The Dream Palace (part 1)

Back in uniform, the squad headed to the Dreaming Palace, located in the Precipice Quarter, situated at the junction of quiet Osprey Lane and Sabaton Road, completed only a few months ago in preparation for the Radiant Festival.

They enter the hotel lobby, a large arched windows illuminate the elegantly polished floor and warm wooden furniture of the hotel’s reception area. Directly across from the stout main doors, double doors of bronze lattice are carved to resemble interwoven vines and offer tantalizing glimpses of a large chamber beyond. A few comfortable chairs surround a fireplace to the west, while to the east a long, tall counter encircles a small wooden door. Ralso is behind the desk.

Simi approached Ralso. "We should like to speak to Mister Pratchett, please?" 

"Mr Pratchett is away on hotel business. If you would like to leave a message..." responded Ralso.

"In that case, you will have to come with us" said Simi.

"You can't arrest me. I have committed no crime," objected Ralso.

"You mean aside from having fenced construction tools from missing patrons staying here," said Jorin.

Ralso

Ralso was handcuffed and searched, then taken back to a holding cell at the station. Jorin tries to turn her on Pratchett via interrogation, but she keeps her mouth shut. Jorin finds that she was wearing a Ring of Discretion, which concealed her armor and weapons.

Secured in a holding cell pending further charges, the squad returned to the hotel. In the cloak room they discovered a checked bag of foreign origin, a pair of control runes for traps (that Valcos fails to disarm), and several peep holes allowing users to spy on hotel rooms.

The party steps into the Grand Hall, which is dominated by a sweeping, bifurcated staircase which rises up from the northern end of this open space, splitting and curving to either side as it reaches the second floor. A huge portrait of a handsome half-elf man looms over the staircase. At the base of the stairs, the handrails end in marble pillars topped with statues, one of a crying angel and one of a laughing devil. Tiled corridors stretch off to the east and west, while bronze lattice doors lead south to the lobby.

Mrs. Honeywell

A little old lady named Mrs.Honeywell approaches and asks if the squad has seen Ralso. She is a guest staying in a room specially designed for shorter patrons. She is here for the festival, but has not seen other hotel guests. She seems quite besotted with Pratchett, however.

The squad begins checking ither rooms, starting with the the Primarch Suite. This spacious room has its own bathroom and large, curtained windows overlooking both a small decorative garden to the west and the quiet street to the south. A huge feather bed, a couch, a coffee table, and several chairs furnish the room, and large paintings of city landmarks such as the Starstone Cathedral and Azlanti Keep hang on the walls. This room is used for show as a sample of what the hotel has to offer. Nothing of interest was found.

Mrs. Honeywells room was looked at next. The ceiling in this well-appointed bedroom is only five feet high and covered in elaborate wooden molding carved to resemble leaves and branches. All of the furniture is half the usual size for humans, and low windows with pink curtains look out onto a small garden bed. Paintings of fruit bowls and assorted domestic scenes hang on the walls. Nothing of interest was found.

The bathroom for guests on this floor is a small, elegant chamber contains a privy seat, a basin in a waist-high pedestal, and a tub for bathing, each made of white porcelain and bearing a gleaming metal handle. A hidden door leads to a secret room with peep holes and a ladder which leads to a crawlspace over Honeywell's room. 

The Pirate Room was examined next. The windows along the walls of this bedroom are stylized to look like portholes. A large painting of a pirate ship hangs on one wall with portholes that show a tropical ocean scene. A large painting of a pirate ship hangs on one wall, and the wooden bed frame has been carved to resemble thick ropes and elaborate knots. A classic wooden pirate chest, straight out of a storybook, sits at the foot of the bed.

The pirate chest was a Mimic, which viciously attacked Valcos when he went to open it. The squad beat it into submission.

(The session ended here for the night)

The House of the Planes

The squad, having successfully fought their way through the Underground to the backdoor to the criminal hedonistic nightclub House of the Planes in search of Jeremin Hoff, the corrupt supplier of labor for city construction projects. Hoff is rarely away from the club, preferring to do business within the safety of its environs. Each room on the main floor is given a different theme and decor, with a different plane of the Outer Sphere. 

The squad climbed the stairs to the back entrance and entered via a concealed door into a pantry. The pantry led to the kitchen, where Simi blessed the food and Valcos ruined a cheese plate by stealing a nosh from the bottom. 

