Characters
Dario Diego Durant, swashbuckling swordsman
Ulu, the party's urska mom
Varro, a young snow elf bearing a magical sword
Johanna, lycan bard and fallen noble
Father Severin, a defrocked priest with a gobkin sidekick
Events
The characters arrived in Chancel, where they hoped to find and question Ratibor Bron--a man somehow connected to the machinations of Yavor Mikalek, who had betrayed their mercenary band. To that end, Cassie Mabcrowe let them use a flat she kept above an herbalist's shop. At the flat, they met Father Severin and his gobkin factotum Slink, who were to help them in their search.
One place that seemed a likely place to start was the Vagabond's Shield, a tavern frequented by mercenaries and sellswords. As they arrived, the barkeep was tossing a musician out the door with his accordion. He explained that the only thing that could help him when he had one of his headaches was music, but the ejected bard couldn't even hold a tune. Luckily, Johanna stepped up and performed a song that got them on the barkeep's good side. The barkeep knew of Ratibor as "the librarian" and was able to offer up the location where he seemed to be employed. They also learned that Ratibor had been hanging about the Vagabond's Shield, trying to recruit mercenaries for an "expedition."
At the library of the Divine Mercy, they found a nervous-looking monk who admitted to letting Ratibor conduct his researches among the stacks, even though Ratibor had been ex-communicated from the Church. Ratibor claimed to have been writing a manuscript on "unholy abominations." The monk allowed them to look at the two books Ratibor had spent the most time with: a collection of horror stories called The Opener of the Gate & Other Tales and A Treatise on Profane Magics. Both proved to be missing pages; the anthology was missing a story called "The Krusikan Gambit" and the treatise was missing a chapter on the mountain cults of Krusikal.
Then, over at the Chanticleer, a molly house, they learned quite a bit about Ratibor's sexual proclivities. The madame of the house also offered to buy Dario from the party. They declined.
The Chapel of St. Aiban the Pious was a more productive visit. The blind priest in attendance within the small, forgotten church admitted that Ratibor and his hired swords had ventured into the extensive crypts below--and had yet to return to the surface. He offered to admit them as well, which they took him up on.
However, these were no normal crypts--below the Chapel of St. Aiban was a vlaak Grail Tomb made of a strange, glass-like, but altogether alien material. Dario wisely left an offering of coins at the feet of the vlaakish statue they discovered in an alcove, which ensured it did not stalk them throughout the complex.
They had much more trouble with the colored doors within the Grail Tomb, as they missed the artwork that would have clued them in to how vlaakish color theory works. They did, nevertheless, find four color-coded keys around the necks of vlaakish mummies--though the order to apply them initially eluded the group, causing more than a few magical wounds through their trial and error attempts to figure it out, until Father Severin used his prayers to get a glimpse of the ancient vlaak using the keys as intended.
Also confounding were the jagged holes in the complex that either had air forcefully rushing into them or being pushed out of them like a vacuum. They threw a few levers they found in a control room, but what that accomplished was not immediately clear.
In one chamber, they found an eerie mural depicting vlaak forging metal gauntlets, then a vlaak figure wearing the gauntlets and commanding two orbs to unleash cataclysmic energies on an army. Behind the figure lurked an ominous presence. Within the same chamber they found a wooden box; the interior of the box looked to have been made to fit two glove-like objects.
The next room they entered featured another of the structural holes with air streaming into it. The chamber also featured a number of vlaak automatons made of the same glass-like substance as the complex; the statues attacked and gave the party a run for their money. Ulu threw one out of the hole, but because of the air current it was thrown back into the room where it shattered against the far wall--and the explosion of shrapnel set up a bad situation that almost cost Dario his life. Ultimately, though, the Charnel Hounds vanquished their foes and carried on exploring the Grail Tomb.
We'll see what else they find next time.