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Three Lunatics and a Paladin ride again! I should do a Celyn userpic, I have one for Danny. No fabulous moments of hilarity here but I seem to be being chronicler so.
Our party is:
Celyn Bettws, Professional Noticer (and Wyrdling Cleric)
Viepuck, the Doogie Howser of Eldritch Fantasy Lawyers
Izgil Moonseeker, Arcane Investigator
Robin of Abenfyrd, The Paladin
(I feel I am pseudohistorically accurate in apparently never spelling that town twice the same way.)
As of last session, we had conveyed an entire village's worth of refugees to Aslain to protect them from a hostile bear-fey (who had one of his giant vultures watching us escort them away, which we know because I am a Professional Noticer). We know the bear fey is one of three fey lords competing to see who can fuck up this area most entertainingly. There we got hit with all the current state of Everything Happens Too Much and proceeded to frantically start triaging, starting with the letter bomb we received under suspicious circumstances.
As we were going through Aslain, we were approached by the barkeep at one of the town inns, who explained that he had a letter for us addressed to "the Tyrwinghan paladin riding a Thing, his straw-haired companion, his page, and their dwarven friend" or something like that, which had been delivered by a disoriented man with a fancy shirt who couldn't remember his own name and who had vanished from the room he'd been put up in to recover. As if that wasn't enough to make us agitated, Celyn spotted sigils in Sylvan on the letter, and promptly liberated it from the man - covering the sigils with his hand - leaving the gent to spend a moment or two trying to figure out where it went.
Celyn does not fuck around with letter bombs and knows that Sylvan script can embed enchantments and curses if one tries to read it. He knows this because, despite expert advice from his apprentice master warning about the dangers of such things, he learned how to read it. He is, however, the only party member who can read it without magical assistance, which he considers unwise when running paranoid about the fey.
So Celyn proposes the party get a private room and he and Izgil could investigate the letter itself to figure out if it is, as he assumes, a bomb (and how much of a bomb it is if so), and then have Izgil study the magic, Viepuck read Celyn's mind to spot untoward changes, and Robin be supportive and protective (and he trusts Robin to notice if he's "acting weird"; he does not actually trust other people to notice if he's acting weird because he thinks their standards of weird are miscalibrated). The actual magical investigation uncovered the bomb and the party worked together to defuse it such that Celyn could read the damn note safely rather than worrying Robin by depending on a saving throw.
Letter is revealed to be the bear fey a) gloating b) trying to get the party to forget via magical curse where his lair is (though since Celyn is the only Sylvan-literate party member one is not sure he thought this through) and c) vaguely threatening. Nobody is impressed. Robin and Celyn are in fact further cementing their partnership by bonding over really wanting to ruin that guy in particular's fucking day.
We then launched into various forms of triage of the things we discovered in town. We went to heal a dwarf seriously injured by bears (affiliated with the hostile bear fey) and discovered that the bears had appeared lost, reoriented themselves when they found someone to attack, and attacked the dwarves, who were rescued by our troop of horsemen, one of whom died in the attempt. We speculate that one of the other fey lords got these bears lost in order to disrupt whatever the Hunter (the bear guy) is up to, but have no way of investigating this at the moment.
Then we divided the party: Robin and Viepuck went to the magistrate to hear the evidence that led to the destruction of the Night Queen temple (because letting it sit wouldn't improve the data); Izgil and Celyn went to try to find out what we could find out about the messenger. ("Short people solidarity, maybe!" - Izgil's player) We got a tip from a halfling bard to the person who made his shirt, who is deeply skeptical of humans - with good reason, as a chunk of her family was recently massacred by the previous baron of this region for uncovering his embezzling - but it turns out that short people solidarity did work and Izgil managed to fumble through most of the talking about how we'd gotten this message and we were worried about the messenger.
