Our magnificent sixth session, 4 September 2011:
Gilles: Seppo the Protagonist
Hector: Foliage the Warped
Eric: Balto the Warrior-Scholar
Beau: Aldan the Righteous Deliverer
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The heroes had left the backwater port city of Poori as hired ship hands, and now have been in Gar for about a week as late February shows hope of fading into spring. Balto and Aldan are more or less at home in this more civilized but still cold and windswept city, while Seppo was trying to get established in the local pickpocket community, and Foliage mostly spent his time on day-trips to the outskirts and getting drunk in the alleys. Rast busied himself in the library and hobnobbing with the elite, while Gurgrock disappeared to some of the seedier parts for a spell. The heroes made a deal to meet soon at The Beetle, a strange inn in the heart of an urban farmer's vines and wild fields, set aside in perpetuity as an untamed bed in the city and a hub of bizarre types of all stripes.
Making Inquiries
Seppo, ever youthful and naive in the big city, set about making inquiries about jobs and tracking down his friend Nikko, of course still ignorant of his childhood friend's unfortunate fate at his companions' hands. To learn more, Seppo played as if Nikko owed him money, which sat well with other thieves and ne'er-do-wells with the same sentiment. Several of the thieves suggested Seppo "check in" with master thief "The Skull", but all were short on details except that Seppo best stick to small work if he is to freelance. At one point he made a (fake) deal with one Ekrar about tracking down and fencing the Crystal, which Seppo had secreted from Rast on the voyage and which at one avaricious Gar cutpurse had made a go for on the sly (he had been allowed to grip the Crystal, which momentarily stopped his heart and left him gasping on the ground).
Meanwhile, Aldan headed for the Temple of the Searing Light, the local hub of The Faith and bastion of honorable discomfort and self-discipline. Aldan had an appointment with the Priest Valcan, who haughtily and without small talk sent Aldan on a one-man mission to pacify the unjustly independence-minded people of the Outer Hold, rebellious from rule from distant Gar. One Paladin, Arius, had been sent two months prior on the same mission, and was not heard from again. Aldan, for his part, inquired about loosening some of the burdensome strictures of his faith, to which the Priest Valcan issued another to test Aldan's faith: No longer can he touch any unclean persons or those wearing dark clothing, for fear of tainting his purity.
During all of this, Foliage, in the spirit of protest, was drunk outside the Temple, heckling the lowly acolytes dutifully earning their karma by cleaning up mud thrown by the angry Druid. Foliage even winged a mud pie at Valcan, who righteously sought no retribution at such a lowly, hirsute, unclean, wild unbeliever.
At the Library of the Towering Spires, Balto was researching the Crystal and its purported companion artifacts. Using an assumed name, he was directed to speak to Axel the Blind Sage, interrupting the latter's being read aloud a book on mountain ferns. Axel, chatty, distracted, and needlessly informative, settled in to discuss the legends of the Crystal, the Bronze Armband, the Glass Eye of All-Seeing (which Axel was interested in), as well as a ring and a cloth on unknown provenance. The artifacts, when combined, would amplify their power and grant much strength to their possessors.
According to Axel's wandering stories, the Bronze Armband in particular was told to belong to the long-dead hero Naxim The Mountain Man, who served the people of the purportedly lawless and fear-inducing Outer Hold. Before he died, Naxim had bound the Armband on the Elder Vulture, a semi-mythical beast who roosts in the mountains of the Outer Hold. Balto gently suggested he might take a look, despite warnings of the curse upon those who defile Naxim's Tomb. The Elder Vulture was invulnerable to all but the Iron-Shafted Spear wielded by Naxim himself. Perhaps the Spear was still there to be discovered for the benefit of historical knowledge.
On his way out, Balto checked out a few tomes with Tulia, a bespectacled young bookworm librarian whose eye caught that of the passing Aldan the Righteous Deliverer, ever-burdened with the Curse of Venus, on his way from the Temple. She confronted him and asked about his destination; Aldan, forbidden to lie, ended up inviting her to join the party at the inn of The Beetle.
At the Beetle, the PCs share their stories and pack up to set out the following morning, Tulia the Librarian in tow. Foliage both escalated and defused a fight, set off by a sailor patron crushing a rare insect with his boot. By the time the dust cleared, he'd warped the branches and vines of the table to bind the nature-defilers and smoldered one of their beards.
Into the Outer Hold
Several missions in hand, it was a six-day walk on the road-turned-trail-turned rain-muddy track to the northeast from the Gar coast, through mountains and rolling craggy, tall-grass-covered hills and ravines to the Outer Hold. They were to start at Fortress Town, a small outpost and entrypoint into the Hold.
On the journey, a coy triangle developed with Tulia trying to cozy up to the broad-shouldered Aldan; Seppo smitten by Tulia as his first love (she only saw him as a younger brother, excruciatingly); and Balto striving to protect Aldan from Tulia's subtle advances. After all, a Paladin must always stay true and never make excuses for lapses, even if it requires concocting rituals to distract and distance him from womankind.
