Erudisia nods, convinced. “True.” She looks at her bookish companions and Rogi in his heavier wear. She has climbed worse with her sister, Exploratia, and she feels she may have more gymnastic training than any of her companions.
“I will follow you up, then we can pull the others up,” she suggests.
What was it with these women and putting their feet on him, Rogi wondered. Some men were into that, he wouldn't kink-shame, but his own preferences were diametrically opposed. He hated being used. Reluctantly, he nodded. "I'll help boost you but you'd better use the window sill as well."
This post has potentially manipulated dice roll results.
Meredith did her best to vault up off Rogi with the arrow between her teeth, giving Rogi a look to say she'd rather be climbing someone other than him as well....
And just misses the lip tumbling down onto Rogis head with a loud thud....
(N.B., I wrote, “This would take an acrobatics roll, DC 10, to manage the action without knocking into the armor.”)
One of Meredith’s hands slips off the dusty lip of the ceiling hatch, while the other holds on. Splaying her legs in the air to keep from falling off, she accidentally kicks the helmet off of the suit of armor beneath her and the helmet goes flying down the stairway, bouncing and tumbling with a clatter. (Unless someone can make a DEX save, DC 15 to catch it).
In any case, Meredith keeps her grip and pulls herself up and into the attic. Turning her lit arrow one way and then the other, she sees a long, open area with low beams overhead. The ceiling at its center is no more than six feet above the floor. Various furnishings are covered in tarps. Nothing moves.
Bell watched as Meredith almost made it up and came tumbling back down kicking the helmet off the armor; sending it off like a punted pig bladder. Reflexively, Bell threw up her hands to block the helmet from clobbering her in the head.
{game log} Dexterity Save: 13+2= 15
The Gods that protect the unwitting and the clumsy blessed the moment as Bell's hand somehow hooked into the helmet and kept it from bounding down the staircase like a church bell dropped from a steeple.
Eyes now huge saucers behind her lenses, Bell stares back and forth between the captured helmet sheathing her hand and her companions, Rogi and Meredith.
(I rolled a failed Dex Save but Kol Drake had already posted, so apologies.)
Erudisia watches Meredith almost make it, almost fall, almost fall somehow again, then somehow make it in, in a weird snarl of improbable and noisy acrobatic ability. The head of the inanimate suit of armor flies obligingly into Bell’s hands, before Erudisia has scarcely noted that one of Meredith’s moments half in and half out has caused her to kick it.
”Good catch.”
Erudisia prepares herself for the climb, planning her route. She notes Rogi’s stance, the implicit offer for her to step onto him so that he can aid her into the attic.
The half-elf has begun to be aware of just how often Rogi seems to make sure he is the one positioned to be used as stretching bar and foot stool. She pushes the suspicious thought down, nodding to him with a tight smile.
Lightly she jumps up and bounds into the attic hatch.
((Acrobatics 12 (15 total). Mark of Storm acrobatics feature: 3.))
(I rolled a failed Dex Save but Kol Drake had already posted, so apologies.)
Erudisia watches Meredith almost make it, almost fall, almost fall somehow again, then somehow make it in, in a weird snarl of improbable and noisy acrobatic ability. The head of the inanimate suit of armor flies obligingly into Bell’s hands, before Erudisia has scarcely noted that one of Meredith’s moments half in and half out has caused her to kick it.
”Good catch.”
Erudisia prepares herself for the climb, planning her route. She notes Rogi’s stance, the implicit offer for her to step onto him so that he can aid her into the attic.
The half-elf has begun to be aware of just how often Rogi seems to make sure he is the one positioned to be used as stretching bar and foot stool. She pushes the suspicious thought down, nodding to him with a tight smile.
Lightly she jumps up and bounds into the attic hatch.
((Acrobatics 12 (15 total). Mark of Storm acrobatics feature: 3.))
Erudisia makes it up into the attic with Meredith, and sees what Meredith sees.
(We can assume that with helping hands above and below, Bell soon joins the others if she wishes, without the need for a roll. Does she? What about Rogi?)
With some struggles and much help from above and below, Bell will climb up with the others. "Any one have some rope we could tie off and drop down to the armor suit? It might keep us from having to leap or drop back down later." She pushes her glasses back up on her nose as she looks around for anything that might be a good anchor to tie a rope to.
" I....I don't have any rope.", Meredith says apologetically to Bell, she then turns and quickly moves away to begin poking under coverings and inspecting furniture her arrow tucked behind her left ear.
