Amergin, male dwarf druid
James male-presenting dwarven stabby thief
Pythia female dwarven cleric
Whisper male dwarf rogue
Lithos male goblin wizard
Archibald male human bard
As we’re walking out, Leaf is like: “You guys really saved my buns in there, you’re my friends.”
Archibald: “Why were you locked in the basement?”
Leaf: “The Senator’s son and I were like brothers. And now he’s dead, so I ran to Dane’s place, and he was worried I was going to get him in trouble so he threw me in the dungeon.”
Archibald: “So, who killed him?”
Leaf: “I have info! But it’s back on my ship.”
We go back and forth a couple of times, but he insists that he needs to give us this information on his ship.
Ambergin insists on going with him. Leaf is now really excited about us coming with him “to meet the crew”. Archibald tries to convince him to come back to the inn with us first, to have a drink before we head for the ship. He agrees.
We get back to the Shattered Golem, and Leaf is like, “Oh, this is your inn? It’s kind of lame. But very nice!”
We get him a drink and he sips it slowly; Lithos pours a cup of tea. Whisper spikes his drink and we put him a room, and take the opportunity to sleep and restore our spells. Leaf suggests that we should probably wait until evening before heading back to the ship. We know he’s a member of the crew.
We spend some more time talking to him. He can help us, but he needs us to help him. He has this treasure map. It’s on the boat. If we help him get the treasure, he’ll tell us everything. We keep discussing: there’s this place called the Crypt of Trickery, also known as Durest’s Funhouse… and it’s built by a fan of Durest Inglorian. Leaf has a coinage problem, A bad one.
We decide to help him out by giving him some of Balin’s gems. Alderman Thunderbrew has stupidly posted two guards out front. They are not privy to what’s going on, and they are not at all smart. Archibald puts them to sleep with Lullabye, and Whisper slips into the house and retrieves the moonstones.
They have basically bullshitted his way through retrieving the moonstones.
Lithos: “How likely is Rose to try to kill us?”
“Not at all! Rose the Unmaiden? She would never–”
Yeah, she would. He starts laying out ship’s defenses, and where the map is (in the bow). Baldy: “This isn’t your map, is it?”
“Rose took it from me!”
So if we go at night, there’s a bar in the back. The bow has the lieutenant’s quarters, Rose’s quarters, and the brig. The brig doubles as the treasure chamber. Leaf is very enthused about his plan. He’s less enthused about our plan, but he agrees.
So our plan is basically that James and Whisper will break into the vault, while the rest of us come and be a distraction. Amergin leads the way, and one of the guards nods at him. Leaf is right behind him. One of the archers spots Leaf and looses an arrow at him: “You motherfucker It misses, but the archer calls: “It’s him! It’s the guy!”
Archibald moves up behind Leaf. One of the two city guards watching the customs house steps in and trips Leaf and puts the blade of the halberd to his throat: “Don’t you dare move!”
Pirates: “Hey! That guy’s ours!”
Amergin: “We got him, we brought him, we got this.”
Leaf: “You motherfucker! You brought me here to steal the treasure map!”
Pirates: “Bring him here! Rose wants to meat with him! She’ll meet with you too!”
We march Leaf forward, and Amergin looks at Leaf: “You have one more chance.”
Meanwhile, another guard and a sorcerer emerge from the customs house. The sorcerer says that Rose laid a charge against him. He’s not that interested in the whole thing. Rose isn’t really a pirate or a smuggler, just a somewhat unsavory businesswoman.
So we all go marching forward, and Leaf keeps trying to hint that Archibald should raid the vault in the customs house. We walk into the party, and four or five of the dwarf pirates grab Leaf and drag him into a corner, where they restrain him. The two archers on the top and the two guards on the bow return to their posts.
Rose is clearly a swashbuckler type; she’s wearing very nice leather armor, probably magical. She’s got this fancy jeweled rapier, which she calls her thorn. The rest of the crew have either axes or bows. She leads with, “I must apologize that this pathetic excuse for a dwarf is the first introduction to the crew of my ship.” She seems super-nice. “So how did you get involved in his shenanigans?”
Baldy begins to tell the tale, and they’re just enraptured. Rose is impressed with the strange human. And, well, she wants help getting the treasure.
Meanwhile James and Whisper have reached the abandoned warehouse and slip past it to the shrine. They wait for a few minutes to study their movements. Then Whisper makes a distraction and James dashes across the final stretch of the dock and vaults through the porthole. He lands on the bed, where two of the lieutenants are going at it. One of them leaps up and grabs an axe, and James right back out the porthole. He climbs back up on the dock, then tries to sneak over to Whisper.
He fails and gets captured.
So we renegotiate a little bit, and Baldy gets with Rose. It’s a very… give-and-take sort of event, replete with marvelous devices and an Enlarge spell. Rose makes sure Leaf sees how Archibald comes limping out there, looks at Leaf, and says: “Tonight.”
Leaf collapses completely. “So Balin was in contact with this deep dwarf trader, a lady named Brinja: standoffish, with orange hair in a ponytail, no beard, pinkish skin; carries a short sword, a buckler, and a crossbow. The cargo was some huge wagon, but I didn’t see what was in it. Must have been heavy, because it took two large cave lizards to pull it. Balin was going to use it to win in the pits. So they went in with a thousand gold each, and they tried to offer Brindja 3,000. This trade came from the deep road, so she wouldn’t have gone through customs here, she’d have gone through customs in Deepwatch. She supposedly had a duergar bodyguard.” That would explain the extra set of tracks at the crime scene.
Archibald lays out what we know.
Alderman: “Oh! She went through customs at Deepwatch?”
“Can you send word?”
“And spend MONEY?”
Us: “YES.”
Brindja had declared a load of magma stone, and apparently her goods were inspected by a junior inspector, who marked her down as a large block of magma stone. She’s from Blackstone, which is an area that exports these sorts of stone. So either the inspector was on the take, or she has a stone cage, or an illusion.
We do some asking around, but nobody seems to be selling huge quantities of food. The main source of food around here is fish. Whisper is listening for anything that might be pertinent while tending the bar for a bit. Amergin checks the fish markets for large purchases, but learns nothing. Baldy checks with the road guards, but they don’t remember that wagon going out. We do hear a little about a weird red-headed dwarf woman with no facial hair.
Lithos talks to a wagonwright and learns a bit about how the big stonehauler wagons operate. After some checking, we find that there was another inn where a dwarf lady stayed with a big wagon, but she left two nights ago.
Our best bet is that it’s down by the water somewhere, so we go find Rose and Archibald asks her about wagons and transports. This dock has the customs house; we should go look at the other docks, the ones the smugglers use. We head over there and ask them. On the way there, we pass a side-passage. Someone has ditched a very large wagon there.
We go investigate. There is definitely a big square imprint in the back of this thing, like a stone block was sitting back there. There is no trace of food there. It looks like maybe a smaller cart was used to pull the slab down to the smugglers’ docks. Looks like a whole lot of people were involved in making the transport. We head down to the dock where it was taken.
Most of the vessels here are small, so they’d maybe take it out to a larger ship. So Jorin took a large stone out last night; Calaman told us. He was taking it… out to the Tainted Rose. We head back to find the Tainted Rose sailing away.
We go report to the Alderman and ask for a coast guard ship to carry us out. He has… one small local craft that he uses to deal with pirates and bandits. We’ll pick up there next time.
