Planning & Pre-Game Discussion

On the long road out of Mathena, the party passed the miles with a get-to-know-you game around the fire — each member pressing another with a pointed question, to be answered honestly or with a convincing lie.

Character Moments

• Valentine, pressed by Chao on what she wants most and would never admit aloud, allowed only that she dreams of "one true love" — which left Chao certain her sunny surface is a cover for something deeper.
• Damien confessed his most closely guarded ritual: grooming his goatee, immaculately, every single day.
• Chao, asked what she would buy if coin were no object, would say only "spell components," and not a word more.
• Elerra credited her guardian, Mara Quint, with teaching her flawless manners — "so that I could be mean for much longer before anyone noticed."
• Pover Meadowmane admitted that the smell which unsettles him most is rot and decay, and hinted at a long-ago act of quiet courage out in the wild.

Lore Clarifications

• The lightning rail runs a single runic track at tremendous speed; staying upright through its lurches takes a steady stomach.
• The capital, Tiraas, is no friend to tieflings — and keeps a standing kill-order for the Scylithene Drow. Only a registered adventurer's license shields those it would otherwise condemn.
• The Adventurer's Guild sorts its members into five tiers; new parties enter at the lowest and climb by completing sanctioned work.

Gameplay Summary

With the Prairie Bloom killings behind them and Madam Dolly's letter of introduction in hand, the party made the four-day trek across the prairie to the rail town of Ferrisden, then boarded the lightning rail bound for the capital. The ride was long and far from gentle: the train's first lurch turned Elerra's stomach, and she was sick all over Pover, who promptly flipped his too-large seat trying to get clear.

Aboard the train they fell into conversation with Marshal Stiff, a genial Imperial lawman travelling the same line. Over shared candy, Valentine — with rather more candor than the party would have liked — all but told a sitting Marshal the whole truth of how they came to be "adventurers." A deft bit of charm smoothed it over, and Stiff let the matter lie, mentioning only that he was heading back to report on "a situation out west."

Tiraas rose ahead of them: a plateau-city of millions, crowned by a Grand Cathedral and a great Imperial Square. The party drew hard looks on the climb through its streets — tieflings are unwelcome here, and Elerra kept her ears bound and her gray skin covered. Elerra hauled Valentine out of the path of a passing carriage, and a trio of friendly gnome tinkerers stopped them to take a "magic picture" of Pover and Valentine.

At the Guild, the party ran the bureaucratic gauntlet. The clerk Edith Sterling processed their paperwork — a surname-substitution form for Chao, verification of Valentine's holy symbol, and a note of Damien's noble standing — and they registered as a company under the name "Something Short." The officer Jody Harrow, an old friend of Madam Dolly's, made good on the favor: she backdated their registration by a month, entered them as a Tier-1 party, issued each a provisional license, and set them their certification quest. The loan agent Cornelius Fenwick III then sat each of them down, one at a time, to arrange the funds to outfit themselves — terms varying with how well each negotiated — before the party turned loose in the Guild's Exchange to shop.

Their assessment took them to a quarantined import warehouse belonging to a dwarf named Walter Penrose. A shipment of fey reagents from the edge of the wilds had gone wrong, two of his workers had vanished, and unsettling magic readings had the place sealed. Penrose, all bluster and sweat, was happy to declare it "the Guild's problem now" and leave.

Inside, Chao's lantern revealed what the naked eye could not: invisible, living branches and fungus creeping over the imported logs, an acidic green ooze seeping down from the floor above, and — when Valentine went to pocket a stray bag of coins on a drain grate — that the coins themselves were alive. They bit her, and the bag proved to hold a swarm of tiny shapeshifting mimics. Valentine cinched it shut and kept it.

The grate itself was the next surprise: it lunged as Damien reached in, a mimic the size of an octopus. What followed was a brutal point-blank brawl. Damien, armored head to toe and braced behind an animated shield, traded heavy blows and weathered gouts of acid; Chao seared it with eldritch fire; Valentine fired her force-wand into it at arm's length and was savaged for her trouble, dropping near death. Pover loosed a clockwork healer bee — bought as a gift for his cousin — that buzzed over and pulled her back from the brink, and Damien finished the creature with a thunderous, crystal-charged slam of his maul.

In the pit below the grate, Chao's magic showed threads of fungus running up through the whole building toward the floor above — and, ringed by acid-stripped bones, the encrypted crystal that powered the warehouse's lift. The bones told their own grim story of the missing workers. Valentine's conjured servant fetched the crystal; slotted home, it ground the lift doors open onto the upper floor — and whatever is still waiting up there.

We left off with the lift open, a bag of mimic hatchlings in Valentine's pack, a strange fae ring in the party's keeping, and the worst of the warehouse still ahead.

Session spine: ← Session 1