Planning & Pre-Game Discussion

Session 2.1 picks up mid-quest — the party was already inside Penrose Imports at the end of Session 2, standing in front of a freight elevator they had just unlocked. There was no new character creation, so the pre-game was short: a recap, a round of drinks, and a pass over the updated character sheets.

Character Updates

Sheet update landed between sessions. Stat blocks are now much closer to correct, items carry descriptions, and more tooltips work. Most numbers now show a tooltip explaining how they were calculated and whether a given bonus is already counted — Pover's Cloak of Protection was verified this way mid-fight (the +1 was already baked into the save).
Consumables came back unequipped. Several players had to re-equip healing potions in Inventory before the Actions tab would let them drink one. Consumables and deployables share the same slot; a deployable (a lantern, a healer bee) works like a consumable but is not spent on use.
Spell effects still up. Nothing was lost between sessions — Chaonnon's Eldritch Sight and lantern were still running from the previous floor.
End of session: the whole party reached Level 2. Level-up and a shopping trip both happen at the top of the next session.

Lore Clarifications

Import law. Goods out of the Underdark are legal so long as they are routed through Tar'Naris. Goods out of the interior of the Deep Wilds are flatly illegal — the Empire does not want anyone provoking Naiya, and going in is close to a death sentence. The edges of the Deep Wilds are a grey area.
Divine burn and exhaustion. Upcasting a divine spell risks a burn; burns accumulate into tiers of exhaustion (tier 1 = disadvantage on ability checks). A long rest clears it. The daily limit is generous, but the instant limit is four burns at once. Tier 6 is death — you work yourself into the grave. The system is balanced on the assumption that casters will push their limits and take burns.
Cantrips cost no mana and can be cast at will, but still go through the cast system.
Standing up from prone costs half your movement (not a bonus action).
Moving through an enemy's square is free; leaving an occupied square is what draws the opportunity attack. Moving only five feet away from an adjacent enemy does not provoke one.
Bag of holding vs. bag of hoarding. A bag of holding is an extra-dimensional bucket. A bag of hoarding dumps its contents into a specific dragon's hoard — General Store LLC holds the copyright and has a deal with the dragon, so genuine ones are loudly and obviously labelled. An unlabelled bag is not one of those.
Guild loot rules. Quests come with loot parameters. Rule of thumb: if it is magical and it is not supposed to be there, you can probably loot it. Anything potentially contaminated is potentially lootable. Do not take a civilian's life savings — and do not lie on the loot form, which is scanned by a lie detector for mal intent.
Speak with Dead is a third-level spell. Nobody has it yet.

Gameplay Summary

The freight lift

Before riding up, the party listened at the shaft. Over the new hum of the elevator's power supply they caught the sound of fluid sloshing and a heavy, musty smell rolling down from the second floor. Valentine missed all of it, distracted by the chittering coming from the pouch on her belt.

The lift turned out to be a bare freight platform inside a metal scaffold, worked by a single armature lever on the floor. Someone threw it. Two large gears ground into motion, the platform climbed with a steady ratchet, and the door opened on a soft ding.

The second floor

Chaonnon's Eldritch Sight went almost blinding the moment the door opened. Everything up there was screaming fey — every biological thing in the room. There was so much of it that picking out any single aura would have taken a spellcraft check.

The floor and shelves had begun to rot prematurely. A thin film of goo coated every surface. Crates and barrels stood broken open. On the shelves, exotic plants in blue, green and purple had bloomed wildly out of control despite having no light and no soil. Immediately to the right stood a large arcane machine — a glass tank with a power crystal at one end and a runic console on the side, packed so full of overgrown plants that there was no clear space left inside.

Pover rolled to identify the plants and got a confident, completely wrong answer. Certain the berries were the same ones he knew from the wilds, he picked one and ate it. It was, by his own account, delicious. It also triggered the fey wild-magic table: a short, thick horn sprouted from the tip of his nose, arriving with the sensation of a zit popping. The rest of the party heard only a soft boing.

Working the room from the other side, Damien investigated a barrel and found the mucus pooled inside it — and, more usefully, that the broken boards from its lid had splayed outward onto the floor. Something had come out of that barrel, not gone into it. Picking up a plank, he found the outer faces were ordinary wood but the broken edge was not: no grain, faintly squishy, lime green. Elerra found a second pile of barrels and boxes that had been deliberately smashed apart, emptied of contents beforehand, with two more scraps showing the same wood-veneer-over-something-else construction.