After a bit of convincing and conversation, in which we pointed out that the fey are ... damn I've forgotten the word we used, let's go with 'tricky', and the halfling lady noted that Celyn is obviously tricky too (Izgil is as blunt and obvious as a rock), she said, "Come back tomorrow. Go do something." "What sort of something?" Izgil asked. "I don't know. Something. Show me you're who you say you are." Izgil is baffled; Celyn basically privately resolves to keep an eye out for his usual people-he-takes-care-of-as-a-cleric, which would be "trans people" and "occasionally, also crazy people".
Meanwhile the others have gotten talking to the magistrate and learned that the baroness's captain came in, said they had evidence of Bad Things, took the magistrate to investigate under the temple of the Night Queen (who I will remind is the goddess of REST IN PEACE ALREADY WHY DON'T YOU), and turned up a necromantic ritual space, which was burned in something of a panic. They summoned Izgil and Celyn (but really primarily Izgil because Izgil actually has magical analysis skills) to come look at the smashed-up necromancy tools from the space and Izgil confirmed that yeah, those were not good.
So we trundled out to the ruins of the temple, where the floor had been ripped up to expose the ritual space to the open air and the sunlight. Robin confirmed that yeah, this place had an evil vibe, though it's burning off over time and exposure. The magistrate explained that the captain had come in, read a scroll, some stuff glowed green, the green-glowing stuff was smashed as Evil Magic Containing, and the place was burned, including six exsanguinated bodies. Access to the space prior to the destruction was through a crawlspace tunnel through which it would be, at best, inconvenient to transport the stacks of stone that were pillars in the basement space with the five-foot ceilings or the tiles that had the cursed necromantic engravings and blood channels on them.
(The engravings were in a language from north of here, and that's a whole other thing to ponder, of why that language in particular, but it was definitely some sort of raise-the-dead-as-zombies deal.)
We got some local dwarves in who had more specific knowledge to investigate and try to date the space, which made clear that yes, it was much more recent than the actual temple, they were highly disapproving of people setting all the evidence on fire rather than consulting local experts about how the place was constructed, there was a certain amount of "And oh, this is a sloppy hack job, it was going to fall down pretty soon anyway," dwarvish disapproval of the whole thing, which Izgil solemnly agreed with.
The whole thing got the local magistrate - who was already uneasy with "the local peaceful community of ghost pacifiers was actually involved in evil blood magic" as a situation - to send a letter up to the capital to ask that they not, like, execute the lead acolytes of the Night Queen or anything before more investigation could happen and anyway five foot ceilings in a human ritual space, wtf.
Viepuck, who is I remind you TWELVE: This is the worst-designed evil ritual space I've ever been in.
Izgil: But really, how many have you been in?
Viepuck, survivor of child-sacrificing ring for one: [starting to count things off on his fingers]
Having put in a complicated day's work, we divide up again: Viepuck to be the local telegraph, Izgil to write up a detailed report on the findings, and Robin and Celyn (and some Viepuck) to do some local politicking. The next day, everyone would head north.
We sent off our surviving military escort to go help deal with the zombie-infested caves in the northeast, which was why we'd borrowed them from Cleenseau. Then we dropped in on the halfling who we knew knew something about the messenger, to say, "Sorry, we said we'd come by, but we have to go, things are urgent"; she actually invited us in to the back and lo, there was the messenger, still not doing great. We investigated some - mostly Viepuck, backed by Izgil - and determined that he had been charmed by the harpies (Celyn was agitated when Viepuck started humming the relevant tune) and been one of a number of people who had been enchanted and Sent Off To Do Things by the bear fey.
It is roughly two days' journey to the capital, so we head out. Robin tells the party on the road the story of Greymalkin's background, why he's a wingless gryphon, and his connection to Robin's magic lantern, so we have more backstory shared there.
After an uneventful ride, we arrive in the town roughly halfway there, to discover that they too are having Events. Specifically: the town's local magistrate/lady, who ascended to the position recently after the death of her mother in undead attacks that destroyed the local temple, was unmarried and was courted by three men. One of them appears to have fucksnapped and murdered the other two a couple days ago, and he was reputed to be her favorite, so now she has to preside over his trial and execution (to the extent that this is unavoidable), and is a wreck. The party, who is well aware that there is a goddamn game on among fey who are trying to make trouble and suffering, all trade knowing looks and are like, okay, let's bang on the lady's door and see what we can do to investigate.
