A disembodied head appeared beside the party, whispered "I've got food for you," and vanished into the mist. Without hesitation, Anar declared: "Let's follow the floating head. What could possibly go wrong?" The entire party agreed. This is how adventurers die — and exactly how this adventure began.
Penelope had been watching from the doorway as a suit of animated armor pounded Puck into the floor. Enough was enough. She wild-shaped into a 400-pound brown bear and charged. Rolling an 18 and a 19 to hit, she tore through enchanted steel with claws and teeth. The armor that had seemed so terrifying moments before was reduced to scattered scrap metal in seconds.
While his companions fought for their lives against animated armor, Anar was in the kitchen filling his wineskins. When he finally emerged, it was with a sword in one hand and a wine bottle in the other — drinking from the bottle as wine ran down his chin and into his beard. He threw the half-empty bottle at the red-hot armor, causing it to crack and splinter from the sudden cooling. Then he drove his sword home with a devastating Dreadful Strike. Anar the Woodsman: ranger, warrior, sommelier.
Orimene had watched her previous party die inside this mansion. She'd been the sole survivor, traumatized and hiding by a campfire when these strangers found her. Now, facing the same kind of enchanted horror that had killed her friends, she rolled a natural 20 on True Strike. Radiant energy blazed through her staff as she slammed it into the animated armor. "This is for Elra!" she screamed. It wasn't just damage — it was catharsis.
The second suit of armor was barely holding together — one arm had already fallen off, its helmet was twisted and crumpled, cracks spider-webbed across the breastplate. Puck, who had taken 14 damage from these things and been knocked flat on his face, stood up, looked at the shambling wreck, and cast Vicious Mockery: "You think you're tough now?" Six points of psychic damage. The helmet collapsed into the chest cavity. The armor folded like a tin can. Sometimes words hurt more than swords.
The lights drained from the kitchen. Cold zipped up every spine. From the corner of the room, a shadow peeled itself from the darkness and lunged. A dark hand stabbed Orimene — the same person who'd already lost everything to this mansion. Eight damage. And the wound refused to heal. Not with spells. Not with medicine. Not with rest. The shadow retreated as quickly as it had appeared, leaving only the mark and a terrible question: what was it, and when would it come back?
When Orimene spoke the command word at the mansion's exterior, every window within earshot flew open simultaneously. For a brief, glorious moment it seemed like the ultimate cheat code. Then the windowsills began to mutate — growing, pulsing, warping into something organic. Mouths formed in the frames. The party watched in horror as the mansion's architecture responded to the word like a living thing. Convenience always comes with a price.
At the top of the third floor, behind a locked door, two voices spoke in perfect unison — lispy, repetitive, like something from a nightmare. Puck tried to steal the book with Mage Hand. The figure snapped her fingers and dispelled it instantly. When the door opened, they found not an enemy but an ally: a human wizard, transformed and cursed, desperately trying to undo what her friend Markos had done. "He's not dead. That's why we're in the position we're in. Look at me." She handed them the key to stopping everything — and begged them not to kill the man responsible.