Pharasma Imitator

They entered the central room called the Boneyard, presided over by a staff member dressed as Pharasma, the goddess of death, to be "judged". The walls of this room have been painted with an endless field of gravestones under a black sky. Open archways along the walls lead to numerous other rooms. Pharasma was perched on a spiral-marked headstone in the room’s center next to an oversized stone sarcophagus filled with dirt.

The host of the room is a halfling fence associate of Valcos' named Leila Scandrabar. The challenge of the Boneyard is simple; one lays down in a grave and allows themselves to be buried alive. Jorin volunteers for the challenge, and afterward finds out from her that a half-orc rogue named Ralso has been bringing masonry tools and other personal belongings to sell.  

The squad remembers Ralso and her boss Hendrid Pratchett, the owner of Dreaming Palace, in their first case at the Tipsy Tango.

Cass Hamish

The next room is the Nirvana Room, run by Cass Hamish, a human assassin of the Garotte Sisterhood. The walls of this room were painted with rolling hills, pastoral forests, and floating temples. The tables, bar, and seats in the room were mostly carved to look like tree stumps and other natural phenomena, save for a raised stone dais in the center which has a squared-off surface inset with lit torches. The challenge of the room is to wrestle the bartender inside the fire circle. Simi defeats the bartender and learns from Hamish that Cass stalked a target who disappeared in the Dreaming Palace, where Ralso is the Concierge. 

Reginald Vancaskerkin
Publisher of the Eyes on Absalon

Next, the squad visited the Heaven Room, run by Reginald Vancaskerkin, who owns and operates Eyes on Absalom, a scandal-filled newspaper. The walls of this well-lit room were painted with blue skies and bright, fluffy clouds, except for the wall behind the bar, which portrays an enormous mountain. Waitstaff drift between the tables wearing revealing white robes and fake feathered wings. A one-foot-high round stone pedestal stands in one corner. The challenge of this room is to confess one's most scandalous sin. 

Valcos relates when he visited Lord Graniosh during his 40th birthday, and seduced and then stole the jewelry from Lord Grandiosh's wife... then his mistress...then his mother. He finished by producing the signet ring of Lord Grandiosh as a souvenir. 

Afterwards Reginald said that he has come to the conclusion that the disappearances must be a serial killer 

In the Elysium room, run by Ahmoset Nez, who makes a living procuring rare animals and items for discerning patrons.  Simi undertakes the challenge of the griffon, placing her head in the griffon's mouth. From Nez she learns that Nez has supplied Pratchett a large Ocre Jelly as a garbage disposal for the hotel. 

The griffon

In the next room, entitled Hell, the squad finds Jererimin Hoff. The challenge in this room is to undergo the torture of the Tian Xia Butterfly Boots. The Butterfly Boots involve lying down and putting one’s bare feet inside an apparatus of wooden boards. When an affixed rope is pulled, the boards rapidly close, painfully smacking the feet and ankles in a motion like the flapping of butterfly wings. Jorin lets himself be tortured for information, and finds out that the builder crew provided by Hoff for the Dragonfly Pagoda complained about their quarters and ended up staying at the Dream Palace.

Jeremin Hoff, Labor Organizer
(who is not related to Jimmy Hoffa)

In Abyss, run by Molly Crimson, a gnome madame, they find out that some of her streetwalkers have gone missing near the Dream Palace, after Jorin reach into the tos of the glass case with their bare hands and fish the bottle of brandy randy from a Woodsedge distillery surrounded by boreworms. 

In Abaddon, run by Lomo Dibashi, Pumpelly drinks from the disgusting Plague Chalice chalice. Dibashi related that his last job was an attempt to rob a new hotel in the Precipice Quarter called the Dreaming Palace. Almost as soon as he broke into one of the bedrooms, however, two statues in the room came to life and attacked him, and he barely escaped.  

In Maelstrom, Pumpelly takes a puff from the hookah containing the latest offering of a drug developed by Sharim and Halan Muzullah. They inform Pumpelly that Hendrid Pratchett has been aggressively buying soporifics and hallucinogens. 

In Axis, the party solves a riddle challenge and is told that Willifred Stoneburrow, a shady real estate mogul of the Argent Syndicate, sold the property for the Dreaming Palace to Pratchett. As part of the transaction, she saw some of his early architectural drawings, which struck her as eccentric and remarkably inefficient, with lots of extraneous chambers and nothing properly standardized.

After leaving the House of Planes, they report to Sgt. Rollo, who agrees that the next step is that they investigate the Dreaming palace and question Pratchett and Ralso.