The Haunted Courthouse (Erastus [VII] 2nd, 4707 AR)

Three sets of thick oaken doors in the great hall lead to the two courtrooms and one judge's chambers of the building. The heroes could not open the largest set of wooden doors.

When Aranthor examined the grandfather clock, it went berserk, tolling and clanging dissonantly, assaulting the sanity of listeners. Everyone hearing the clock was violated by images of strangulation, death, murder by axe, and other gruesome flashes.

Malgrim’s corpse disappeared as soon as the heroes left it.

Jury Deliberation Chamber

This room contained one long oval-shaped wooden table and twelve rickety, worn chairs. Razor-thin shafts of moonlight peeked through one large window covered with rotting boards.

This is where the jury retired to deliberate cases. The room was empty now.

Clue: Ebin Blithoddle, not very wise, carved his initials on the underside of the table where he sat for hours on end listening to the others jibber-jabber. When the guilty verdict proved imminent (thanks to Malgrim’s persuasions), Ebin delightedly carved “Who’s funny now Mord?” next to his initials “E.B.”. This led to the heroes questioning the verdict of some of the jurors.

Zemurin reduced Five-Toes to a blubbering mass, at which time he admitted he was strong-armed into voting guilty by Malgrim. The heroes also learned why he sent Mord to the noose (not because he feared more brutalization at the hobgoblin’s hands, but rather to save his children).

Halgrak did not want to kill Jarbin Mord. Halgrak owed Alastir Wade a lot of money and entered the plea of guilty to erase his debt. He’s called “Five-Toes” because Malgrim Hurkes, Alastir’s “debt collector,” leaned on him hard before his scruples buckled and he agreed to sentence Mord to death. The hobgoblin cut off all of Halgrak’s toes on one foot and kept them in a jar until his debt was cleared, gleefully returning the severed digits to him after he sent Jarbin Mord to the gallows. When the truth came out he appeared as little more than a selfish half-orc who sent a man to death because he owed some dirty money. When the heroes investigated further, however, they found out that Halgrak has a family, and he borrowed the money only after he could find no work for months and needed the coin to feed his children and wife. He held out against condemning Mord even after they took his toes. It was only when Malgrim Hurkes threatened his children’s lives that Halgrak gave in. Halgrak knows he has perpetrated a horrible wrong and he knows he’s going to pay the price. 

Malgrim didn’t lean on Ebin. Ebin made his own hateful choice to hang Mord based on nothing more than petty spite. Sir Cole wringed the motives and guilt from the little gnome.

Blithoddle voted to hang Jarbin out of personal spite (further fueled by the other jurors’ urgings). Mord embarrassed Blithoddle in a contest of wit and wiles at the District Councilman’s Birthday Feast a few weeks before the murders and subsequent trial. The Councilman claimed “death itself was funnier than Blithoddle” and called up the executioner to engage in banter with Ebin. While Mord was no razor-wit, he easily upstaged the dull Blithoddle.

Madge was reticent about her motivation for convicting Mord, but Killian urged her to spill the tale of her father’s hanging at the executioner’s hands.

Madge was apparently selected for her dislike of Mord, who executed her father years before the trial. Her father was executed for knifing a nobleman in the back. Madge does not believe her father would do such a thing.

Courtroom

Much of the furniture in this old courtroom had been splintered into kindling. It looks like someone had ruthlessly smashed almost everything in the room. Beyond the carnage, the bench had been overturned and the jurors’ box was in shambles. The windows here were crisscrossed with heavy boards. Where the nails breached the plaster around the windows, rust stains seeped like bloody wounds in the courthouse walls.

Flocks of undead ravens hid until their prey drew near.

The hobgoblin reanimated as a horrible corpse at the same time and beset the party from the other courtroom. Malgrim was now an undead abomination. He charged toward the closest character.

Tablark is a stout old dwarf and a wellspring of courage at the outset. He blustered that he’d seen ghosts aplenty and had no fear of “Ole Broke-Neck Mord”. He also assured any panicky heroes that everything would be just fine. When actually faced with the Croaker, though, the old dwarf fell apart.

As soon as he first caught sight of the horror Mord had become, he clawed his own eyes out of his skull. This also marked the first time the heroes saw the Croaker.

Out of the shadows shambled a tall, hunched figure. The thing’s head jerked obscenely to one side atop a discolored broken neck. Its face was obscured by a rotten death shroud, a milky eye peering through one worn hole, half its blacktooth-filled mouth visible through another rent in the fabric. A horrid rasp of air croaking out pain and misery issued from the thing’s crushed throat as it reached for Tablark Hammergrind.

The dwarf moaned, a sound like a tortured animal as he dropped to his knobby old knees. His hands reached toward his face as if of their own accord and his fingers curled and clawed at his eyes. Tablark screamed, a high-pitched monstrous sound that cut the air and warbled on impossibly long, as he left large bloody furrows across his face and eyes. The scream turned to mad wild laughter as Tablark rose to his feet and fled.