Belllaughs nervously. "I did not come equipt for a dungeon crawl. I was expecting books and study so I have paper, ink and quills. I would trade it all for rope, hammer, pitons, and maybe a couple healing kits or potions." She looks about that attic as she steps away from the trapdoor 'floor hole'. Finding a clear spot out of the way from the others, Bell will draw a circle in the dust.
Sitting down in the circle and placing the helmet she had absentmindedly brought up with her, she will begin a ritual of hand motions and words as she invokes Detect Magic
(( it takes 11 minutes for the ritual so... go about your business in the meantime... ))
As Bell casts her ritual incantation, Erudisia and Meredith explore. The attic is stuffy, dark, and covered in a fine layer of dust. (All three: roll CON save DC10 to avoid sneezing). It is a single room with many vertical support beams holding up the low, slanted roof which extends along the same east-west axis — and to about the same distance — as the long hallway on the “ground floor.” Incidentally, with your shared arcane bent, thinking about the term “ground floor” in reference to this place — existing as it does in its own pocket dimension where gravity, light, and substance or lack thereof are all answers to an arcane bureaucratic request in the form of a permanent magic spell — may cause a certain flavor of vertigo.
Yet, putting such thoughts aside, under the tarps, you find a variety of antique furnishings, a few dusty rolled rugs and tapestries, and many framed paintings — not very well executed, juvenile — set on the floor in a corner, stacked on edge like a huge deck of cards on its side.
A bit of light coming from the western end of the attic eventually draws Meredith and Erudisia’s attention. Here, the floorboards are rather loose, and a knot in one board has fallen out, leaving a peephole. You can look through to a room immediately below this end of the attic.
It is mostly empty space and shadows below, lit as it is by a single dim lantern. But set against the western wall you spy a row of windowed cabinets filled with books.
Bell’s spellcasting draws to completion. When her sixth sense (detect magic) clicks in, the entire mansion — everything around her— now glows with an aura of conjuration. Well, not everything. Most of the covered furnishings, the paintings, and other sundry objects are mundane. But among the mundane objects at the eastern end of the attic, Bell senses that an old adventurer’s pack contains something magical. The pack bulges with various objects, including something flat and oblong: a book, perhaps, which gives off a potpourri “scent” of various arcane schools.
As Bellhad expected, everything 'glows' in the aura of magic since the building is in a pocket dimension. She is delighted when she can sense variations in the general 'wash' of magic.
After a few minutes of standing and letting it all 'come in', Bell slowly moved about the attic; passing the stacks and tarps. Reaching the eastern end of the attic, she sensed a 'difference' coming from what looked like a well used adventurer's pack. Carefully pulling the pack from the mound, Bell will take it closer to the trapdoor area and begin looking at what the pack might hold or be salvaged. The one item that must have triggered her 'sense' seems to be a book. Oblong and flat, it did not give off one particular 'scent' of a magical school but seemed to be a smörgåsbord of spells and schools. 'This requires further study. It may be a book Fistandia actually used in her adventures!'
Bell will carefully slip the book into her own pack and then go back to examining the other items in the adventurer's pack -- especially anything that might be of use in getting them back to Candlekeep -- or even climbing in and out of holes in the ceiling.
The volume is a spellbook, Bell knows. A wizard’s first spellbook, she might guess. The pack from which Bell removed it was set upon a small wooden chair, sized for a halfling or young human. Within the pack, in addition to the spellbook, Bell finds 50 feet of fine silken rope with a small spring-action grappling hook firmly tied at one end, an ink pen and old bottle of ink (dried out), a perfectly sharp knife in a comfortably worn leather sheath, and a well-used tinderbox.
Bell will spread out all the items -- minus the spellbook -- in display mode. "Looks like somebody used to be an adventurer of some sort and stored their old pack up here. Except for the dried up bottle of ink, it all seens to be in good shape. Even the pack itself is 'well worn' but useable."
She will tuck the helmet she accidentally dragged up into attic into the pack as she went back to doing a 'sense' of the attic area.
Following Bell’s examination of the objects, there is nothing else of interest in the attic, other than the peephole I already mentioned that Meredith and Erudisia discovered in the floor at the western end of the attic.
Rogi:
Fifteen minutes have passed, during which you have remained on the landing near the trapdoor. You now hear a sound drifting from somewhere downstairs. A noise like a whisk whipping a bowl of eggs. It stops after a few moments, leaving silence for a dozen heartbeats, except for the sound of your companions in the attic whispering softly and boards creaking quietly under their feet. Then the whisking sound starts up again, and along with it, a very tiny voice…singing?
"If nothing else, seeing what is in the attic might just keep 'a surprise' from visiting later?" Bell whispered to Erudisia.
