Thank you for joining us at this event! Here is a plot debrief for anyone who missed out on Sunday morning...
Guests arrived at Spirit Springs through an interplanar portal for many and varied reasons (rest, healing, research, religion, and some even by accident!) and from many different lands. However, the promised 'spa retreat' was not as they anticipated. Greeted by the grumpy receptionist, Mirabella, they found the spa to be run down and very short on treatments.
Not long after their arrival, the guests were greeted by an assortment of monks of the Great Divide, the holy order which runs the monastery at Spirit Springs where the spa is located. The Head of the Order, Abbot Yannis, with his faithful right-hand woman, Sister Lysara the Vaultkeeper, led everyone in the monks' frequent ceremony to the Great Divide, where bottles of a mysterious substance that the monks claimed (or even believed) to be the 'holy water' of the Springs was offered up. Although the monks seemed wholly satisfied with the ceremony, by the morning the substance had turned sludgy and polluted.
Later in the evening, some of the guests met the Head Ratcatcher, who was there to offer up a reward to anyone who could help him to keep on top of Spirit Springs's terrible rodent problem. He provided them with a handbook of somewhat dubious rat facts, including a communication guide to lure the rats (icky icky squeeeeeak?). The guests soon set to their ratcatching task, with some success, although the rats they found seemed to be whispering fragmented riddles to them.
A Necromancer called the Pale Steward was visiting Spirit Springs in an attempt to track down a mirror he'd been commissioned to provide to Abbot Yannis years before, so that he could use the mirror to prove his abilities to the Higher Necromancers on his home plane, and get out of his menial work creating zombie labourers for local agriculture. Yannis believed the necromantic mirror could help him communicate with his forefathers - but as it didn't do this, he'd cast it away. The Pale Steward had come back at the behest of an inventor called Malanost, also situated at Spirit Springs, who himself had a vested interest in the mirror.
Some guests discovered that their affinity for the dead allowed them to see and communicate with a spirit called Bollow who had been tied to Spirit Springs for some time. The Inventor Malanost who had been situated at the monastery for a while (to the monks' delight given his wealth) and having befriended Bollow, was trying to make a machine that would reconsitute a body for Bollow and thus bring him back to life. However, the machine was missing some components, as well as the 'essence' which would effectively stick Bollow's spirit back to a given physical form. The next morning, Malanost revealed his progress to date, and some guests were tasked with helping to get the machine going, as well as tracking down the missing essence.
As the evening progressed, guests socialised and got to know one another, as well as various monks who inhabited the monastery. During the evening and throughout the next day, a small number of guests went wandering off and had an unpleasant interaction with a disembodied voice which knew far too much about their past trauma... But as they left its presence they found these memories immediately became vague and they were just left with the sensation that something unsettling had happened to them.
Late in the evening, a visitor turned up from another plane, seeking a missing elven friend called Alice. No one at the monastery claimed to have ever seen her. Perhaps she was never really there?
As the evening drew on, many guests retired to bed. But a small number received a summons - at long last - for a luxury spa treatment. They were taken into a small room by a monk, lay down, and fell into the deepest sleep of their lives.
As the other guests enjoyed their breakfasts, those same guests that went for a treatment the night before were conspicuously absent. Sadly, they awoke next to their own bodies in a crypt below the monastery and were greeted by a mysterious figure who introduced them to the afterlife, with the warning that their spirits could not be sustained forever. Fortunately they were then greeted by their fellow spirit, Bollow, who would look after them in their new mode of existence.
Eventually the ghosts were able to track down the Necromancer's mirror to allow them to communicate with all the guests at will.
Some guests continued hunting for rats and were surprised to discover a giant, human-like rat lurking on the stairs. The rat, sensing danger, tried to run away to the garderobe, thankfully protected by a kind spirit who deterred the hunters. When the hunters realised that the giant rat was sentient, they concealed it from the Rat Hunter and helped it to escape the building, but not before discovering that it seemed to share some of the memories of Alice, the missing girl from the day before...
Meanwhile some guests discovered that Mirabella, the Receptionist, had been receiving gifts from a presumed secret admirer. Could there be someone else in the monastery who had a vested interest in her desperation to break into the Vault, where enlightenment as to true goings on could be found?
Meanwhile, the scholarly-inclined guests were delving through dozens of scrolls and cryptic puzzles, which eluded to darker things afoot at Spirit Springs, not least of all religious fanaticism about the Great Divide, something strange about the rats, the existence of a so-called Heretic in the grounds, and creeping vines and lost memories connected to something called The Withering.
