Lisport Manor: ​Lisport Manor

Main Floor: Foyer

The huge oaken doors creak loudly as you pull them open. Light shines in through the open doors into a dark foyer. Eight yards down a smaller pair of arched doors lead deeper into the manor; just beyond the short foyer, a hallway leads left and right to each wing.

Drawing Room

(Morning: Sunlight streams in through the front window.)

The piano in the southeast corner is almost never there. Melody brought it in when she hid in the vault, and it stayed there until Erisu began luring people in to feed his hunger for despair. He did this to Eldred. He tried to do it to their great grandfather, Meril Alegar I, but Meril I was too frightened to play. Erisu summoned a shadow to strangle Meril I before he could let the secret out. When the characters arrive the piano will be flipped to the vault side. Erisu (as Melody) plays the piano incessantly, looking for the right melody. It has long since left off recognizable melodies and plays harsh, discordant tunes which are faintly discernable around Melody’s ghost.

If they get to the drawing room before Erisu is aware of them, the piano will be in the vault. As soon as Erisu realizes that someone is in the house, it will knock Eldred’s body off of the piano bench. Five minutes later, the piano will flip back to the drawing room. Whenthe piano is in the drawing room, the wall near the piano will appear much less faded than the rest of the room: it hasn’t been in the sun nearly as much.

If Erisu discovers that Meril is Eldred’s brother, it will raise Eldred’s body as a walking corpse. It will do so before returning the piano to the drawing room. If Erisu has already returned the piano to the drawing room, Erisu will return it to the vault when no one is looking, to ensure that he has a life-like Eldred when Meril enters.

If Erisu finds out that they have a missal full of songs, especially if it finds out that the missal was the Courlander family missal, it will almost certainly begin plotting to kill the characters. If it can’t safely do so, then it won’t, but it would be nice if no living person knew that Melody Lisport was still alive and had exited the vault. It will use summoned creatures first, as it can act scared at first and hide behind the big strong fighter.

Main Floor: Chapel

Two thin oaken doors rise into an arch, and over the arch are engraved the words “Marching to Zion”.

The doors open to an empty room; sunlight streams in a multitude of beams through shuttered windows illuminating a marble altar in the east end of the room.

Empty of anything worthwhile. Sunlight and moonlight shine through the empty windows. But the stone altar is still there. The family still uses this chapel for important ceremonies, such as marriages.

The top of the altar is marked with the ancient symbols “alpha” and “omega”, which is common for altars.

There is a small closet, empty, underneath the stairs.

Main Floor: Great Hall

(Evening: The great old hall is brilliantly lit by the afternoon/evening sun.) It is over thirty feet to the ceiling, decorated with vines and circles. About twenty feet up, a balcony and railing runs along the north and east.

Dining Room

(Evening: Light streams in from several windows.) Through the windows you can see a green garden, its hedges still trimmed after all these years.

Main Floor: Scullery

This area is more of a wide alcove off of a hallway than a room of its own. A thin pair of double doors leads to the outside. You can see a small ramshackle building with a stone chimney, partially crumbled, through the wide window next to the door. A long stone countertop runs along the north wall beneath the window. A small wooden door in the southwest corner lies ajar, but all that escapes is darkness.

The small ramshackle building is the kitchen. All wood except for the oven and chimney, it has not survived as well as the manor. Much of the roof has fallen in on the single-room building. It’s about twenty feet by thirty feet, and about forty feet from the side of the manor house.

Scullery stairs and cellars

This cramped, three-foot-wide stairway leads down into a dry, cool room covered in cobwebs ancient and new. Dust rises from the dirt floor as you step from the stairs into the room. The walls to your left are hard clay. The walls to your right and forward are wood, with thick beams going from the ceiling into the grey floor. A few dried husks of ancient roots lie scattered amidst fallen shelves. Dry wooden doors stand partially open to your right and forward.

Parts of the cellar have been cleared away, and if they look before they trample it they’ll see that someone was here recently. Eldred looked around for a secret vault here in the basement, but didn’t find anything. It’s typical of Eldred that he didn’t close the door behind him when he left.

There are three rooms down here, each separated by wooden walls. They enter the main room, which was for grains, oft-needed vegetables, and fruits. Off to the right is the wine cellar. Forward is the root cellar. The main room and the wine cellar are each about ten by twelve feet. The far room is more of a large closet at five by seven feet. Only a few dried husks of ancient roots remain, and they’re on the floor amidst the torn-down wood shelves.

The wine cellar is empty. Meril will know that all of the wine left after the war was brought to Fork.

The main stairs

You climb the ancient marble stairs. The high morning sun shines brightly into your face. You are momentarily blind as you round the corner away from the sun…

If they are climbing the stairs behind the Great Hall, and the first character makes a Perception roll, they’ll notice an old scribbling on the wall.

…but something captures your attention to your left. Something is there, a pattern on the wall, scratched in dust and faint with time. As your eyes adjust to the light, it coalesces into form. Behind the dust and years, you barely make out one word: “despair”.

Otherwise, they’ll just see the upstairs.

…until a long iron railing fades into view overlooking the tiled and marbled ballroom you just walked across a few minutes ago.