She falls over herself with enthusiasm about the idea that we might save her boo from this frame job which she is certain is a frame job and we try to indicate we are mostly interested in the truth here (though seriously suspecting that this is a frame job actually), and decline to go talk to the accused before the magistrate shows up so as to not look like we were doing nefarious scheming.
In the morning, the magistrate from the capital arrives, being rather pompous and full of himself and uninclined to listen to the party's argument that the fact that there is fey nonsense happening means this is not in fact an open and shut case no matter how many people saw the accused poison a cup or stab the other guy. He does, at least, agree to meet with us after he interviews the witnesses, and before he interviews the accused.
Celyn manages to identify the poison residue in the cup as having been from a magically constructed poison, and praise the Wyrdling when the magistrate asked how he knew, he said, "The Wyrdling told me", because he did in fact use clerical magic to do the analysis (and also rolled a nat20 on figuring out what he knew from what he got). Clerical magic is more trustworthy than arcane magic and also the magistrate clearly was like "Oh, that guy's Wyrdling-touched? ... actually, now that I look at him that totally makes sense." Sometimes being obviously a lunatic has useful functions! No poison is found in the accused room via the same method. The magistrate asked if I could divine anything useful but I had to admit that the future is not in fact one of my skills.
(I need to hit seventh level and then I will have my full range of intended cleric spells...)
We interviewed the accused under the influence of a) Robin's lantern, which is rewarding to the truthful and b) Viepuck's mindreading skills, and confirmed his innocence. THe magistrate turns to Celyn and asks what the Wyrdling says. Now, I have no spells for this as beforementioned but anyway Celyn leans back into his sense of divine presence and gets absolutely nothing to indicate that Viepuck is wrong, and thus says so.
(Presumably in here we get the blessing for good luck in the investigation that the magistrate asked me to offer but we didn't explicitly say so. I am mentioning it here in the session summary so that Mike knows that I did do that in there and I do earnestly hope it goes better than blessing the Duke did.)
Celyn spent the rest of the day puttering around the apothecary and other such places to see if any traces of the magical poison could be found anywhere and did not succeed at finding them. Which is more or less what we expected, but Being Helpful To The Investigation was an important show of willing here and that was a thing we could actually do.
The magistrate was at a loss for motive but we had to point out that a young Lady, recently bereaved, and now having to deal with this whole mess, would both be an intrinsic source of whatever misery the local fey wanted to generate and too much of a mess to be able to properly investigate whatever other shit might go down around here. He hemmed and hawed a lot, and is not convinced of the accused's innocence, but we have at least edged him over into "Not Proven" and now he's planning on spending a week collecting evidence. After prevailing on him to please contact us if something comes up that warrants our investigative skills, we prepare to depart for the capital because that other matter is still, actually, urgent.
While doing his routine checkins with various of our allies as the human telegraph, Viepuck gets a panicked response from the guard captain in Cleenseau, who desperately wants to know if everyone else is dead. Because apparently a messenger came through and claimed we all died in the zombie-infested caves, which not only we have not reached yet (and may not get to, depending), but which our military force has also not reached yet. (Though the delay from the Hunter did mess up the timing, which makes me wonder if it is Player #1, The Hag, that made that play.) This delayed our departure somewhat as Viepuck needed to do some rest and recovery so he could continue to be a communications nexus. Celyn suggested that he contact Rinault as well - who is not on the usual rota of contactees and possibly mad about that - to assure him that everything was fine with us, which was deemed Oh Yes A Very Good Idea.
Having done our best to assure our allies that we are in fact Not Dead Yet, And Think We Will Go For A Walk, we depart for the capital.
We are about two miles outside the capital when Robin becomes aware of the impending ambush. (Which was well-enough concealed that Celyn, Professional Noticer, did not in fact notice them.)
