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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy E Grenemyer" data-source="post: 7924651" data-attributes="member: 12388">From this list of <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/adventuring-company-names-and-what-they-are-up-to.473088/#post-6771762" target="_blank">40 adventuring company names</a> on page 1, I present:CATHCATCH’S DOOMED FRIENDSKnown in the village of Dhedluk for breeding boobries of exceptional height and taste, the man called Cathcatch has suffered several interruptions of his business.  The first involved his abduction by night at the hands of cultists wearing stag antler masks and wielding daggers capable of floating point down if released in midair. The second involved his imprisonment by a band of rogues—every last one of them a woman—who dwell not far from Dhedluk and allow no one to trespass in their territory. The third was not one interruption, but an ongoing sequence of several visits from uninvited guests, all of them demanding and few disposed towards polite behavior.Catchcatch’s first rescue came swiftly thanks to lifelong friends who’d grown up in Dhedluk hearing stories of the cult called the High Hunt, and who’d spent their youthful days exploring the hidden holds with a day’s walk of the village and listening hard whenever two or more strangers of regal bearing met in those same holds to converse in what they assumed was total privacy. In one such hold, the breeder of boobries was surprised to learn the blood of two extinct Cormyrean noble families ran through his veins, as well as a grandmother from House Irlingstar. This much Cathcatch learned before the masked nobleman who’d proclaimed his lineage out loud was interrupted by a handspan of steel protruding from his ample belly. Six Cormyrean nobles felt the hot stab of cold steel that night, each blade wielded by one of Cathcatch’s friends. Half as many nobles fled for their lives into the trees.A season later the Women of the Woods took Cathcatch prisoner after he blundered into one of their campsites while tracking a wild boobrie. The beast would have made for excellent breeding stock, but it fell swiftly under a storm of crossbow bolts let loose by the Women. Catchatch’s rescue involved no violence, but careful negotiation on the part of his friends. They convinced the Women to accept boobries as a ransom—a mated pair up front, a male the next year and a female the year after that, the last two to be delivered within a tenday of the anniversary of Cathcatch’s “invasion” of their lands.The boobrie breeder nearly missed his first anniversary payment one year later, thanks to a rumor in the village that spread first to Waymoot, then Knightswood, then Eveningstar to the north. The Sembian merchant who'd fanned the rumorfire claimed to one and all that she observed Cathcatch in the presence of not one ghost, but two, the first an apparition that decades ago found its way free of the sprawling wayhouse in Dhedluk that it once haunted, the building known throughout Cormyr as the Blushing Maiden. The merchant swore the first ghost was that of Aradaera Tinshar, a spell-brawler of a sorcerer memorialized in bard song as having roasted beholders with fireballs and earning the friendship of the legendary Witch Queen of Aglarond. The second apparition appeared in Dhedluk not long after the first was seen to wander by night among the cottages nestled between the massive oaks that grow everywhere in the village. This ghost the merchant identified as that of Thiombur Dhedluk, made king’s lord of the village in the wake of Thiombur’s valiant opposition to the extinct noble House of Dheolur who once ruled the village with an iron fist (and whose surname the village was known by at that time) over one hundred and fifty years ago, and whose heart belonged to Aradaera until her death in battle.Listeners assumed the seemingly unkillable breeder of boobries was the descendant of Aradaera and Thiombur, and that their ghosts must be imparting secrets to him of all the ways to activate a massive tapestry hanging within the Blushing Maiden that is rumored (correctly) to hold several magical gates within its one hundred paces-long length. Others concluded Catchcatch must have access to a cache of magic that once belonged to his mother. A cache that must contain potent magical objects gifted to her by the Witch Queen, surely, for if the whispered rumors of Cathcatch’s encounters with the High Hunt and the Women of the Woods were true, then how else could he have escaped but by wielding powerful magic? A month later visitors began to arrive at Catchcatch’s cottage, sometimes forming a line at his front door. Some offered coin, others offered promises of power, and yet others defaulted to armed threats when the hapless breeder claimed to know nothing of what was being asked of him.For their part, Cathcatch’s friends have quietly steered away the worst of the threats, disposed of those who were prepared to offer violence, and taken care not to claim any credit for their deeds. They refer to themselves as “the Doomed” in secret, but always with a sense of mirth and a smile. They wear stag masks stolen from the nobles who’d sought to sacrifice their dear friend, and they operate by night.</blockquote>

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