The Chaotic shadow organization called The Assemblage was reeling from our successes against them. They sent messages to threaten us and even sent a guy to wrap up loose ends by shutting down the remaining local operations and disappearing any leftover operatives. We flipped the script on them and bagged their regional manager of loose end snipping. Here's what happened.
Sloane, Slaid, and Vylas had a wealth of hooks to choose from for adventure, but the nagging Assemblage activity won out for session. Instead of chasing treasure maps or mountain temples, we opted to hunt the hunters locally after they threatened Sloane's mom's bakery The Muffin Top. Mom ain't in the game, she's off limits.
We mulled over ideas, most of which were long play, wide net rumormongering, until we interviewed the Dockmaster and a plan began to form. He had been visited twice by a well-spoken fellow in a dark hooded cloak embroidered with some version of the Assemblage's variable emblem, sometimes bug arms and sometimes human arms and sometimes robit arms surrounding the central logo. I thought it'd be real convenient if we had access to Locate Object and could just divining-rod our way to the villain by finding his cloak.
Turns out we had a potion! We thought. But we had sold it in downtime. Ok plan B, let's hire someone. We went to our contact at the Temple of Turas who pulled a string to get us a mage from the Tower of Knowledge in exchange for security and a nice lunch. Right up our alley.
My experience with Locate Object has been mixed, the distances in wilderness and dungeons where I adventure the most being generally greater. It's pretty effective in a city though, especially when you can search by grid and know what you're looking for. It didn't take long for us to find our way back to the Tower of Knowledge of all places. Our mage ally happened to be a ranking officer in the organization and was pretty sour about cultist shenanigans showing up in his house.
A student's room held the cloak, a middling level mage who passed all the background checks for admittance. Vylas and his right hand elf Gilfandel loitered near the stairwell in case anything spicy happened while the rest searched the room. A couple nerds showed up and looked curious but kept on about their business. Then our guy showed up, saw us tossing his room, and tried to run. The elves were on him quick and brought him back.
Man what is this wizard's name that's helping us, the DM wondered. Well clearly it's Mister Wizard. So Mr. Mister Wizard interrogated the kid, happy to clean his own house while helping us hunt down the cultists in the city. The kid gave up his Mentor, who he was supposed to meet in a few days, and we offered him his life in exchange for his help in a sting operation. He agreed since he was pretty sure the Mentor was just gonna kill him anyway.
The site was a cafe, a tea house of decent quality. The elves infiltrated the staff, Slaid and his crew took up position across the way, and Sloane established a consignment deal with her mom's bakery and scheduled a delivery right at the time of the meet. All the kid had to do was play his part to lure in the Mentor and we'd nab him. Or kill him. You know, whatever.
The clientele of the tea house was a few mages, none matching our guy's description at a glance, and some civilians. Nothing unusual for the place. The kid took his seat and shortly afterwards a commotion was heard inside. A rat drew all eyes as it tried to scurry through the dining room, but when Sloane stuck it with her knife it was an illusion! The rest of us saw a black robed man creep up behind the kid.
The action was swift, Slaid's crew of bladedancers and archers and whatnot putting the target down fast enough that no one else had to act. The girls quickly scooped him onto a horse and got him out of the way. Well, that's that! Job's done! Except ole boy didn't have any spell books or components or mage stuff on him. If the Mentor was a mage, this weren't him, despite being dressed the same and making the meeting. We opted to stay in place and see what else might happen.
After a while, the clientele cleared out, uncomfortable with the violence nearby. The mages were left and with less of a crowd we were able to look more closely at them. One actually did kind of match the description of the Mentor, so I approached in my guise as a waiter to get a closer interaction. He smirked and paid his bill, rising to leave, so I followed him out to hold the door like a good host. I also grabbed my stashed sword from the host stand just as he turned to gloat about how well our trap went off but too bad we missed him! Haha! Mustache twirl!
Well. That's certainly a choice to make. I guess he was so arrogant he didn't realize I was about to beat his ass. I planted the pommel of my sword between his eyes, which crossed and he staggered. He was able to get a spell off before I could hit him again, trapping me, Sloane, and the rest of the dining room in magical sticky webbing. Unfortunately for him it didn't stop me from casting my own spell which cut him down with magical blades, chop chop. I'd have rather pummeled him again but once he went to magic I couldn't risk it. I was just happy it wasn't a fireball.
He survived his defeat thanks to healing potions and quick response from the rest of the team. We've got him in custody now and have learned about a ship coming in soon, which we will capture as we've done before, and a rogue werewolf operation at a nearby farm that could be bigger trouble than we'd guessed. Someone really ought to do something about that.
Musings:
The more time we spend in a friendly urban environment, the better our relationships get with the powers that be. We are cleaning house pretty well so the adventure will have to extend beyond the city soon. I will note that the suggestions given by the big brain RPG developers like Macris and Gygax are that adventure primarily happens on the frontier, where resources are slim and allies are few. We are experiencing why those suggestions are wise as we regularly leverage a broad array of resources that we otherwise would not have. I worry that we will grow accustomed to doing so and struggle to adjust once the hooks take us on.
There are, of course, urban environments that are as filled with peril as the wilderness. We even have hooks pointing us to such a place. Allegany just ain't that. It's the regional bastion of Law and we are clubbing Chaos at every turn even if individually we aren't exactly model citizens. We're establishing a strong reputation that should serve us as we advance in notoriety or at the very least provide a place to send our bodies back to.
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