Adventure Log I
AN APPOINTMENT WITH FORTUNE
Five strangers received a mysterious summons to the home of aVarisian fortune-teller called Zellara, who claimed to have information on their mutual enemy, the petty crime lord Gaedren Lamm. They arrived at the appointed hour to find her house empty, but they could see there was bread and wine on the table and a note from Zellara promising she would return shortly.
While they waited, the five introduced themselves to one another: Taylan, a half-elven Sorcerer who lived as a beggar on the streets; Trevor, a happy half-orc Barbarian and bouncer at the Cracked Weasel pub in the Old District; Byron, a human Barbarian who made his living fighting in the pits, otherwise known as the Korsovan bear; a half-elven female Bard who introduced herself as Calli, who carried a parasol at her hip; and an eloquent human Magus she introduced as her manager, who went by the name of Nightingale. As they met, some recalled rumors they had heard about the others, but as it was their first meeting, no one was so rude as to ask any delicate questions just yet. What they did discuss was that each of them had been wronged by Gaedren in some fashion and all hoped to see justice done to him. Two briefly shared their stories: Taylan had once been one of Gaedren’s “Little Lamms,” street urchins forced to work for him. A distant dragon ancestor gave Taylan the ability to manifest scaled claws, which resulted in Gaedren and his people torturing him for years, removing scales to sell. Calli mentioned her brother having been framed for murder, and when she was able to find a witness to testify, the witness was murdered as well. Her brother was released but sent far away to protect the family from the shame. None of the others were questioned before Zellara arrived.
Zellara revealed that Gaedren Lamm had murdered her son after he managed to recover her precious Harrow deck Gaedren had stolen from her. The fortune-teller said that she had located Lamm’s hideout at an abandoned fishery on the West Pier but couldn’t risk approaching the Guard because their slow-moving bureaucracy was likely to give Gaedren time to escape. So instead, she used the divining powers of her Harrow deck to learn of others wronged by him and gathered them here. She implored the party to exact justice on the crime lord. Before they left, she performed a Harrow reading for them all, predicting both unexpected opportunity and mass chaos in the near future.
The party approached the fishery during the day to scope out the building. Trevor discovered a door at the side that was open, revealing a small entrance hall. They carefully entered and heard the muttering of voices from a locked double door opposite, revealing children in forced labor. This spurred the team into taking immediate action. It took both barbarians to wrench open the doors. Byron saw a number of urchins moving barrels and told them, in not-so-polite terms, to fuck off. Trevor intervened and tried a much more diplomatic approach. Unfortunately, one of them was not a child but a gnome called Hookshanks Crueller, the boss keeping the kids in line. Hookshanks started shouting, and a fight broke out! Nightingale set off a spell and managed to daze the bully. Fists flashed and axes swung, but few blows struck their mark! The slime of the fish paste they’d been making and moving had made footing slippery, and it took time for all to adjust to the terrain. Calli opened her parasol, revealing a series of bells, and started singing, trying to inspire the team to great heroics! Another door opened, and a vicious dog entered the melee. Trevor, not wanting to hurt the children, tried to grapple them but missed, and the children were too afraid of Hookshanks to refuse his orders to attack Trevor in return. Trevor was wounded for his caution. Taylan fired magic missiles that looked like laser beams from his eyes. The fight was on a knife edge, but then Trevor swung his great axe and carved the gnome in two. At that exact moment, the dog leaped through the gnome’s flailing body, attacking Trevor! Luckily for him, the dog missed, and Taylan ended it. Byron, using his intimidation skills, told the kids once again to fuck off or die. Trevor once again intervened and told them to find shelter with the priest Otto in the Old District. This time the orphans took his advice and left, but they kept looking at Byron the whole time.
The team, wounded but relieved the fight was over, then entered through the door, which revealed another small room. As they entered, an acid attack from a wand almost slammed into them. Calli used her charm, and the attacker was mystically convinced that they were good friends. He said his name was Yargin, and he was confirmed to be Gaedren’s right hand. It didn’t take much to convince the charmed man to join forces to overthrow him under the ruse of installing Yargin in his place. However, Yargin happened to have a blood feud with Byron, and it took all of Byron’s willpower to stop himself from killing him on the spot. Calli used her diplomatic skills to hold the peace by getting Yargin’s wand off him. The truce secured, they learned from Yargin the whereabouts of Gaedren Lamm and one of his enforcers, a nasty, vicious piece of work called Giggles. As Yargin told Calliandra all, he saw Trevor and turned pale, making out that Trevor was some kind of chaotic psycho and referring to him as “Shiv.” Trevor and the rest of the party were utterly confused. All but Byron, who recognized the name but stayed silent as he tried to piece together the disconnect between Trevor and the man he knew.
The team was taken further into the building where they saw Giggles on the fishery floor below, enjoying the pain and misery caused to kids forced to wade in a vat of fish guts and acid to mash it into paste. Giggles was instantly suspicious of the strangers, but Calli and Yargin lied that they were investors here to inspect the operation. Yargin held Calli at the top of the stairs while the rest of the team descended to surround Giggles and make a swift end of him. Nightingale buried his long blade in the man’s stomach, causing him to slump forward. When he did, Nightingale saw on the necklace Giggles wore the wedding ring stolen from Nightingale’s wife on the night she was murdered. He had no time to process the knowledge that he had unwittingly gotten the revenge he was after before they had to keep moving towards Gaedren, the monster who had ordered the attack. Trevor, ever the nice guy, helped the kids and once again told them to find shelter with Otto the priest.
