Seule's IC Freeport Storyhour (01/26/03)

[Seule]

Alright. I'll be posting mostly submissions from the players in this game, which I run. The game was inspired in large part by both DrNuncheon's Freeport Storyhour, and by Kyri Chronicles. In what way, I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.
The cast of characters, in no particular order are:

Fenaik, Male Human Psychic Warrior
Constable Fraser, Male Human Fighter
Lyran, Female Human Psion (Savant)
Endrin, Male Human Cleric of the God of Retribution
Ving, Female Halfling Rogue/Monte Bard
Noewyn Winterborn, Female Half-elven Urban Ranger

All players are the same gender as the characters.
The story starts off in Freeport, with the characters having just graduated from basic training, and being assigned to a newly formed unit designed to investigate anything outside the ordinary Watch run of things. The Watch is small, run down, and heavily corrupt.

I'll be posting spoiler warnings at the start of each post, if any published module is involved.

Lyran's player missed the first session, and an NPC filled in, badly, thus the story starts a little abruptly.

--Seule

 

[Seule]

Spoilers: Death in Freeport

Dear Dad,

Good news! I’ve been accepted into the City Watch after all! It seems that the recruit they chose over me wasn’t able to handle the pressure. I can’t say I’m surprised, it has been quite an adventure so far.

I met the rest of the team and discovered that they had imprisoned several people for assaulting the watch. I was there for the questioning but it was quite confusing as there were many names being thrown around that I’d never heard. Ving (she’s a halfling!) was quite helpful in sorting out the story for me. It seems that Brother Egil approached our group looking for help finding his friend Lucius who had gone missing. During the investigation the Watch was attacked by a group of humans and a gnomish psion. Now in the prison were Hans and Petaro. Further questioning revealed they were part of a mercenary company called the Yellow Shields. They had been hired by a nervous little man called Enzo, and were supposed to meet him in a bar for payment.

We decided to go to the bar undercover, not revealing ourselves as officers of the watch. It was very exciting! It all went smoothly, Benton Fraser (my partner) and Fenaik (Ving’s partner), met with Enzo and got the payment as well as a little information. Noewyn and Endrin (they’re partners too) were waiting outside the bar, so she was able to follow Enzo when he left, and we met with Noewyn back at the station once we left the bar.

Once we regrouped, Noewyn led us back to where she had tailed Enzo. We climbed through a window into a building just outside of scurvy town. We went down a trapdoor into a wine cellar, and found a secret door in a wine caske that wasn’t really a wine caske! It led into some underground tunnels, and Noewyn nearly fell into a pit trap, but she managed to catch herself.

Well, we soon found a room full of skeletons that stood up and attacked us! I managed to knock some of them down from outside the room and Endrin managed to drive most of them away from the door and stop them from attacking. While all this was distracting most of us, strange lizard-ish creatures came out of a secret door down the passageway we had passed and attacked Benton. I knocked one out myself but my partner completely missed it and thinks I abandoned him. I stood guard with him after the lizard men were gone and while the rest of the team beat the skeletons down so that he would stop saying that I left him during combat.

I’m getting pretty tired now Dad, so I’ll finish this story tomorrow.

Love,
Lyran

 

[Seule]

Spoilers: Death in Freeport

Dear Dad,

I’m a little more rested now, thankfully. We decided that since the lizard-men had come out of a secret door we should follow their path. We didn’t find anything except other secret entrances at first, and Benton began to act a little strangely. Well, stranger than he had so far. He began accusing all of us of being in on some conspiracy. (DM: He had been poisoned, and was paranoid) Ving finally confessed in an attempt to make him shut-up but it didn’t work. Endron tried to coax Benton to let him have a look at the wounds from the lizard men, but Benton would only let him look from a distance. We were concerned but decided to press on in our explorations.

Finally we tracked down who we believed to be some of the kidnappers. We prepared to attack, waiting for them to come through a door to us. Unfortunately when the fight began Benton became completely unpredictable. He attacked the kidnappers, but also Fenaik, and he knocked Nowyn’s sword out of her hand. If this wasn’t surprising enough, one of our opponents was Milo, the assistant to the High Priest of the Church of Knowledge. And he was casting spells! We defeated his two snaky henchmen and finally knocked out Milo and Benton to take back to the station.

We found Lucius, in poor shape but alive, in a room being tended by Enzo. We had a lot of people to carry back, as Lucius fainted in relief and Enzo fainted in terror. Brother Egil was relieved to see Lucius and shocked to see Milo. We were all shocked when Milo’s form changed in the cell to resemble a large snake man.

Captain Williams has decided to send us out of town for a bit, to investigate some strange things in Bellhold. Seems that people are having headaches and bad dreams, and clerics and psions have left the city. I’m not sure what we’re going to be able to do about nightmares, but we have the day off so I’m going to run some errands and I’ll be home tonight with dinner and a little money for you guys.

