Chapter 4 / Episode #105 “What the Chest Cost”

Date: Flocktime 1, 576 CY

Region: The Lighthouse and Northern Shore, Safeton, Wild Coast

Weather: Overcast. Wind off the bay. By evening, clearing.

Players Present

Bellator Nocturnus, Fantra Paladin

Kagen Sunhammer, Dwarf Cleric/Fighter

Thorian, Warrior-Monk

Barnabuss, Healer

Harry, Halfling Thief

Squints, Archer of Safeton

Flocktime 1 — “The Top of the Tower”

The door at the top of the lighthouse spiral was stuck in the particular way of things that have been

wedged shut deliberately and left long enough to forget. Harry checked it for traps first, found none,

and then the group spent the better part of an hour failing to open it. Kagen snapped a crowbar against

it. The door did not move.

Harry looked at the exterior of the tower, at the rope in his hands, and made the calculation that

halflings make when they have decided the straightforward approach is no longer available. He tied off

and went up the outside of the fluted stonework, hand over hand in the coastal wind, until he reached

the window at the top level. On the other side of the stuck door he found the spikes that had been

holding it — driven into the frame from the inside, someone’s idea of making sure no one followed

them up. He pulled them and the door opened.

The top room held the lighthouse mechanism — mirrors, once used to throw firelight out over the

Woolly Bay. Burn marks on the housing showed how it had worked. Two ornamental blue quartz gems

sat at the base of the mechanism, low value but worth carrying. Bellator tested one in the housing to see

if it produced any effect. It did not. The group dismantled the mirrors carefully, stacking them for

removal. They would fetch something at market.

The torch went out during the work. They finished in the dark.

Flocktime 1 — “The Hidden Room”

Squints ran a feather along the wall of the corridor below the top level, checking for air movement,

looking for gaps. The stone gave him nothing on the first pass. On the second, a seam.

The hidden room behind it was not a treasure vault. It was an armory.

Longswords. Shortswords. Daggers. Maces. Battle axes, hand axes, javelins, spears. Crossbows and

bolts counted out in stacks. A bardiche. Glaive-guisarmes. Bill-guisarmes. Bucklers and wooden

shields ranked against the walls. All of it freshly forged, well-oiled, without a mark of rust or a scratch

of use. No heraldry on any of it. No maker’s mark that meant anything. Fresh boot prints on the floor.

Someone had been stocking this room recently, and whatever they were stocking it for had not

happened yet.

The group stood in the armory and looked at the inventory and did not say aloud what several of them

were thinking. There was no proof of anything. There was only a room full of unmarked weapons in a

supposedly haunted lighthouse on the edge of a city, and a dagger in Thorian’s pack with a triangular

symbol on the hilt, and the memory of a hooded figure in the Bleached Salmon pointing a blade at

someone who had survived the slave trade.

They moved the chest out of the hidden room first. It could be opened outside, in the light, with room to

work.

Flocktime 1 — “Harry”

They brought the chest outside onto the grass above the cliff. The lighthouse at their backs. The bay

below. A good day for it, or as good as any.

Harry knelt in front of the chest the way he always did — unhurried, methodical, the tools coming out

in the right order. He was the best at this. He had always been the best at this. The group stood back and

gave him room and watched the coast and waited for the sound that meant the lock had given.

The dart came out of the chest mechanism and Harry did not have time to know it had happened.

He was gone before he fell.

The group stood over him and the chest sat open in the grass and the wind came off the Woolly Bay the

way wind does when it has no particular interest in what just happened. Inside the chest: three thousand

electrum pieces and four thousand copper. Not nothing. Not enough.

“He was careful,” Squints said, after a while. “He was always careful.”

No one had anything to add to that.

Flocktime 1 — “The Pyre”

They gathered wood from the treeline and brought oil from their packs. The pyre went up on the grass

above the cliff, in sight of the water, which seemed right for a halfling who had spent the last weeks on

the Wild Coast doing things that were considerably larger than most halflings attempt.

They lit it and stood back and let it burn.

There was no ceremony to speak of. These were not people who had known Harry long enough to

know what he would have wanted said, and Harry had not been the kind of halfling who talked much

about what he wanted. He had been the kind who went up the outside of a lighthouse in coastal wind

because someone had to, and who knelt in front of locked things with patience and good tools and did

not make a fuss about it.

The fire did its work. They turned away when it was done and began loading the mirrors and the

weapons onto improvised carries made from the polearms, and did not look back at the lighthouse

again.

Flocktime 1 — “Back to Safeton”

The road back into Safeton was heavy going with the mirrors and the weapons and the chest, but they

managed it. At the money changer they converted the electrum. At the market the weapons moved for

what weapons move for when they have no history attached to them. The mirrors found buyers.

When it was tallied: one thousand eight hundred and sixty-one gold pieces divided among five. Three

hundred and seventy-two gold each — more than most of them had seen in one place before the slave

cart, and a different kind of weight to carry than the chest had been.

The evening was Barnabuss’s idea. His place, a pig purchased for three electrum, a fire that had nothing

funerary about it. The group ate and drank and did not talk about the armory or the dagger or the

hooded figure or what the weapons in that hidden room had been waiting to be used for.