End of session.
Our party is:
Celyn Bettws, Professional Noticer (and Wyrdling Cleric)
Viepuck, the Doogie Howser of Eldritch Fantasy Lawyers
Izgil Moonseeker, Arcane Investigator
Robin of Abenfyrd, The Paladin
(I feel I am pseudohistorically accurate in apparently never spelling that town twice the same way.)
As of last session, we had conveyed an entire village's worth of refugees to Aslain to protect them from a hostile bear-fey (who had one of his giant vultures watching us escort them away, which we know because I am a Professional Noticer). We know the bear fey is one of three fey lords competing to see who can fuck up this area most entertainingly. There we got hit with all the current state of Everything Happens Too Much and proceeded to frantically start triaging, starting with the letter bomb we received under suspicious circumstances.
As we were going through Aslain, we were approached by the barkeep at one of the town inns, who explained that he had a letter for us addressed to "the Tyrwinghan paladin riding a Thing, his straw-haired companion, his page, and their dwarven friend" or something like that, which had been delivered by a disoriented man with a fancy shirt who couldn't remember his own name and who had vanished from the room he'd been put up in to recover. As if that wasn't enough to make us agitated, Celyn spotted sigils in Sylvan on the letter, and promptly liberated it from the man - covering the sigils with his hand - leaving the gent to spend a moment or two trying to figure out where it went.
Celyn does not fuck around with letter bombs and knows that Sylvan script can embed enchantments and curses if one tries to read it. He knows this because, despite expert advice from his apprentice master warning about the dangers of such things, he learned how to read it. He is, however, the only party member who can read it without magical assistance, which he considers unwise when running paranoid about the fey.
So Celyn proposes the party get a private room and he and Izgil could investigate the letter itself to figure out if it is, as he assumes, a bomb (and how much of a bomb it is if so), and then have Izgil study the magic, Viepuck read Celyn's mind to spot untoward changes, and Robin be supportive and protective (and he trusts Robin to notice if he's "acting weird"; he does not actually trust other people to notice if he's acting weird because he thinks their standards of weird are miscalibrated). The actual magical investigation uncovered the bomb and the party worked together to defuse it such that Celyn could read the damn note safely rather than worrying Robin by depending on a saving throw.
Letter is revealed to be the bear fey a) gloating b) trying to get the party to forget via magical curse where his lair is (though since Celyn is the only Sylvan-literate party member one is not sure he thought this through) and c) vaguely threatening. Nobody is impressed. Robin and Celyn are in fact further cementing their partnership by bonding over really wanting to ruin that guy in particular's fucking day.
We then launched into various forms of triage of the things we discovered in town. We went to heal a dwarf seriously injured by bears (affiliated with the hostile bear fey) and discovered that the bears had appeared lost, reoriented themselves when they found someone to attack, and attacked the dwarves, who were rescued by our troop of horsemen, one of whom died in the attempt. We speculate that one of the other fey lords got these bears lost in order to disrupt whatever the Hunter (the bear guy) is up to, but have no way of investigating this at the moment.
Then we divided the party: Robin and Viepuck went to the magistrate to hear the evidence that led to the destruction of the Night Queen temple (because letting it sit wouldn't improve the data); Izgil and Celyn went to try to find out what we could find out about the messenger. ("Short people solidarity, maybe!" - Izgil's player) We got a tip from a halfling bard to the person who made his shirt, who is deeply skeptical of humans - with good reason, as a chunk of her family was recently massacred by the previous baron of this region for uncovering his embezzling - but it turns out that short people solidarity did work and Izgil managed to fumble through most of the talking about how we'd gotten this message and we were worried about the messenger.
After a bit of convincing and conversation, in which we pointed out that the fey are ... damn I've forgotten the word we used, let's go with 'tricky', and the halfling lady noted that Celyn is obviously tricky too (Izgil is as blunt and obvious as a rock), she said, "Come back tomorrow. Go do something." "What sort of something?" Izgil asked. "I don't know. Something. Show me you're who you say you are." Izgil is baffled; Celyn basically privately resolves to keep an eye out for his usual people-he-takes-care-of-as-a-cleric, which would be "trans people" and "occasionally, also crazy people".
