T1 - A Visit to Spelding Square (Adventure Summary).
Short version
A star falls from the sky, and something crawls from the sea into a market square, where a small party of adventurers, assisted by a very old retired adventurer, do combat with it and eventually prevail, despite clouds of foul-smelling gas, a mind-bending assault, and a tendency for the creature to multiply when struck.
Finally arriving too late to help, the wizard Rilithorne teleports away with the remains to study them, and rewards the victors with magic items. The grateful city authorities also give them a small amount of gold.[sblock=Long version]As night falls, the patrons of the Red Dragon Inn are startled by their drinks wobbling on their tables, a great gust of wind, and cries of alarm from outside. A few - namely, Quozen Ilphukiir, an elven monk, Peladus Bralc, a handsome young wizard, and Pendrake Utherman, a fighter from the Northlands - head outside to see what might have been the cause. They are met in Red Dragon Square by Midias Sunchosen, a cleric of Hyrag, and a new arrival to Orussus, the half-giant Ngikhnit.
An old man named Gillin tells them he witnesses what he interprets as a star falling from the sky, passing low over Orussus, and descending towards the Great Sea in the west.
With nothing else to do, the group decide to take a look at the sea while they escort Gillin, chattering about 'Mildred', back to his home in the slums beyond the north docks.
While walking across the dock, they are surprised by a great wave that sweeps in from the sea. Peladus holds Gillin upright and, surprisingly, it is only the half-giant who is knocked from his feet. Further up the dock, some patrolling guards are also swept out to sea. They swiftly organise a rescue mission, throwing rope. Pendrake leaps into the sea to rescue a guardsman.
The guards offer thanks, but head off to the High Quarter to show their faces, lest politically influential citizens have been disturbed by sea water in their manicured gardens.
Cold and wet, they arrive at Gillin's poor home. Peladus befriends him by asking about Mildred, who proves to be his magical morning star, the last of his possessions from the days years ago when he too was an adventurer. They leave Gillin apparently preparing for bed, and head into the slum quarter, wondering whether anyone else has been swept out to sea.
Passing along a quiet street, they encounter the halfling Rollfar Lightpurse, who has business of her own - she was the owner of the houses of Spelding Row, but has sold them on to raise ready money, and and has been explaining the situation and bidding farewell to her former tenants. Having heard the wave, and then noticed a strange smell coming from Spelding Square, the large cobbled marketspace behind Spelding Row, she entered the square to investigate and encountered... something, a dark creature that she caught only a glimpse of.
Thinking very hard "Stay there, don't leave the Square!" she ran from it, swiftly organised an evacuation of her tenants for their own safety, and then - heading towards the good parts of the city in search of guards or other help - came upon the party. She begs the party to do something about the creature she believes to lurk nearby and takes them to the entrance to the Square. Seeing that some tenants are dawdling, she leaves to firmly escort them away. A short time later, she somehow becomes convinced the party are in trouble, and sprints as quickly as she can to the tower of the wizard Rilithorne in Allimon Street, where she yells for help.
Meanwhile, the party have entered Spelding Square and cautiously explore. After a time, Quozen notices a creeping crawling black creature with paired tentacles that keeps to no single shape, though strangely no one else in the party can see it. It creeps past several of them, making no attacks, while Quozen calls warnings, before losing sight of it. When Ngikhnit suddenly sees it, he smashes it with his flail.
A foul-smelling fog rises to surround the creature and the party, several of whom are overcome by nausea. Fighting half-blind in the fog, Ngikhnit strikes another blow, and is at last joined by Pendrake, who slices the creature in half with his sword. Unfortunately, the two halves are otherwise unharmed and each assaults the adventurers. Their blows burn with acid.
Somewhere in the fog, one reaches out gently to touch Quozen's head. His mind is damaged by the contact. The fog continues to swirl, and vomiting adventurers burst from it at intervals.
When the fog suddenly clears as swiftly as it came, Ngikhnit is found lying unconscious, and there is no longer any sign of the two creatures. After Midias restores Ngikhnit to consciousness, there follows a game of cat and mouse, with the adventurers hunting for the creatures while they hunt them. At times, someone spies a creature, but mostly they disappear into the shadows.
Pendrake switches to using a morning star, and when Quozen is ambushed from behind a market stall, he strikes the attacker, only to find that it still splits again. Now there are three creatures. Peladus blasts the newcomer with a magic missile, which sends it streaking away into hiding at surprising speed. The other strikes Ngikhnit down, bringing him perilously close to death.
Even as a second creature is messily dispatched by Pendrake, the party hear the old man Gillin calling to them from the south of the Square. He has been having the time of his life dodging waves and walking round the town with adventurers again, and has decided to follow them rather than turn in for the night. He has no idea of the danger he is walking into.
Midias heals Ngikhnit again, and the half-giant and Peladus hatch a plan to trawl the Square for the elusive creatures with a fishing net. But as Quozen moves to join Gillin, he runs into the missing creature, which swiftly drops him. Ngikhnit and Pendrake head to his rescue.