"And what if the attic is an alternate way back to Candlekeep? We have to keep all options open, don't we?"
Erudisia nods, convinced. “True.” She looks at her bookish companions and Rogi in his heavier wear. She has climbed worse with her sister, Exploratia, and she feels she may have more gymnastic training than any of her companions.
“I will follow you up, then we can pull the others up,” she suggests.
What was it with these women and putting their feet on him, Rogi wondered. Some men were into that, he wouldn't kink-shame, but his own preferences were diametrically opposed. He hated being used. Reluctantly, he nodded. "I'll help boost you but you'd better use the window sill as well."
"As an aspiring artificer, Rogi, maybe you should invent a collapsable ladder that fits in a backpack," Bell smiles as she helps any way she can.
Meredith did her best to vault up off Rogi with the arrow between her teeth, giving Rogi a look to say she'd rather be climbing someone other than him as well....
Acrobatics- 19
And just misses the lip tumbling down onto Rogis head with a loud thud....
She points to Erudisia, " Your turn............ow......."
(N.B., I wrote, “This would take an acrobatics roll, DC 10, to manage the action without knocking into the armor.”)
One of Meredith’s hands slips off the dusty lip of the ceiling hatch, while the other holds on. Splaying her legs in the air to keep from falling off, she accidentally kicks the helmet off of the suit of armor beneath her and the helmet goes flying down the stairway, bouncing and tumbling with a clatter. (Unless someone can make a DEX save, DC 15 to catch it).
In any case, Meredith keeps her grip and pulls herself up and into the attic. Turning her lit arrow one way and then the other, she sees a long, open area with low beams overhead. The ceiling at its center is no more than six feet above the floor. Various furnishings are covered in tarps. Nothing moves.
DM for Candlekeep Mysteries // Dev Hornd in Curious Critters // Eclipse Faraway in Gallows Dancer
Bell watched as Meredith almost made it up and came tumbling back down kicking the helmet off the armor; sending it off like a punted pig bladder. Reflexively, Bell threw up her hands to block the helmet from clobbering her in the head.
{game log} Dexterity Save: 13+2= 15
The Gods that protect the unwitting and the clumsy blessed the moment as Bell's hand somehow hooked into the helmet and kept it from bounding down the staircase like a church bell dropped from a steeple.
Eyes now huge saucers behind her lenses, Bell stares back and forth between the captured helmet sheathing her hand and her companions, Rogi and Meredith.
(I rolled a failed Dex Save but Kol Drake had already posted, so apologies.)
Erudisia watches Meredith almost make it, almost fall, almost fall somehow again, then somehow make it in, in a weird snarl of improbable and noisy acrobatic ability. The head of the inanimate suit of armor flies obligingly into Bell’s hands, before Erudisia has scarcely noted that one of Meredith’s moments half in and half out has caused her to kick it.
”Good catch.”
Erudisia prepares herself for the climb, planning her route. She notes Rogi’s stance, the implicit offer for her to step onto him so that he can aid her into the attic.
The half-elf has begun to be aware of just how often Rogi seems to make sure he is the one positioned to be used as stretching bar and foot stool. She pushes the suspicious thought down, nodding to him with a tight smile.
Lightly she jumps up and bounds into the attic hatch.
((Acrobatics 12 (15 total). Mark of Storm acrobatics feature: 3.))
Meredith crooks an eyebrow at Erudisia as she lands in the attic, " You should definitely go first next time."
She lays down flat and dangles an arm out to try and assist the others up her eyes meet Bells apologetically....
Erudisia makes it up into the attic with Meredith, and sees what Meredith sees.
(We can assume that with helping hands above and below, Bell soon joins the others if she wishes, without the need for a roll. Does she? What about Rogi?)
DM for Candlekeep Mysteries // Dev Hornd in Curious Critters // Eclipse Faraway in Gallows Dancer
With some struggles and much help from above and below, Bell will climb up with the others. "Any one have some rope we could tie off and drop down to the armor suit? It might keep us from having to leap or drop back down later." She pushes her glasses back up on her nose as she looks around for anything that might be a good anchor to tie a rope to.
" I....I don't have any rope.", Meredith says apologetically to Bell, she then turns and quickly moves away to begin poking under coverings and inspecting furniture her arrow tucked behind her left ear.
Bell laughs nervously. "I did not come equipt for a dungeon crawl. I was expecting books and study so I have paper, ink and quills. I would trade it all for rope, hammer, pitons, and maybe a couple healing kits or potions." She looks about that attic as she steps away from the trapdoor 'floor hole'. Finding a clear spot out of the way from the others, Bell will draw a circle in the dust.
