game 16
After accepting the offer of the Church of Torm to work for them in exchange for a 7gp fee per person per day as well as provision of all equipment and healing that the party needs, the party settles into their quarters inside the temple. That evening, the group enjoys an opulent meal, together with Fianne and her group as well as the Harpers, purple dragons and warwizard. After the 9-course meal, the warwizard and the purple dragons bid farewell to everybody and go to a portal in the dungeons of the Temple, which will bring them back to Cormyr. The Harpers have decided they will stay around for a while, while Fianne and her friends have also accepted employment with the Church of Torm. Fianne indicates that they will use the time between missions to prepare plans for bringing their companions in the Dragonspine Mountains out of Zhent lands and to freedom.
Ilimitar and the others spend the next few days in the safe comfort of Tantras and the Temple of Torm. Nat spends a lot of time practicing his
weapon skills against the soldiers in service to the temple, while Ilimitar explores the library on the templegrounds. Thazraim seeks contact with the temple of Lathander within the city. He befriends one of the priests, Augeas, who is at first a bit startled by his lack of knowledge of the temple etiquette and some of the finer points of Lathanders teachings. After talking to Thazraim for several days, Augeas brings the dwarf into contact with another paladin of Lathander who lives in the city, Vaudrey. She explains to Thazraim the requirements that Lathander places on his paladins. But after about a week, on the 6th of Uktar, Tyana sends for the group.
A priest of Torm in the village of Melladant, some 100 miles east of Tantras, on the road from Dragon Falls to King's Reach had sent a letter to the Church, informing them he had found evidence of the existence of a Temple of Cyric in or near the village. The letter didn't provide any
specifics, and Tyana wanted the group to go to the village, find the Temple and if possible destroy it. So, the next day, the party left for Melladant, well equipped with armor and weapons from the armory of the Temple. At the end of the 9th of Uktar, the party saw the village lying in the distance. Deciding it was not a good idea to just go into the village and risk alerting the Cyricists, only Finn went into the village to make contact with the priest of Torm and get the rest of the story from him.
So, while the rest of the group set up camp, Finn sneaked into the village under the cover of darkness and went to the tiny temple of Torm. Knocking on the doors of the temple, he found out there was nobody there. However, directly adjacent to the temple there was a small house, which seemed to belong to the resident priest. The priest was home and invited Finn in. They discussed the letter that he sent, and the priest told him everything he knew.
The priest, a young man named Ryin had only been in the village for about 7 months. He paid regular visits to the local inn, the Tusked Boar, in order to talk to the passing travelers. As he did that, he saw that every two-four weeks, small groups of rather unsavory looking figures came through the village and spent a night at the inn. About two weeks earlier, while he was present in the inn, a group of adventurers ended up in a barfight with a small group of them. One of the unsavory figures was knocked unconscious, just beside the table the priest was sitting at. When he looked down at the man to see if he was all right, he noticed a holy symbol of Cyric hanging by a chain from his neck. While the priest was unwilling to confront the guy, he did sneak up the stairs to the room of these guys and went inside to search it. In the room, he found a holy book of Cyrics church and a letter of invitation to the Church of Cyric in Melladant. The letter was signed by 'Crimson Dagger'. The priest then left the room again, trying to leave everything behind as if he had never been there. Unsure whether the local law would be able to handle these guys, he wrote a letter to his superiors in the Temple of Torm and sent a messenger to Tantras with the letter.
After the conversation, Finn left again and sneaked out of the village to return to his friends. The group decided to o into town in separate groups and stay in the Tusked Boar, waiting for more unsavory figures to arrive. Just a few days later, on the ... of Uktar, a group of five persons entered the inn, two half-elven women and three human men. One of the women and all three men wore armor and booked two rooms in the inn. At that time, late in the afternoon, most of the party was present in the inn, only the paladin and Celedor were out. Ilimitar and Nat were at a table quite close to the entrance of the inn; Finn and Lauda were at the table in one of the corners. As the group of men and women settled down at a table in another corner, Lauda went to the innkeeper and asked where the outhouse was, then proceeded out the door in that direction. Once outside, he quickly climbed up one of the walls of the inn, into the corridor on the first floor and sneaked towards the rooms of the newly arrived. After checking for traps or other inconsistencies, he picked the lock and went inside. Once inside, he carefully started to search the room for information.
