Twelfth Session (12 page pdf), “Mansion of Shadows, Part II” – The PCs hang out with a Chelish noble family for a while, and witness depths of degeneration that make even hardened criminals from Riddleport uncomfortable. After a long night of sneaking around the mansion and fleeing from horrid things, they lure the eldest son out to the forest and whack him.
[Note: spoilers for Mansion of Shadows, a Green Ronin d20 adventure]
Our Pathfinder campaign, Reavers on the Seas of Fate, continues in good spirits as our fledgling pirates continue their infiltration of the Staufen family manor. I haven’t had to change the adventure a whole lot from the Green Ronin original; “demented devil worshipping noble family” drops right into Golarion’s Cheliax without a second thought. In fact, the players are already speculating on both the Asmodeus worship and “seven sins” ancient Thassilonian elements, both of which came along in the original!
The players definitely found the mansion super creepy. The best parts were:
- The hugely fat naked freak eating nonstop in the kitchen. My impression of it picking up its battleaxe and giving them the hairy eyeball even as it continued to munch on a leg of mutton, and that later when it was sleeping it was sleep-gnawing on the same mutton, made quite an impression. But they were most disturbed when they found out it was female (Leanor Staufen).
- Serpent being too nosy and ending up running around Three Stooges style fleeing from one devil after another in the mansion at night, even tossing himself down a staircase to escape more quickly. “Woowoowoowoowoo!”
- Sindawe seducing Amalinda Staufen in the catacombs under the temple to Asmodeus, and after she put out the candle, he started to realize that her cadaverous body was horribly similar to a lot of the preserved corpses in the room. He got so nervous that he lit a sunrod and passed it off as “Oh, I just wanted to be able to look at you.”
Rules note, Serpent had to spend an Infamy Point to stop Jack from getting away. The PCs didn’t really coordinate ahead of time and so when Serpent decided to attack Erich it caused enough confusion that Jack rode off on his horse, which would have been pretty much a scenario-derailer – if they couldn’t find a way back into the mansion then the pirate attack would pretty much be a non-starter. But Serpent coughed up an Infamy Point so I rolled a random encounter and said “His horse got disabled by a… dire badger… so you’re able to catch up to him.” So in the end it worked out fine.
Next time in Mansion of Shadows, Part III – both a mass combat and a naval battle! I’m working on rules for both to make them fun and not onerous.
Geek Related 
Oh, and great work to Paul on taking up session summary duty!
They figured out the seven deadly sin tie-in with the siblings pretty quickly but it was entertaining as they tried to figure out who was what and some players don’t remember all the sins offhand. “Uh, so far we have lust, gluttony, pride, prejudice, sarcasm, and hot interracial action… Which one are we missing?”