There would be time for that.

Tonight they had earned the fire.

XP Award — Episode 105

372 XP each after returning to Safeton

Harry, Halfling Thief — killed by a poison dart trap, Flocktime 1, 576 CY. He was careful. He was always

careful.

Watch the campaign unfold at @thedmandfriends — blog.hommlet-dark.com

Chapter 4 / Episode #104: “Bones”

Date: Flocktime 1, 576 CY

Region: The Lighthouse, Northern Shore of Safeton, Wild Coast

Weather: Fog through the morning. The coast offers nothing but grey and cold.

“Three Knocks”

Someone tried the knocker.

One knock. Two knocks. Three.

The door swung inward on its own, smooth and unhurried, as if it had been waiting for someone to ask

politely. Kagen spiked it open before it could reconsider. The group filed through into the debris and

the dark, torchlight pushing back just enough of the lighthouse interior to show them what they were

dealing with.

What they were dealing with announced itself from somewhere in the shadows.

“Arr, what’ve we got here then? Lost, are ye? Wrong door, I’d say — though it’s a fine last sight

ye’ll have of the world above.”

The skeleton stepped into the torchlight with the swagger of something that had once stood on a

quarterdeck and had not entirely forgotten it. It had a pirate’s bearing and a pirate’s mouth, and it

seemed genuinely pleased to have company after however long it had spent alone in the dark.

“Turned”

Kagen raised the holy symbol.

The turning hit the skeleton like a wind off open water — sudden, irresistible, pushing it backward

against its will. The bravado went out of it in an instant. Whatever it had been saying died in its teeth. It

turned and fled, rattling down the stairs to the lower level, the sound of its retreat echoing up through

the stone.

The group went after it.

The lower level opened into a long corridor heading north — toward the mansion, if the lay of the land

above matched what was below. The skeleton was somewhere ahead in the dark, still moving under the

compulsion of the turning. Squints raised his bow and put an arrow into it.

The turning broke.

The skeleton stopped fleeing and became something else entirely. Bellator did not wait for it to close

the distance. The paladin charged down the corridor, which is exactly the wrong thing to do in a

corridor that has not been searched, and the floor opened beneath him. He dropped into the pit trap and

the darkness swallowed him whole.

The skeleton, freed from the turning and faced with a corridor now partially occupied by a

paladin-shaped hole in the floor, seemed to find this arrangement agreeable. The fight that followed

was close and grinding — the group working around the pit, Bellator hauled up by rope while the battle

continued over his head. The skeleton took enough punishment to decide the corridor was no longer

worth holding and disappeared back into the dark.

They let it go. Squints was hurt. Bellator was bruised and irritated. They pulled back to the ground floor

to regroup.

“While the Party Was Upstairs”

The second floor called for attention. Harry went up first, then others followed — four giant rats in the

close dark of the upper room, dealt with in the efficient way the group had developed for things that

bite and have no particular strategy beyond biting. Squints worked angles. Kagen worked the stairs.

The rats were finished.

Below them, the ground floor door slammed.

Bones had come back.

Barnabuss and one other had remained on the ground floor, and now they had the skeleton’s full

attention without the rest of the party to distribute it. The fight downstairs was smaller and more

desperate than the one in the corridor

By the time the others came back down, the skeleton was broken on the floor.

Flocktime 1 — While Upstairs

The wolf spider came out of the upper dark with the confidence of something that had not been

seriously challenged in a long time. The group spread across the room and attacked from angles, and

Squints put the killing arrow into it from across the chamber. It folded.

Harry found the footlocker. He found the trap on it first, which is the correct order of operations, and

then he opened it. Inside: copper, silver, electrum, gold, and platinum in quantities worth the weight.

Three gems. And beneath the coins, folded with the careful attention of someone who considered these

things important — a cloak, clothes, and a dagger.

The dagger stopped the room.

The blade was wavy, curved in the particular way that has a name in certain circles. On the hilt: a

triangular symbol, small and precise, stamped into the metal with the care of something meant to be

recognized by the right people. Thorian turned it in his hands.

It was the same mark the hooded figure had carried into the Bleached Salmon the night before — the

tall thing with the knife and the nine-inch tongue that had put its blade in Thorian’s direction and then

dissolved into the Safeton dark.

Someone connected to that creature had been in this lighthouse. The cloak was ordinary cloth — no

magic to it, just fabric. But the dagger went into Thorian’s pack and the clothes into Bellator’s, and the

group stood in the room with the dead spider and the open footlocker and a thread that now ran from

the Bleached Salmon to the hooded figure to whatever had been living here.

The third level of the lighthouse remained above them, unopened.

XP: 40 each

 

Chapter 4 / Episode #103 — "Dame Gold's Second Calling"

Date: Flocktime 1, 576 CY 
Region: Safeton, Wild Coast 
Weather: Cool and overcast. A grey sky off Woolly Bay. The kind of morning that asks nothing of you and gives nothing back.

