Shieldmeet, 1372 DR

 

With Helena out to spend a few days with her mother, the first half of the day was spent with the group lounging around downstairs “holding the fort.”  Randal Dan, the proprietor of the Silver Mist Inn stopped by and spewed a wealth of information, while some of it may have been useful picking the useful information out of the useless was like finding a silver needle in a stack of steel needles.  Randal Dan’s mouth continued to spew information until the Innkeep of the nearby Broken Blade Inn, Davrin, stepped into the room.  It is well known that both Davrin and Randal despise each other since both own inns in the general vicinity of each other.

 

Davrin stopped by to ask a favor.  He needed some healthy backs to help put up his new sign.  The group, minus Kelmar who has neither a healthy back nor a helpful attitude, assists Davrin for most of the afternoon in putting up the new sign.  While Davrin’s new sign may be much nicer than his old sign, the hooks he had made were of a poor quality and the sign comes crashing down on the group.  After many apologies, and a promise of free booze for the evening, the incident is quickly forgotten and soon the revelry of the evening in the Broken Blade begins.

 

Late into the night, after many drinks a man comes racing into the bar out of breath, he claims that Councilman To-Be-Named (I swear I had his name somewhere, but I can’t find it now) has been assassinated.  On that down beat, the crew returns home, and sleeps the night away.

 

1  Eleasias

 

The next day, Davrim comes early in the morning and asks the group if he could use their assistance again.  Davrim had found some replacement hooks that were stronger.  The group once again leaves Kelmar to stay and babysit the business while they head off to help the innkeeper. 

 

While the group is gone, a young private in the Knights of Silver shows up and insists that Kelmar come with him.  After a bit of complaining, the Knight forces Kelmar to follow him so that he may identify someone.  Kelmar and the young knight, Christian Durney, arrive at the suspect’s house, only to find someone else has broken into the house.  As Durney enters the property to investigate, he narrowly dodges an attack by two assassins who have already killed the suspect.  While he dodges the attack, Kelmar does not and the old mage falls to the ground dying.  Before he could die, he tried casting one last spell.  The result of the spell somehow switched Kelmar’s body with Christian’s.  Christian passed out, then awoke to find his body lying on the ground, dead, with daggers sticking out of it.

 

Christian, now old and wrinkled with the mage’s body, striped the dead body of the armor and equipment he had, and placed it on his own.  He then did the only thing he could think to do as a Knight of Silver, he straddled his horse and rode back to his barrack to report of the incident.  When the old mage appeared at the barracks with a horse and armor of a knight of the Silver, they properly locked up the old man in a cell within a zone of silence.  Where he waited gagged, bound, and silenced.

 

Meanwhile, back at the business the rest of the team returned from helping Davrim out, only to find Kelmar missing.  But knowing that Kelmar was just a pain in the ass to begin with, no one bothers to search for him.  Later in the day, a man named Hal walks into the business and asks for help.  He tells the group that his daughter has been missing, and she was the apprentice of a mage in town.  He asks for help and offers a reward, a family heirloom that he is willing to part with.  The same heirloom that will later become the discussion of business ethics of the north and the ramifications of accepting rewards in a medieval age...

 

Anyway, the group agrees, and then Hal leaves.  Not long after Hal leaves, Kelmar shows up with a big bruise on his face, and he’s gagged.  Oh yeah, and bound by iron shackles.  Also, he is kinda tossed into the room by a dwarf who is a Knight of the Silver.  The wizard, Vlad, who had setup Kelmar’s arrangement with the group, escorts the dwarf.  The dwarf removes the shackles, per Vlad’s request, curses a few threats at the group and leaves.  Vlad tells a wonderfully touching story about a demon, a knight, and how it was Kelmar’s fault the Demon killed the knight.  Flash-forward a few years, the little boy of the knight, now grown, is also now dead because of Kelmar.  When he removes the gag, Kelmar claims he’s the little boy, now grown, named Christian Durney.  Vlad believes him, because he claims he read Kelmar’s mind, or some such.  Pretty much says sorry ‘bout your luck kid, and leaves with promise of, “I’ll look into it.”

