Session 47 - Downtime in Baldur's Gate (recap)

In this session, our party visited the Hopstra University library, investigated the John Wilkes Booth Theatre, and were deputised by Marshal Ulder Ravengard…

Zoyana’s magical crafting

• Zoyana gathered hair from Pliny (a glimmering piece, short and curly… definitely from the mustache) and scales from Aegar and Fang, and explained that she was trying to craft some magic into her ruby that would provide the group with protection and safety.

Hopstra University

The John Wilkes Booth Theatre

• The players next went to explore the John Wilkes Booth Theatre and see if they could develop any new leads about the Murkwater Maniac.

• They took their time investigating.

• Pliny went up and checked the box where they first found the Murkwater Maniac, but found little but cobwebs.

• Aegar investigated the other wing of the Mezzanine and Balcony, also finding nothing.

• Downstage left, just below the first balcony box, Zoyana noticed an out-of-place panel that Pliny might have kicked when he climbed up the wall. A light breeze blew from inside, indicating an open space.

  • She pulled, and discovered an office underneath the balcony box.

• To stage right, Aegar found a table littered with notes and poems, each with some doodles and scribbles:

• On a slip of paper:

Sometimes we are less unhappy in being deceived by those we love, than in being undeceived by them.
…
BLONDE LEG

• On the back of an envelope:

DOBLE GLEN
…
And once, or twice, to throw the dice
Is a gentlemanly game,
But he does not win who plays with Sin
In the secret House of Shame.

• On a piece of paper, folded in half:

The Fiend
It walks around with a mirror
Showing the reflection of your soul
Tricking you into believing it’s his personality
Making you fall in love with it
Filtered with friendship traits
Luring you to its kingdom
******* from you your blood and soul
Turning you against yourself
Making you your own enemy
With it success is foreign
And no outside things are allowed in its castle
It makes you toxic with its diabolical nature
And blinds you from reality
It controls you till it becomes you
Soon when you look into the mirror
Your soul wont be reflected
The only thing you will see is
The fiend …

GLEEN BOLD

• Carved into a piece of wood:

LEND GLOBE
…
T.I.A.M.A.T.

Is she an ancient chaos serpent of death?

Is she the prototype of the mother?

Is she just a myth or, has she been created?

• On a long piece of parchment:

LONG BLEED
…

The Love of Tiamat
     behold now everything on this earth;
     the fields with abundance of grain,
     palm-grove harvests rich and fruitful,
     the forests that separate kingdoms and the fires that scorch them;
     the brickwork of ancestries and the towers that reach our gods.
  behold these crop-fields that we call life and death,
  grown on the back of a sludge-like entity
  sowed, and heaped, in granaries of self-doubt;
  collected by children’s dirty hands;
  bronze-sickles, charcoal-eyes;
   while the storms unwrap in the south…
  gales have swept these homes and huts of clay,
  the dog-faced pazuzu gnarls at the moon, as inimical as it is revered;
      a mother’s love for the murderous son is as complex
      as the children’s dependence on these fearsome steppes.

behold now everything on this earth;
  the countenance of the origin-beast-mother carved in the mountains of the north
  and the efflux of her genitals streaming to the south of the marshes,
  into that great ocean whose shores we know only by myth
  and whose waters is the abode of the primordial one,
  whom hurls the long-spear of flood and storm
  deep into the sides of these lands - for these lands are hers:
     when all comes about, has not the lands risen strongly
     from her bottomless and abysmal womb?
     was not the pleasure that shook the members of the old, old gods
     into ejaculation, indeed, the motion of her scaled loins?

is she not the temple to which all sacrifices are offered, all libations put forth:
  is she not the shrine; the death-black ziqqurat; the lighthouse emitting darkness?
  is she not the stele inscribed with all words of grace,
  and the eloquence of our beautiful poets?

over the lapse of a thousand millenia,
  she has been constricting the gods of the heavens
  in a strong leather noose,
  f o r   i s   n o t   v o i d   o r i g i n a l   t o   a l l ;
      c h a o s ,   d i s c o r d ,   o r i g i n a l   t o   o r d e r ?