Love,
Lyran

 

[Seule]

Spoilers: Of Sound Mind 1

Dear Dad,

How are things at home? Still eating some leftovers? Remember to go ahead and get some of Karla’s favourites, I should be making regular money now that I’m part of the watch.

The trip to Bellhold was fairly uneventful. (DM: I placed bellhold on the other end of the same island as Freeport, by the big mountain) Ving is from here so we got lots of history on the journey. It was more than I can remember, but basically all bells in the land come from Bellhold. One of the bells in town even killed someone who was standing inside the tower when it was rung!

Once we were almost to town, we met up with a man in the road who was trying to round up his horses who had gotten out of their paddock. Since none of us knew anything about horses this was time consuming, so we had lots of time to speak with Othic, the farmer. I noticed that both Blaze and Broadsword (those were the horses) had matching scabs on their heads. Othic hadn’t noticed it before so Endron had a look at them. He thought the scabs were healing over something that had been put there, and it would be dangerous to the horses to try and remove whatever was there so we left them alone. Othic had us in for dinner and confirmed what we were told about the bad dreams in town. He also recommended a tavern for us, so I’m staying at the Bell & Clapper Inn while I’m here in town. Othic plans to come by to meet us for breakfast in the morning.

The innkeeper, Tokket, was very gracious and we had a second dinner. After our travelling it wasn’t difficult to eat a second time! Tokket let us know that the problem had been gradually increasing over the last month or so, but the town oracle (some crazy woman) claims it will all stop within a week. More seriously, three children have gone missing and now the adventurers who went after them are missing too. People seem to believe the oracle, so maybe we should focus on the missing people problem. After all, we have experience in that!

We attended a town meeting by Mayor Waterman, and he doesn’t seem to think the dreams are much of a problem either. We attempted to introduce ourselves to Captain Holdeck after the meeting and offer our help but he seemed very distracted. Perhaps this won’t be a long assignment after all. I certainly can’t change people’s dreams and the city guard is uninterested in our help. Oh well, perhaps we’ll get more information in the morning.

Love,
Lyran

 

[Seule]

Spoilers: Of Sound Mind 1

Dear Dad,

I hope you and Karla are doing well, and staying away from Bellhold. I for one will not stay one second longer than I need to and hopefully will not be returning anytime soon. You might not want to read all of this to Karla, it’s been a bad day.

I had a horrible dream last night, and I had trouble waking up from it. It was terrifying, bloody, and painful and I am not sleeping in this town tonight! Nowyn’s screaming finally woke me this morning, apparently whatever is affecting the townspeople has already attacked our group. We all met for breakfast, and we all had rather poor sleep due to dreams. We waited for Othic to join us, but when there had been no sign of him we finally began to eat. We were interrupted by the lead hand at Othic’s farm, who ran in to tell us that Othic had been murdered. We quickly went to the farm.

I won’t give you the unpleasant details Dad, but to say Othic had been murdered was a gross understatement. Even the term butchering doesn’t do justice to the reality inside that barn, and I quickly lost what little of breakfast I had. While I was trying to calm myself outside of the barn, I heard one of our signal whistles coming from a paddock behind the barn. Benton, Ving and I ran towards the noise to discover the two horses we herded just yesterday attacking Endrin and Noewyn. The horses were slain, and Endrin discovered crystals embeded into their brains. This explains their bizarre behaviour, but we don’t know how the crystals got there.

After comforting the farm hand, we headed back to town to gather more details on the missing children and adventurers. Our best source of information continues to be the innkeeper Tokket as Captain Holdeck seems dangerously distracted. Tokket directed us to the river where the children had been playing before their disappearance. We did manage to find some tracks from the children, but they were mingled in with goblin tracks!

We (okay, Noewyn) followed the tracks to the remains of the copper mine outside of town. We climbed up the mountain past the mine entrance until it was impossible to climb further without equipment. Assuming that goblins carrying children might also be without climbing gear we descended back to the old mine entrance and went in. We had to lower ourselves down on a rope to a very unstable platform…which collapsed shortly after but we all managed to get into the tunnels. There was quite an extensive network underground, complete with more gross ‘décor’ and lots of bugs! Nowyn and I might have to work on our stomach control. We fought some smelly zombie creatures and won, although I don’t remember the fight very well.

Anyhow, we finally found a room with an enormous statue of a dragon, and an enormous bowl of offerings to it. We had to fight a strange bone creature, I managed to knock it over a couple of times (DM: Stomp) but when I joined in the fight I was quickly knocked out and woke up surrounded by bones with Benton feeding me a potion. In the meantime, Endrin and Noewyn had given chase to a smelly lizard man who seemed to be a bit of a magic man. From him we found out that there is a way to upper levels of the tunnels through the dragon room, but he didn’t know how to use it.

