Radha Felflame: 12/1/22

 We reconvene, continuing our battle with the revenant, who has initiative, and who has already taken a total of 54 damage this battle.

The revenant, right up in Brace's face, ready to strike bellows menancingly, "to put him out of his misery is the worst blow of all".  A reference to Strahd, no doubt. Brace takes a large slashing hit from the revenant!  The revenant tries to slash Brace again but misses on the 2nd attempt.  If the revenant makes a clean hit next time, Brace will be done for.

Trieskan is watching the heat of the battle - about 10 feet from the revenant.  Trieskan, taking careful aim, looses a crossbow bolt at the fiend. With expert aim, and sneaking in some extra damage, Trieskan scores a direct hit on the foul monstrosity, who bellows in pain at the hit.

"Owwy!" it cries.

"What of all the lives and misery of the people of Barovia, what about them?", cries Brace.

Brace takes a clean shot at the revenant with his war pick, and causes the revenant a little bit of damage, also illuminating the revenant with a dim light for those within a five foot radius.  Brace's second attack causes a bit more damage to the evil lord.

Ezmerelda yells over to Brace, "move out of the way and give me a clear shot", firing some crossbow shots at the revenant.  Bolt 1 causes a moderate amount of damage.  Bolt 2 causes more-than-moderate damage.  Fantastic work out of her this round, two precision missle shots. Wow!

Ireena, still in pole vault action-pose mode, tries to impale the revenant. Unfortunately, she runs right by the revenant, cartoon-style. Pretty unimpressive followup to Ezmerelda.

Radha launches two purpley eldritch blasts at the revenant.  Each one juices the revenant for some hp-loss; the second blast more impressive than the first. Notably, each blast pushes the revenant a bit further out of the reach from Brace - about twenty feet.

"pretty good Radha!", some encouraging words from Uncle/DM Ed. Nice!

"You people always come here to fulfill your own desires", bellows the Revenant. "All you do is hurt! go back to where you came from and let the devil continue his suffering. I can't let you continue doing this!", rushing madly at Brace. Some impressive swordwork by the cursed soldier leads in one out of two successful sword strikes, though weaker than in the earlier round.

Trieskan sizes up the lay of the land and tries to reposition on the battlefield until the DM provides some useful tips on proper battlefield positioning. Something to keep in mind for next battle. In any event Trieskan launches some more bolts at the revenant. A couple healthy shots whiz thru the air. The shots cause the lifeforce to leave the revenant altogether and it collapses into the ground weakly, almost into dust.

The sound of battle dissipates immediately and the party is left with the stillness of the night and howling of the night.

Brace laments the passing of the bone daddy, and wishes the other bone daddies would join us in battle against the devil.

Radha goes over to the corpse to make sure bone daddy is truly gone. Nudging him with her boot causes the corpse to be crunched a bit. It seems the revenant is truly gone.  Trieskan goes over to check out the armor, hoping to gain some insight from analyzing the revenant's remains. The longsword is in pretty decent shape, given its age. There are some patches on the armor that Trieskan looks at. Looks like a puppy head with three lightning bolts below it. Trieskan takes all of them except one.

Ezmerelda is eager to find a place to camp out. She is weary without her wagon, and is worried that the party might have to take some refuge within the woods.

The team gathers their thoughts while making camp. The group thanks Ezmerelda for her help, promising her rich rewards at the end of the quest. Ezmerelda has a flask of an unknown beverage, which Ireena is extremely interested in sampling. Ireena drains a healthy amount of the delicious beverage.

"So this van richten guy," Ireena questions "Ezzy". You guys had a thing together eh?"

"I can assure you there's nothing like that at play here," Ezzy tartly responds.

Brace does the first watch, and Trieskan offers to do a watch. Radha flatly refuses to do a watch. How rude.

The mist has mostly disappeared after the long watch, with the tall gate about 30 feet away from where the party had rested. It's time to continue on. Reset all your HP and spells please.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Intermission~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The party works it way through the gate, as it slowly closes.

"There's no turning back now, even if the gates won't close. Strahd is trapped here, with us, and the light of Sylvanas"

The party hikes for a few hours, with nothing very eventful happening.

Ezzy stops the party. "If you look up there, there's a crossroad. There's a direct path directly to Castle Ravenloft, with the other pathway headed towards the Tser falls and the village of Barovia. If you have any special precautions or meta-gaming, please prepare now. For example, I'm going to cast detect magic"

Brace follows suit, using his divine sense and gets an immediate hit. The ping seems to be coming from close to the crossroads. The party considers whether it's wise to split up, and have Trieskan scout ahead to see if the path is clear. Ezzy offers to make the party, or Brace, invisble.


Trieskan stealths ahead. There's a carriage with two black draft horses on the road, in the direction of castle Ravenloft. The horses are standing perfectly still as if statues, but the horses do seem real. There is no other sounds but the howling winds of the mountains. Trieskan dashes back to the party and brings the party up to speed.

The party ponders the best course of action - speed or steatlh at getting down the path. Ezzy & Ireena decide on speed, starting to run down the path. Brace follows, with Trieskan and Radha bringing up the pack. We get to a cave area, as it starts to pour outside. It's a small cave, with bascially enough space for the whole party to take shelter. There's a little slapback as Brace "who's" and "ha's" into the cave.

After some time the rain has started to lighten up. Continuing down the path, the party travels another couple hours down the mountain path. Nothing glamorous here, just good old hiking down the trail, with Ezzy leading the trailblazing.

Ezzy mentions we are close to the Vistani. Brace fears that she will tell the Vistani that we are here. Brace informs Ezzy that we are soldiers of the one light and path and will make short work of her if she informs the Vistani of our location.

The party comes up to the bridge, the fateful bridge where Strahd battled the famous wizard ages ago. Ahead of us in the road is a body facedown in the middle of the road. Upon further inspection, the body is simply skeletal remains with a commoner's outfit. Radha feels around the body. Nothing notable here in her opinion. Ireena remembers that we saw this body last time we came through here. The party decides that it would be best to bury the ancient corpse by tossing it over the bridge. Brace leads the prayer, imploring Sylvanas to grant the corpse safe passage to the land of light. Brace and Trieskan misunderstand whether they are counting to three and tossing the body at three, or are tossing the corpse after three. Consequently, the botched corpse toss leads to total disintegration of the corpse into the mist of the waterfall.

Further down in the direction of the Tser pool and Vistani camp, there seems to be a procession of people marching in the grass headed towards the body of water where the pool drops into. They are colorfully clothed and marching pretty slowly.