In which our friends speak to the unquiet dead, find an ally, and face the master of Schloss von Reuter.
The night before Sunday, October 7th
Eyes in the night
Armed and armoured, and their horses and cart packed, the adventurers were ready to escape Schloss von Reuter.
Suddenly they spied something in the forest: pairs of tiny red pinpricks shining between the trees, dozens or maybe hundreds of them. The forest seemed to be holding its breath. In the mansion behind them, there was a light in a window upstairs in the main hall building, and in another in the southern wing.
The tombs
The adventurers moved north to examine the low stone buildings to the side of the house – they did, indeed, turn out to be a group of tombs. Aenlinn tried to open the door of the smallest, neatest tomb, and the whole door fell off. Inside was a small coffin, containing the tiny skeletal remains of a child of perhaps two.
They circled around the tombs, examining their exteriors first. A couple of them had inscriptions over the door: “Sven Feuerschild / At last, an end to sorrows / 2394-2468”, read one of the newer ones; on the largest and grandest tomb the writing said, “Helga Feuerschild / 2407-2443 / Mother, wife, beloved”.
With some difficulty, Aenlinn managed to force open the door to Helga’s tomb. It was lavishly decorated inside, with ornate figures on the walls, but now mould was everywhere and the smell was choking. A solitary coffin sat on a raised marble plinth; the fittings and hinges had rusted away. Aenlinn examined the coffin and found a female skeleton and a nice little silver mirror; Kethe searched around the burial chamber but found nothing special.
The restless dead
Sven Feuerschild’s tomb was sealed, and Wernhart and Aenlinn barely succeed in forcing the door open with their joined strength. In the unadorned burial chamber inside, the adventurers saw a stone shelf with a sturdy black wooden coffin… but then something shimmers in the air, and a translucent ghostly form of a bearded, one-eyed man faded into view sitting on the shelf next to the grave.
“Vermin,” the apparition spat out in a hollow voice and rose up. “So the old man has sent more of his spawn to torment us. Come on, then…” He drew an equally ghostly sword and rushed forward, ignoring Kethe’s cries that “We’re not with him!” and slashed at Aenlinn. The sword went right through her; the ghost, roaring in frustration, continued slashing around and cursing them.
“You have robbed her grave!” he yelled; the adventurers realised he must be sensing the mirror they took from Helga’s coffin. Kethe sprinted back to Helga’s tomb with the mirror and returned it to its place. Finally, the ghost calmed down somewhat and stopped swinging its sword, but it was still visibly angry.
“Well, if you’re not here to rob us,” muttered the ghost, “what are you doing here then?”
Kethe explained that they had been lured here, believing they were helping a wounded man. The ghost – who was Sven Feuerschild – told them in return how he could hear the screams of Konstantin von Reuter’s victims and feel the wicked forces pulsating from the house, and that Konstantin stole his brother Karl’s body from its tomb and hid something valuable in there. He also asked the adventurers to take the remains of his wife and daughter and bury them somewhere better, not this unholy place. Sven’s own body didn’t need to be moved – “I will not have it said that I ran away from anything, even in death” – but he didn’t want to risk the souls of his wife and children being trapped within Konstantin’s reach.
If the adventurers could put a stop to Konstantin’s plans – whatever they were – he would also be grateful. He wished he could help the adventurers face Konstantin, his “brute of a son and harpy of a daughter,” but he was bound to his tomb and couldn’t leave it.
The last tomb
Unlike the others, Karl Feuerschild’s unmarked tomb was fitted with a proper lock. Marike rubbed a weakening ointment on the lock and, with an extended bout of blunt force, the adventurers managed to break open the door. In the musty tomb inside, they found a coffin marked with the coat of arms of the house von Reuter. In the coffin was what appeared to be the corpse of Gustav von Reuter, the man they tried to “save”. The body was wrapped in a shiny silvered chain.
As they removed the chain from the body, the same cold feeling as in the attic came over them again, and Gustav’s ghost appeared at the foot of the coffin.
“Thank you, my friends,” he said in a hollow whisper. “By unshackling my body, you have weakened my father’s spell on me, if only briefly. I grieve that I should have been used to lure you to my father’s house, just as he lured all those poor souls for whom I could do nothing.
