Khûm – Chapter 1

"Autumn of 67. Second Age. Spoiled Shore.
That’s one for the annals – contract completed, client content, coin in purse. A day-to-remember and no mistake.
Now, I was never one for the open ocean but I gotta say – feels good to see the Spoils shrinking into the distance. Astonishing how much you come to miss even the sun upon your face, the wind blowing in your beard. Something as simple as the cries of the gulls overhead might just fill you with hope and good cheer for what’s to come.
Yet it won’t last.
Many leagues we may put between us and them benighted country but the Spoils ain’t truly a country. It ain’t merely the earth that the dead corrupted all them years ago.
Nay, the real blight lies within, in the hearts and souls of anyone who survived those dark days. It may lay dormant while the sun shines but when the sun sinks and night falls and the darkness presses close about the walls of the tent and your dreams populate with the shuffling, deathless horror of a million marching slain, it’ll come back.
Some of us can never truly leave that behind."
 – Beholder's Log, 67 2A

Aboard a Vhakizlan dreadnought, the Menagerie makes for Qhlomi, the first stop on the voyage to their new contract in distant Khûm. Along the way, Chimera tests Umber's strength, Mouse practices their Draconic with Basilisk and Griffon recuperates alongside Harpy and reads a troubling letter he was sent.
Qhlomi, untouched by the Night Wars, makes the company's first stop. Here, Umber seeks supplies and is confronted by the Snagtooth street gang, resulting in a brawl. Mouse recruits scouts and spies to serve in the company while Remorhaz recruits their next passage, a swift merchant vessel called the Osprey, bound for Obsidios. 
The Osprey departs Qhlomi and swings southeast, making for the jungled Obsidian coast. Along the way, they pass the ruins of Ychra, where both Griffon and Umber were born. The Commander announces that, effective immediately, Invisible will serve as the company's new intelligencer, demoting Stirge from her position. While Remorhaz and Willow practiced archery together, Stirge approached Mouse about potentially stealing something – that same troubling letter – from Griffon's cabin.
In the cliffside city of Jarkoth, Umber goes to recruit new fighters and meets his doppelganger in Thrask the Troll, a pit-fighter and lackwit. While Remorhaz struggles to find passage north, Mouse has no trouble supplying the company from the local merchants in the lower city. When Griffon attempts to reach out to his intoxicated mother, she drunkenly mistakes him for Umber and confesses her anxieties about Griffon's fitness to lead.
Aboard the Narliza, the mercenary company trekked north, toward the untamed continent of Rubicos. While their destination was Port Sumpton, the only accessible port to outsiders entering the Hidden Kingdom, an unseasonable blizzard blew down from the north and stranded the company in the tiny mining community of Banishment. For three weeks, they wasted away, praying a ship willing to brave the ice and take them further north.

Campaign: The Menagerie
Game Date: Gnoson 43, 67 – Borson 39, 68 2A
Starting Point: Spoiled Shore
Player Characters:

• Griffon
• Mouse
• Remorhaz
• Umber