With the morning spent on consultations (and payouts!) with your patron, you hurry across the fields just outside of Tegel Village, hoping to reach the manor before the grey mists thicken uncomfortably.

As before, Tegel Manor stands on a flat plateau overlooking the sea and the surrounding lands. With the exception of a few clutches of windswept and leafless trees, only the sturdy wooden walls and brick façades of the manor break the harsh winds blowing from the east. The age of the structure is apparent on first glance, but only a few cracks and fallen bricks are readily apparent. Strangely enough, most of the narrow windows are still intact. It has stood for eight hundred years and might stand for eight hundred more.

A walkway, inlaid with brick and cobblestones, leads up to a courtyard before manor. Two withered trees and two statues stand guard next to a horse-tie station. One statue is of a female Viking warrior; the other is a halfling-headed troll with its arms outstretched.

Before the gates to the manor, the three corpses still molder, slumped against the wall by the outside door, possibly former heroes as they still bear rusty arms and wear torn and rotten leather capes.

Any hope of finding the good butler back at his post is dashed after you pass through the arched gates and into the Grand Foyer; he is still gone, gone on a booze hunt.

With the Torture Chambers easily and conveniently accessed from the foyer (even if the butler is not), the guests reach the Room of Fear before even Brant has started to think of his next drink. Within the room, the painting is still on the wall, still showing a representation of the room with an X (where the stash with the bag of gems had been). Nothing else about the room has changed; the tables remain looted of their valuables.
This message was last edited by the GM at 23:22, Wed 11 Jan 2023.

Brant takes great pains to remove the painting without looking too closely at. He sets it face down on the floor while he looks for a sheet, curtain or other fabric with which to cover it. Once covered, he hoists it up and waits for direction to their next objective.

Using the various pieces of scrap wood from the broken chairs and tables from the Great Hall, we will fashion a crude but protective box around the Fear painting, to protect it for transport on our return trip to the Inn.  We’ll leave it in the Fear room until we head back.  That will take a few hours.

While a few of us are doing that, the rest of the group can retrieve the quills and ink vials from the coffin desk in the Office and the blood-stained broken mobile from the Nursery.

Does anyone else know if we’ve seen any “murder” weapons in our past rooms that might be of interest to Shadrach? Anything else from the Torture Chamber or Prison Cells (across hall from the Room of Fear)?

As Cassandra plots out her scheme for the day's retrievals, Brant moves to accomplish the first of them: the painting of the Room of Fear in that same room.

After some awkward maneuvering so as to do something without entirely seeing what he's doing, he unhooks the painting from the wall and places it face down on the floor so that he can look at it without it looking back at him. The room does happen to have a heavy tablecloth, perfect for his purpose. As he's gathering it into his arms, he hears gasps of fear from those around him. Chilled, he turns around to look at the wall that had been formerly graced by the painting. A blackness has started to billow forth from the space it had inhabited behind the painting. In no more than an instant, it has assumed the fullness of its shadowy self and flows forth to attack.

Shadows have an AC 7 and can only by hit by magical weapons (not silvered ones).
They turn as Type 4 undead.
All are considered to be engaged with the shadow.
You may act first.

10:53, Today: The Host rolled 5,5 using d6,d6.  Init: Guests/Residents.

Since Ornwin has no magical weapons, he looks on with frustration, murmuring a heartfelt brief prayer to the dwarven gods.

Seeing the shadow creature, Brant curses himself for not magicking his sword first.
"Well, hell."
He puts himself between the shadow and the party in hopes someone will turn or blast this thing back to the abyss it came from.

Since this was a party someone else had set up, Archonia just followed along, looking at things with an appraising eye. She rather wanted to have a good look to see what the painting looked like, but perhaps that could be something to do when they dropped it off with the storytellee.

With the shadows appearing, she frowned. If only she had listened more carefully to those stories, the wisdom in them might have helped her decipher the riddle of the magic missile spell. But as it is, with sleep in memory, and no magic weapon, there was nothing she could do to harm them. So she tried to stay out of the way, moving to a place she could have good visibility of the show.