Session 7: Days at the Colosseum Report
General Summary
Armed with a very generalized map of the Cold Lake region of Morbus Gravis, our heroes -- Happy, Fallenbridge, Cerice, and Leonardo -- are led by the tiefling Variance underground to the Citywalk Colosseum at the border between the Desmesne of Lord Raktavi and the Holdings of Zarloff.
The Colosseum, like the rest of the Citywalk District, is a marvel of mechanical-and-magical engineering. The city here, you see, moves. Buildings wrench themselves out of foundations on great articulated legs, or treads, or huge wheels, and shift positions. Buildings themselves rearrange their rooms and even their floors.
The Colosseum is a three-tiered cake of stone and wood, each level slowly rotating, rising up or sinking down through and around the other levels, individual sections rising and falling to create a massive puzzlebox that blends fighting space with audience stands. But now, like much else in the disputed territory between realms, the colosseum grinds away in emptiness.
Once there, Variance leaves the adventurers to their plan of scouting out patrol schedules, resting up, and, in Cerice's case, doing a lot of reading in order to understand the book she acquired from Lord Raktavi's treasure hoard.
While the warlock-cleric reads in a haze of candle and magic-light, and while Happy lurks in a window-door ("It has been a while since I have lurked. I miss it"), Leonardo and Fallenbridge work their way a few blocks back into Raktavi's territory in order to get a feel for the local bar culture.
There, they meet a group of tieflings more than happy to buy drinks and tell stories about the war. As it turns out, Raktavi's territory has been constantly shrinking since Zarloff first began his expansion two years prior. Previously content to rule decadantly and distantly from his castle at Graymark Citadel in the foothills of the Mountains of Sorrow and Ice, Zarloff began creating armies of undead and marching outward, first allying with and then claiming the domains previously called the Frostbite Kingdom and the Parasite Court, until the Throne of Cats is nearly surrounded, and only a few miles of cityscape across.
This meshes with what the adventurers have already seen of groups of skeletons moving through the low-lying fogs of the border alleys, hunting for new recruits.
Meanwhile, back at the Colosseum, having heard about a strange bugbear in the neighborhood, three bugbears -- Crug, Lug, and Chad -- sneak up on Happy as she stands watching the city. Smitten with the foreign bugbear with the fashionable moss in her hair, the chief, Crug, begins the courtship dance of posturing, which is answered by Happy with the traditional playful exchange of shoves, trips, and blows, all resulting in an evening spent around a hallway fire learning about the dangers of traveling north into Zarloff's cityscape -- something the bugbears know a little about, since they are part of a mercenary band that fights on Raktavi's side on occasion.
Leonardo and Fallenbridge, strangely not drunk, return and join in on this conversation, with some more required posturing, and the comradery continues into the night, until the bugbears depart to check up on the rest of the mercs.
The next morning, during breakfast, Raktavi's promised guide, the urban ranger Silent Sam, a black dragonborn, arrives as silently and unseen as his moniker would imply. Armed with slightly better knowledge of the Holdings, and with considerably more knowledge of the ways to scavenge and survive in the streets of the Demon City, Sam, though a dragonborn of few words, will hopefully prove to be an invaluable asset in the coming days, weeks, and, perhaps, months as the Troubleshooters try to navigate alien politics and wars, and make their way back home.
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