Just as Lauda went into the room upstairs, the non-armored female nudged the other woman, who motioned the three men to follow them and they walked towards the stairs. Finn, who had been sitting with Lauda, realized something was wrong and tried to distract the group by posing as a drunk and trying to fall in their path, making a lot of noise in the process, hoping it would alert Lauda. One of the men gave him a good shove and pushed him out of the way as the women started running up the stairs. Lauda, realizing something was wrong, bolted for the window and tried to get out before he was caught. Unfortunately, he failed to hold on and made a hard drop from the first floor. The women who were coming up, hearing the noise, ran into the room and looked out the window and looked straight at Lauda lying on the ground beneath them. Quickly Lauda ran back towards the common room of the inn and sat down. Finn had moved to the bar by then and was ordering another beer, trying to keep up a masquerade.
Very soon afterwards, the women came down from the stairs again with the three men, and walked straight towards Lauda in the corner. Lauda cordially invited them to sit down and discuss the matter. The women and one of the men sat down with him and started a very tense conversation. The two other men, having realized than Finn was sitting with Lauda before, came up to him at the bar and 'invited' him to join them, which Finn did. In the meantime, Ilimitar and Nat were some 20-30 feet away, trying to hear what was being said between Lauda and the woman in armor, who seemed to be in charge. Both Nat and Ilimitar were ready to pounce the moment they thought that trouble would start. The woman talking to Lauda insisted on knowing who he was and what he wanted. She invited him to step outside to resolve this matter, but Lauda steadfastly refused. While Lauda admitted readily to sneak into their room and looking for clues which would indicate their identity, he refused to say why, though he hinted at having masters who wanted to know and at some connection to the temple of Cyric in the village. The woman threatened him in veiled terms with torture and other forms of violence, but this didn't persuade Lauda. Then, Lauda asked who they were and tried to insist on them revealing their identity and/or allegiance.
Suddenly, the unarmored woman tried to cast a spell, Ilimitar saw it was some kind of charm spell and decided it was enough to warrant a response, though not a lethal one, and cast a color spray. The color spray had a limited effect on two of the men, while the charm spell failed to affect Lauda. The woman in armor tried to calm things down for a moment, and while she prevented a general melee from breaking out, tension rose to a peak. In the meantime, the regular patrons of the inn were trying to get away from the fight as soon as they saw the bright lights of the color spray.
Then, Nat jumped up and shouted: Freeze in the name of Torm. Then, all hell broke loose, one woman tried to cast a spell, only to have it fail as a fireball from Ilimitar, who also had cast a haste spell just before, and a beer-mug from Finn broke her concentration. The fireball, badly hurt the warriors, and injured the woman in armor. While the other woman and Finn were unharmed, Lauda had taken the full force from the blast and was also seriously injured. The goons next to Finn tried to stab him with short-swords and while one missed the other really struck home, seriously injuring the rogue. The woman in armor suddenly cast a spell and reached out to strike Lauda. Lauda, boxed up in a corner could not evade the blow and as the negative energy hit home, Lauda slumped into the corner and died. Ilimitar kept pounding the corner with another fireball, which fried one of the warriors, followed by a magic missile targeted at the unarmored female.
Finn fought a desperate battle against the warriors, but was quite seriously hurt by now and was also hit by a magic missile from the unarmored woman. In the melee that ensued, the male companions of the women all died and Finn was fatally struck by another spell from the armored woman. The unarmored female bolted for a nearby window and jumped outside, while the other woman ran for the door. Unfortunately for her, a blow by Nat's greataxe caught her as she tried to get by him and she went down. Ilimitar pursued the remaining female and downed her with another magic missile in the back as she was fleeing. Returning inside, Ilimitar and Nat managed to keep the armored woman and one of the warriors alive, but all help was too late for Finn and Lauda.
Both opponents were securely bound and gagged to prevent spellcasting. As the fighting died down, the innkeeper had already started to put out the fires started by the fireballs. As Thazraim returned from his trip around the village and the surrounding countryside, he found the inn in disarray and two of his friends dead. The group called for the presence of a member of the local law, and even though the innkeeper was busy restoring some semblance of order and cleanliness, he did find the time to politely but firmly insist that Ilimitar and Nat find residence elsewhere. So they paid him for the damage they had done and asked if they could borrow a tent, which the innkeeper provided with great haste.