Sitting down in the circle and placing the helmet she had absentmindedly brought up with her, she will begin a ritual of hand motions and words as she invokes Detect Magic
(( it takes 11 minutes for the ritual so... go about your business in the meantime... ))
As Bell casts her ritual incantation, Erudisia and Meredith explore. The attic is stuffy, dark, and covered in a fine layer of dust. (All three: roll CON save DC10 to avoid sneezing). It is a single room with many vertical support beams holding up the low, slanted roof which extends along the same east-west axis — and to about the same distance — as the long hallway on the “ground floor.” Incidentally, with your shared arcane bent, thinking about the term “ground floor” in reference to this place — existing as it does in its own pocket dimension where gravity, light, and substance or lack thereof are all answers to an arcane bureaucratic request in the form of a permanent magic spell — may cause a certain flavor of vertigo.
Yet, putting such thoughts aside, under the tarps, you find a variety of antique furnishings, a few dusty rolled rugs and tapestries, and many framed paintings — not very well executed, juvenile — set on the floor in a corner, stacked on edge like a huge deck of cards on its side.
A bit of light coming from the western end of the attic eventually draws Meredith and Erudisia’s attention. Here, the floorboards are rather loose, and a knot in one board has fallen out, leaving a peephole. You can look through to a room immediately below this end of the attic.
It is mostly empty space and shadows below, lit as it is by a single dim lantern. But set against the western wall you spy a row of windowed cabinets filled with books.
Bell’s spellcasting draws to completion. When her sixth sense (detect magic) clicks in, the entire mansion — everything around her— now glows with an aura of conjuration. Well, not everything. Most of the covered furnishings, the paintings, and other sundry objects are mundane. But among the mundane objects at the eastern end of the attic, Bell senses that an old adventurer’s pack contains something magical. The pack bulges with various objects, including something flat and oblong: a book, perhaps, which gives off a potpourri “scent” of various arcane schools.
DM for Candlekeep Mysteries // Dev Hornd in Curious Critters // Eclipse Faraway in Gallows Dancer
{game log} CON: 8+2= 10
As Bell had expected, everything 'glows' in the aura of magic since the building is in a pocket dimension. She is delighted when she can sense variations in the general 'wash' of magic.
After a few minutes of standing and letting it all 'come in', Bell slowly moved about the attic; passing the stacks and tarps. Reaching the eastern end of the attic, she sensed a 'difference' coming from what looked like a well used adventurer's pack. Carefully pulling the pack from the mound, Bell will take it closer to the trapdoor area and begin looking at what the pack might hold or be salvaged. The one item that must have triggered her 'sense' seems to be a book. Oblong and flat, it did not give off one particular 'scent' of a magical school but seemed to be a smörgåsbord of spells and schools. 'This requires further study. It may be a book Fistandia actually used in her adventures!'
Bell will carefully slip the book into her own pack and then go back to examining the other items in the adventurer's pack -- especially anything that might be of use in getting them back to Candlekeep -- or even climbing in and out of holes in the ceiling.
The volume is a spellbook, Bell knows. A wizard’s first spellbook, she might guess. The pack from which Bell removed it was set upon a small wooden chair, sized for a halfling or young human. Within the pack, in addition to the spellbook, Bell finds 50 feet of fine silken rope with a small spring-action grappling hook firmly tied at one end, an ink pen and old bottle of ink (dried out), a perfectly sharp knife in a comfortably worn leather sheath, and a well-used tinderbox.
DM for Candlekeep Mysteries // Dev Hornd in Curious Critters // Eclipse Faraway in Gallows Dancer
Bell will spread out all the items -- minus the spellbook -- in display mode. "Looks like somebody used to be an adventurer of some sort and stored their old pack up here. Except for the dried up bottle of ink, it all seens to be in good shape. Even the pack itself is 'well worn' but useable."
She will tuck the helmet she accidentally dragged up into attic into the pack as she went back to doing a 'sense' of the attic area.
Following Bell’s examination of the objects, there is nothing else of interest in the attic, other than the peephole I already mentioned that Meredith and Erudisia discovered in the floor at the western end of the attic.
Rogi:
Fifteen minutes have passed, during which you have remained on the landing near the trapdoor. You now hear a sound drifting from somewhere downstairs. A noise like a whisk whipping a bowl of eggs. It stops after a few moments, leaving silence for a dozen heartbeats, except for the sound of your companions in the attic whispering softly and boards creaking quietly under their feet. Then the whisking sound starts up again, and along with it, a very tiny voice…singing?
DM for Candlekeep Mysteries // Dev Hornd in Curious Critters // Eclipse Faraway in Gallows Dancer