and the not-so-fluffy sister and brother Lorraine and Haromyr, the druid who really wanted to be a pyromaniac and the storm sorcerer who thought it would be wise to make a deal with a genie to dabble in the eldritch arts. In short: the perfect team to kill some demons.

Preparations! Step 1: buy one overpriced lantern that reveals hidden beings. Step 2: decide to buy another one from the cranky beholder with glasses after failing to convince Rogma to let us ‘borrow’ one of them. Step 3: buy a lot of oil flasks to light the lantern. Step 4: keep the volatile fluids away from the druid! Step 5: fail to discover more information about the demons in the library. Step 6: perfectly prepared for action, let’s go!

Greyshire: a somewhat sad excuse for a town’s district. A lot of empty houses, a lot of running people. As Muzzle takes to the sky, Snuzzle looks through his familiar’s eyes. His keen senses pick up a tiny green demon turning into an even tinier bug and scurry away quickly, disappearing in the sewers. Having found what they are looking for, Conan and Lorraine rush to the needlessly heavy sewer lid and pick it up. The moment they can lift the lid, four demons appear out of nowhere, surrounding them. The demons, known as quasits, tried to intimidate and scare them with their horrid screeches, but to no avail. With the brutal force of many eldritch blasts, the punishing swing of a longsword, and the fiery wrath of a summoned fire elemental in the form of a sweet bird called Mees, the demons were vanquished in seconds.

Questioning the few present inhabitants resulted in two curious encounters: one was with a mysterious red-haired woman, who suggested these four brave adventurers should visit an ominous empty house, completely unsuspicious behavior. She quickly left after Conan put a sword against her throat to reveal her true intentions, without any success, of course. The other encounter was with a drunkard named Bran Don. Unlike the dodgy woman, Bran was easily convinced he was a hero himself! Armed with an alcoholic amulet, a torch, and a hammer, he went into the sewers all by himself to hunt quasits, while the ‘true’ adventurers visited the totally not-demon-possessed house to the north.

Darkness all around. Thank the gods of all the pantheons for those extremely expensive lanterns to light their path deeper into the unlit and abandoned mansion. While Haromyr was checking every fireplace for hidden clues – burning one of his hands in the process due to a party member lighting the fireplace – his sister Lorraine was clever enough to release a poisonous gas by messing around with the rotten food on the dinner table. Not much to find on the first floor, so they hurry up to the second floor, facing four inanimate statues of knights in the hallway. Again, thank all the gods those suits of armor weren’t animated armors. Oh, the horror! A quasit popped up in one of the rooms. When it tried to flee, they all tried to capture it. Its shapeshifting ability proved this would be a pointless task, so Lorraine enclosed it in her hands and burned it to ash with a single spell. Upon inspecting the room, they found a little girl hidden in a closet. Mara asked these brave and bold buccaneers to help her find back her missing family members and reunite them. They promised to help her, not knowing it was impossible to give Mara what she truly wanted.

When they ascended to the third and upper floor they faced a foe they had never encountered before. Behind a door, two quasits were guarding the door with a large burning portal behind them. Besides the fiery gate, another demon lurked in the dark. Imagine when you fuse an evil-looking gargoyle with translucent black shadows, well, that’s the terror they faced. A lot of things happened in a very short amount of time. The quasits became entangled in thick, constricting vines, Mees the firebird kept teleporting to keep Mara save and a lot – A LOT – of magic missiles were fired to bypass the incorporeal defenses of the shadow demon, who kept walking straight through walls to evade most of the attacks. And that’s when an epiphany resulted in something dreadful. Realizing the portal had to be closed to stop the demons from entering our plane, Conan ran into the portal and disappeared. Mees flew quickly into the portal to retrieve him, dragging the human back. Only a couple of seconds had passed, but Conan was beaten to within an inch of his life, unconscious and dying. The harengons fired every spell known to them to close the infernal gate, just in time. As the portal started closing, the monster that nearly killed Conan tried to step through. A large orange and blue gorilla-like demon, a barlgura, stuck its ugly head through the portal but was pushed back into the Gaping Maw from whence it came. The bones of Mara’s family were collected and a funeral was planned. She returned with the four heroes to the guild, but not before checking in on the unsung hero of this day, Bran Don the drunkard. He told them he fought off two large ape-like demons in the sewers and came out victorious. No one told him about the barlgura, but somehow he described them perfectly. Nothing to worry about here, I hope. Oh, well.