A mother turned up at Spirit Springs, castigating the monks for apparently losing her 9-year-old daughter, Janett, who had come to take the healing waters and never arrived home through the portal. Again the monks claimed no knowledge of this girl, despite Janett naming Yannis on a postcard home, and eluding to getting in trouble with him for making a friend outside in the grounds.
Later on, another frightened giant human-rat was spotted by the guests, trying to bolt through the Great Hall. The rat was visibly terrified of the monks, and after a lot of coaxing was discovered to respond to the name of Janett. It transpired that the rats attracted the dissipating spirit fragments of those guests who had met their fates at Spirit Springs - once their essence was lost, their spirits began to drift and fragment, and something about the unusual rats at Spirit Springs captured little bits of spirit. This particular rat had a bit of Janett's spirit inside it, and she just wanted her mother and her teddy bear. The guests persuaded the Abbot to house the human-rat Janett, until her mother could be relocated and - hopefully - accept what was left of her daughter.
A farmer turned up to thank the monks for saving his crops from a spreading blight. Whatever the monks were doing here was making the blight lose potency and retreat.
Some players were drawn to the stranger in the grounds, who offered 'readings of truth, daily at noon'. This individual, called a Heretic by the monks, proclaimed herself to in fact be a divine Avatar of the Great Divide. She had been cast out by the monks as she advocated to close the Great Divide, which she claimed was an artificial conduit to the Gods created by the monks seeking divine influence, but which was also letting other, terrible things through - including a sapping, eldritch entity known as The Withering, which was polluting this realm and making greater and greater demands of the monks to satiate its hunger. The monks were using guests' essence as a really potent food source to keep it quiet and contained.
According to Abbot Yannis, closing the Great Divide would be heresy. The Avatar offered the guests healing waters, as she was protecting the springs, and also shared information about the ghosts and their missing essence needed to give them new bodies. She asked the guests to track down three clay objects which were acting as a ward to keep her outside of the monastery.
Later in the day, she was met at the doors to the monastery by an irate Yannis, but the guests used the clay objects to break the ward and let her back inside so she could help them with the rituals they needed to perform to save the ghosts and put the Withering out of harm's way by sealing the Great Divide.
In the afternoon, some guests used information from one of Mirabella's mysterious gifts to break into the Vault while Lysara was away. They discovered documents relating to guest sacrifice, increasing guests being sacrificed for essence to deal with the Witherings increasing hunger, and increasing essence-sacrificing rituals. There was also a map showing that the farmer's blight actually centred on the monastery and the Withering, and therefore it was only the essence-sacrifice that was temporarily keeping it in check, They also discovered five vials of essence for the Machine... but there were five guests plus Bollow, so one too few - there were difficult choices to be made.
Helped by rat-Janett and some riddles, some guests identified how to summon the King of the Rats at a certain time in his lair beneath the stairs. These guests made the benevolent choice to return the bodies of the captured rats to their King, and forgo the Ratcatcher's reward. In thanks, the Rat King gave the guests a boon - a ritual to send the Withering to sleep to buy them some time, protect the ghosts from the Withering until they could be brought back to life, and hopefully give them a much easier time of finally banishing it by closing the Great Divide.
At long last the Abbot and Sister were won round and finally regained their memories of their many, many encounters with the Withering and their harvesting of guests' essence to contain it.
The guests turned on the Abbot's fanaticism and proclaimed they would sealed the Great Divide using the Avatar's ritual, in order to save this plane and others, and end the sacrifice of Spirit Springs's guests.
With the guests' help, Malanost finally got the machine working. The essence was used and the machine activated to save the ghosts - save one, who sacrificed themselves to allow Bollow to use the final essence vial.
Now that the ghosts were safe, the guests - having reworked the ritual to honour rather than rebuke the Gods - performed a final ritual to close the Great Divide and banish the Withering for good. With their pure and honourable intentions, the ritual worked perfectly and the Withering was not awoken before being sealed away. Now that the conduit to the Gods had been returned to one-way (at the will of the Gods), the divine influence on Spirit Springs was gone, the final ghost drifted away, and the Avatar of the Great Divide ascended.
The guests retired to the Great Hall to celebrate and tie up loose ends, before their scheduled departure through the interplanar portal from their not-so-restful spa retreat.