Yargin told the team that Gaedren lay below the fishery. The team walked outside, carefully navigating their way around a slippery walkway and saw what looked like a ship that was badly in need of repair. Yargin revealed that Gaedren lay below but that he’d never been down there himself. He just sometimes sent food down. Byron, realizing that his enemy was of no use to them anymore, stepped up and slammed his fist straight through his body, ripping out his guts. Yargin toppled and fell into the murky dock waters.
The team then entered the small broken-down wooden boat, coated in cobwebs and dust. They were set upon by half a dozen spiders that were no match for the group. They searched and managed to find the secret door to a thin L-shaped boardwalk that would take them into a small dwelling under the fishery above. Calli sent out her dancing lights across the water, and the group got a better view of the underside of the building, noting the pilings lifting it above the river. As they took stock of the lay of the land, they saw small shadows and movement from schools of fish that swam by, as well as the shadow of something noticeably larger.
They quickly realized it was a shark! The group threw some of the dead spider bodies into the water at a distance, and Calli used her bardic magic to create splashing sounds where they landed to distract the shark. It worked, and the huge beast swam away. The team, taking advantage of the shark’s absence, walked carefully along the boards and made their way to the door of the small dwelling. They all expected it to be locked, but to their relief, it was open. As they opened the door, a square-shaped pit in the room was revealed, surrounded by another narrow walkway. In the pit below was a very large alligator, Gaedren’s pet, Gobblegut. The cruel man would feed enemies and those who displeased him to the beast. At the end of the room past the pit, in a small living area, stood Gaedren Lamm.
The walkway was deliberately small, allowing only one person to walk down it at a time. Lamm saw the adventurers walk in one by one, mocking and taunting them as they entered. He didn’t recognize Calli at first, but she removed a hairpin, and a magic effect altering her appearance was dismissed. Her bright pink hair became almost black, and a port-wine stain birthmark spread across her face. Gaedren then revealed it had been Byron he’d had kill off the witness that could have cleared her brother’s name. There was no time to digest that information as the battle had begun. Each one of them had reason to kill Lamm, and the team attacked. Byron ran down one walkway first, followed by Nightingale on the other, then Calli, Taylan, and finally Trevor. But as they did so, Lamm released the passive crocodile, which attempted to attack Calli
When Trevor entered the cramped room and saw Lamm and the crocodile, something inside him snapped, and he pulled a block of something from his pocket and put it in his mouth. A physical change came over him. He began to rage, but while this would be normal for a barbarian, in this case, Trevor physically turned into somebody else. Byron cried out, “Shiv!,” finally seeing within Trevor the man he thought he was. A chaotic evil character called Shiv who used to work for Lamm. Shiv wanted nothing but to burn and ruin the world around him and once he raged he couldn’t stop! But that wasn’t the only change. His body oozed some kind of sickly green liquid—which smelled slightly acidic. Shiv leapt into the pit and attacked the crocodile. It was a bloody battle.
In the meantime, Byron, Nightingale, and Taylan surrounded and began their attack on Gaedren, with Taylan delivering the final death blow. After years of being a monster in their lives, he was nothing more than a cowardly old man.
Back in the pit, Shiv had been trying to attack the beast, but his accuracy was awful and in his blind rage, he missed the creature several times. But the beast didn’t miss and almost killed Shiv with its blows. Byron and Nightingale, seeing this, leapt into the pit to save him. It was an epic battle, but the men were able to slay the reptile together, Nightingale delivering the final blow. Shiv, however, continued to rage and started to take all his anger, all his hatred out on the beast by ripping and tearing its dead body to pieces. After six rounds, he was exhausted and physically transformed back into Trevor. Trevor lay fatigued on the floor, confused and bewildered as to what had happened. He remembered nothing of his change and staunchly denied having taken anything at all. The rest of the group didn’t press him on it.
In the aftermath, while Byron tended to Trevor, Taylan searched Lamm’s dead body while Nightingale and Calli searched Lamm’s room. In the room with a variety of loot, they found a ledger that Calli would be able to use to clear her brother’s name, a bejeweled brooch depicting a pseudo-dragon and an imp entwined with each other in a yin-yang pattern—the family crest of the Queen—and a hatbox with flies buzzing around it. Inside the hatbox was a grim discovery: the severed head of Zellara, badly made up to conceal the sagging flesh, clearly having been dead for several weeks, and her precious Harrow deck. Now the party had more questions than answers. Why did Gaedren have the queen’s brooch, and how did Zellara meet with them that morning?
As they pondered this dilemma and started taking stock of all the loot they’d picked up through the adventure, deciding how to divvy it up between them, the characters made their way out of Lamm's hideout and returned to the city from the fishery. However, it was plain that something horrible had happened: Korvosa was in flames. A wing of Sable Company hippogriff riders headed towards Korvosa Castle at flank speed. As the characters watched, one of the hippogriffs erupted in blood and crashed through a wooden wall, sending splinters and debris to the street below. As the characters watched, a herald’s voice rang out, “The King is dead! The King is dead! Long live the Queen!” Another voice silenced the herald, “Silence, you miserable traitor! Death to the Usurper Whore! Death to the Queen! Death!” Civil war had broken out in Korvosa!
End of Game 1!
