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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy E Grenemyer" data-source="post: 9399885" data-attributes="member: 12388">8 Uktar - The RottingEighth day of the first tenday1500 DR - Year of the Sea's Secrets RevealedEarly snow blankets Cormyr. Halfjack's Basilisks assemble. Ruldragon plots revenge. CORMYR - Today, all of Cormyr received a preview of the winter to come. The Forest Kingdom was blanketed in rain and wind on the coast, and snowfall inland. Thunder cracked over the Stormhorns and the Thunder Peaks remained cloaked in ominous clouds. Merchants and peddlers pressed on against the cold and the wet, while folk who didn’t need to be outside wisely remained indoors.KNIGHTSWOOD - A new adventuring band has formed inside the Old Owlbear. Led by the aging mercenary Halathor “Halfjack” Baerobuld, the Black Basilisks are comprised of veteran caravan guards, a forester, and a pair of hulking daughters of the local sawmill owner who’ve become tired of “life in a place that’s hardly a village” and wish mightily to see all of Cormyr and the lands beyond. The Basilisks have made plans to travel east to Immersea and then south, with the hope of arriving in Suzail before winter blankets Cormyr in impassable snow. After purchasing a charter, Halathor plans to lead the Basilisks west to find adventure in the Gritstone Moorland.MARSEMBER - The Blue Diamond remains docked in the City of Spices. Hardhands and dock watchers have concluded the Diamond’s hold must be enormous; its crew spent a rain soaked day offloading crate after crate of goods to waiting merchant wagons.Elsewhere in Marsember, dead barge cremations have resumed after a lengthy pause owing to the discovery that someone, or someones, had been poisoning Marsembians, robbing them of their possessions, and then dressing them in beggar’s clothing and dropping them off where the bodies could be picked up by the Watch and disposed of. Until the arrival of the Blue Diamond, talk in Marsember had focused on the near death of the merchant Ruldragon “Ruldo” Sammurth, who’d been poisoned and shaved of hair and beard before being dumped within a stone’s throw of the Tankard of Eels tavern. As folk tell it, Ruldo, still heartily sickened but not quite dead, was awakened by the sensation of fire creeping up his rotting breeches and managed to throw himself into the freezing water and then swim back to Marsember. The corpses he’d been stacked with burned to ash and sank with the barge before the authorities realized there might be more victims among them.Ruldo is known for his hearty smiles, loud voice, and jovial way. Yet there are whispers he has contracted with professional assassins–out of Westgate, some folk claim–to find his attackers and slay them as slowly and painfully as possible. Other folk claim Ruldo’s demeanor is merely a facade, and that he is really a cunning dealer of poisons himself. If so, these persons claim, Ruldo was most likely the victim of a poison crafted right under his very nose! Inside the Drowning Flagon, hardjaws (barflies) have shared names of Ruldo’s known associates and made plans to volunteer to load corpses when the next dead barge goes out. Loading corpses onto decrepit barges is dirty, sometimes disease-spreading work, that not even Marsember’s proud watch members will do if they can avoid it, yet bets have been laid by the hardjaws over which of Ruldo’s associates betrayed him and so must be fated to suffer the same misfortune they’d planned for their master.More about Halathor and his companions:Halathor was a mercenary captain who practiced his bloody trade in the Sword Coast lands and further south in Tethyr. Most folk know he settled in Knightswood after arriving too late to be of use in Cormyr’s battle with the dark forces of Shade. Halathor has lived a quiet, peaceful existence in Knightswood, and found ready listeners to the stories of the battles he participated in among the Old Owlbear’s clientele. Halathor’s cottage, relatively new and built with Crown permission alongside a handful of other structures in a trio of former woodlots a handful of years ago, has already been rented out to a member of the Lionsyn noble family.It was Halathor’s battle tales that sparked a desire for adventure in the hearts of Calaumdra and Belyndra Hardspike. Expert woodcutters with calloused hands capable of picking up the most splintered piece of wood without suffering injury, Calaumdra and Belyndra grew up in a twice expanded woodshed that has grown to overshadow a small pond filled with irascible ducks. Calumdra keeps a matched pair of razor sharp axes on her belt and wears a leather apron that has become supple with age and use. Belyndra wears a similar apron, but wields a splitting maul whose hammer end has been carved to resemble a dragon’s maw. Their plans to depart Knightswood have been met with warm wishes by their family. Their father, Halliard, oversees the family’s increasingly busy sawmill alongside his wife Tethmra, which is staffed by their five remaining children (Stornara, Tamphrae, Whelandra, Trystarn, and Torm) and six additional helpers.Halathor readily made friends with the forester Torstram Harbrow, the later an experienced forester who’s spent his life tending the woodlots of Knightswood and violently dissuading unscrupulous woodcutters from illegally harvesting choice trees in the deeper parts of the forest.  Torstram is well acquainted with the other foresters of Knightwood, and communicates with them by using trail markers and leaving signs the others can read. (In the forest he can go for days at a time without speaking.) In Knightswood proper, Torstram is known to be a voracious reader and avid listener to minstrels. He can be depended on to show up whenever a true bard arrives at the Old Olwbear and always has coins at the ready to pay for their food and drink in exchange for the latest news of wider Cormyr.Of the three caravan guards, only Belgrin is native to Knightswood. Belgrin has spent five years guarding caravans and seen much of the Heartlands. Arlthrave Daerskult, a native of Amn, joined on with a caravan in Scornubel and so met Belgrin early in his career. Esmara Harthcloak, of Baldur’s Gate, joined the same caravan out of Scornubel but remained aloof from its guards. Only later did the three become inseparable.</blockquote>

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