Session 51: The Quest for Sharles
10/1/23-10/12/23, rest 10/13, active 10/14
PC: Zektel, Cracaryn, Alari (Spellsword), Karl (Explorer)
Hench:
This session took a while to get off the ground due to much indecision about what hook to pursue. The high risk, high reward payout from Bigtoe was still on offer, but the players did not feel that they had the resources to tackle it. They tossed around the idea of a return to the Fallen Castle dungeon, but they couldn’t come to a consensus. Eventually one of them remembered Sharles the Nightblade had been a captive of Talston for over a month. Surely with the town having fallen and under new management, the elf had been released! The Quest for Sharles was on.
The group was in Deinwick and did some shopping. Coincidentally, Sharles was also in Deinwick after having escaped during the battle for Talston. I gently probed them about asking questions around Deinwick about the missing elf on the off-chance that they’d get lucky, but the crew was focused on the goal. Shop, then head to Talston. Ok then.
Sharles and I had a mini session in his downtime channel on Discord while his other PC Karl looked for himself. While the party went the opposite direction, Sharles was mugging folks for money, connecting with one of the syndicates in Deinwick, and hiring on to assassinate Teutch the Alchemist.
The group traveled to Talston and met up at EARS, which has become kind of a hub for them to trade info between their various teams. They were able to contact Gwendolyn the Goat and get a meeting set up with a LT of Marshal Hummel’s who had helped them in the past. Solid reaction rolls got them some good info about who was released from the dungeons and who was still kept there, none of them matching Sharles’ description. Apparently he looks like Guile from Street Fighter with pointy ears.
Zektel Communed with his ancestral spirits to learn that Sharles was alive, he was not within the city of Talston, and he may or may not have been liberated which caused some confusion. The party hit the streets and bars to dig up rumors about the strange looking elf. Zektel got shaken down by thugs, which would become a theme for his attempts at gathering information this session.
They learned that an elf matching Sharles’ description had been seen in company with a Valestrian cavalryman fleeing Talston during the recent battle towards Deinwick to the west. Off the party went back to Deinwick to continue the trail.
Several more rumormongering mishaps and Zektel was running from guards, dodging thieves at a gay bar, and paying off other thugs. The crew eventually overheard that an elf matching Sharles’ description had signed on with the syndicate to spy on Teutch. Apparently they believed the wizard to be some sort of competition.
When the crew arrived at Teutch Tower, they went immediately to Barbinikus the Butler Mage to report their suspicion that there was an assassin at large. Barbinikus nodded and listened attentively, “Yes yes, all very important, please right this way” as he showed them to the door leading back out into the courtyard. Before they realized it, they were standing outside with the door slammed shut and latches and bars and things clicking and clanging behind the door. Barbinikus shouted through the door that should they find the assassin, they should take care of it.
Meanwhile, Sharles was working on imbedding himself among the elves that loiter around the place. When the party showed up, I had to consider how they were supposed to find a guy that didn’t want to be found. I decided that Sharles’ move silently roll would be the target for the party’s rumormongering roll. Unfortunately, Sharles did Sharles things and rolled like a 4 or something so the party found him basically immediately as soon as they started looking.
There was a tense moment of confrontation when they found him in a bar and he fled. Zektel chased him and threw his snek at him, which eventually wrapped him up. Sharles’ hench buddy surrendered after facing the whole party alone. Lockleaf the elf showed up on scene with some soldiers to investigate, taking everyone down to the small prison that Teutch keeps ne'er-do-wells in before hanging them or setting them on fire or turning them into toads or whatever.
The party was able to convince him that there was evil chaotic magic afoot, so some local mages were summoned and determined that indeed Sharles and his dude were under the influence of… something. They just didn’t know what. Lockleaf, “Listen I feel your pain, but if he stays here he’s gonna die. You need to move on or it’s gonna be ugly.” All the while Sharles was assailing them with claims of injustice and persecution and I was trying hard and failing not to laugh. The party tied the two up and carried them off.
Bigtoe the Wombat has a workshop in Teutchland and the party decided to hit him up to see if he had anything to offer. (Cracaryn is played by the same player). He had a leveled cleric on his staff who attempted to Remove Curse to combat what they believed to be a Quest spell, but was insufficient level to overcome the original caster.
There was some talk of stopping the session there or trying to get to Redcorn (another Cracaryn PC) or trying to get to Bellport. They eventually decided on Bellport by way of Redcorn to check all the known boxes for a potential cure. Sharles and his guy were steadily berating the party until they were gagged.
Back to Deinwick through the ruined Rushford, pillaged by Tyring during the Brigstein, saw them with few random encounters but an eager to escape set of prisoners. Each night I had Sharles rolling an escape attempt but he was on a roll with single digits today.
When they arrived in Millon, they found Redcorn there and tried to get a cure from him, but even he wasn’t high enough level! Unthinkable! So they had to try to get to Bellport and the Bishop Dante Relos who had brained one of the party’s captives in the past during a failed exorcism. Sharles got locked in Millon’s dungeon overnight, so of course that’s where he rolled his best escape attempt. Unfortunately with the negative for an actual dungeon, he was still captured.
At Bellport the party talked their way easily into the gate with a great reaction roll, earning an escort from some 14 year old schmuck in an oversized helmet. With a cracking voice he led them to the cathedral district of the tiered city and to the temple to Heironeous. Bishop Relos himself was summoned to oversee the attempted Remove Curse, with a prompt to the party about donation to the church and an overabundance of theatrics to cast the spells. Satisfied with their donation and his performance, the Bishop bounced and the boys were cured.
The Valestrian trooper just wanted to go home. With a poor reaction check he was confused and scared and just fled. Sharles blamed the party for leaving him to be tortured for weeks. He thanked them for the cure but also fled, theoretically seeking a peaceful cabin in the woods somewhere but who knows?
Musings:
Another slow start to the session. I try to encourage preliminary planning in the Discord channel in downtime to avoid that, but sometimes it doesn’t stick. What can ya do? Weird session with a lot of players playing multiple PCs and talking to themselves and whatever. After the session, we talked about relinquishing control of their PCs as NPCs when they weren’t the active party, like we do with Patrons. I think everyone understood the value and purpose there and endeavored to set contingencies for their PCs if they ran into other adventurers during a session.
There was no real score here in terms of gold or xp, but everyone seemed happy enough to have done right by their boy, especially Cracaryn who seems to be the lone survivor a lot. We also settled on a limit of time advancement that a party can make during a session at 2 weeks. Plenty of time to tackle most goals and not so long as to scum up the rest of the living world at 1:1 time. We’ll play that way a bit and see how it goes.