Chaonnon read the big tank and found the surprise in it: the machine was not producing fey magic, it was repelling it — the aura was bouncing off the outside of the glass. A closer arcana check came up a natural 1, which delivered a confidently incorrect verdict: harmless control ring, perfectly safe to fiddle with.

Pover, raised around Estel tinkerers, woke the runic console with Magitek Runeartistry and got an illusory readout floating above it:

Readout	Value
Power	12%
Status	Nominal
Integrity	2%, blinking red

The party argued the machine over at length — break the glass, cut the power line, pull the crystal out like a battery (there was a clear release hatch). Valentine asked whether arcane and fey were opposites, and whether diffusing the power was the answer. In the end they decided to finish exploring the room first and leave the device alone.

Meanwhile Damien knocked on one of the two intact lower barrels to listen for a hollow. What came back, in his own voice and tonally exact, was: "Hello, this is Damien."

Elerra then ate a zucchini. The vegetables on the far shelf looked completely normal — really quite ripe. It tasted normal too, right up until it turned to sludge against the back of her throat. She coughed it into her hands, shook them out, and both hands took on a permanent metallic silver sheen. The table awarded her the epithet on the spot: Silverhand.

Beyond the shelves the party found the second half of the room: another tank of the same design, its glass broken open, with enormous thorned tentacles surging out of it and slowly pulsating. Beneath the growth was a body. Chaonnon crept up for a look and confirmed it was plant-derived, fey-infused, and definitely not an animal.

At a desk at the end of the aisle, Pover went through Penrose's records. The loose papers had rotted in the damp, but the ledgers held: for about a year Penrose had been importing steadily more exotic and less savoury material, in bigger consignments with fewer people handling them. Shipments came from a town on the edge of the Deep Wilds and from the Underdark routed through Tar'Naris. The most recent was the largest he had ever taken — an entire train car of material pulled out of the Wilds.

Reminded of the quest's exact wording — determine what happened to the workers and resolve the risk if possible; if it is beyond you, report back exactly what it is — the party also learned who had actually hired them. Penrose had not. The workers' families reported the disappearances to the military police, who did not want to deal with it, locked the building down, kept Penrose out, and handed the job to the Adventurer's Guild.

Elerra climbed the shelving, shimmied along it without touching the ground, and examined three objects stored together: one that was unmistakably an egg — scaly, species unknown, alive or not unknown; one that looked like an elemental core, similar to the earth cores she had seen but far more fiery; and one crystal, which she could make nothing of and could not explain being filed with the other two. She took the egg one-handed and got back off the shelf without dropping it or tipping the rack.

The barrel mimics

The two intact barrels burst open. Both were mimics — the fronts opened like shells — and they had been waiting.

The first launched two pseudopods at Valentine and she barely held them off; the second skittered up beside it and slapped her across the small of the back with an acidic, bludgeoning arm. Chaonnon answered with Inflict Wounds at melee touch, twenty points of necrotic atrophy racing out from their palm along the barrel's flank, then hit the same target again for eighteen, cracking part of the shell away. Valentine hit back with Chill Touch and rimed its side with frost, which was enough to make it change targets: it wrapped her up and slammed her down for eleven, and she did not get up.

Pover ran over, slipped past Chaonnon, and poured a healing potion into her mouth. She came round to the sight of him standing over her with an empty bottle and a sickly sweet taste in her mouth, and asked whether they had beaten the mimics yet.

They had not. Damien used power jump to reposition, stuck the landing, swung, went badly off balance and hit the floor instead. Elerra fired her sunbeam wand through a gap and burned a neat hole in the wall. Chaonnon drew both rapiers, double-stabbed, and discovered a sheet problem — the Dual Wielder feat was not supplying the off-hand proficiency bonus. A mimic answered by hitting Chaonnon for ten, which was exactly their remaining hit points; Elerra revived them with a potion for nine.

Valentine was then engulfed — dragged bodily into the barrel by its pseudopods, still conscious, watching through the broken side while the acid worked on her. Pover punched the shell twice with his runic knuckles, force and lightning bursting off his fists, broke it open, and the mimic vomited Valentine back out prone and coated in what may have been stomach acid.

Elerra tore a half-rotten floorboard out of the floor and used it as an improvised two-handed club, missing spectacularly on the first swing but keeping the board. Furious, Valentine got up and upcast Sacred Flame into the mimic that had swallowed her — brilliant golden fire that collapsed it into a gelatinous pile — accepting a divine burn to do it. The last mimic, nearly dead, retracted its pseudopods, closed its lid and went back to pretending to be a barrel. Pover finished it with a small, reluctant, apologetic punch. It had one hit point left.

