Record of Encino War: Session 1

So I've been running Mall Rats with some friends, playing through my interpretation of the D&D 5e module CURSE OF STRAHD. I'm gonna try to write up play reports from now on, but here's the first session off of notes and memory.

The Encino Shopping Arcade

CAST:

Sir Roland Byrne - A Roller Knight of the Knights of Hawthorne, dresses in an oversized suit and wears a hair-shaped helmet

El Mosco - A mosquito/vampire themed Lichador.

Scrunky - A Scrapmaster who is pretty scrunky.

George - A Big Monkey with a big heart, and also a gun.

Four Scavengers

have just left a mall in Burbank. This mall - like all others - was abandoned after the economic/paranormal crash of 2000, and they had hoped it - like many others - would contain riches worth overcoming the unpredictable dangers within. A long day of searching had resulted in little to show, however, so now they rest in the parking lot IHOP and prepare to head back to the more civilized parts of the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

Suddenly, the room goes black. The lights had been flickering before, but it wasn't too hard to see by the evening light coming through the windows. But now it was pitch black, darker than the darkest corners of Spencer's.

Seconds later, the lights come back on, steadier now and illuminating a different IHOP. The layout of the room is different. The floor is cleaner - although still a bit dusty - and the tables and chairs all intact. Off-white bricks cover the other side of every window, as well as the glass front doors. And standing in front of the table are two children.

The players entered in room 0.

The children introduce themselves as Rose (the older sister) and Thorn (the younger brother). They insist that there's a monster deeper in the "house" but don't provide much other information.

The players begin to explore the IHOP. They first enter a room (1) with a circle of chairs around a "rug" made of paper placemats. Moving the rug aside, they discover a large loose tile, although they cannot lift it fully as it seems to be stuck on something. As this room is a dead end, they explore the other way.

The next room (2) contains various paintings, all solid burgundy. Closer inspection reveals that whatever the paintings had previously contained had been crudely spray-painted over with the new color.

Continuing, the players entered a room (3) with bookcases and store shelves, most containing records but some containing books. They find a key on a record player, and a secret room behind one of the shelves. The secret room contains the corpse of what appeared to be a fellow scavenger, and a desk. The scavenger had opened a trapped drawer on the desk, and been nicked by a spring-loaded, poisoned knife. The desk contained a few occult items, some cans of soda (which work like potions and haven't been used yet), an Experience Token, and a phone+answering machine containing a message:

"Hey now, this is Count Zarovich. I'd just like to say, uh, I'm not here to save ya. I'm not gonna make you live forever. You uh, you said you were cursed, and what with all the uh human sacrifice and so on - I agree honey. But I don't wanna save you from it, no sir, I think it's better this way. Anyways, stop calling me, you're filling up my answering machine. Thanks baby."

The players then went into the kitchen (4), where a mannequin dressed in an IHOP uniform was standing in front of the stove. The mannequin insisted that the players get out, as they had many orders to fill. The mannequin was clearly not cooking anything. Quickly, Sir Roland Byrne insisted that it should not chase out the health inspector, and so convinced the mannequin to let them investigate further (although it was confident they would find no health violations).

The next room (5) was a storage room. Shelves were pushed to the side to make way for three mattresses, and in the corner the ghost of a young woman stood over a cardboard box filled with blankets. The woman insisted no-one approached the baby, "Walter", but otherwise mostly just cried. The party left her alone. They discovered the freezer (6) was locked by the key they found earlier, and opened it. Inside were two skeletons, evidently of the children from earlier, as well as some toys and a placemat.

(Here, the "real" ghosts of the children would appear when the party approached the toys or the skeletons, with the previous apparitions being "fake" ghosts. This was taken directly from the module, and was overcomplicated, there really didn't need to be two sets of the same ghosts. Then I described the room assuming the party was looking in from the doorway, but they left because there didn't seem to be anything really interesting to interact with in the room - and there wasn't, really, until they interacted with something uninteresting. Basically I should have definitely had the ghosts appear sooner - right after describing the room perhaps - and possibly just removed the first encounter with the ghosts.)

The party - having seemingly explored every room, goes back to that loose tile in room 1. El Mosco wedges a chair (or some other long object, but I think it was a chair) under the tile and then does a flip onto it, breaking open the trap door to the basement (secret room off of 12).

Heading down the stairs, they find themselves on the other side of another shelf/secret door. Strange chanting seemed to echo throughout this entire floor. Opening that reveals an alcove/shrine, an effigy wearing a glowing purple coat, rock albums placed at its feet, and currently being tended to by an emaciated, corpselike man in a tattered suit.

The man - surprised by the party's entrance - scurries up a wall, into a dark spot between the many pipes covering the ceiling, then a voice echoes in everyone's head. "Approach the likeness of our Dark Master only in deference and submission!"

After some examining of the room, Scrunky does not approach the likeness of their Dark Master with nearly enough deference or submission, and the man drops down from the ceiling wielding a amulet of dark magic that let him redirect injury, and a sharpened rib. After several members of the group took some fair injuries, George shot the man dead in cold blood, and his magic amulet was taken.

With its defender out of the way Scrunky was free to take the glowing coat, which had no effects other than glowing but did have an experience token in the pocket.

 Exploring the other rooms, they found room 10 had stairs down. The chanting grew louder that way. Rooms 11 and 8 were simply pipe-filled hallways, with 8 containing a stairway up to a secret room (7) that could be accessed through the refrigerator in the kitchen (the party poked their head through and informed the mannequin that they were still inspecting healths). Room 9 had a table set for 9 to play Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition, as well as 8 costumes to match.

The group then headed down a floor (13), to a room containing four objects sitting on cardboard boxes: a KISS tee, a Digimon virtual pet device, a laserdisc of Nightmare On Elm Street, and a left hand in a glass jar.

Room 15's door was a padlocked gate so the group first went to 14, whose three alcoves each had a set of handcuffs hanging from a pipe. A skeleton in black robes sat beneath one set of handcuffs.

With nothing left but room 15, Scrunky fashioned a lockpick out of gunk and scraps, then opened the door. However, they got a poor result on their roll to make the tool and chose, "Making the tool takes longer than expected or attracts unwanted attention," resulting in the chanting - very close now - stopping by the time they finished picking the lock.

Room 15 contained a red pentacle on the floor with a disemboweled raccoon in the center, a box covered in a white sheet (which was, upon removal of the sheet, revealed a hi-fi tape deck), and a large mound covered in multiple sheets.

When the party crossed the pentacle to approach the large mound, seven ghosts wearing blood-red robes appeared, beginning to chant but quickly noticing Scrunky in their purple glowing coat. The Ghosts were excited that the Dark Lord Count Zarovich had finally appeared to them, and offered to show their visitors Lorghoth the Consuming.

The ghosts awoke Lorghoth the Consuming - a chattering mound constructed of hundreds of glued and stitched together Furbies, who didn't care that Scrunky was dressed like the Dark Lord and preferred to focus on the torch that El Mosco immediately threw at it. The ghosts vanished at the start of this conflict.

The fight went fairly quick, with the group getting a solid head start on Lorghoth and dealing a good amount of damage to it. I could have made Lorgoth more threatening.

With Lorgoth's last chirp, the House was now nearly silent. They went to leave the room - after taking two Experience Tokens in the racoon's entrails - only to find that several of the doorways now had swinging ghostly axes threatening passage through them. This last risk wasn't too bad, with Sir Roland Byrne sliding under each axe with style and panache, and everyone else managing.

Making it back to the beginning, they found that the front door now opened into a strange room made of stacked tables, with a nearby Level Up vending machine where they could cash in their Experience Tokens, and the session ended.