(Sept 18 2016, Oct 16th 2016, Nov 13 2016)
The party makes it to Timore’s West Gate on the Salt Road, and takes up residence at the Sweetbutter Tavern. There is already an assortment of adventurers gathered in the common room eager to see what new opportunities will arise from this momentous occasion.
The party meets a variety of NPC’s here for the wedding, including the noble and altruistic Sir Gallen – who wants nothing more than to be a Heroic defender of the realm like his legendary ancestor Sir Auratine.
After some interactions, getting food & rest, the party awakes to find Sheriff Colburn and several of his men declaring a call to action, as 3 children have just been abducted the previous night. They are the latest in a series of child abductions, bringing the overall number up to 10 within the past 2 weeks.
Moira, Alena, Yoshy, Shea, Talthus and Sir Gallen all sign up to help the Sheriff, and go to investigate the site of the latest abduction.
After consoling the grieving parents, the party finds tracks outside the window of the childrens’ room. Clearly, these are lizardfolk tracks. That’s all that Sheriff Colburn needed to see, as he already suspected the swamp dwellers of foul play. The party follows the tracks south into the Swamp of the Lost, where the lizardfolk are known to make their home.
However, not is all cut and dry. Alena notices that the tracks being followed seem unnaturally symmetrical; they are too perfect. Normal tracks display variations due to shifts in weight from carrying things, difficult terrain, and various changes in speed and posture. These are perfect, metronome like tracks dotting the path without variation. She brings this up more than once, but Sheriff Colburn is already on the hunt and thirsty for lizardfolk blood. The tracks lead unerringly into the Swamp of the Lost, then disappear into nearby water.
Someone remarked about the Sheriff’s dogged pursuit of the lizardfolk, and Laremy replied in a whisper,
“The Sheriff has hated them since they migrated here four years ago. His sister was a ‘scaly sympathizer,’ bringing them food and such with other well intentioned village folk, but eventually got murdered for her trouble and devoured by them. So, yeah, he’s got a vendetta for sure.”
When the party gets to the swamp, they split up to circumnavigate Pete’s Bog, hoping to pick up the trail again. Sir Gallen, Laremy, Talthus, Moira, and Alena take the southern shore, with the north side taken by Colburn, Jormun, Kadich, Yoshy, and Shea. Kadich gives Talthus one of the amulets the good wizard Neff created for the Timore City Guard (Sheriff Colburn has another), allowing the two parties to communicate while separated.
On the southern side of the small lake, the party encounters some obstacles. Early on, after navigating some treacherous terrain, the party stumbles into a pack of giant frogs that attack with ferocity. The party also comes across an odd luminescent flower that, when approached or disturbed, erupts in toxic pollen. Later, as the last light of day dwindles, eerie lanterns flicker in the distance, inviting the party to stray from their course. Alena and Moira didn’t think it was a good idea to follow them. They are not unfamiliar with the stories of ghosts, will-o’-wisps, and stranger things.
Finally, as they come to the other side of the bog, they find a peculiar creature sitting upon the cusp of Mortar Rock. It has purple skin, sharp talons, and eight shiny black eyes. It speaks in a lilting hiss, and encourages the party to follow it. They ask, “Did the children come this way?” The creature replies, “Yes, yes, feeding of the children, yes.” Not a hundred feet from Mortar Rock, the party is ambushed by five giant spiders, each as big as a horse, and each bearing unique attacks and hideous features that belie a malicious intelligence.
Alena keeps her distance, peppering them with arrows. Talthus and Sir Gallen wade in, the latter using The Auratine Blade’s golden flames to devastating effectiveness. However, our heroes are overwhelmed, Talthus and Laremy take poisonous bites, and quickly find themselves bound in webs; that is, until Moira unleashes a fiery blast of burning hands, setting the bonds alight and freeing the party to finish their foes. Talthus does not escape his “release” unsinged, unfortunately. Of all the party, he is the worse for wear.
After the battle, the voice of Sheriff Colburn issues from the amulet, telling them they have found the trail again on the north side of Pete’s Bog, not far from Mortar Rock. The split parties join up, and sure enough, here again are lizardfolk tracks. These, however, are different. They look like actual lizardfolk tracks, burdened by four heavy loads. The party is confused; they thought perhaps the earlier tracks were fakes, but here is confirmation that something is afoot involving lizardfolk. And four bundles? Only 3 children disappeared. The plot thickens. Off to the northwest the reunited party proceeds, after the trail.
Along the way, the party notices this symbol carved into trees along the path:
Not an hour later the trail leads to a lean-to outpost, covered with branches and leaves as ingenious camouflage, but Alena’s sharp eyes see the murder holes and the squared outline of the hut. Shea and Alena sneak around one side, while Talthus and Moira sneak around the other. The less stealthy members of the party continue down the center of the path as a diversion.
Instead of meeting combat, the ghillie-hut’s only inhabitant bounds off at a run, leaping into the branches above, and heading further west along a tree-top tangle of vines and canopies.
The contents of the lean-to suggest it was a guard post meant to house 4 individuals. Further examination of the lean-to and the path by Colburn and Alena suggests that four lizardfolk, carrying four burdens, were met here and escorted by three of these lizardfolk, seven now total, in the direction that this last lizardfolk was seen running off in. The troupe of seven moved slowly, with one in the lead, the four burdened clustered in the middle, and the last two flanking near the rear.
The path leads to the stone ruins of an ancient Hyldavari Temple, millenia ago swallowed by the swamp. In the distance, the party sees the lizardfolk scout scurrying along a gangway up into a raised balcony of the creeper-covered temple. “Well, there goes the element of surprise,” Talthus quips.