Players Present

Bellator Nocturnus — CN Human Fantra Paladin

Kagen Sunhammer — LG Dwarf Cleric/Fighter

Thorian the Blessed — CG Warrior-Monk

Barnabuss Feadle — LG Healer

Harry Jewels — Neutral Halfling Thief

Squints — CG Human Archer of Safeton

Slash the Bard (NPC — agent of Dame Gold)

---

Flocktime 1 — "Broke and Breathing"

They arrived with nothing.

That is not a complaint. That is a fact. The slavers took everything that could be taken, and what could not be taken was left behind in the Drachensgrab Hills along with pieces of themselves they will not easily recover. They arrived in Safeton broke, hungry, carrying only what their bodies remember — how to fight, how to endure, and how to hate the people who put chains on them.

Safeton is a walled city on the Wild Coast that has seen enough of the world not to be surprised by people who look like they have been through something. They found food. They found shelter. They found, eventually, each other — the particular gravity that draws survivors together in the aftermath of shared catastrophe.

Seven days passed. Long enough to heal. Not long enough to forget.

---

Flocktime 1 — "The Bleached Salmon"

The notice at the Bleached Salmon Tavern was written in a clean hand on decent parchment. Work available. Experienced individuals only. Report within.

The man waiting at the table was not what any of them expected from a job posting.

Slash the Bard — seventh level, Dragon Magazine trained, carrying more stories than most men carry scars — sits with a cup he has not touched and eyes that have measured every person who walked through the door. He works for Dame Gold now. He has worked for worse. He lays out the situation without embellishment because embellishment is for people who have time and these people do not look like they have time.

Dame Gold wants the ruins at the Drachensgrab Hills investigated. Specifically: surviving captives left behind in the chaos. Slaver manifests — the lists of names, buyers, prices, routes — that the organization used to track its inventory. Families in Safeton are still waiting for news of people who never came home. Dame Gold wants answers to give them.

Five hundred gold per person. Payment on the third of Flocktime, at the Bleached Salmon, upon return with findings.

The group listens. The group agrees. The group has, after all, been there before.

---

Flocktime 1 — "The Tall Man"

The evening settles over the Bleached Salmon in the usual way — noise bleeding toward quiet as the hour grows late.

Thorian notices him first.

The figure is hooded. Tall — six and a half feet at least, and built wrong in the way that things built for purpose and not origin sometimes are. The hood stays up. The face stays down. What is visible is a hand, and in the hand is a knife, and the knife is making a point that does not require words.

A message. An intention. A warning from something that knows they are here and wants them to know that it knows.

Then the figure is gone. Through the door, into the Safeton night, as if it was never there.

The group makes a decision without much deliberation: they will deal with whatever that was when they encounter it again. For now — the lighthouse.

---

Flocktime 1 — "The Northern Shore"

Barnabuss knows a place on the coast. He kept it to himself for years, the way people keep things that have served them well. The group camps there for the night — cold air off the bay, fog rolling in low over the water, the temperature in the low forties and the sky offering nothing in the way of comfort.

Harry scouts ninety feet ahead by habit and disposition. It is what a halfling thief does when he wants to stay alive, and staying alive has been Harry's primary occupation for some time.

In the morning they move north along the shoreline.

The lighthouse appears first — stone and old mortar, a wooden door at its base, the lamp long dark. Beside it, set back from the cliff's edge, the mansion. Stone construction. Decades abandoned if the rumors at the Bleached Salmon were accurate. A sea captain, they said. His family. Something that happened in those rooms that no one who knows will say plainly.

Grounded in the shallows nearby, half-submerged and barnacled over, the wreck of a ship rests at an angle that suggests it came to grief close to home.

The group takes it in from a distance. Then they move closer.

---

Flocktime 1 — "What the Door Would Not Do"

The lighthouse door is wood. Old wood, swollen in its frame, partially ajar in a way that suggests not welcome but collapse. Kagen tries the direct approach. The door does not move the way doors are supposed to move.

Hinges rusted. Something wedged on the inside, or wedged by time itself into a position it has no interest in leaving. Oil is applied. Squints proposes the mirror trick — an arrow shaft disassembled, the mirror angled to see past the gap and into the dark beyond the door.

The mirror goes in.

Something takes it.

Not a gust of wind. Not the frame shifting. Something on the other side reached through the gap and pulled the mirror from Squints' hand with intent, and now the mirror is gone and the door is still closed and the gap offers nothing but darkness.

The group recalibrates.

Harry goes up. Grappling hook to the second floor window — a clean throw, a solid catch. He goes hand over hand, gets the window, and finds what no one particularly wanted to find on the other side: an undead thing in the dark, and no easy way back down when things go wrong.

They go wrong.

Harry comes back down faster than he went up. The grappling hook does not follow him. The rope does not follow him. He lands in the way of someone who has survived worse falls but would prefer not to make a habit of it. The group regroups at the base of the lighthouse, lighter by one mirror and one grappling hook, and with a considerably clearer picture of what is waiting inside.

The session ends there. The Bleached Salmon has agreed to receive their report on the third of Flocktime. They have two days.

The lighthouse has not moved.