Session 2: "How I Met Your Father."
(July 1, 2018)
In the dungeons, the party finds and liberates Vaelin, a human paladin, a sort of knight errant in the Order of the Talon. Vaelin had been tracking rumors of a fast-moving airship crewed by a mercenary company of giff, large hippo-like humanoids with a fondness for pomp, military hierarchy, and gunpowder. He had gathered enough information over the course of his quest to know that the captain of this particular giff company was Loyalard Brund, and that the company itself was named Brund's Magnificent Fusiliers. He has reason to suspect that the company had been hired for some nefarious purpose. Vaelin tracked rumors of their airship to Rathádan, specifically to Rothenel Manor. He asked too many questions and was disarmed and thrown into the dungeon for his trouble. Worse still, his pants were taken away.
He is able to tell the party that a particular "prisoner" in the dungeon, the female duergar held by herself in the far cell, receives special treatment. "Lady Rothenel" (who turned out to have been a doppelganger) would come and stand wordlessly in front of the duergar's cell, then leave after some time, looking thoughtful or pleased, as if communication had taken place.
The party (now including Vaelin, who has retrieved his pants as well as his gear from a guard room upstairs) goes to interrogate the duergar. She is kept in her cell with a silver chain, which (Dara perceives) dampens her innate magical abilities. After the duergar refuses to speak, Snadwick uses the detect thoughts spell scroll on her while the party asks questions. The duergar was sent here at the command of a duergar she sees as a mighty king, and her job required her to cooperate with the doppelganger, despite her feeling of contempt for the creature. They discover that the iron casks upstairs don't contain gunpowder bombs, as they had assumed, but rather a sort of ooze. The duergar's mind contains all the intended recipients of the ooze casks, who aren't the intended victims of the ooze but rather co-conspirators, who are facilitating a greater plot.
Snadwick recognizes the images of seven of the recipients' locations from her own extensive travels:
* A library in the Rajgani Scriptorium (the empire's magical college). The intended recipient is a human woman with long black hair in a braid.
* The Winged College in Rajgan, where airship pilots and wyvern riders are trained. The intended recipient is a burly blue dragonborn man with a scar on his throat.
* The Rusted Shears, a onetime tavern in the Landing District of Rajgan which now serves as the headquarters and meeting house of the Charioteers (a city-wide union of lower class workers and citizens). The intended recipient is a bookish human man with dark brown hair and a gold ring in his nose.
* Pyrigol, a small city and trade hub a couple days east of Rajgan, on the Simrijjar River. The intended recipient is an old gnome man who is quick with knives and keeps his beard trimmed short.
* Doko, the aforementioned city-state port on the Middle Sea. The intended recipients are two tall half-elf women who appear to be twins. One has a shaven head, the other has blond hair and tattoos reaching from her fingertips all the way to her neck.
* Hadrigan, a port city in the northern reaches of Thask, across the Middle Sea. The intended recipient is a goblin woman draped in colorful skirts and scarves, with gnomish spectacles on her face.
* Torelennor, an elven city in the vast desert region of Adjan, in northern Thask. The intended recipient is a richly-dressed elf man, young and dashing, with a charming smile. He appears to have a pseudodragon familiar on his shoulder.
Additionally, Snadwick senses that the next level "up" in the conspiracy is a shadowy figure known as the Starling, who appears to be a malevolent construct of some type. The Starling might be located in Zanjamand, a desert oasis town near Malimpel, known to be a bazaar for dangerous and magical items.
The party decides to keep the duergar chained in the dungeon for now, as a potential future source of information.
Vaelin, "the new guy," is encouraged to bust open one of the ooze casks to see what's inside. He is promptly attacked by a green ooze, which feeds on his memories when it lands a hit with its pseudopod.
As the party takes a long rest, Dara meditates as usual, but finds herself plunged into a sort of shadow. When she emerges, she finds that the book has been taken from her. In its place is a single long black feather on a delicate chain. She meditates with the feather and discerns it is a token of thanks from her mysterious patron. Now that she is attuned to the feather, she may use it once (and only once) to ask a "reasonable" favor of her patron—the reasonableness of the favor being left to her patron to decide.
In the morning, the healer Widdershins announces that the elf healer (a druid named Alsheer) arrived, and that the two elf women are awake and wish to see their rescuers. The true Lady Rothenel (who wishes to be called by her given name, Errali; her ordeal has left her no longer concerned with titles and nobility) and the wizard Thiala cling to each other, supporting each other with contact. They appear to be reunited lovers.
