Session 14 (Rats, loads of rats)
They entered through the manhole into one of the larger sewers with dry-ish walkway not far from where a narrower sewer lead northward towards the ghost house. A few yards into that tunnel they just about spotted a beartrap submerged right where a subtly different coloured brick was set into the wall. Cautioned by this the next couple of dozen yards where spent painstakingly searching for further traps (in the map in foundry I used a teleport to skip between the first trap in the centre of the map and the second traps the lower right corner. Everything in the top half is at an angle for a better fit)) A second beartrap was found, also hidden submerged. Again a discoloured brick was the marker for it. Presumably this is how the cultists entered and left the ghost house without being seen. At the end of the sewer tunnel, under the manhole cover they had seen from outside, there used to be a slightly wider room. They had seen a similar place under the first manhole cover they opened, which looked like a collection room where multiple smaller tubes entered from different directions and from a larger opening a bit higher up fresh water cascaded down to flush the sewage collected in this room further down the sewer network.
In this case an even smaller tunnel had been dug above the waterline, keeping it dry and presumably leading to the ghost house cellar.
With two up front, the mage in between and one guarding the back they carefully crept closer. Soon they could hear hundreds of little feet and high pitched squeaking in front of them. And behind them. They entered the trap set by Baltram (LINK)
The 3 swarms of rats in front of the heroes were controlled by him, summoned as the rats child hordes (in total 82 rats after Ishan killed a few last night) while the swarm of rats behind them were actually him: Baltram had turned his body into rats and in that form he had followed the heroes underground for quite a while now, finally trapping them.
Ishan and Savertin fought valiantly against the 3 swarms ahead, while Aurelian cast an Armatrutz on himself, something that would let them survive in the end. Halvar turned around to face the last swarm he didn’t know was Baltram and activated his witch‘s claws. Aurelians best spell, the fulminictus, targets only individual creatures, but using the Ignifaxius he did some collateral damage and after each hit a swarm would disperse for a while, fearful of the fire. One of the 3 swarms broke through to Aurelian, but where rats a masters to exploit gaps in any armor, the magical armor of the Armatrutz proved to have no gaps. Only lucky hits penetrated Aurelians armor while the other heroes were slowly bleeding to death from numerous rat bites.
Behind the Baltram-swarm of rats a cultist named Krima had sneaked up to the fight and took aim for the well lit mage from the shadows. Luckily the shot went wide and alerted the heroes that someone was behind them in the darkness. Finally a target for Aurelians Fulminictus, if he could just see her. Both him and Halvar ran with the light toward her while she was frantically trying to reload her crossbow before she was exposed. Meanwhile she was slowly retreating further into the darkness until she almost bumped into the second beartrap, trying to remain outside the light. Eventually Aurelian got a glimpse of her and the Fulminictus almost killed her. She then died because she had fallen backwards, unconscious, into the bear trap just behind her. By that time Savertin also lay dying , followed by Halvar and finally Ishan, all reaching Pain IV (At this point consequently the rats should have easily nibbled away the last few hitpoints of the fallen heroes)
This resulted in a stalemate as the rats couldn’t really harm Aurelian much and he couldn’t harm the rats much further, almost running out of astral energy.
At this point i talked to the players if they preferred to have the heroes die here or wanted the cultists to let them flee.
They chose the later and i wrapped up this mini campaign here:
The rat swarms retreated and with his last astral energy Aurelian healed two of his fallen comrades just enough so they could carry the other one to the temple of Peraine, where their wounds were taken care of.
While they were recuperating the nosy informant Alrik was found as a last message to make them leave town and never come back.
I might restart this campaign with a new set of heroes at a later time but the group is currently running different adventures I am not writing up.
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