The party broke for food.

The thing in the rafters

Out of initiative again, the party went back to the tentacled plant. Chaonnon poked it with a rapier and it immediately tried to grapple the blade. Elerra tried animal handling on it — the GM allowed it — and had to jump clear as it snatched at her hand.

Then Pover looked up. A natural 20 on perception got him three things at once: the fluid pooled on the floor did not match the fluid still in the broken tank; a very, very slow drip was coming out of a large wooden box slung from the rafters directly above that spot; and out of the corner of his eye, the box was looking back.

Pover announced he had no ranged attacks, picked up a crystal to demonstrate how weak and pathetic his throwing was, and then rolled a natural 20. The crystal — teal, and therefore necrotic — arced up, landed on top of the crate and shattered in a burst of energy for a critical hit and 36 damage. The crate-mimic roared, opened its underside, and dropped from the ceiling straight onto the tentacle plant, which promptly tried to grapple it.

The big one hit much harder than the barrels. It lumbered at Elerra, opened a maw in its side wide enough to swallow her whole, and although she fended off the pseudopods the impact and acid together took twenty off her — enough to drop her into death saves. She failed the first one. Pover got to her with a potion and brought her back to eight.

Damien power-jumped the shelving to reach it and finally connected for sixteen, blowing a chunk off its side in a crack of lightning. Valentine shot it through a gap in the shelves with her Harker & Webb HW-8 Standard, taking half cover, for nine. Chaonnon ducked and fired Eldritch Blast through the shelves into its mouth, declining to upcast — at first level a single point of corruption earns an infernal caster a new mutation, and most of them are far less kind than the one Chaonnon started with.

Pover was engulfed next: a strength save at disadvantage came up fifteen, one short, and the mimic crushed him for twelve and pulled him inside. Damien slammed his maul into its flank for twenty-six with a stun rider attached and tipped the whole box onto its side. Elerra beat it with her floorboard, yelling about giving her friend back, and it spat out Pover's comatose body; she followed up with a healing potion. Pover, back on his feet and out of patience, punched clean through it with such overkill that he fell inside as it dissolved into ooze, taking a single point of acid damage and emerging covered in mimic gum.

Damien washed him down with a Potion of Hydration — a decorated glass ball with a very fancy label reading Eustace T. Crazitem's House of Magic Items, non-refillable without going back to the manufacturer, with a warning on the back about counterfeiting.

With the mimic's body crushed on top of it, the tentacle plant stopped pulsing and stopped moving.

The skeleton, the cloak and the book

Pieces fell into place: the fluid dripping through the floor into the room downstairs had been the suspended mimic drooling, and it was mimics — not the fey growth — that had killed the two workers.

There was still a skeleton lying in the acid under the plant. A natural 20 from Valentine, helped by Chaonnon's lantern, showed that it was wearing a cloak, that the cloak was magical and fey-powered, and that the dead worker had wrapped something in it before the acid caught them. Valentine summoned her Unseen Servant — described for the first time as a small, ethereal, see-through and faintly featureless gnome — which waded into the acid, lifted the skeleton over its head, carried it out and set it down at her feet.

Inside the cloak was a plain leather journal. The writing was complete gibberish. Two people got something out of it:

Pover was certain he recognised the script from the bowels of the dungeon near his home warren, and told the others so without hesitation: ancient Elder God writing, a transcription out of an Elder God ruin, possibly worth a great deal. He suggested a temple might want it.
Elerra recognised the form: it is a cipher. Somebody encrypted this notebook.

Chaonnon argued against selling it and the party agreed to hold onto it until they could read it. On the walk back, Chaonnon also asked everyone to keep quiet about the book — and about the crystals — unless directly asked.

The rest of the salvage: the multicoloured crystals high on the shelves are probably just pretty stones; the red ones are oddly warm and read as fire. Everything out of the Deep Wilds is likely both illegal and unstable. Nothing else survived on the skeleton — the acid had taken it.

Valentine found sacks to carry the bodies out. The first took the skeleton without any trouble at all. The second, identical in size, would not fit it — and reaching into the first went far deeper than it should have. It was a bag of holding. She roped and labelled both skeletons so the guild would know which was found where.

Only once the party confirmed they were finished did the GM answer the question they had been sitting on: the arcane device was a trap. It repelled fey energy from both sides of its field, and what it was mostly doing was keeping fey in. There was another one of those tentacle plants inside. Anyone who had powered it down or cracked the glass would have been sprayed at close range and hit with some very nasty poison. It was built to punish players for poking something they should not have poked.