My time is short, so I will be as brief as I dare. My father, Konstantin von Reuter, wants to use you for his… experiments. He used me too, and I did not survive. Neither will you. He bound my soul in a body he built and forced me to go out and lure travelers like you to his house.
Father’s spell means I remember less and less… but I do know you will never escape through the woods, as long as Father still commands the things that infest them. You must find another way… or face father and end him. I can help you no more, but… maybe one of my siblings can… but whatever you do, don’t trust Jonathan. That much I remember…”
The ghostly shape began to fade away again and soon he was completely gone. Who the hell is Jonathan? the adventurers asked themselves. Were there more siblings?
Going exploring
Creeping back to the main courtyard, the adventurers began their exploration with the southern wing, which held the gatehouse. The ground floor held nothing of much interest – a brewhouse, a storage room, privies – so they continued upstairs to the second.
The stairs led up to a hallway with several doors, one of them decorated with runes and arcane symbols, most prominently a pair of pentagrams and a stylized pointing hand. The door had no handle, with no obvious way to open it.
After some more wandering, they found stairs up to the attic and a short wood-paneled corridor – lit by lanterns on the walls – ending at a door with several heavy iron bolts holding it in place. Behind the door they heard a faint scraping sound and then a man’s voice, hoarse and faint.
“Is anyone there? I am begging you, help me… for the sake of the Five, help me!”
“Who’s there?” Kethe asked.
“My name is Jonathan von Reuter,” replied the voice. “They’ve locked me in here!”
Aenlinn asked why he’d been locked up; he just replied that “they’ve said I’m sick… but I’m not sick, just alone and imprisoned…” The adventurers looked at each other and decided to follow Gustav’s warning and leave Jonathan in his prison.
Returning to the second floor, they caught a glimpse of a light moving through the house but then disappearing again – someone walking around with a lantern?
* * *
There was no obvious way to get through the mysterious door that seemed to lead to the one room with the light, so the adventurers crept back down to the courtyard and proceeded to the great hall – where they were received last night – and up to the landing Konstantin’s daughters came down from; they’d seen lights in a couple of windows there as well.
On the landing were a couple of doors; from beyond one of them they faintly heard a child’s voice singing. They stopped and listened; it sounded like little cousin Elena, singing a nursery rhyme slightly off-key:
There was a crooked man
who walked a crooked mile
He found a crooked shilling
upon a crooked stile
He bought a crooked cat
that caught a crooked mouse
And they all lived together in a little crooked house
The adventurers decided to leave Elena alone for now and approached the other, silent, door. Not completely silent, actually; as they approached they heard quiet sobs from within. They opened without knocking and went straight in. Inside, they found a large but cold and drafty room, with fine but old and worn furniture and one of the window panes broken. Anya von Reuter, Konstantin’s eldest daughter, sat on the bed with her head down but looked up as they entered and stared in surprise at the adventurers, her eyes red and puffy from crying.
“You… you’re alive?”
“Yes,” said Kethe, “thanks to Gustav.”
“Is Konstantin really your father?” Aenlinn asked.
“He is, but that will do me little good. He was Gustav’s father too.” Anya started crying again and told the adventurers how her father intended to use them as test subjects for his experiments; he had lured several other travellers here before to the same end. “If you can get me out of here… may I come with you? I want to help you with whatever I can.”
Unfortunately, Anya didn’t know any good way to get out of here – her father didn’t trust her with secrets. Her sister Mina might know how to escape, but she liked it here and was probably happy to stay. Anya admitted there was something strange about cousin Elena – her father came home with her one day and she is “all cold”. Kethe quietly reminded the others of Gotthard Kepler‘s maid Fiona, who then turned into a daemon.
The adventurers gently pumped Anya for whatever she could tell them about her family in general:
- Mina loathed her and probably wouldn’t be sorry to see her go away for good. Despite being her father’s favourite, she seemed to see Anya as a threat, maybe because Anya was older?
- Their mother Sanne was completely cowed by Konstantin. “She was always kind to us… but she did nothing to save Gustav.”
- Sebastian was also loyal to his father, but not that interested in his arts – he wanted to be a knight.