• As the party discussed, Pliny started to put some pieces together with his grandfather Barley Pan and some of his tales of the Followers of the Goldenbel.
  • “There was some dragon thing he did. He was old by the time that I got to know him, so I don’t know much…”
  • “I always thought he was crazy. He was always talking about the Followers of the Goldenbell, the fog and all this crazy shit someone named Xoc told him about.”
  • “Some kind of crazy cult. They wanted to raise a dragon and make it so that dragons could do something. They had some kind Head of Avarice that he was always talking about.”
• Zoyana: “That’s what the Cult of the Dragon are trying to do.”
• Aegar: “That is exactly what they are trying to do.”
• Pliny: “You think they’ve been doing this, since my grandpa was was here?”
• Aegar: “I do. The Professor today was talking about how they were trying to raise the dragons hundreds of years ago.”
• Pliny: “You might be the first person who’s ever listen to Professor Stein, Aegar. Holy shit.”
• Aegar: “This has been going on for a very long time.”
• Zoyana: “Maybe we should go back to the library and see if we can find out more information about Goldenbel.”
• Zoyana also wondered whether the Murkwater Maniac might join up with Rezmir and the Cult when they finally arrived.
  • The party discussed and decided they should find and eliminate him before that happened.
• Pliny started wondering whether the poetry looked anything like poetry that Hans had written. But his efforts (Insight 9) were inconclusive.
• In addition to the poetry, there were some rough notes, barely more than scribbles. They roughly described the play and the scene that the party participated in the night before.
  • The boy as a sacrifice
  • A party of adventurers to try and stop the summoning as as part of the ritual. (The two extra charmed adventurers were part of this plan)
  • The quasits as the leaders wearing dragon masks.
  • The cult is trying to summon Tiamat, wearing their dragon masks and chanting, and some form of living sacrifice is needed, so the boy was the placeholder for whatever sacrifice has to be had to bring Tiamat.

The Next Day (Day 37 since meeting Ragvala)

• The party spent the day on small tasks, shopping and selling and keeping their ears peeled for the the Murkwater Maniac.
• Pliny found a buyer for the playwright’s notes
• Aegar sold the jeweled dagger.

Grand Duke Marshal Ulder Ravengard

• The following day (Day 38), while crossing through Baldur’s Gate, the party was stopped by the guards and invited to speak with Marshal Ulder Ravengard.
  • Zoyana turned to her friend, “Aegar, when they say ‘invite,’ that means we have to, right?”
    • “It does.”
• They were escorted to a local guardhouse in the Steeps district.
  • It surprised the party a little bit that they were not taken to the fortress on Wyrm’s Rock that served as the headquarters of the Flaming Fist.
  • The guardhouse was a workaday police station with a single office in the back.
• Sitting in the office behind the lone desk was Marshall Ulder Ravengard.
• Marshall Ravenguard let the party stand in the guardhouse lobby for a few minutes, long enough to be uncomfortable, before he waved to the guards to let them in.
  • Zoyana: “Great I don’t like being here people tell you what to do all the time. It’s really annoying guys.”
  • Aegar: “It is something that you get used to…” His voice drifted off, “There are many rules that are put in place that govern govern people’s actions and… any small thing can tip off someone else. It is a game Zoyana.”
  • Pliny: “I feel like this town, we had so much more fun last time I was here. We were out there, playing music drinking ales. Casting shit. Doing shit. It feels like a whole lot of just getting bossed around here now.”
• Marshall Ravenguard stood as they approached. He held himself well, and he clearly knew how to handle himself in a fight.
• He was direct from the beginning: “Well, what is going with this loon in my city, and how are you involved?”
• Aegar bowed and introduced himself, “We found ourselves involved in this through happenstance. We were taking part in the Best Adventurer’s Contest when there was a murder. We had deciphered a riddle that was left in blood along the wall and attempted to contact the guards, but they wore indisposed at the time, dealing with the body. We felt that time was of the essence, and so followed up ourselves. Us being… capable adventurers.”
  • Zoyana: “We tried to tell the guards Aegar, and they ignored us.”
  • Pliny made a shushing motion: “Zoyana”
  • Zoyana turned to him and shrugged: “Well, it’s true.”
  • Aegar: _“That. That may be so. However, we found ourselves at a boat…” and he continued to detail their experience on the Patience of the Waves and how that led them to the John Wilkes Booth Theatre and their part in the Murkwater Maniac’s play.
  • Zoyana: “Oh, and then they kicked us out, but then they didn’t find the dead body and the other notes. The guards again. And me back went back and found the dead body that the guards had missed.”
  • Aegar: “We returned yesterday, yes and found extra evidence.”
• Marshall Ravenguard listened with a serious face as Aegar recounted their adventure, and crooked a little bit of a smirk whenever Zoyana piped in, showing that he understood the truth behind her snark.
  • When Aegar finished, he gave them all a wicked grin, “Great. You deputized yourselves. You fix it.”
• Zoyana: “What?”
• Aegar: “Yes, Sir. Is there anything that the guards know or that the Flaming Fist knows that we need to be aware of in order to be able to achieve our goals.”
  • Marshall Ravenguard shook his head, “No. What you just covered is about as much as these fools had gotten so far.”
  • “There have been a few… weird incident murders in the past few weeks. One of them a single and then two double homicides. One in Eastway, one in Bloomridge, and one in Seatower.”
  • “There wasn’t any obvious rhyme or reason to them. The only connection that brings them to mind are weird little poetic elements to them. Touches of theatrical or spiritual or magical elements, but no messages to the wider world trying to announce that a murderer was on the loose.”
• Zoyana asked how much they were getting paid.
  • Marshall Ravenguard spread his hands, “All the responsibility, none of the perks.”
• Pliny chimed in, “Sir, sir, I know in this town that there’s quite a bit of taxes that are paid, by our merchants and by anyone coming through, to keep it as safe as possible. Which your men do a noble job at…”
  • He was interrupted by Zoyana coughing.
• Marshall Ravenguard: “The price on his head is 3,000 gold pieces.”
  • Pliny tried to argue for more resources.
  • Marshall Ravenguard: “The price is out there on his head. We haven’t had any luck finding him. He is not really the kind of thing that we tend to find, and he seem to have taken an interest in you. You deputized yourselves and got involved. And so now… it is up to you.”
  • Pliny: “Or we can also just leave town at any point.”
• Marshall Ravenguard ignored Pliny: “How are you going to find him?”
  • Aegar: “We are currently following up on a few leads, but they are spotty, at best, and any help is greatly appreciated.”
    • “We know that he at one point was associated with Hopstra University, and so there are some names that we can follow, though it is a long shot.”
    • “We have a few of his writing samples, and some of the things that he was interested in.”
    • “There seems to be some connection with the Goldenbel. We would need to check up in the library at Hopstra in order to be able to see if that leads anywhere.”
    • “But other than that, we do not have much to go off of.”
• Zoyana: “I think he likes Pliny for some reason. Maybe we should lay traps for him.”
• Pliny: “If we were to draw him out, how many of your men do you have available?”
  • Marshall Ravenguard: “If you find him? All of them.”
  • Pliny: “Since we’ve been to town, he’s been finding us.”
  • Marshall Ravenguard: “Well, once again, that’s your problem now. If you have anything you actually need, stop back in, and they’ll take care of you here.”
• Zoyana: “We need to know right away if somebody gets taken again.”
  • Marshall Ravenguard: “Oh, you’re at the top of the list.”
• Marshall Ravenguard passed the party three tokens with the Flaming Fist stamped on them. “If you need any of the Fists’ help, show them this and tell them I sent you. They’ll help or get word to me. Good luck.”
• Aegar bowed his way out.