Out front, and the walk back

The two soldiers were still on the door. Penrose was long gone — he had booked it. The party told the guards the warehouse was full of illegal goods, that there was something inside likely to go off soon, that there was a great deal of slime, and that there might be more mimics. One guard took out an arcane rod, pressed a rune, and called for an Azure Core representative and bioprotection gear. The bodies, they were told, were guild business.

Walking back, the party noted that they had come through their first mission without a single death, having saved each other repeatedly and now sitting on secrets they were not sharing with anybody else. Somebody said it: we're a real gang now. Something Short.

The Guild Hall

Nobody had explained how to turn in a quest. The signage pointed at the main guild hall, whose door was marked registered members only — and the party, registered but not yet certified, went in anyway. Passing through, they each felt a faint tingle of arcane magic.

The hall does not match the rest of the building. Where the bureaucratic wing was a very nice office, this is a tavern out of an adventure novel — two thirds of the room given to high-backed leather chairs, a roaring fireplace, a bard on a stage, a long bar and moving servers, and every single patron armed to the teeth and built like they could arm-wrestle a bear into the ground. Along the other wall: a single desk with a bored half-elf woman behind it, and a large board of tacked-up papers next to it.

Only Chaonnon's perception caught anything, and what it caught was that in a room full of the most magical gear money can buy, their eye kept snagging on exactly three people for no reason they could name.

The bartender — Ferrin Coy. "Names I gave to people. At your service." A previous adventurer, a lifetime ago; now he watches, pokes his fingers in, gives advice and meddles a little. Foolishly friendly, working at a brisk pace in a tailed tuxedo one size too big and dingy beyond belief. He gives every rookie one free drink. He signed a little half-patter at Valentine when she gave her name, and told her not to worry, everyone's got a story.
The bard — Mr. Koloski Resk. Fully committed to the concept: violently bright clothes that clash with each other, big poofy pants over long hose, a fiddle, and a hat with a four-foot feather in it. He is playing something that is becoming very common in Tiraas — not quite jazz, jazz meeting early country, a little bluegrass and folk. If you find yourself drawn to him, Coy is sorry; Veskers are like that, and he does it to everybody.
The veteran by the fireplace. A middle-aged woman nursing a tankard and staring into the flames, in an Imperial Army green dress coat with the sleeves torn off and every insignia removed — not unusual for a retired veteran who joined the Guild. Twenty years ago she would have been a perfect match for the Avenic Ideal. When the party looked back for her, she was gone, and Coy claimed not to know who they meant.

Coy poured for the whole table: an Izara Bloom for Valentine (bright pink, fruity, candied orange slices on the rim, free to rookies), a twenty-five-year-old tawny port for Damien when he was told there is wine, good wine, and things that are like wine but better, a layered Punaji Sunrise with a little fake tree and an umbrella for Pover, and three fingers of Rodevenheim black whiskey straight from the dwarven mines for Elerra — smoother than anything she has ever had and possibly three times as strong. Chaonnon simply asked what Coy would make for them. He undid his bow tie, blindfolded himself, grabbed bottles at random off the back wall, poured a glass to exactly the right level, let the liquors layer themselves, put every bottle back, took off the blindfold and dropped in an ice cube shaped like a skull. Chaonnon's insight roll got nothing back but the same smile he gave everybody.

Certification

The desk clerk had not seen any of them before, and her first question was whether anybody had died. Then came the paperwork: a post report against the parameters of the quest, a loot form ("it's important that we keep track of that, for tax reasons"), and the final certification once both were signed. Damien handed the forms straight back — you just tell me where to sign, I don't touch the paper.

Declared on the loot form: a contaminated notebook, the cloak, the egg, the crystal, the fey ring from the first floor, the bag of holding, and — after some deliberation — a bag of contaminated magical coins. The two skeletons were handed in to be returned to the families.

The clerk slotted each probationary badge into a device, pricked a finger onto a small red gem, and let the badge absorb the drop of blood. Each card came back with a small bronze circle enamelled on it. Something Short are now official members of the Adventurer's Guild of the Tiraan Empire, at Bronze rank.

The Imperial Army's stated reward was 1,800 gold. After the guild's cut, taxes and a payment against the party's outstanding starting loans, the take handed over in a bag was 1,200 gold pieces.

Everyone earned a level. The job board hooks go up in the chat, and the party needs to pick one before next session.

Session spine: ← Session 2