S1 E13: A Timely Rescue

General Summary

• Pevushal is examined more closely, and his wounds are significant but limited to his head - blood caking from the ears, nose and eyes suggesting a massive cranial hemorrhage. Bakunne knows that Pevushal had basic combat abilities as part of the Steel Reciters, but was no seasoned adventurer. Still, he should have been able to hold his own against an unskilled attacker or at least leave signs of who his killer or killers were. And why was he here alone?  These things may forever remain a mystery (thanks to some mediocre investigation rolls lol).
• The door on the other side of the balcony platform is perfunctorily examined, then opened; releasing a flurry of arrows from the Yuan-ti massed on the other side. By contrast to the wild and tribal appearance of the Zhis-Kaas clan, these are two elegantly armored Malison females that superficially resemble Hamadryas, the snake-bodied medusa types, but in fact their 'snakes' are curved decorative blades held in place by headbands of metal, and three more-or-less human looking yuan ti, two women and one man, and these are dressed more like armed city merchants than tribal warriors.
• The tide of the battle does not go favorably for the party, and Bakunne opts to bolt, running headling into more Yuan-ti coming up the stairs from below, beefy Malison types with snake heads and bodybuilder human torsos, tattooed and festooned with bones and teeth in tribal patterns. Alistor falls prey to a powerful suggestion spell from one of the Night Whisperers - the psuedo-medusa Malison females - and decides he simply must return to his camp for his magic sword (when technically they have 3 of them, the +1 Scimitars from the previous room, but for whatever reason Alistor opted to instead try to defeat the five Yuan-ti with the dead body of Bakunne's friend Pevushal, in another triumph of PC strategy)
• Fortuitously, however, the Yuan-ti that are running up the stairs are on their side, from the Zhis-Kaas; they fling the party members out of the way and charge headlong into their enemy, the Society of the Sleeping Mother. Along the way they tell the party of a secret exit in the hallway between Polmachis' room and the stairway that they missed when coming up, and the party bravely skee-daddles, leaving their rescuers to their fate.
• Back at the camp they find someone new, a somewhat befuddled Orc in plate armor, abnormally clean for the marshy jungle. He mentions that some kind of metal rot has affected the wagon wheels of a merchant he's working for, and they sent him to look for help. The party is wisely suspicious but seeing no immediate or obvious threat - and suspecting that they themselves are the reason the metal rot has gotten loose from the mirror room of Tamoachan, so his story checks out - they ask him to bring back his traveling companions. He introduces himself as Trom, short for Trom Trolltrain, a professional caravan guard and likely some kind of heavy for the various smuggler gangs operating freely in the area.
• He returns with a lovely, eye catching red Tiefling woman dressed in a fairly comically decorative version of jungle adventurer gear complete with pith helmet, named Kalspira, and a small, round, mulch-brown crone woman named Mama Danzri who is of indeterminate species; possibly human but her hands are twisted and tipped with razor-sharp black nails, and she's hunched to the point of being nearly spherical.
• Mama Danzri is evidently some kind of alchemist-witch who has a secret potion of Lycanthropy, and they were transporting it from her settlement north of Talaganza to some Minonoise buyers in colonial Kanambou, another 40 miles to the north - the first of the cities of Caetica that the PCs saw burning in the vision at Tamoachan. "Werewolf Juice" as she calls it is in high demand in Kanambou, a colony of Minon on the western coast, though it's de-facto outlawed in the other colonial city on the eastern coast, Nogossi, which is an Imperial colony under the jurisdiction of Pilaan; the empire has been at war with shape-shifters and lycanthropes for almost 200 years in the distant northwest. 
• Mama Danzri is also quite unsettling in person; she takes Alistor's Whiskey, giving him a bag of holding in return for it - a bag of Beholding, in fact - and disappears into one of the tents to noisily suck it down, giggling and singing to herself. Kalspira explains they keep the werewolf juice in a similar bag and the cart really just has their other belongings and simple trade goods as a cover. "Just don't use it under duress, like in combat or in haste, because then it does Beholder stuff."
• The plan for the rest of them is to get some sleep, then take a look at the broken-down wagon which was abandoned on the road, and then head back to the Zhis-Kaas encampment to give them their fangs/spoons and get their help prying their way into the Pyramid of Malavir.

Rewards Granted

• Bag of Beholding https://www.dndbeyond.com/magic-items/6981341-bag-of-beholding

Kalspira, one of the three visitors who have come to the PC's camp outside the Viper Pit...

Report Date

29 Jun 2023

Primary Location

The Caetica Region

Secondary Location

The Viper Pit/Polmachis' Folly