Hello everyone!

This is the third installment of the series of stories that feature the Dracula macrocosm that I created a while back. If you’re unsure where to start, I highly suggest starting with [the first installment].

But, let’s start off with the crew manifesto as always!

My side:

 

 

My SO Niky’s side:

 

 

This entry will be quite a lot shorter as we tried a different approach in recording our session via audio while I jotted down some notes on major events, took screenshots, and the like. However, as the program crashed when I pressed stop on the recording, we lost the entire thing. So, this is essentially a reduced account of the next step of our journal with very little dialogue. In hindsight, none of us felt this method was any better because we all missed having the chat log as our memory backup.

So, without further delay…

When we woke up in the house ruins, we were all stiff, cold, and clammy. When we all filtered out through the front door, we were met with the sort of blue-grey lid of clouds that tells you that a day is going to be a slog to get through. Sasha wasted no time in calling the two remaining horses that we had left. However, only one of them returned and it was the one that had the long scar on its side.

Meanwhile he was singing to get the horses back, the rest of us were inspecting the carriage which had seen some action because some bits were broken or chewed on. It really was impossible to tell at that point. But our gear, the tent and the holy water all seemed more or less intact. Sasha grabbed some of my toolkit to tend to the horse and after a few minutes, it was looking a lot happier.

I also want to mention that my session notes said, “Puppet showed up, everybody hates him, which was entirely OK.” None of us can remember said puppet or what it did as I’m editing this document. Still, I want to make it clear that if there ever is a puppet in the future in this adventure, it’ll probably be that asshole.

After that, Circe and Andrei combined their strength and resilience as they repaired the bits of the cart that were broken. One of the wheels had lost a spoke and the seat where the driver was about to sit (basically a long plank), had to be reinforced as well. At this point, we’d fired up our table top game engine and laid out a simple layout of the cart and everyone in it. Everyone being crammed into the cart was less than ideal, but we made it work.

As we started down the road, Sasha and Kay were keeping a lookout in front while Andrei kept a close eye from the rear portion of the cart. Soon enough though, we started seeing flora and fauna, some grassy hills, some seagulls shrieking overhead and some creatures that were skittering about the mounds of grass.

Sasha though, spotted a strange creature that looked like a big lizard that was staring at us from the top of a hill. What rattled him (and us when he told us) was that the lizard had two empty eye sockets. As he pointed it out, Kay readied her crossbow and aimed at the creature to let it know she meant business. Yet for as far as it could, it followed us, staring at us in that creepy way that meant that it could absolutely see us despite not having any eyes. Then as we started veering away from it, Sasha shuddered as he saw the eyes of the lizard come crawling up its back as they settled into its eye-sockets. When the eyes had fully settled, it nodded at him and smiled in an unnerving way before it quickly scampered out of view.

Meanwhile, we were having a hushed conversation about different things as the cart now was heading out towards a coast line where a big, brine-smelling ocean greeted us. While the right road offered a lush set of bushes and a tree here and there, the left portion of the road was just a steep transition to craggy cliffs that went straight down to the minimal ocean shore below.

It wasn’t until we started to smell the fresh sea air that we all realized that the air had been kind of murky around us ever since we’d left the necropolis. After some discussion, we all agreed that the explanation was perhaps that it’d just been the smell of all those half-rotted corpses and old tombs that had lingered around the general area.

Suddenly, Sasha stopped the cart as both he and Kay noticed what looked like a deformed skull among a pile of bones in the distance. Andrei, being the courageous one, got off the cart and moved closer to inspect it. However, as its anatomy failed to mean anything to him, he called Sasha over to take a closer look at it. We all froze up when Sasha confirmed that this was, indeed, the skull of a child.

Finding nothing else, they both turned around and started walking towards the cart again, when a chattering sound coming from behind caused them to freeze. As they slowly turned around towards it, they saw the skull had now turned its head somehow and it was staring at them while grinding its small, crooked teeth.

While I don’t remember much of the dialogue, I do remember Andrei exclaiming a loud “oh HELL no,” as he blasted it with fire. However, maybe perhaps to the surprise, he somehow missed.

But the skull’s fate was still sealed as Kay ran up to it, stabbed it through the top of the head, and then used her sword to hurl it against the nearest big stone where it shattered. After that, we all got back on the cart and pressed on; clearly, this world wasn’t going to give us a break.

A while later, still following the side of the ocean, we came upon a small island that for some reason caught our interest. But, as we had no way of getting over there, we first sent down The Hand (Circe’s familiar) who didn’t find much of anything. Then Dhum made a few passes but cawed in defiance when Kay asked him to land. Clearly, he wasn’t much of a fan of the idea.

Rather than press our luck this time, we opted to leave the mysterious island alone as we pressed on further. The road soon started veering off towards the inland and in the distance, we could now see the daunting castle of Dracula. Sasha stopped the cart for a bit and we all got out to look at it.

While we’d expected a decently sized castle, this one seemed incredibly large to the point where it looked like a decently sized town. I nodded as I told the others that this was probably in line with the practices at the time as castles were usually small towns, in and by themselves.

Getting back into the cart, we were soon heading into a deep lush forested area where big trees and bushes were obscuring the view in all directions but forward. Remembering our first session, we all kept a lookout in every direction we could while Dhum was busy flying around scouting to find anything.

As we got deeper into the forest, Dhum flew back down and settled in the cart on Kay’s shoulder and she gave him a sip of water to quench his thirst. As she was giving him some snacks and a much needed head scratching, we all started hearing yipping and cutesy little howls.

Except as we all knew, there was absolutely nothing cute about anything in this world. When Sasha spotted several furred creatures blocking the way, we decided that it’d be probably better to stay and fight than to try and risk the remaining horse we had. The ensuing battle was a quick, but bloody one as what looked like miniature werewolves were attacking us and then quickly retreating into the bushes where we couldn’t see or follow them. Eventually, we got most of them (some escaped), but we were still in for a nasty surprise as a bigger werewolf showed up and started tearing into some of us.

After a long and annoyingly protracted battle, we finally got the better of him. But as you can see above in our tabletop view, we had to surround him and keep the pressure up until he had no strength left. After he was defeated, the remaining small “werewolflets” as we called them, scattered in all directions.

Circe, having a particularly gruesome idea, severed the wolf’s head and presented it to me while bowing and saying, “for you, my lord.”

I told her to knock it off. But, after some deliberation, we decided to nail it to the side of the cart and hope that it’d scare off any other such predators. (And for the rest of the trip, it seemed to do just that.) During the remainder of the daily trip, we had a very nonsensical and intense discussion of what to name the werewolflets. In the end, to nobody’s satisfaction, we settled on the name used now. I think that if Sir Hammerlock would have been there, he would have been proud of us.

Eventually though, we reached the end of the forested areas and started seeing (and unfortunately also smelling) the fetid swamps that marked the final stretch we would have to traverse before coming to the castle proper. As it was getting late both in and outside the world, we all decided to pitch our tent among a bend in the road that had big rocks arranged in a semi-circle. But more on that in the next segment which deals with the swamp, the lake and our entry into the castle grounds.

As always, I’m your chronicler.

– Wondrous Fairy