The Fortress Town was just a collection of stand-alone houses at the craggy base of a lonely Gar-built keep on an outcropping. Aldan, representing the outside controlling force of Gar, made no friends and encountered simmering hostility by the free-minded cattle and goat-herders and rye growers, including a guffy one-legged old man resting in front of his house. Despite this, they learned that Arius, the Paladin who had arrived on a mission of pacification two months back and won no local love, had set out to the Fortress Keep and did not return. The people of the town had no curiosity as to his fate, and the fact that there had been not a peep from the Fortress since caused nary a stir. This is to be a quest for another day.
Foliage as a wild man himself, had more luck, leading the PCs to the house of Modi, a raspy-voiced carpenter who nodded at Foliage's desire to pay his respects at the Tomb of Naxim the Mountain Man. Modi, treating the PCs to goat milk and local rye bread (only Foliage partook in the latter, as Tulia had once heard and dutifully warned the PCs not to eat bread from the local crop), offered to lead them over the hills of Fortress Town to the head of the trail to the Tomb in the mountains.
The Ambush at the Ravine
Two days march in the mountains, with that familiar feeling of being tracked on their journey, led by Foliage in his spirit forms of hawk and fox, led the party to through a forested stretch to a ridge and riverbed ravine housing Naxim's Tomb in a shallow cave on the far side.
As they approached, Foliage the Fox smelled predators; notably three wolves barreling through the trees right toward them. Indeed, as his instincts led him to panic and flee up a tree, Balto followed suit, Aldan bravely stood near (not too near) his charge Tulia, and Seppo took cover behind some rocks and at the edge of the ravine. And then the arrows started raining in.
The characters had been ambushed by a pack of some twenty dog-men kobolds (identified by Balto, an expert in humanoid physiology; and Foliage, endlessly pissed at the depredations of evil humanoids) and their trained wolf companions.
At the outset, Aldan took a primitive arrow in the backside as he shielded Tulia, and as he met the beast-men's charge, took a second arrow in the shield-shoulder and another in the knee, plus a rusty shortsword cut to the hip (Paladins are immune to tetanus, we are reminded). One of the wolves, lucky to score a nip on his calf, met the Back Talker blade, a month of intolerable abstinence since tasting the glory of battle, and fell to earth in three parts, to Foliage's chagrin.
Meanwhile, Balto and Foliage led a tree-mounted sneak attack to the rear of the main pack of beast-men, heads cracking and the druid's Branch Cutter spreading vorpal fury among the violators of Nature's Path. Neither would feel a scratch from their victims' rusty blades.
From cover, Seppo had first noticed on the other side of the ravine a human figure lurking and then disappearing into the tree cover as the battle started. No matter -- the thief launched black powder-tipped bolts from his crossbow, the first shattering a tree (also irritating the Druid) and second scattering the attackers. One wolf, wounded by fire but vicious, wrestled with him on the precipice. But when a stray kobold threatened Tulia by the trail, Seppo heroically hurled his short sword into the slathering beast's eye, just as the wolf tore into Seppo's shoulder and incapacitated the love-smitten lad.
The kobold attackers slain and the last wolf charmed into friendship by Foliage, the party cleaned themselves up and approached the Tomb. Seppo made no mention to his fellows of the man watching them from the other side of the ravine.
The Tomb of the Mountain Man
The tomb was a shallow cave over a river, an entrance only four feet high and half-blocked by a pile of stacked stones. With Seppo and Aldan recovering from their injuries thanks to the assistance of Tulia's caring hands (one was in heaven, the other in hell), Balto and Foliage entered the Tomb. Indeed, this was a place to lay a curse on the head of anyone not respectful of the natural way to enter. Balto, having no fear of grim portents and such silliness, examined a painted depiction on the wall of a twin-mountain spire surrounded by a ring of stones in the nearby mountains; the roost of the Elder Vulture and presumed possessor of the Bronze Armband.
Foliage paid the proper respects at the sarcophagus itself, a cairn of stones on which was laid two slabs, unmoved. With much persuasion, he convinced Balto not to disturb the resting place of the hero Naxim, Iron-Shafted Spear or otherwise.
The party, exhausted, spent the night in the ravine. But in the morning, they returned to the Tomb and realized one of the slabs on the sarcophagus had been slid aside, opening the coffin. As Foliage and Balto bickered, Seppo entered the Tomb (incurring the curse), and without notice peeped inside the sarcophagus. Although there was no Spear to be found, Seppo secreted a gold ring off the gray-dusty bones of the dead Naxim, perhaps doubling the curse over his soul.
Denouement
As the curtain fell for the evening, Balto howled in regret for not looting the Tomb at first chance; Aldan ritually bathed repeatedly in the river after an unwelcome thankful embrace by Tulia; Seppo rocked on cloud nine before the dark clouds of the curse were to gather overhead; and Foliage (befriended wolf in tow), in a fury, demanded to the uncaring trees vengeance against those unknown forces which had defiled Naxim's Tomb and stolen the Hero's weapon for mysterious ends.
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