Session 11: The Road South

General Summary

Midmorning, 17th of Rottingtime - Morning, 20th of Rottingtime

17th
Conor and Claire journey south, walking through gentle snowfall. Overhead, the sky is dark and gloomy, laden with heavy blue clouds. It seems like a storm is imminent. After walking for several hours, they come across a roadside in. Its sign shows a picture of an orangeish cauldron, but no words. A dark-haired young man in leather armor is nailing a piece of parchment to the signpost while a goat nibbles at the end of his trouser leg. Seeing approaching strangers, the youth waves them both over. He introduces himself as an adventurer looking for work and tells them he's been staying at the Copper Cauldron Inn for a week hoping someone will hire him. Somewhat reluctantly, Claire tells him that she and Conor are heading to Crowhill. The young man tells them his name, Kaiess Knolltun, and excitedly asks to tag along. They agree to travel together for a little bit.
The three of them head inside and Claire and Conor get a room. The only other guest, other than Kaiess, is a barrel-chested salesman who keeps to himself. Claire has a lie-down while the others sit in the main chamber near the fire. The innkeeper's son brings his family's animals (two goats, a sow and her piglets, and a few chickens, as well as the other traveler's horse) inside and bars the door against the howling wind. The innkeeper's wife cooks a lovely soup for dinner, made from vegetables grown in the garden outside, and the guests eat dinner alongside the innkeeper family. Claire, Conor, and Kaiess sleep on straw mats for the night, rats huddling beneath them for warmth as a snowstorm rages outside.

18th
The group wakes up to a breakfast of hardboiled eggs and a thick blanket of snow outside. Before they leave, Kaiess buys a bag of coal from the other traveler in the inn. Seeing Claire standing in the road, shivering in her totally unsuitable clothing, Kaiess offers her his thick, fur-lined coat.
Later in the morning, they pass two wagons that are heading northward. The merchants driving them have winter clothes among their goods. Claire buys a green wool hooded cloak decorated with black knot work, fur lined boots, and a dark red fuzzy wool shawl. She bundles up and returns Kaiess's coat.
Around midday, they stop for a rest. Kaiess sets up a small campfire and melts snow to boil. He harvests some wild carrots and throws them in with some salt fish from his pack. Claire and Conor see him pull some spices out of a small pouch that seems to be deeper than it appears on first glance, and cooks the best soup imaginable. While they eat, he shows them the pouch and explains that it is a Heward’s Handy Spice Pouch that he got from his mom.
As it nears evening, the group passes a road sign that tells them they are crossing into The Darkwood Duchy. On the reverse, it says "The Wynfield Duchy." At sundown, they find a copse of trees decently far from the road to make camp in. Kaiess sets up a trap on the other side of a small creek and baits it with a Goodberry. With the remainder of the berries, he cooks a pastry that fills his and his companions' stomachs through breakfast the next day.
The night passes uneventfully. The only signs of life are passing owls and elk, the howls of wolves in the mountains, and a lone traveler heading north on horseback.

19th
Kaiess awakes at dawn to the sound of squeaking near the trap he set. The closer he gets, the more distinct the sounds become until he's able to pick out words: a string of curse words shouted in Sylvan. He sees a tiny humanoid struggling to pull themself free from where the trap snapped shut on their arm, tiny dragonfly wings beating furiously. The others awaken and approach as Kaiess frees the sprite, apologizes for catching them, and splits their arm. After being healed, the sprite flies off holding two weighty Goodberries.
The group walks through farmland. Some of the crops are not yet harvested, and Kaiess tracks down a farm girl from whom he can buy an enormous pumpkin. He straps it to the back of his pack.
Around midday, they see the fuzzy gray shape of the Darkwoods up ahead. Seeing it for the first time in eighty plus years, Conor realizes this is where her family lived. Claire tells her they don’t have to go if she doesn’t want to, but Conor says she wants to. She tells her companions about the dangers in the Darkwoods that she remembers, including plant monsters, beasts, and something that grabbed their dogmoles and dragged them into the trees.
While they walk, Claire teaches Kaiess the thumbs up and “horns/rock on” hand signs, which he thinks might be a tiefling thing. He doesn't ask for clarification.
They make it to the shores of the Lost Pine Lake in the late afternoon, and find a small trading outpost built between its shores and the edge of the Darkwoods. There is an inn here, called The Angry Shoemaker. They go inside to get rooms, and Kaiess offers to work for his meals in the kitchen. The head cook, brawny woman named Ingrid, takes him up on his offer. While in the kitchen, he cooks a very large pie from his pumpkin. After giving slices to himself and his friends, he leaves the remainder for the staff.
Over dinner, they discuss how to get to Crowhill from here, as the road between there and the Lost Pine Outpost goes the long way around the Darkwoods. Kaiess declares himself to be a master bushwhacker, and ultimately they decide to go to Crowhill through the Darkwoods following his lead. Their plan settled, they go to bed for the night.

