Session 23 Report

General Summary

The group travelled back to Lonereach and hid Maggy, the friendly Magma Mephit that they found in Lady Firetel's Basement, in the tunnel that leads to the Ustia family crypt, giving it rations for a day. The party went to the Gate to the upper city, where a guard went and fetched Tibbleswearth, the Butler of the Firetel Family. He told the group in a tavern that he had a good idea of what Lady Firetel was doing in the Basement, and asked the group to keep quiet about it - especially to Lord Firetel, who apparently didn't know what his mother was up to. He then payed the group handsomly. The group then paid Talara Ironshield a visit, and she told them that they had made enough of a name for themselves to be invited to the Party of the Lopeks. She also told them that the Vampire in the Lopek Crypt was under surveillance, but that the guild wouldn't do anything about it since the beast was stagnant and attacking it would risk waking it up.   They then proceeded to meet the five-fingered hand in the sewers in order to ask about their involvement with Lady Firetel's schemes. Tarik told them that Lady Firetel saw the strange stone at a "social gathering" and wanted to analyze it further. Thus, the guild stole it for her. Since her prodding wasn't really able to produce any results, she asked them to acquire the scroll for a specific spell - one that allowed her to summon a Fiend that would help her answer her questions. The guild stole this spell scroll from a bloodmage near Lonereach Pass that was - apparently - later killed by the party. The ritual however required a vial of blood from a humanoid who had died not more than 24 hours ago. Lady Firetel asked for this as well, but since the Guild couldn't guarantee that the blood would make it to her in time, they brought her a live victim instead - a member of a splinter group called the Rattails - a Thieves' Guild that, according to Tarik, consists of Wererats that don't care for the thieves' code and instead includes violence in their tactics.   In order to gain all of this information, Tarik asked the party to destroy the Rattails, offering all of the wererats' loot as an additional reward. However, when Krum offered Maggy as a servant for the five-fingered hand instead, Tarik agreed to take care of the Mephit and gave the information freely. The group told Tarik of Maggy's whereabouts, and left in order to take care of a quest on the quest board.   On the way out of the sewers, Artemis heard a voice coming from a side-channel whispering to her, and when the group checked that direction, they saw a creature entering a passage and dropping a scrap of paper doing so. They took the paper, which was a cryptic note saying something about Tarik lying to them, and decided to convene with Fingle about the whole deal.   Alvir told Fingle about everything that they had encountered, and Fingle seemed distressed about the Note. He opened up to them, that he and Treth were a part of a secret organization, and that the note suggested that whoever wrote it at least knows about this organization. He fetched Maggy from the tunnel and used his influence to secure a safe place in the Adventurer Guild's Smithy for her, and asked the group to be patient while he tried to find out if what the note said was true.   In the meantime, the group decided to start the Quest "Missing people", which would lead them to Fairwinter, the village south of the Academy of the North.   They started by talking to the local village elder, who informed them that since about a month, 10 of the villages' youth have disappeared, which is far more then usual. The group then had a talk to several of these youths' parents and friends, the owner of the local meadery as well as one of the younger men in the village, but their investigation didn't really lead to any conclusive evidence. Instead, the party decided to stage a stakeout, and kept watch during the night. During Uthal's watch, he saw a figure approaching the village elder's house, vanishing behind it, and then two figures - the first one and a smaller figure - leaving the village eastwards.   The party started their pursuit...