Shea has an idea. Instead of making for the front gate, which is incidentally wide open, she decides to scuttle along under the overgrowth and scale one of the towers, unseen, to peer into one of the two anterior balconies overlooking the front gate entrance. While the rest of the party takes up offensive positions, she succeeds, and discovers that while the entrance is unguarded (for now), the two balconies do sport impressive ballista.
She decides to use one of the kegs of black powder the party received from Scarsburg, and creates a makeshift bomb to disable the sentries and their weapon. It is an explosive success.
The rest of the party uses the distraction to close in on the entrance, but by now some ground level troops are alerted, and there is a skirmish at the front gate. The party dispatches several lizardfolk guards, a buff lizardfolk leader-type with a whip, and his two raptor beast pets.
The party enters the mysterious Hyldavari Temple, now home to this tribe of lizardfolk. All around are those scrawled glyphs they saw earlier carved into trees, clearly some sort of tribal territorial mark. Vines and creepers have woven themselves into the masonry here, and decades of mud and detritus have made the distinction between wall, floor, plant growth, and random debris a bit hard to distinguish. It is more of an animal warren than an actual stone structure anymore.
One of the first curiosities the party encounters is this scene:
There was a dead tree, another live tree not too far off, a bunch of glowing flowers, a rope net and some wall pullies… really it’s a bit much to describe, but since those bright red-orange flowers were the very same ones they saw earlier that exploded in toxic pollen when disturbed, everyone basically decided they had seen enough, thought very little about the strange scenario, and just headed up the north passage.
There they fought more lizardfolk guards, and this time Sheriff Colburn finished one with a grizzly display, taking the near-dead foe and gruesomely decapitating him. “Enough! It’s time you bastards got what you deserved!” he declared, letting the lizardfolk’s blood splatter across his face. Even his two closest lieutenants, Jormun and Kadich, were rattled by the act. They kept quiet though.
The party continued on, and found the larder. On the ground floor, it was a large pit of green slime, but dangling above, accessible from the second floor, was a net holding a mix of barrels, meat carcasses, and giant fish. Further down the hall were more lizardfolk warriors, and then a vine covered wall that was alive. Avoiding its tendrils, they moved on until they came to a portcullis. [Here I don’t remember how they got past the portcullis, but they did.] Still beyond was the common area and living quarters of the lizardfolk tribe, filled with noncombatants.
Warriors rushed in to guard their people, while the weaker lizardfolk ran about in panic. Sir Gallen noticed that none of them registered as evil to his divine senses, so he started pulling his punches. The guardsmen of Timore though were mopping up the place. Eventually, when the Champion of the lizardfolk entered the fray followed by their shaman, it was Moira who decided to end the madness.
She threw herself at the feet of the shaman, an act of supplication, and used her magic to communicate with them. With weapons held in check, the party engaged in parley, and realized that the children of Timore were not here. The party had been duped by a complicated ruse, and the Turtle Tribe of lizardfolk were implicated in the abduction by the Snake Tribe (and possibly other forces). The tracks followed from Pete’s Bog were four Snake Tribe lizardfolk bringing a gift of four pig carcasses to the Turtle Tribe, yet this conveniently led the party here on a quest for vengeance. The Snake Tribe lizardfolk were nowhere to be found at this point.
The Turtle Tribe bore no ill will toward the people of Timore, and only wished to coexist with their neighbors while living in the swamplands. But now things are a political mess. The children are still missing, and in the eyes of the Lizardfolk Champion, their military leader, this incursion was a direct attack on the lizardfolk Turtle Tribe that calls for retaliation. The shaman (called ‘Cleverman’ in Common Tongue) continues to converse with the party, and convinces the rest of his people that he will seek justice, but stresses that they all must not let this misunderstanding jeopardize their delicate peace, fraught as it is with deliberate guile by their enemies.
And so, an ambassador from the Turtle Tribe, the mighty Gnarl, is sent with the party to reconcile what has happened with Duke Lapis. The party begins planning how to investigate the nearby Snake Tribe for signs of the missing children, when across both communication amulets a message comes from Sir Murphy, Captain of the Timore City Guard, demanding Sheriff Colburn report back to Timore immediately for court martial.
Apparently, this “investigation” was out of his purview, the evidence of tracks outside the childrens’ homes has been revealed to be magically altered, and it is as if Sir Murphy already knows Colburn has overstepped his authority and potentially started war with the lizardfolk under false pretenses. Talthus is quick to respond with his amulet, claiming to be “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” and is summarily given authority to take Colburn into custody. The party argues over whether it is more important to move on to the Snake Tribe to find the children, or turn in Sheriff Colburn, but Sir Gallen casts the deciding vote, pleading with everyone, saying:
“I came all this way and did what I did because I was moved by righteous zeal. It was, admittedly, intoxicating. But then it dwindled, and I saw through the haze; I had to question what we were really doing. What we did here was clearly misguided. But we can still do the right thing; I want to do the right thing. If we venture further into the swamp, Colburn may just slip free, especially since he faces some hefty charges should he stand trial. Also, and I hesitate to say this out loud, but if the children have been gone this long in the hands of savage cannibals and evil doers, they probably aren’t among the living anymore. We have to face that. I would sleep better knowing I did what I could to affect the most right in the world, and that I can do by seeing Sheriff Colburn answer for his deeds, in the eyes of Sol and the law. I just want to feel like I actually made the world better with my actions.”
And so, instead of pursuing the Snake Tribe lizardfolk, the party headed back to Timore.
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