Session 13

We go downstairs and have some small talk with the barman, we get a complementary meal, he asks what we've been up to on our patrol, and i try to deflect away from the important stuff and instead steer the conversation to be about the dangers in the woods, especially away from the path. In the end none of what I tell him is a lie, he knows we encountered a giant spider and killed it, but nothing more
 
We meet a new party member, Mercury, who is from the golden administration
 
We spend a lot of time informing Mercury of some of the goings in the area, as that is part of their reason for being here.
 
We discuss what to do regarding the report we need to give:
 
There is the issue of the idol we found, and the severed arm too. I really want to know who was at the homestead at the time of the attack, but don't want to give up too much information. Of course we can always mention the dangers present in the woods, such as the giant spider we fought (and brought back evidence of)
 
We stay stuck in this discussion for a while, not sure what to do, until suddenly Mercury proposes to write a report for us with a plausibe story of what happened. The goal is to not blame the druids for the attack, because we don't want Tharian to use this as a reason to retaliate against them. So we come up with a story that the homestead was attacked by a giant spider, as a sort of protest from the woods themselves about the recent expansions done to the homestead. For this reason its ill advised to return to that particular homestead for the foreseeable future, as we managed to defeat the beast but there are undoubtedly more lurking in the woods.
 
All this talk has been said in a whisper, because this bar is filled with people who might be listening in on us, that's why I beat around the bush a lot, especially when it comes to the idol, never actually mentioning it out loud, mercury can however still hear us fine, as they're sitting right across from us of course, but this should be fine.
 
Mercury turns out to be an expert at falsifying documents, so the written report is very well made and we decide to just turn that in instead of trying to pry more information out of Tharian by reporting in person, and possibly getting caught for our lies in the process, this does mean that we should ask someone else about the arm and idol some other time.
 
From this moment on we enter a longer period of downtime (about 15 days or so) and we have a few options for what to do:
 
Fix the Cranes (5 subsections, 3 cars, train about 30 engineers, 3 priests of Gond)
 
Find or train 3 priests for Gond
 
Find a cleric for the idol RuHa has
 
Shape the social balance
 
Help the homesteaders with general labors (to free up volunteers for other stuff)
 
Investigate Zerrat's homestead (for goodwill and such)
 
Potentially go shopping or crafting (armour and such)
 
Mercury was sneaking into Tharian's tent to find some writings of his, and she did.
 
The short snippets of writing outline some of Tharians reasonings for his behaviour, and are very insightful to us all.
 
He talks about his concern about reconnecting with the ivory order from the hilltop, as they still follow military doctrine very closely, so he fears that impressing them with words won't be enough to subjugate them (this hints at his desire to take over the wider ivory order in some way)
 
He also talks about the recent fight with the druidic circle, where he and his men invaded the druid's homebase and killed Oriria, this battle was apparently very messy and shows he's not actually a great commander in stressful situations. He says he personally dealt the last blow to Oriria (by tripping over a branch with his sword in hand, mind you, it wasn't heroic at all, but no one saw it happen directly, just the aftermath) but also admits that it wasn't him who killed her, she was already dying when they arrived (we need to investigate this at some point, maybe it was the zombie plant monsters, or something else entirely)
 
He started this whole military campaign against the druids not because he hates them, but because he sees their destruction as an opportunity to prove himself to his men and the rest of the ivory order, in hopes of gaining more power and influence.
 
The last scrap talks about his concerns about Bramthrum and the cranes; he recognizes that Bramthrum holds immense power and knows it has something to do with the cranes, and that scares him. He fears that reactivating the cranes could bring his power into question or in some way is a barrier to his rule, so he wants to dismantle the cranes to get rid of that problem once and for all, and of course turning the scrap into weapons and armor is a logical next step. In short, He doesn't understand how that magic works and it scares him.
 
Now that we've read those it’s time for the first couple activities of the downtime period.
 
There are already 10 volunteers available around the camp that could be trained up to become engineers or priests
 
I try to get Bramthrum's help in teaching some of the volunteers, i can't convince him but one of the volunteers is now trained as an engineer (1/30)
 
I try again later that day, this time it goes much better and i get all 9 remaining volunteers trained up (10/30) yay!
 
The plan is now to go to some nearby homestead and help with the harvest, to free up more volunteers to be trained up, but of course other options are also available