Gillin, having failed to stop Quozen's bleeding and been attacked, takes a swing at a creature, no one having warned him about its tendency to split... which it does. Now there are three again.
There follows a fierce exchange of blows, which end with Ngikhnit on the verge of unconsciousness again. He backs off.
Meanwhile, alone, Peladus follows the creature he damaged with his spell along a narrow alleyway into a storage yard. It attacks him out of nowhere, and his response - a Color Spray - has no effect. He decides retreat is the safer option, as he sees the creature climb onto the roof of a shed. He returns to the main Square just in time to hand a healing potion to Ngikhnit.
The creatures have all disappeared again. Worse, one has decided to take Quozen's unconscious form with it. As it picks him up, he vanishes from sight. The others try to locate him by probing the empty air, with no luck.
At last Peladus and Ngikhnit return to retrieve the fishing net and sweep the Square with it. The method works well, except that when Peladus wraps up the creature holding Quozen, he finds himself right beside it. Before Pendrake kills it, it drops Ngikhnit yet again and further injures Gillin.
Midias uses the last of his healing power to get Quozen and Ngikhnit back on their feet. As Quozen wakes, the fourth creature becomes visible nearby, obviously now dead. Just one is left.
They return to the yard behind the Square where Peladus last saw it. Quozen climbs a ladder onto the roof, followed by Pendrake, who promptly falls through the shoddy roof tiles. Despite seeing this, Ngikhnit too follows, and falls through, fortunately landing on a pile of sailcloth. Pendrake ends up suspended and entangled in a fishing net. The missing creature belabours him with stinging blows while he dangles helpless. When he finally breaks free, he further injures himself in the plunge to the ground.
There follows a comedy of errors as Peladus and Gillin desperately try to get the shed doors open from the outside, first with lockpicks, then with blows of the morning star Mildred. Inside, Ngikhnit and Pendrake put their shoulders to the doors time and again, but they stubbornly refuse to break.
Unseen, the creature retreats to the roof. Midias, perched atop the ladder, pierces it with a useless crossbow bolt, and is then nearly pushed from the ladder, but proves stronger. He retreats to the ground, while the creature follows him and strikes him about the head. Peladus quickly casts another magic missile from a scroll, but it fails to finish off the creature.
At last the door breaks, and Pendrake bursts out to splatter the creature to bits. The adventurers have prevailed, though all are greatly battered, bruised and burned.
Ngikhnit proves difficult as they try to leave the Square, unreasonably insisting that it is a beautiful place. Unable to convince him to come with them, he is left behind. But the others have gone only a short way when they run into an extremely out of breath Rollfar Lightpurse and the wizard Rilithorne, together with two guardsmen.
Rilithorne listens to their tale and examines the creatures' remains, and grows increasingly worried. The likelihood is that this creature fell from the sky, and it might not have been the only one. Should there be more of these things around, it would be important to know as much about them as possible.
He writes a pair of notes, one for the guardsmen to give to their Captain and the Mayor, one for his apprentice Jon Kilran, and teleports away with three of the corpses, to examine them at once with his colleague and collaborator Thyrin of Grenton. Rollfar departs for Fallon, where for some reason she believes a friend is having difficulties.
Rilithorne's apprentice is a little overwhelmed by being left in charge for a week with instructions not to disturb Rilithorne for any reason, and has a little difficulty in reading the sentence about the party's proposed reward, due to some stray blobs of creature slime, interpreting the obscured words as "foolish boots and the like." That might not have been quite right. In any case, he empties out the closet under the stairs of boots, cloaks and other items, many of which he made himself under Rilithorne's supervision as exercises in magic item creation. Peladus is instead given the opportunity to take scrolls and inks. Gillin demands monetary compensation, as you cannot eat boots.
The adventurers return to the Red Dragon Inn.[/sblock][sblock=Location details]The adventure took place entirely in Orussus.
The tavern 'The Ship's Wheel', first seen in W1: Blacklily Violence, appeared again. It is somewhere near the northern docks, but was closed at the time the PCs passed by.
In the slums, there is an even cheaper bottle store, nothing more than a tent or shack, run by a dwarf who sells very bad rum and seems to sleep in his store. It is called the Flopping Wick, but the 'c' has fallen from the sign.
Many of the streets near the northern docks have fish-themed names: Carp Avenue (this is not as grand as it sounds), Cod Street, Eel Row, Crab Garth.
The thoroughfare that is called Merchant's Avenue continues north into the slum district where it is known as Lower Merchant's Avenue, but Cutpurse's Retreat to some, describing the use to which some less than honest inhabitants of the Low District put it.
Spelding Row is a terrace of houses of stone construction, of better quality and in better repair than many of the Low District buildings. In origin, they were fishing village cottages beyond Orussus that many decades ago were swallowed up by the spread of the city and its slums.