Thiala describes receiving the book. She was suspicious of it, and tried casting remove curse and dispel magic on it, but it backfired—the pages flipped open and its malevolent intelligence grabbed hold of her mind and sucked the magic out of her. It is an ancient and powerful object, hungry for magic; only a truly powerful being could destroy it.
They tell the story of how the doppelganger first arrived in the guise of a young male elf, Durven Anduriel, second child of the noble family of Anduriel, ostensibly to seek a marriage match with Errali at a formal ball. Thiala was jealous of "Durven," which she blushes to admit to now. The next thing Errali knew, she was in the tower room while "Durven" assumed her own shape in front of her and asked her questions. She didn't answer, but the doppelganger seemed to get information from her all the same. "It was reading your mind," Thiala murmurs. "It was reading all of our minds, for so long. I never even suspected, until recently. I thought that young man had broken your heart and turned it to stone. It knew just how to pull me along and keep me believing that."
The Manor of Anduriel, according to shipping receipts discovered by Lan, was the destination of one of the ooze bombs sent out by the doppelganger—and thus the home of one of the co-conspirators. Anduriel becomes the party's next step.
The party learns that Baron Calaern Anduriel, the current lord of Anduriel, is an otherwise unremarkable nobleman distinguished by his fanatical passion for hunting large, rare, magical creatures. They hatch a plan to infiltrate the manor by posing as a party of trophy hunters eager to learn from such a masterful sportsman. They ride a day's journey to the east, where Anduriel Manor sits in the forest in a bend of the Simrijjar River. It was once an elven settlement, but the "manor" (something more like a vast hunting lodge) has sprawled across the entirety of the old settlement, and the onetime villagers are now all employed as servants, gamekeepers, and private militia for the Baron.
The Baron welcomes the party of "hunters" heartily, and says that they're in luck, that his people have brought certain rare and dangerous creatures for him to hunt this very day. Asked about any odd oozes he might know about, he says that a green, memory-sucking ooze sounds to him like an oblex, a creature that steals memories from its victims until it can create a sort of marionette duplicate, indistinguishable from the original victim except for a faint smell of sulfur. He says they could be found in Durjheim Caverns, far to the east beneath the Rangrum Mountains, in the subterranean realm of the duergar despot Gralkhar Fellgren—but that no one should try to venture there without an invitation.
The only other hunters in the party are three of the Baron's children. (They don't speak of the fourth, a son he doesn't name.) The firstborn is Lillin, his regal and aloof heir. The second child is Durven, slouching at the table swirling wine in a glass and appearing bored. The youngest is Arlea, who lost her mother (the Baroness) at a young age, and emulates her father's habits and taste for exotic hunts. Arlea has a tendency toward cruel glee.
The party rides out with the Anduriel family into the ancient woods around the manor. The Baron's gamekeepers drive a manticore toward an encounter with the hunting party. The manticore, regardless of its alignment, is intelligent and appears scared. Calaern grows frustrated with how the manticore evades his arrows, while Arlea laughs and shouts with sadistic pleasure as her arrows find the beast. Vaelin throws a grappling hook onto the manticore and dangles from it as it takes flight.
Ward hangs back behind the hunt to flirt with Durven, who smirks as his father grows increasingly angry. She asks Durven about his failed courtship of Lady Rothenel, but Durven seems to be ignorant of what she means. Durven mentions that he likes fighting with fists rather than weapons.
At last the Baron, furious enough to crack through his hearty façade and expose his true nature, casts a spell to hold the manticore still while his daughter Lillin strikes it with phantasmal killer and his daughter Arlea riddles it with arrows. This foul behavior earns the ire of both Snadwick and Vaelin, who mock and challenge the Baron to his face as he hacks away the head of the manticore. Snadwick tugs the head away from the Baron as he tries to tie it onto his horse. Calaern casts hold person on her while Arlea shoots at Vaelin. Lan tackles Lillin to the ground and grapples her in place, then steals her spellbook from her. Vaelin attacks the Baron, who casts invisibility on himself—but not before Dara hexes him, enabling her to track his movements and cast toll the dead on him, ending his invisibility.
Despite the arrival of the Baron's gamekeepers as reinforcements, our heroes manage to battle the Anduriel family into a surrender. Disarmed, any arcane focuses and spellbooks taken from them, tied up, the Anduriels are now the party's captives.
Ward continues to flirt with Durven, whom she finds quite attractive. For his part, Durven seems to have little love for his father.
An unknown number of loyal servants and militia await, but for now the party has the upper hand as they head back toward the manor.
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