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Mercenaries & Moonwolves

The party bumbled around in the night for a bit before eventually all returning to their homes to sleep. The next day, they went to the guardhouse to see if Abe the guard secretary had discovered anything and report their unmitigated success at the Dancing Pigeon. When they arrived, Abe told them that his research had uncovered the identity of their target. Frank Smith was a mercenary with a history of doing questionably ethical jobs and was most commonly found working for the Landowners' Association. Although the guards weren't aware of his current whereabouts, they did know that the Landowners' Association was planning on announcing the details of a mercenary job that afternoon, and Frank would be likely to be in attendance. The party decided that they should attend the meeting to find Frank. Before leaving, they told Abe that the Dancing Pigeon did indeed have an illegal fight club after hours.

That afternoon, the party showed up to the Association meeting. Frank was indeed in the crowd, so Ayala walked up to him and informed him that he was under arrest. In another context, and from a different person, this might have been interpreted as a threat, but Frank only reacted with somewhat hostile bemusement. He told her that they could talk after the mission briefing, so the party dutifully waited until the announcement was done. Before long, an obesely rich human named Jimblebock Crivvleforth came out and gave the details. According to him, the Landowners' Association had reason to believe that the magic used to build the Havens was sinister and dangerous magic. They needed mercenaries to investigate the Sekerren Ruins outside of town to find evidence to support those claims. Groups which retrieved such evidence would receive 500 gp as a reward, while groups that failed to find any such evidence would receive only 20 gp for their efforts. The party objected in various ways to the mission, alleging without a trace of evidence that the good Association was in some ridiculous way biasing the keen investigative abilities of their brave mercenaries. Naturally, Jimblebock deflected those objections without a trace of concern, and none of the other mercenaries there seemed to have objections about the arrangement.

After the meeting, the party discussed their concerns about the mission and confronted Frank again. They were unable to convince him to let himself be arrested, in part because he showed them that he was also the proud owner of one of the Praxian Honor Badges. He left with two apparent allies to prepare for the delve into the ruins, and the party went back to the Hedges' house to warn them that the Association was plotting something against the Havens. The Hedges were concerned by the Association's machinations, as well as by the possibility that they had accidentally tapped into evil magic. They believed that it was very important to the long-term sustainability of the Havens that no plausible evidence be presented that they were built with foul magic, but they implored the party to find the truth in case they needed to give up on the Havens and try a different strategy in the city. The prarty promised to do what they could and left to go back to the guardhouse and report their findings. Captain Tam was in the guardhouse this time, and she seemed very interested by what they had uncovered. She confidently said that no guard had ever given Frank one of those badges, and that the party could at least try to bring him in for counterfeiting or stealing a badge even if they couldn't get any other charges to stick. After the conversation, the party decided to head out into the wilderness to try to reach the ruins.

While the party was travelling through the woods, Ayala stopped the party to announce that a stream of water they were about to cross was running uphill because it was scared. After the party determined that she was, in fact, serious, they took up arms to try to find what was scaring the water. Following the water downhill/upstream, they found a monstrous moonwolf - a magically altered wolf1 with strange and unnatural power over water. The party jumped into battle with the creature and eventually managed to bring it down, restoring the stream to its natural state. After a brief rest, they continued on their way.

Join us this week to find the Sekerren Ruins and unearth their ancient mysteries that probably do not involve magically altered wolves!

  1. Yes, again

Stupid Awards

Mikolash: Camilla: Ayala: Charlie:
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