- They never talked about Jonathan. Anya did remember him being very fond of setting things on fire.
The adventurers began discussing how to go about confronting Konstantin directly. Anya, aghast, tried to warn them of how dangerous her father was, but Aenlinn and Kethe were pretty confident they’d dealt with more dangerous villains than him before. It turned out Anya did know how to get into her father’s study – she’d quietly observed him open the door. You had to trace your fingers along the two pentagrams in specific directions simultaneously; Anya helped Marike draw a sketch of the pentagrams and finger tracing necessary. Anya said her father was probably in his study right now – he had one of his bedrooms right next to it.
* * *
Anya quickly packed a bag and accompanied the adventurers downstairs; they stayed with her until she was safe with Courage and the cart and horses in the stable, then they snuck back to the south wing and up the stairs. Aenlinn loaded her crossbow and walked up the study door.
The fight in the study
As she followed the instructions, the door clicked and slid open. A familiar voice bellowed: “WHO DARES?”
Konstantin von Reuter was sitting behind a desk in a study cluttered with unsavoury taxidermy beasts and what appeared to be chemically preserved human corpses in glass cabinets.
“You!” said Konstantin darkly, rising as the adventurers stepped into the room. “I see you have rejected my hospitality. But then, you’re not familiar with… ” At that point he was interrupted by Aenlinn, not in the mood to be monologued at by a serial killer, pulling the trigger and burying a crossbow bolt to the fletchings in his stomach. Staggering backwards with a gurgle, he shouted “You do not understand!” and then called out some sort of command word before collapsing to the floor, bleeding heavily. The huge taxidermied bear in the corner started moving, soon followed by the corpses breaking out of their glass cases, shuffling towards the adventurers.
The fight was on. Kethe missed the now prone Konstantin with a pistol shot; Marike also missed the bear with a bottle of alchemical fire, setting fire to part of the floor instead. Aenlinn dropped her crossbow, got out her sword and shield, and with a mighty slash straight through its pelvis managed to cleave one of the walking dead into two wriggling, crawling halves.
As the adventurers were struggling against the undead and the embalmed bear, a door opened and Konstantin’s wife Sanne ran in, screaming in despair. “Murderers!” she screamed upon seeing her dying husband on the floor. The adventurers ignored her and continue fighting Konstantin’s creations; they managed to bring down the bear and another of the walking dead.
And indeed, the remaining undead suddenly stopped and then collapsed into a stinking mess on the floor. Konstantin had ceased moving by now; perhaps his life energy was needed to keep his creations going?
The aftermath
Sanne was utterly hysterical, crying and screaming. Kethe tried slapping her, which only calmed her down marginally; they had to tie her up to make sure she didn’t hurt them or herself.
The adventurers then quickly searched the study. Lying open on the desk was a book of necromantic spells; surely very valuable but also very illegal to possess. Marike found a number of bottles of alchemical elixirs, which she stuffed into her bag to examine later. Wernhart also picked up a small book of short biographies of “Necromancers and Magicians of Ill Repute”, illustrated with macabre woodcuts. It had, among other things, chapters on Imperial Baroness Dagmar von Wittgenstein and on Heinrich Kemmler, the Lichemaster of Nuln.
On the bookshelves, they also found several titles they recognised from the libraries of Dagmar and her descendant Margrethe von Wittgenstein, about alchemical necromancy and transformations.
* * *
Then they started thinking about what to do next. What were they going to do about the rest of the family? Sanne obviously couldn’t take care or herself; she needed to be taken somewhere to be looked after. That might or might not be true for Anya as well. They couldn’t just leave Jonathan here, either. And what to do about little Elena, who might not even be a real child? This adventure might not be quite over after all…
The Enemy Within: Remixed 
I really like your reworking of Carrion Crawl – I liked the concept of the original adventure, but hated all the “you can’t map the house” railroady nonsense (and the infinite number of undead wolves). Your take looks much better. (And I love the map you used!)
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Glad to hear it! I’m not sure how much my players would have actually noticed the difference if I’d run it more straight (they didn’t call my bluff on the wolves, for instance), but it was definitely more fun to play and run it this way.
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