Meanwhile the others have gotten talking to the magistrate and learned that the baroness's captain came in, said they had evidence of Bad Things, took the magistrate to investigate under the temple of the Night Queen (who I will remind is the goddess of REST IN PEACE ALREADY WHY DON'T YOU), and turned up a necromantic ritual space, which was burned in something of a panic. They summoned Izgil and Celyn (but really primarily Izgil because Izgil actually has magical analysis skills) to come look at the smashed-up necromancy tools from the space and Izgil confirmed that yeah, those were not good.
So we trundled out to the ruins of the temple, where the floor had been ripped up to expose the ritual space to the open air and the sunlight. Robin confirmed that yeah, this place had an evil vibe, though it's burning off over time and exposure. The magistrate explained that the captain had come in, read a scroll, some stuff glowed green, the green-glowing stuff was smashed as Evil Magic Containing, and the place was burned, including six exsanguinated bodies. Access to the space prior to the destruction was through a crawlspace tunnel through which it would be, at best, inconvenient to transport the stacks of stone that were pillars in the basement space with the five-foot ceilings or the tiles that had the cursed necromantic engravings and blood channels on them.
(The engravings were in a language from north of here, and that's a whole other thing to ponder, of why that language in particular, but it was definitely some sort of raise-the-dead-as-zombies deal.)
We got some local dwarves in who had more specific knowledge to investigate and try to date the space, which made clear that yes, it was much more recent than the actual temple, they were highly disapproving of people setting all the evidence on fire rather than consulting local experts about how the place was constructed, there was a certain amount of "And oh, this is a sloppy hack job, it was going to fall down pretty soon anyway," dwarvish disapproval of the whole thing, which Izgil solemnly agreed with.
The whole thing got the local magistrate - who was already uneasy with "the local peaceful community of ghost pacifiers was actually involved in evil blood magic" as a situation - to send a letter up to the capital to ask that they not, like, execute the lead acolytes of the Night Queen or anything before more investigation could happen and anyway five foot ceilings in a human ritual space, wtf.
Viepuck, who is I remind you TWELVE: This is the worst-designed evil ritual space I've ever been in.
Izgil: But really, how many have you been in?
Viepuck, survivor of child-sacrificing ring for one: [starting to count things off on his fingers]
Having put in a complicated day's work, we divide up again: Viepuck to be the local telegraph, Izgil to write up a detailed report on the findings, and Robin and Celyn (and some Viepuck) to do some local politicking. The next day, everyone would head north.
We sent off our surviving military escort to go help deal with the zombie-infested caves in the northeast, which was why we'd borrowed them from Cleenseau. Then we dropped in on the halfling who we knew knew something about the messenger, to say, "Sorry, we said we'd come by, but we have to go, things are urgent"; she actually invited us in to the back and lo, there was the messenger, still not doing great. We investigated some - mostly Viepuck, backed by Izgil - and determined that he had been charmed by the harpies (Celyn was agitated when Viepuck started humming the relevant tune) and been one of a number of people who had been enchanted and Sent Off To Do Things by the bear fey.
It is roughly two days' journey to the capital, so we head out. Robin tells the party on the road the story of Greymalkin's background, why he's a wingless gryphon, and his connection to Robin's magic lantern, so we have more backstory shared there.
After an uneventful ride, we arrive in the town roughly halfway there, to discover that they too are having Events. Specifically: the town's local magistrate/lady, who ascended to the position recently after the death of her mother in undead attacks that destroyed the local temple, was unmarried and was courted by three men. One of them appears to have fucksnapped and murdered the other two a couple days ago, and he was reputed to be her favorite, so now she has to preside over his trial and execution (to the extent that this is unavoidable), and is a wreck. The party, who is well aware that there is a goddamn game on among fey who are trying to make trouble and suffering, all trade knowing looks and are like, okay, let's bang on the lady's door and see what we can do to investigate.