Spelding Row forms the southern edge of Spelding Square, a large cobbled area at the edge of the sea, north of the North Docks. A wooden pier extends from its north-western corner. Small fishing boats bring their catches of fish to Spelding Square, where locals gut them and split them for drying in the sun as the speldings that give the area its name. The fish guts and scales are irremovably ground into the western side of the square. On the cleaner eastern side, a fish market is held regularly. There is a small storage area on the Square's northern side, made of a yard and some tumbledown sheds, beyond which are the blind back walls of another row of slum houses.[/sblock][sblock=Notable NPCs][sblock=Gillin]Gillin is a wiry grizzled old man, who admits to being 84 years old. He never married and has no family. A long time ago, he was an adventurer. He says that it was his tales of derring-do that inspired Joe Smith to take up the lifestyle, though this may be exaggerated. He claims to have once defeated a hag who wanted to live near Covington, which is why no one has ever heard of the Covington Hag. The other members of his adventuring party are now dead, with the presumed exception of an elf whom he has not seen for many years. He ended his adventuring career with little to show for it, and year by year has sold off his remaining gear, until all that he has left is his beloved +1 morning star that glows intrinsically, which he refers to as Mildred and generally talks about as though it were a wife. He lived in a house in Crab Garth, a small courtyard in the slums, but on coming into wealth as a result of his heroism during the adventure moved into a better home in Spelding Row.
Mechanically, he was a Str-based Rogue 3 with venerable age penalties (Str 8, Dex 6, Con 8, Int 15, Wis 12, Cha 15, 12 HP, AC 8, feats: Improved Initiative, Dodge*, Mobility* (*no longer operative due to lost Dex).[/sblock][sblock=Joe Smith]It was seen that the landlord of the Red Dragon Inn most evenings pops out a side door of the Red Dragon Inn to hand out fresh food to the poor and needy. Since there were only three people waiting in line, it seems likely that he has made a private arrangement with a different set of people on each day of the week. To avoid any suggestion of charity to those who might be offended by the idea, he claims the food would just be wasted otherwise.[/sblock][sblock=Cobby, Medwyn]These were two named members of the city guard who were swept into the sea by a large wave and were rescued by the party. Cobby in particular now looks up to adventuring types. They are both a little dissatisfied by the political requirements that sometimes get in the way of doing their jobs.[/sblock][sblock=Rollfar Lightpurse]Rollfar is a rather brisk tallfellow halfling. There is something slightly odd about her, but even she is not quite sure what it is. She owned the houses of Spelding Row and collected rent from them, but recently sold them to raise money to outfit herself as an adventurer. She is a childhood friend of Keldar Warbray and is now his cohort, so not generally available as an NPC.[/sblock][sblock=The Ironforge-Millers]They are tenants of Spelding Row and a rather oddly-composed family - a male human and female dwarf who have adopted two gnomish children. Presumably unimportant Commoners.
If Keldar Warbray met them due to his friendship with Rollfar Lightpurse, it might go some way to explaining his mistaken views on the origins of gnomes.[/sblock][sblock=Rilithorne]Rilithorne keeps a wand of arcane mark handy to quickly sign documents officially, and also possesses a handy haversack that - among presumably many other things - holds a small folding table for ease of writing when out and about. Again we see that he can teleport. He also cast floating disk and dispel magic.[/sblock][sblock=Jon Kilran]Rilithorne's apprentice; slightly uncertain and bumbling without his master's backup, but anxious to impress.[/sblock][sblock=offstage NPCs]Thyrin of Grenton is a colleague of Rilithorne's, who featured onstage in Notes on the Aether and A Rather Odd Shovel.
The leader of the Guard is still Watch Captain Frendath.
Corolio is named as some sort of punctilious city official, secretary to the Mayor. Rilithorne wrote him a letter. He delivered the city's reward money into Joe Smith's hands.[/sblock][sblock=The Unknown Thing]Its origin remains unclear. It appeared in Orussus shortly after a new 'star' fell from the sky, crawling from the sea, but whether it was washed from the depths or fell with the star is yet unknown. It showed some similarities to the creatures known as oozes - mainly in that it was split apart unharmed by slashing weapons and inflicted acid burns - but unlike an ooze, it seemed to possess a low cunning, possibly even intelligence.
Initially, it looked like a hunched or spreading black mass topped at all times with two long tentacles, but later some of its offspring transformed into ball-like masses of dozens of tentacles.
Though it ordinarily moved about relatively slowly, it moved faster than an ooze should, and on one occasion moved in plain view faster than a running dwarf, though perhaps not as fast as a running human.
It exhibited several strange abilities - it released or called up a cloud of nauseating fog, it struck once with unerring aim, it blurred its outline with dancing shadows, and its touch temporarily damaged the mind of an elf.
It showed an ability to repeatedly vanish from sight, though notably those with sharper eyes sometimes could see it when others could not. Moreover, an unconscious person picked up by it also vanished from sight for a time.
It showed a resistance to damage by nonmagical weapons, and a resistance to spells. If it possessed other abilities, they were not noticed at the time, or were forgotten.
Once it was dead and could be examined safely, it became apparent that the creature was extraordinarily light for its size, though its flexible nature made it difficult to pick up.
Rilithorne of Orussus and Thyrin of Grenton are in possession of three corpses, and hope to learn more of its origins. A fourth corpse is held by the Orussus city guard.[/sblock][/sblock]
