Session 7: A Bone to Pick
Played: Session 7 — August 22nd @ Nevada City Setting: The cellars and caverns beneath Tresendar Manor, roughly one to three in the morning
Recap
Old Bones
Six weeks for you; half a heartbeat for them. The crypt was exactly where you left it — three sealed sarcophagi, six dead men in rusted mail on their feet, and every empty socket pointed at the bear.
They were not the Tresendar dead. Up close, the cloaks rotting off their shoulders were red. Redbrands — and not long dead, either. Why a gang’s own corpses stand watch in a noble family’s crypt, and who set them there, nobody could say. The skeletons weren’t taking questions.
They also weren’t taking much interest in anyone but Versace. Whatever animated them walked straight past four people in scarlet cloaks as if they were furniture and closed on the bear — right up until the cloaked four started swinging, at which point the dead remembered what enemies look like.
It was a good, ugly fight. Versace bit the femur clean out of one and clawed another apart. Fleck put a crossbow bolt through a skull so hard the head left the body and kept going into the wall. Grom laid a blessing over the front line and then demonstrated why, against things held together by habit and bad magic, a warhammer is the correct argument. Orla caved in a ribcage with her shillelagh and finished the job on the skull. Thea’s frost found its mark exactly once, which was once more than the skeleton wanted. Fleck ended it — rapier, one clean cleave, the last of the six coming apart at the joints.
Somewhere in there, Grom realized he could have simply turned them. He will not be hearing the end of this.
The Whimpering Door
Fleck picked the other lock, and the door opened on iron cages and filthy straw: the Redbrands’ holding cells, and in them Mirna Dendrar and her son Nars, thirteen, hollow-eyed, alive. Taken for ransom the day Thel was killed for refusing to pay. The town had already buried them in its heart.
One Redbrand was on guard. The cloaks bought the party a few seconds of doubt and no more — the bluff wobbled, the guard reached for steel, and Thea froze the life out of him where he stood. Her first kill. She’ll remember it. Fleck immediately went through the body for valuables; Grom pointed out, with great patience, that there was a child in the room. The wrought-iron key on the guard’s belt opened both cells.
Mirna did not weep. She asked for one thing: find Thel. Bring him home. They promised.
The Way Out
The party dressed Mirna and Nars in red cloaks and went looking for a way out that didn’t run past a one-eyed thing in the dark. The crypt’s copper-sheathed door — a mournful angel carved into the green-black plate — opened onto a dusty hall of false columns. Fleck, who has stopped trusting any floor in this manor, went over it inch by inch and found the hidden pit in the middle: loose tiles over rotten timbers, a twenty-foot drop. They sprang it on purpose, stepped around the hole, and found the hall ended in a secret door that let out into the cellar by the cistern — a few feet from where the party’s night had begun.
Up the kitchen stair, out through the roofless ruin, and the Dendrars were sent down the hill toward Phandalin, Nars over Grom’s shoulder for the last of it. Two of the town’s dead are walking home.
Fine Weapons, No Sale
The armory beside the crypt gave up its lock to Fleck as well. Racks of spears and swords, crossbows and bolts, a dozen red cloaks on hooks — and three pieces that didn’t belong with the rest: a shortsword with semiprecious stones set in the guard and pommel, and two matched crossbows inlaid with silver. The party took all three.
Then they went back to Ssarnak.
The crossbows went up before the great eye and were turned slowly in the light, and the eye was not impressed. The sword stayed in its scabbard. The party tried a different currency — knowledge, the location of the spellbook of Bowgentle, the answer Agatha gave them in Conyberry — and learned something about how a nothic shops: it does not want to know where a thing is. It wants the thing. It has now heard the name Bowgentle, and it filed it away.
Somewhere in the haggling, Thea felt something move through her thoughts — unhurried, curious, turning things over like a hand in a drawer. Then it was gone.
Newton remains a guest. The party left with the crossbows, the sword, a plan — a certain ruby earring, or perhaps an emerald Mirna once mentioned — and cold hands.
Grom, King of the Orcs
The common room at the west end of the cavern held the rest of the garrison: two ruffians and two bandits, deep in the party’s own beer, a stack of coin on the table between them. Grom kicked the door open, drew himself up to his full height, and announced that he was Glasstaff — transformed into an orc, by magic, obviously — and that he was extremely displeased.
The bandits believed him. The ruffians did not. The bandits, reasoning that a man who has just been turned into an orc by his own wizard is not a man to argue with, drew on the ruffians. The party waited a polite moment and then killed everyone who was still standing.
On the table: 75 copper, 55 silver, 22 electrum, 15 gold, and a gold earring set with a tiny ruby. The earring has an appointment with a nothic.
The Wizard Runs
North of the common room, a door, and behind it a wizard’s workshop — alembics bubbling, bookshelves crowded with parchment, a room that smelled of nightshade and hot glass. Grom went in first. Nothing was there. Nothing was visibly there.