Well, this next part takes a lot of explaining so I’ll stop for now and send you the rest in my next letter.

Love,
Lyran

 

[Seule]

Spoilers: Of Sound Mind 1

Dear Dad,

Sorry to keep the two of you in suspense, this has been a tiring adventure. Anyhow, I think I was about to explain how we figured out how to enter the upper levels past the dragon statue. Ving found remnants of a broken mirror on the floor, on the side of the room opposite the dragon’s gaze. We figured we must need a reflective surface to catch the light reflecting off of the dragon’s large eyes, but after searching the hoard and questioning the strange lizard man we still hadn’t found anything. Finally we decided to try and pry out one of the dragon’s eyes to use as a mirror. This turned out to be a poor plan. Ving and Nowyn managed to climb the statue, but when Nowyn freed the eye-gem the statue woke up and threw her off! Ving managed to cling to it’s head a little longer but quickly joined those of us on ground level too. Luckily upon retrieving it’s eye the statue resumed it’s former posture, but during the excitement a couple of us noticed that there seemed to be an exit behind the statue.

We went back through the tunnels, checking some of the side passages that we had skipped over and we found a copper mirror. Hanging it on the wall opposite the dragon caused a lot of reflection from the dragon’s eyes, and the mirror started to melt! The dragon moved to the side, exposing an exit, and we all raced into the new room.

Soon we were at the base of a slippery spiral path winding up around a waterfall. It was a tricky climb, so we were all moving very carefully. That’s where we met Velea! She’s wonderful! The dragon imprisoned her in the waterfall and she asked us to help her get free. I can tell she’s really counting on me to be the one to help her too. I think Noewyn is trying to show off to Velea though, and I know that Benton is! They’re just jealous because she obviously likes me best. She gave me the healing potions after all, Noewyn just got a bow.

We continued up the spiral…it was somewhere along here that we began to hear the voices. Finally someone responded aloud to the voice, maybe it was Endrin, and we realized we were all hearing someone. Except that everyone else was hearing ‘join me now, you’re all doomed’ sort of things, and I was getting pleas for help. It seemed that the dragon was still very much active, and recruiting.

Finally we reached the top, and climbed into a room that immediately dried us out and our things. There was an oversized chessboard with pieces as big as Ving in this room, and a large bell. We searched around and found a little face in a wall. I tried moving it, but nothing happened. Ving licked it, and it started to talk to us. We were a little stunned by this, so once we realized it was asking us a riddle most of the clue had been missed. Since we couldn’t answer one of the chess pieces started walking towards the bell. The men quickly smashed it, and smashed all the others just to be on the safe side. Ving licked the face again and this time we paid attention and solved the riddle. It was a pretty good one too! I’ll teach it to Karla when I get home.

Anyhow, solving the riddle let us into another area. We found some chests and I tried to help Ving with the locks. I didn’t help so well, and fell victim to a trap that weakened me quite a bit. Benton was kind enough to carry most of my things, as they were too heavy for me. We did find some psi-crystals and some money though, but nothing to immediately help my condition. Continuing on, we found a bit of a lab. We could hear voices coming from nearby so we searched the area quietly. There were dragon sized gem cutters and lots of crystal. We found a really neat psi-library type of crystal, I could look up a whole bunch of stuff through it, and it didn’t take any exertion. Fenaik and Endrin found an illusory wall, through which they could see goblins, and a child chained to a stone. There was also the very large corpse of a dragon lying by an opening to the outside. There was a bit of a drop into the room from where we were, so Ving and I shot goblins from above while the others dropped down to engage in hand to hand combat. We managed to eliminate all the goblins, helped somewhat by one of them that turned against the others. It seemed the goblin that had taken our side was from a rival group or something. We have no interest in goblin politics so we let him leave. The other two children were in a cage, one of them already had a crystal imbedded in his forehead (like the horses!) and had attacked Benton. We had to knock him out while we figured out what to do with him.

The voices in our heads were getting more talkative, so we decided to investigate the corpse of the dragon. We had seen one of the goblins come out of the mouth, so we were pretty sure it wasn’t just rotting there. Ving and Fenaik climbed in, then made a hole through the side so we could all see. There was a large blue crystal inside, that seemed to be the source of the voices, and probably what was controlling creatures with crystals in their heads. We tried talking to it, but it wasn’t very reasonable, and I still had a voice in my head begging for help. It seemed like this voice was trapped inside the crystal too. We found another similar crystal in the workshop, and dropped them both inside a bag to see if one of the personalities would transfer to the new crystal. This didn’t work, but we decided to bring both crystals back with us anyhow.

