The Characters
Doctor Pendleton Torst, a sinister surgeon and anatomist
Dalton Thayer, an explorer who collects rare specimens
Countess Catarina Redmoore, a young and mysterious widow
After learning the location of the Church's "secret weapon," Pendleton, Catarina, and Dalton all set about researching it in hopes of learning how it might best be dealt with. One avenue of inquiry indicated that the Ultimatum might be an artifact from the Church's early days of spreading the faith by force. Long thought legendary, the Ultimatum was an object contained in an ark that was brought to offending pagan cities and let loose--where it inevitably caused a reign of bloodshed.
Other research postulated that the Ultimatum's madness-inducing effects were slow acting; prolonged proximity to the artifact was required and its effects wore off quickly once someone was out of the scope of its maddening aura (1). The group agreed that it was best to destroy the item or otherwise remove it from the Church's hands. Belle Silvra agreed and outfitted them with a ship that would take them to the Monastery of Pont de Rais.
The monastery proved to be a former fortress repurposed as a leper colony and place of spiritual contemplation. The isle's pier was mostly made of new wood; clearly, someone had made recent repairs. Waves crashed on shore and the calls of seagulls were nearly deafening. A path wound up the black pebble beach, disappearing into the stone archway of the monastery's surrounding wall.
Passing through the monastery's courtyard, the group got a better sense of the structure. The monastery itself was a small fortress of foreboding gray stone. Attached to the monastery was a belltower. Surrounding it at the front was what was once a garden capable of providing for the residents meals, but it showed signs of becoming overgrown and untended. The monastery's front door wouldn't open; it appeared to be barricaded from within rather than locked. Also, the group noted dried bloodstains on the stones directly in front of the door (2).
The window to the dining hall was broken, so they used it as an entryway into the monastery. Inside, they discovered wrecked furniture, broken dishes, and more dried bloodstains. As they explored, they found more signs of violence within. In the monastery's scriptorium, they found sheets of parchment scrawled with "I saw the angel in the marble, and I carved until I set him free." The madness brought on by the presence of the Ultimatum had been unleashed within the Monastery of Pont de Rais just as it had aboard Captain Laurant's ship.
On the second floor of the monastery, they found a strange set-up in an isolated chamber. A stone basin, its sides decorated with religious motifs, sat below a round mirror that had been suspended from the ceiling (3). Water was poured into the basin and immediately a face formed in the mirror above the water. The face possessed a fierce androgynous beauty and piercing green eyes. The being's mannerisms were strange; it referenced being "carved free." When asked if it was an angel, it replied, "Of course. I am a child of the Word and the Light."
Fearing that they had just freed the Ultimatum, the party made their way to the bell tower, where they found the figure they had been conversing with dusting chucks of marble from its radiant white clothes. Stone shards lay strewn at its feet where it had burst forth from the block of marble in which it had lain dormant. Speaking to the angel proved ineffective; the group soon found themselves ducking and parrying the angel's expert sword blows (4).
The angel's skin was supernaturally tough, rendering it difficult to wound. Pendleton took a savage gash from the angel's sword, and luck alone prevented Catarina from being pierced through. Pendleton began to trim the wick of one of his bombs in hopes that this desperate measure would bring the angel down, but Dalton managed to duck under the angel's sword swing and sever the angel's head. In death, the angel became a thing of shattered stone (5).
After the angel's fall, the group did a cursory exploration of the rest of the monastery. They found a pile of stinking corpses that looked to have torn each other to pieces in a fit of insane rage. They also found a bolt hole full of hiding lepers, but they quickly closed that and let them cower in peace (6). Satisfied that they had destroyed the Church's secret weapon and saved Lachryma from immediate reprisals, they returned to their ship and reported their triumph to Belle Silvra (7).
Notes
(1) - Each player rolled a different skill here: Academics, Occult, and Research. I gave them each a different piece of information based on their level of success, which I think added up nicely to a fairly complete picture of the Ultimatum's true nature.
(2) - The bloody footprints they found here belonged to Church agents who came to check on the Ultimatum and found that its influence had caused the monastery's leprous inhabitants to turn on each other. The thing that Captain Laurant didn't tell them last time is that something similar had happened on her ship as well.
(3) - Using the basin and the mirror was the key to either unleashing the angel from the block of marble that "imprisoned it" or re-encasing it into its marble shroud. Unfortunately for the players, they found the basin and mirror before they discovered warnings about what it was or instruction on how to use it!
(4) - Once unleashed, the angel's solitary motivation is meting out violence. There's nothing they could have said to stay its hand. To be divine is to be merciless.
(5) - The bomb idea was potentially a good one, but also carried a risk of blowing up the characters or at least destroying the tower they were standing within.
(6) - Nobody really wants to mess with lepers.
(7) - I confess, I think the map I used for the monastery let me down a bit. There were other cool, interesting things to find there, but the "flow" didn't really put those things in front of the players easily enough.