She falls over herself with enthusiasm about the idea that we might save her boo from this frame job which she is certain is a frame job and we try to indicate we are mostly interested in the truth here (though seriously suspecting that this is a frame job actually), and decline to go talk to the accused before the magistrate shows up so as to not look like we were doing nefarious scheming.
In the morning, the magistrate from the capital arrives, being rather pompous and full of himself and uninclined to listen to the party's argument that the fact that there is fey nonsense happening means this is not in fact an open and shut case no matter how many people saw the accused poison a cup or stab the other guy. He does, at least, agree to meet with us after he interviews the witnesses, and before he interviews the accused.
Celyn manages to identify the poison residue in the cup as having been from a magically constructed poison, and praise the Wyrdling when the magistrate asked how he knew, he said, "The Wyrdling told me", because he did in fact use clerical magic to do the analysis (and also rolled a nat20 on figuring out what he knew from what he got). Clerical magic is more trustworthy than arcane magic and also the magistrate clearly was like "Oh, that guy's Wyrdling-touched? ... actually, now that I look at him that totally makes sense." Sometimes being obviously a lunatic has useful functions! No poison is found in the accused room via the same method. The magistrate asked if I could divine anything useful but I had to admit that the future is not in fact one of my skills.
(I need to hit seventh level and then I will have my full range of intended cleric spells...)
We interviewed the accused under the influence of a) Robin's lantern, which is rewarding to the truthful and b) Viepuck's mindreading skills, and confirmed his innocence. THe magistrate turns to Celyn and asks what the Wyrdling says. Now, I have no spells for this as beforementioned but anyway Celyn leans back into his sense of divine presence and gets absolutely nothing to indicate that Viepuck is wrong, and thus says so.
(Presumably in here we get the blessing for good luck in the investigation that the magistrate asked me to offer but we didn't explicitly say so. I am mentioning it here in the session summary so that Mike knows that I did do that in there and I do earnestly hope it goes better than blessing the Duke did.)
Celyn spent the rest of the day puttering around the apothecary and other such places to see if any traces of the magical poison could be found anywhere and did not succeed at finding them. Which is more or less what we expected, but Being Helpful To The Investigation was an important show of willing here and that was a thing we could actually do.
The magistrate was at a loss for motive but we had to point out that a young Lady, recently bereaved, and now having to deal with this whole mess, would both be an intrinsic source of whatever misery the local fey wanted to generate and too much of a mess to be able to properly investigate whatever other shit might go down around here. He hemmed and hawed a lot, and is not convinced of the accused's innocence, but we have at least edged him over into "Not Proven" and now he's planning on spending a week collecting evidence. After prevailing on him to please contact us if something comes up that warrants our investigative skills, we prepare to depart for the capital because that other matter is still, actually, urgent.
While doing his routine checkins with various of our allies as the human telegraph, Viepuck gets a panicked response from the guard captain in Cleenseau, who desperately wants to know if everyone else is dead. Because apparently a messenger came through and claimed we all died in the zombie-infested caves, which not only we have not reached yet (and may not get to, depending), but which our military force has also not reached yet. (Though the delay from the Hunter did mess up the timing, which makes me wonder if it is Player #1, The Hag, that made that play.) This delayed our departure somewhat as Viepuck needed to do some rest and recovery so he could continue to be a communications nexus. Celyn suggested that he contact Rinault as well - who is not on the usual rota of contactees and possibly mad about that - to assure him that everything was fine with us, which was deemed Oh Yes A Very Good Idea.
Having done our best to assure our allies that we are in fact Not Dead Yet, And Think We Will Go For A Walk, we depart for the capital.
We are about two miles outside the capital when Robin becomes aware of the impending ambush. (Which was well-enough concealed that Celyn, Professional Noticer, did not in fact notice them.)
End of session.
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This might be the previous session's descriptive text?
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I am entirely possessed of the cabbage nature; I am sorry to have inflicted you with it.
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