Chapter 3 / Episode #102b — "The Long Way Home"
Date: Planting 19–23, 576 CY Region: The Drachensgrab Hills to Highport — Woolly Bay — Safeton, Wild Coast Weather: Cold overnight at the ruins. Four days of open water. The bay is grey and cooperative.
Players Present Slash the Bard Tiger Wong, Monk of the Eastern Lands Dog the Ranger — recovering
TerryOr, Kern Blackshield, Silversun Ubermage, Talon — left below
Planting 19 — "The Night They Wait"
They stay.
It is not a decision so much as an unwillingness to make the other one. Slash and Tiger make camp above the entrance to the ruins and watch the rope and listen to the dark below and wait for someone to come up.
No one comes up.
Dog breathes through the night in the shallow way of a man whose body is doing all the work. The burns are bad. Whatever those pale creatures had planned for him was already well underway when the bard found him. He is alive because Slash went down into the cave with two dwarves and a lantern and did not talk himself out of it.
The rope hangs still.
By morning it is clear. TerryOr is not coming up. Kern is not coming up. Silversun and Talon are not coming up. Whatever is on the other side of that membrane in the northern hall is keeping what it has taken, and no one left above ground has the means to go back in after them.
The decision is made in the grey early light without much ceremony.
They leave.
Planting 19 — "What Cannot Be Carried"
The freed captives cannot go to Highport. Everyone understands this without it needing to be said at length. Highport is an orc-held city on the Wild Coast, and a group of recently freed slaves walking through its gate is not a group that walks back out. The captives are given what supplies can be spared, pointed toward safer roads, and released to make their own way.
It is the hard decision and the right one. Both of those things are true at the same time.
Those who can pass are another matter. Lady Morwen. The noble brother of Dame Gold. Kern's wife. The two dwarves. Tharney of Hardby, copper ring and all. Their hands are bound — not cruelly, but convincingly. They will enter Highport as slaves, because that is the fiction that gets them through the gate, and fiction is something the bard has always been good at.
Planting 19 — "The South Gate"
Highport's south gate has thirty orc guards and a sergeant who has been doing this long enough to know what a bribe looks like when it walks up to him.
Slash plays an old orcish lullaby as they approach. It is a small thing, a gesture of respect in a language the gate understands. The sergeant listens. Then he looks at what is being offered — two hundred and fifty gold pieces, sapphires to make up the remainder, handed over with the easy confidence of a man who has done this before.
The gate opens.
The group wastes no time inside the city. No taverns, no questions, no lingering. They move directly from the gate to the docks, keeping to the wider streets where a group this size draws less attention.
Planting 19 — "Captain Red"
Three captains are approached at the wharf.
The first two find reasons to say no. The third is Captain Red of the Woolly Bay — a man whose willingness to ask ten thousand gold pieces for a four-night passage to Safeton tells you everything you need to know about his relationship with risk and reward. The negotiation does not take long. The gems do the talking.
They board before the tide turns.
Planting 19–23 — "Four Nights on the Bay"
The Woolly Bay offers nothing to complain about.
No other ships on the horizon — which is strange, and everyone notices it, and no one mentions it aloud because some observations are better left to settle on their own. The water is grey and calm. Captain Red is a man of his word, which out here counts for more than most credentials. The accommodations are generous for the price, and the price was enormous.
Dog sleeps most of the crossing. His body is making use of every hour.
Slash works the crew. Four nights is enough time to learn a great deal about a ship, its routes, its captain's habits, the particular texture of how information moves between sailors when they think no one important is listening. The bard files all of it away in the place where bards keep things.
Tiger watches Tharney.
Tharney turns his copper ring.
The bay passes beneath the hull and Safeton grows on the horizon one morning like a promise that has decided to keep itself.
Planting 23 — "Dame Gold's Door"
They go directly from the docks.
No detours, no delays. The noble brother of Dame Gold has been in their custody since the slave cart, and custody has a weight to it that does not lift until the delivery is made. Dame Gold's establishment is not difficult to find for people who know the city, and they know it well enough.
The brother is returned.
Whatever passes between them in that room stays in that room.
What comes out of it is a reward of twenty-five thousand gold pieces and the particular exhaustion of people who have been holding something tightly for a very long time and have finally been allowed to put it down.
Then: soft beds. Hot water. Food that did not come out of a dungeon or a saddlebag. Sleep without a watch rotation, without one ear open for something moving in the dark. The first real rest any of them have had since before the Drachensgrab Hills, before the stockade, before all of it.
Dog eats. Dog sleeps. Dog does not yet know everything he missed.
There is time for that.
Somewhere in the hills behind them, in a pocket the world has forgotten, TerryOr the Cleric of St. Cuthbert stands before a throne and waits for something to change.
The king is patient.
So is Terry.
XP Award — Episode 102b
| Encounter | XP |
|---|---|
| Highport gate (bribed, entered) | 150 |
| Passage negotiated, Woolly Bay crossing | 100 |
| Noble brother delivered to Dame Gold | 500 |
| Session Total | 750 XP |
The survivors reach Safeton. Dame Gold's brother is home. The reward is paid. And somewhere beneath the Drachensgrab Hills, four companions wait in the dark for someone to come back for them.
Watch the campaign unfold at @thedmandfriends
Nobody should have to make these choices but they had to be made.
ReplyDelete