20th
As soon as they wake up, Claire and Conor discuss that it has been two weeks since they were in The Great Wizard Rudolphus's Tower in the Wastes, and his next shipment of Autunite crystals is due. They summon Rudy's chest and put the new crystals Coalclaw stole inside. They then puzzle over the chest for a while, trying to figure out how to send it to The Greenlake Wizard. (Basically, they just rapidly send the chest back and forth between the Material and Ethereal planes.)
Kaiess begins knocking at their door. Unable to get him to leave, they ask him through the door if he has ever heard of a place called The Greenlake. He tells them he has. There is a place southeast of his village called Greenlake, a settlement in Ostabek near the coast. It’s a site of rumors of strange events, like astrological and meteorological oddities, and strange diseases. Kaiess overhears Claire say the phrase "I killed a person" as she and Conor quietly argue what to do next. He is alarmed, and to calm him they hurry him inside and explain that yes, someone died, but he was hurting other people and they had no other choice.
They show Kaiess how the paired chests work, and ask if he can send the chest to Greenlake since he knows more about it than they do. It doesn’t seem to work. Claire is getting more and more frustrated with the chests and throws the miniature one onto the bed. Kaiess explores the chest and sees a large, fist sized ruby on the lid of the chest, as well as a variety of smaller stones of different cuts and colors. He also sees greenish powder inside the metalwork on the chest, which Claire tells him is dangerous.

Eventually, Claire decides she wants to be inside the large chest to see where it goes. Holding the lid shut from the inside, she is hurtled through space and time into the Deep Ethereal. Opening the lid, she sees a vast, foggy plane stretched out before her. The chest she's sitting in is but one of thousands housed on shelf of chests that extends past her range of vision in either direction. There is a small brass nameplate beneath her chest that reads "The Great Wizard Rudolphus." She sees translucent, robed figures gliding around the plane, ignoring gravity. They are at work, moving chests around between spots on the shelves. One of these ghosts, a wispy elven man, sees her and soars towards her, his face twisted in rage. Before he reaches her, the lid closes and she is sucked back through to the material plane.
Claire stumbles out of the chest, sobbing. Once she is calm enough, she tells her friends what she saw. They realize that the ghosts moving the chests around must be the mechanism by which chests can be transferred between different wizards in The Consortium. They send the chest back and leave it there. Kaiess keeps the small chest on his person. The three of them go down for breakfast.

Outside, they see a man hammering a sign into a notice board on the side of the outpost office. He is offering a bounty of 600 GP for a beast that’s killed livestock recently, and a man this past night. They walk to where the man was found, and see signs of a struggle: blood, contorted tracks in the muddy snow, and the man's forearm and hand trampled into the dirt of the road. Kaiess examines the tracks in the area and determines that they belong to a large, cave-bear sized avian quadruped- specifically, an Owlbear. The trio stands at the edge of the Darkwoods, preparing to follow the beast's tracks inside.

Rewards Granted

Kaiess: bag of coal, Absolute Unit of a pumpkin, bounty flyer for the beast that killed the man, the mini chest
Claire: boots, shawl, cloak, fear of the unknown
Conor: another foolhardy youth to take care of

Missions/Quests Completed

Make a New Friend
Warm Up Claire/Get Claire Better LARP Gear
Kaiesse: Obtain an Absoulute Unit of a pumpkin
Claire: Travel Through Space-Time, Part II
Claire: Have an Existential Crisis
Conor and Claire Do Identity Theft, Part II
Get a Job

Character(s) interacted with

PCs

Conor Oakenriver
Claire Blackwell
Kaiess Knolltun

NPCs

Copper Cauldron Innkeeper & Family (& Animals)
Coal Salesman
Ingrid the Cook
Diego Donaghue, head of the Lost Pine Outpost

Notes

(K said “In before "it’s a mama trying to feed her baby before it’s winter," because I’m gonna kill it anyway.”)

Report Date

12 Oct 2018

Primary Location

Lost Pine Outpost