Meanwhile, the other half of the party was still back in the cavern — which is where Orla happened to be when a section of the storeroom wall swung open and a short, dark-bearded man in an ermine mantle came through it at a dead run, glass staff in one hand and a fistful of scrolls in the other.
Orla became a giant spider. The wizard became a man wrapped in webbing, restrained and furious and suddenly not running anywhere. The rest of the party arrived at speed. He fought — he never once offered to surrender — and he lost: the last blow put him down at zero, unconscious, and the party let him live.
Something small and vicious had been trailing him, unseen — a tiny, clawed fiend that went visible at the wrong moment and died for it.
So: Glasstaff, the Redbrands’ wizard, trussed and breathing, slung across the back of a brown bear.
The Letter
His quarters behind the secret door were scarlet drapery, a desk, a chest — and paper. A great deal of paper. The party took all of it, along with the two spell scrolls he’d been clutching when he ran — and the glass staff that gave him his name, etched with stylized feathers, which is now in Thea’s hands. It did not protest. Neither did he.
On top of the pile, rolled and sealed with a spider pressed in red wax:
Lord Albrek —
My spies in Neverwinter tell me that strangers are due to arrive in Phandalin. They could be working for the dwarves. Capture them if you can, kill them if you must, but don’t allow them to upset our plans.
See that any dwarven maps in their possession are delivered to me with haste.
I’m counting on you, Iarno. Don’t disappoint me.
The table went quiet.
Glasstaff is Iarno Albrek — the Lords’ Alliance wizard Sildar Hallwinter sent you to find, the man Sildar called the genuine article, missing nearly a year. He wasn’t missing. He was downstairs, building a kingdom out of brigands on someone else’s coin. The rest of the bundle — his own drafts, an apothecary order, an older note under a black wax spider — says the Spider promised him the town and a share of what the forge yields, that the bugbears answer to the Spider and not to him, that wagons come through the tunnel, and that someone in Neverwinter knew the party was coming before they ever reached the Triboar Trail.
Two quests, it turns out, were one quest. The fifty gold is going to be an awkward conversation.
Big Ears
One door left. Through it, in the Goblin tongue, the sound of large creatures being cruel to a small one.
Grom kicked it in. Four bugbears — tall, furred, sober, and unimpressed — and one terrified goblin they had clearly been using as a footstool. Grom tried the orc-wizard speech again. The bugbears didn’t blink. They don’t take the wizard’s orders, transformed or otherwise; they take someone else’s. The nearest one came forward to ask, in so many words, who exactly had just kicked in his door.
Grom answered with a net.
Behind him in the common room, a bear is carrying an unconscious wizard, a rogue is counting crossbows, and nobody has rolled initiative yet.
See you September 23rd.
What the Party Walks Away With
- Mirna and Nars Dendrar, alive — sent home down the hill, and one promise made: find Thel
- Glasstaff, captured — unconscious, webbed, tied, and riding a bear; he never surrendered
- The Spider’s letter and Glasstaff’s correspondence — Halia Thornton’s 100gp bundle, and the proof that Glasstaff is Iarno Albrek
- Two spell scrolls taken from his hand as he ran, and the glass staff itself — claimed by Thea
- The armory’s three fine pieces: a gem-set shortsword and two silver-inlaid crossbows (Ssarnak declined the crossbows)
- The common-room pot: 75cp, 55sp, 22ep, 15gp, and a ruby earring earmarked for Newton’s ransom
- Six skeletons, one guard, four drunks, and one small fiend — the manor’s garrison is down to the bugbears
- Thea’s first kill, and something that went looking through her thoughts
- Nets remaining: three of five
- Not yet: level 3 — that comes when everyone is back at the Stonehill Inn in one piece
Active Quests
- End the Redbrand threat — take Tresendar Manor — 200gp (Sildar Hallwinter, Lords’ Alliance); one room left: four bugbears, mid-net
- Find Iarno Albrek — 50gp (Sildar Hallwinter) — found. He’s on the bear. Sildar doesn’t know yet.
- Deliver Glasstaff’s correspondence — 100gp advance paid; 100gp more on delivery (Halia Thornton) — in hand; you’ve read it
- Rescue Mirna and Nars Dendrar — done; they’re walking home — and find Thel’s body
- Ransom Newton — Ssarnak wants something more beautiful; the ruby earring is the next offer
- Find Gundren Rockseeker at Cragmaw Castle — the letters say the bugbears answer to the Spider, not the wizard
- The Spider — the IOUs, the wagon note, and now a sealed letter in a slanted hand: “my spies in Neverwinter”
- Tsernoth of Iriaebor — Sister Garaele’s Harper inquiry, pending; Ssarnak has heard the name Bowgentle now
- Clear Wyvern Tor — standing 100gp bounty (Harbin Wester)
DM prep / session plan for this session: see DM notes.