More Plans

• After Zoyana got over her doe-eyes for Lord Ravenguard, Aegar facilitated a planning discussion about what to do.
  • Who did Pliny know who was part of the conversations about buying up the John Wilkes Booth Theatre: Sall, Hans, Van, Tars, Tara, Barry
    • They met Van in the Wide and he mentioned seeing Sall and Barry.
    • Tarz was the one who got them to the front of the line at the Best Adventurers Contest.
    • Hans they saw at Hopstra and ruled out.
• Zoyana suggested that Pliny plan a reunion and they get his old buddies back together to get a feel for them, Tarz in particular.
  • Aegar suggested that they might all want to come see Pliny’s lecture. Pliny declined.
  • They put out the word that Pliny would be playing at Baldur’s Burrow that night, and that everyone should come.
• In the meantime,
  • Aegar stopped by Ackyn’s. She was happy to see him (so was Skeleton Skull Skin), but had no word.
  • Zoyana searched the wide for the covered wagon, but no luck.

The Day After the Show (Day 39 since meeting Ragvala)

• The session ended the day after the show. The party awoke with plans:
  • Zoyana was going to go looking for the covered wagon she’d seen in Elturel and the Wide.
  • Aegar heard of a Temple to Ilmater, and so was going to explore Little Calmishan.
  • Pliny was going to Pliny.

Loot

• Playwright’s notes (300 gp to a purveyor of fine arts)
• Jeweled dagger (1,400 gp)
• Flaming Fist tokens from Marshall Ravenguard
• Amulet of Health countdown:
  • Started on Day 31
  • 40 days to completion: done day 71
  • Sped up 5 days from help from Wood Woad: done day 66

NPCs Interacted With

• Hans Rimmer
• Murkwater Maniac (mentioned)
• Ditto the ghost
• Lily the librarian
• Dobby the house elf
• Professor Stein
• Sammaster (mentioned)
• Shargrailar, the first Cult dracolich (mentioned)
• Professor Guinevere Garrgol
• Barley Pan (mentioned)
• Marshal Ulder Ravengard
• Ackyn Selebon
• Skeleton Skull-Skin
• Sall Sihehal
• Van Wylder
• Barry
• Professor Gilroy
• Tarz Seleno (mentioned)
• Tara Seleno (mentioned)

Locations Visited

• Hopstra University
• The John Wilkes Booth Theatre
• Guardhouse in the Steeps district
• Baldur’s Burrow
• Selebon’s Outfitters

Experience Per Character