Don’t worry if no one notices the writing, Melody will be emphasizing it in blood later on.

Washstand area

Birds, disturbed by your presence, fly through the window and up the stairs, out of sight.

Erisu’s shadow

If Erisu hasn’t had the shadow move yet, it will be in the storage spaces here, and will act autonomously. It will tend not to attack groups, but if anyone lags behind it is likely to attack them, and then flit away as soon as assistance arrives. It will avoid sorcerors and people with magical weapons to the best of its ability to perceive them. However, don’t forget that it has magic resistance 1. There is a 1 in 20 chance that magic will simply not work around it.

Outer Walkway and roof

On either side of the attic, slightly hidden doors open out to the outer walkway. The railing of the walkway is the gargoyles and angels visible from the front of the house. This thin walkway makes a perfect place for the shadow to ambush a lone intruder.

There are also ladders to the roof on either side of the walkway.

North stairs (Elizabeth Mardel’s study)

The narrow stairs creak loudly as you step slowly up into the high room. Paint flakes from dry wood on the stairs and wall. You hear the fluttering of birds roused by your presence, and as you reach the landing you see them escaping the rafters into a small alcove to the north. Shelves line the walls, and light shines through from the alcove.

The birds are flying out of the window, but the window isn’t immediately visible from their vantage.

The rafters

Birds live in the rafters, and spiders, bees, and mice. There is dust everywhere along the beams, and nests of all kinds in the nooks and crannies where beam meets beam and beam meets wall.

The solved Erisu ritual

In the rafters of Elizabeth Mardel’s study is the solved version of the Erisu ritual. She had it in her hands when she died, and a bird brought it up into a nest. A character who looks at the rafters can make a Perception roll to see a piece of paper in a nest. Anyone who actually climbs into the rafters and looks will find it.

The paper is old and cracked with age. There’s a magic circle, and a sigil of some kind in one of the corners. Scrawled in faded, wide ink is “M back corn”, but the “n” trails off as long as the rest of the letters combined.

Aunt Elizabeth Mardel's rooms

The Mardels were a magical family of minor repute, and Elizabeth Mardel maintained that tradition. Ostensibly, Aunt Mardel’s room is small, a perfect spinster’s attic room. There is very little indication that she was a sorceress. Aunt Mardel’s magical library and laboratory are in a hidden part of the upper floor, created as a permanent lost corner.

Elizabeth Mardel was aware that there was a shadow over the family, but was unaware of the source. She has extensive notes on demonology as well as spell notes. See ELIZABETH MARDEL'S NOTES in the appendix.

Someone doing a close examination of the walls might notice that the northwest corner is in better shape than the rest of the walls.

In the northwest corner the paint runs in a thin unbroken line from ceiling to floor, where all around it is chipped and flaked.

That’s because the northwest corner is the entrance to Elizabeth’s lost corner. The trigger to entering it is to back into it. This is the meaning of Elizabeth’s scrawled message to her sister on the solved Erisu ritual.

If they don’t have those clues, it is unlikely that they’ll figure out how to enter the room, and that’s fine. Entering this room gives them a lot of information, but it isn’t necessary. That said, leaning against a corner is not a totally uncommon thing to do. If the characters hold long conversations in Elizabeth’s bedroom, give the bored ones a chance, depending on the situation, to lean against the northwestern corner. If they do, they’ll need to make an Evasion roll or fall backwards into the room. They’ll fall fully into the room—there is no half in/half out of a lost corner.

To those watching them, especially as they’re likely to be watching them only tangentially , it will look like the falling character has fallen down three stories, except that the corner should have been in the way.

If the character makes their Evasion roll, they’ll be momentarily off-balance and realize that there’s nothing there behind them.

Elizabeth’s Lost Corner

There is a writing table against the wall, and a bookshelf next to it. The walls of this small room are stone embedded in hard clay. A strong light permeates the room, illuminating the papers on the table next to pen and ink that appear as if they were left yesterday.

The room is eight feet square. There is an ink blot on the paper just below the writing pen.

Leaving the room is easy—there is no lock on leaving this lost corner like there is in the drawing room. They just need to walk into the southeast corner of the magical laboratory; they can leave whether they walk into it backwards or not.

The papers on the table are Elizabeth Mardel’s demonology notes. They are open to a page of word after word, Elizabeth’s attempt to decipher the anagrams on the Erisu ritual. Both the paper and the ink on the table is dry.

Her bookshelf contains her earlier notes from 1881-1891, Aaron Courlander’s letters, and several books. Suggested books:

1. Lawrence Bisson’s The Residual Auras of Human Writing

2. John Isaacs’s Metaphysical Magic

3. Michael Berkman’s The Mathematics of Temple Architecture

4. Kenworth Shirley’s Divine Ratios of Geometry

5. Herbal Lore of the Celts

6. The Biblical Remembrance of Oren Thomas

7. Strange Tales for Dark Nights

Strange Tales provides useful information about demons couched in allegory and parable. As a mojo resource, it has a rating of 5.

South stairs (Male retinue)

The narrow stairs creak loudly as you step slowly up into the high room. Paint flakes from dry wood on the stairs and wall. You hear the fluttering of birds roused by your presence, and as you reach the landing you hear them flying away through the rafters.