 

After that display, the group remembers they need to look into this missing daughter thing.  They go about asking question to neighbors of the Wizard who was teaching the girl.  One neighbor said he heard yelling, but that was a day or so back.  Someone else said that the daughter, Cali, was worried for her child but didn’t say why.  The group breaks into the home once they establish that the door was unlocked—in actuality the lock was broken by the barbarian dwarf—and seems to be an invite to investigate the inside.  They find the house appears to have been hastily cleared out.  The clothes from Headly’s armoire are missing, but Cali’s clothes are still there, as well as the diapers and pins.

 

Then the dwarf and the-monk-who-shan’t-return start piecing tiles back together near a pink doorway that screams magic portal.  The dwarf pops out of existence, and the tiles fall to the floor, forcing everyone who wasn’t paying attention to the puzzle to now continue to not pay attention as one more person places the tiles in the correct position and disappears.

 

The dwarven bugbear slayer deletes everyone in the room he pops up in before they have a chance to bat an eye, including the DM.  Then the rest of the party shows up in what I’ll now refer to as “The tower that God burned down.”

 

So as the group clamors about “The tower that God burned down” they find traps and bugbears galore.  During one such occasion, the new Kelmar/Christian decides to start casting spells from his book, thinking that this was the way to cast them.  And ended up nearly killing half the party firing off whatever spell he finds in the book.

 

The group finds some phat l00tz--  Um, I mean treasure, hidden in a bedroom.  Most of the treasure is for spell casters, and luckily the items were identified with little labels on them, so that any poor saps that came along wouldn’t need to use identify spells, but just in case they needed them, the treasure chest included some identify scrolls that would tell them that, yes, the items were indeed what they were labeled.  Queue the evil wizard music.

 

Yes, I know I skipped the scene where Ed’s Paladin bashing the holy hell out of all the zombies, but the description is getting too long.  Next the party faces off the evil wizard, since the mage/priests were properly wearing their new l00tz—treasure—they were silenced this entire battle.  Which left it up to the fighters to beat the baddies while the casters ran/flew around uselessly crying, “I didn’t role a saving throw, its not fair.” Funny stuff, anyway, the dwarf tackles the bad guy mage, they save the naked girl and her baby, before they could be sacrificed.

 

It turns out that, the baby has a were-dad, and that the evil mage wanted to kill said were-baby as it turned for its first time.  But then Kelmar did a little dance move, and the Paladin panicked and tackled him, thinking it was an evil dance move.  Then the Paladin claimed the jig that Kelmar did to be an evil jig and ordered the entire “the tower that God burned down” burned to the ground to prevent the evil dance move from spreading.  So they coated the books on the top of the tower with oil and burned the books like good little Nazis.  Then they realized, they didn’t know how to get out of the tower, so while “the tower that God burned down” burnt down around them they decided to activate the false portal downstairs.  But, the false portal never opened, and the group decided they’d leave out the front door.  Only they failed to try the front door before, and when they noticed the army of bugbears encamped outside “the tower that God burned down” they hesitated to leave “the tower that—(you get the point)” and finally, when the choice was burn alive, or face an army of bugbears, they decide to go down fighting.  They step out the door...  And find out that the occupational army is there to destroy the tower, which the group had just accomplished.  The bugbears rejoiced, and made sure that they rejoiced with the group.  They offered them much wine, warmth, and bugbear women as one night could handle, then kindly escorted them out of the bugbear territory with a warning never to return.

 

2  Eleasias

 

The group walked back to Silverymoon, with the girl and her were-son in hand.  Entered the city and reaped their reward—after spending another hour yelling about the ethics of private detectives in medieval times. 

 

THE END