Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fenrir" data-source="post: 659021" data-attributes="member: 401">After Lorken’s demise, we decided to examine his last place of residence, a townhouse in Waterdeep’s wealthy quarter. Obtaining the address from Gobinda, we arrived at his home and entered the front door using the key so generously donated to us by Lorken’s corpse. Upon entering, the wall spoke some sort of curse at us and we found ourselves trapped in a large, square stone room, the center of which was dominated by a carefully crafted statue of a woman dressed in a flowing gown. From the woman’s eyes spewed a line of fire, which coalesced into what could have only been a fire elemental, twelve feet tall, burning, with eyes like blazing emeralds among the red-orange blaze. Kantral and I bombarded the beast with spells of cold while Karl, with his ring that defended him against fire, took the fight to the beast up close. Kantral suffered most at the hands of the spirit, but we prevailed.Using the only other door in this room, which had been securely locked and trapped by both mundane and magical means, we came upon a smaller chamber with a single pedestal in the center dominated by a complex puzzle involving numbers and moving tiles. Several hours were spent trying to crack the enigma, but it turned out that the answer had been in front of our noses the whole time. As the final piece slid into place, two swirling vortexes of brilliant blue burst into existence before our eyes. Kantral identified the vortexes as portals that could cover long distances with but a step. Trying our luck, we decided to take the right portal, as there were no other appreciable ways out of this room.We stepped out of the vortex into a small shack with sparse furniture, but the building was of strange design. The walls, it seemed, were crafted of paper, and every piece of furniture was very ordered and simple, sanded and lacquered to a perfect uniformity. Confused, we walked out onto the streets of a truly strange city. The buildings here were either much like the one we had just left, or were giant, tall structures built in layers, the gables of each layer large, fluted, and exaggerated. The people here all looked at us with extreme curiosity, much as we had regarded them. They were a short folk, dusky of skin and slanted of eyes. Attempts to communicate were met with the strangest language I had ever heard.Magic proved to be our savior here, and before long we learned that we were in a city called “Pingchow,” in a land known as “Shou.” In all of my reading, I had never heard of such a place, and I wondered if perhaps the portal had taken us to another plane of existence. A sign revealed a nearby building as some sort of tavern to our magically aided eyes, and we took no time making our way in.As fate would have it, we had walked in on what appeared to be an arrest. Five heavily armed men had surrounded a girl no older than twenty, an exotic beauty with fire in her eyes. We arrived just in time to see the men lunge, and the girl twist about in such an incredible manner that we were all significantly stunned. In a matter of moments, an unarmed teenager had disabled five trained soldiers. Strangely enough, the folk in the tavern seemed pleased that she had defeated the guardsmen, and the owner of the establishment quickly tossed the unconscious louts out. Intrigued, Karl approached the girl. Brief conversation revealed the girl as one Mei Fa Lin, the daughter of a local governor who had fallen victim to somewhat of a coup. Lin explained that the men she had recently bested were sent by the man who had assumed her family’s lands, and that they had challenged her fairly. Apparently, the new owner of the Mei Fa estate was determined to get the girl with whatever legal means he could. The challengers were growing tougher, and Lin wasn’t sure how much longer she could take it. Having little else to do at this particular moment, we agreed to help her. Rather, Karl agreed to help her, likely drawn in by her attractiveness, much to Laena’s chagrin. It was clear we had little to do with this, and Kantral and I both agreed that we had more important things to do than trifle with a familial dispute in strange lands. Karl didn’t take our dissent too lightly, and he recklessly went off without us that night to the Mei Fa estates. Word got back quickly the next day that a “strange giant with hair of fire” had been captured while prowling around the estates. With a collective groan, we determined to rescue the poor oaf before it was too late.By the next day, we didn’t have to. Karl came stumbling in to the tavern, near death and sputtering more blood than could fill my waterskin. Discreetly, we tended to his wounds, and he told us what he had discovered. The new ruler of the estates was someone of persuasions more familiar to us than to the Shou- an apparent clergyman of the Child of Bane, Iyachtu Xvim. What a Xvimlar was doing here was beyond him, but much to my dismay, Karl had determined to combat the Xvimlar on his own, and had been severely damaged before he managed to escape. If the Xvimlar had indeed been working for this shadowy conspiracy we were trailing (which certainly appeared to be the case), he now knew that someone from the “old country” was here as well. Still, we were determined to discover exactly why the priest, who Karl had pegged as “Martin,” was here in the first place. According to Lin, who had apparently been to our lands as a child, Shou was thousands upon thousands of miles distant from Waterdeep. What possible connection could there have been? Lin provided somewhat of a solution, which Karl filled in belatedly. Apparently, the Mei Fa estates included an old monastery that sat atop a tall mountain several miles out of town. Lin was able to identify the rock on the horizon. Karl had heard Martin mention something about a proceeding at the monastery within the next tenday. After cursing Karl for leaving out this crucial bit of information, we returned through the portal to Lorken’s abode, where we tried to find a way out. Lin offered to accompany us, as she would do anything to reclaim her lands from the Xvimlar and also wished to see the West again.Our salvation lay in the statue of the woman. After very close inspection, it was discovered that her hand could be turned over. Doing so, a staircase opened in the back of the room, and we ascended back onto the streets of the City of Splendors. Returning to Bowman’s townhouse, we began to plan.It was determined that one of us would have to search the rest of Lorken’s townhouse. Kantral volunteered for this task. I suggested that we hire someone with discreet talents, and so, I went to the only man I knew who could garner me such labor. Besides, old Yosef owed us a favor for the whole ordeal with the glorified mind-controlling trout. Yosef assigned us one of his new men for the sum of 500 gold pieces. It was then that I met Drim Soigrim, the little halfling that would change the very nature of our journey and would grow to assume the focal point of our troupe. I must confess, he did not impress me much at first glance. His clothes were old, battered, his weapons aging and rusty, but there was something about his stance, his jaw, even, that screamed confidence. I knew he was a wise choice.I paid out of my own pocket to outfit our new hiree with some better equipment. I told him to meet us at Bowman’s hideout the next day. He did, promptly, and revolutionized our planning, both with his discreet tactics and fresh bottle of Tashalar red that helped pass the evening a bit more smoothly. Kantral’s findings at Lorken’s townhouse were disturbing- Lorken’s documents described some sort of geographically dependent ritual that spanned the world, explaining just why Pingchow was so important. The other portal, according to the notes, led to an underground sanctum in Calimshan, land of Harami’s birth. Both ends of the ritual needed to be performed simultaneously in order to be optimally effective, and thus to stop it, both had to be disrupted. Furthermore, Kantral’s inspection of the statue beneath Lorken’s house revealed that it acted as a magical focus, the central location of the dual energies collected from the Shou and Calimshan sites. The final plot, a visit to the map showed us, was a giant triangle spanning the continent. The portals would have to be destroyed in order to secure the failure of the ritual.What made things more difficult was the fact we had no idea what the ritual was FOR. We were running on blind circumstantial evidence- basically, that those responsible for the ritual had tried to kill us multiple times. It boiled down to an act of revenge. Little did we know what sort of trouble this revenge would get us into down the line, but we were all younger then, and had seen less of the world and the way things truly function. The patterns were strange, the nature of this ritual staggeringly ridiculous, but this didn’t occur to us. As far as we were concerned, it was one hundred percent authentic, and nothing was going to convince us otherwise. Within three days we had planned that the group would split up to deal with each side of the ritual simultaneously. The group would meet again in three years, in the centrally located city of Suzail, capital of Cormyr.</blockquote>

Verification