First though, I felt we had to bring the dragon-crystal down to Velea, so that we could free her. Benton and Noewyn agreed with me, but everyone else was very argumentative. I don’t know what was wrong with them, why would they feel that freeing a prisoner of the dragon was a bad thing? Especially since she was so obviously a good woman? Fenaik refused to bring the crystal down to her since he didn’t know if she needed it. Well, Noewyn, Benton and I went back down the spiral to see her and explain that the dragon was dead, but his consciousness might be inside this blue crystal we found. Of course she needed it! I was right in the first place! We all hurried back up the spiral. Benton slipped and fell into the waterfall but he caught himself in a giant spiderweb so Noewyn and I knew he’d be ok for the time being. (DM: And they knew that trapped he couldn't vie for Velea's affections)

The rest of our group was becoming totally irrational, they wouldn’t let us bring the crystal down to her without knowing why she needed it. Velea needed it to be free of the dragon, but that wasn’t specific enough for them. Fenaik accused me of being ensorcelled, so I told him that he must be to think that leaving a helpless woman prisoner was the right thing to do. There was a lot of yelling and Fenaik tried to smash the crystal but it was too strong (he cracked the ‘empty’ one though!). I tried to grab the bag from them and Noewyn joined in to help me. I don’t really remember anything after that.

Now it is morning, I have a headache and I had another horrible nightmare. I’ve just woken up in the cage where the children were and Noewyn is here too, sleeping. I can see the others from here and I don’t think anyone else is awake yet. I can’t believe they’ve locked us up! Clearly they’ve been affected by some sort of magic, maybe the crystal is doing something to them to make them behave irrationally. Oh, I see Benton is starting to wake up, I’ll finish this later again.

Love,
Lyran

 

[Seule]

Spoilers: Of Sound Mind 1

Dear Dad,

I’m coming home! We have solved Bellhold’s problem, and we could all use a bit of a vacation from watch duty I think.

First things first, I guess I might have been wrong about Velea, she clearly exhibited some not-so-nice behaviour after I fell asleep last night. I guess she did fool some of us, and definitely caused some stress in our group. We all managed to agree with each other in the morning, I did apologize for my argumentative attitude of the night before.

We climbed down the side of the mountain very slowly. We had to keep the psi-controlled child unconcious for the safety of all of us during the hard climb. Once on the ground, and returning to the village the voice started sounding a little desparate in its assurances of our imminent doom. Entering the village, the people rushed forward upon seeing the missing children, then things got weird. The dragon crystal took control of all the village people! Even the children we had just brought home! Luckily they were a very slow moving mass so we ran back towards the mountain until we were well away from any villagers. The dragon crystal seemed very confident now, so we took out the library crystal and I spent some time trying to find a clue as to the weaknesses of our enemy.

The best I could find was that crystal in general can be damaged sonically. We rummaged through our trinkets from the mountain and found a crystal pennywhistle. Benton tried blowing on it but nothing happened to the crystal. I decided to give it a try, and we did manage to cause a little damage to the dragon. Seems you have to be a psion to cause damage with the whistle. Anyhow, it wasn’t enough to destroy it, but we all immediately thought back to the story Ving had told us about a man dying when he was inside the bell tower while the bell was rung. We decided that was our best course of action, but unfortunately there really wasn’t any way to hide our plans from the dragon crystal. We returned to the village to find all the people surrounding the bell tower.

We devised a plan, Endrin and Noewyn would wait on a nearby rooftop holding the dragon crystal, with a view of the tower and the bell rope. Fenaik would be the one to actually try and ring the bell, with Ving providing back-up should he fail. Benton and I would lure some of the villagers away from the tower, after I had used one of the crystals we found in the mountain to turn Fenaik invisible. When the bell started to ring, Endrin would summon a creature to carry the bag with the crystal to the tower and drop it through an upper window. Our plan went off pretty much as planned, although Noewyn had to shoot at a few villagers that tried to climb up to Fenaik and knock him off the tower. Fortunatly none of the villagers died from their injuries, and we saved all of them, including that little boy with the crystal in his head.

We got a reward and had a party in our honour, but I’m still more than happy to be leaving Bellhold! Maybe a long time from now I’ll come back and visit.

Love,
Lyran

 

[Seule]

Spoilers: Terror in Freeport

Dear Dad,

First off, if anyone asks you, I am vacationing in Bellhold and was not home for dinner last night. In fact, you haven’t seen me at all since I left for Bellhold with the entire special unit.

This is a bit tricky to explain, but here goes. We came back home because we had another message from Brother Egil asking us for help. We met with him at an Inn and found out that Lucius has not been recovering well from his ordeal, he faints and seems to have a poor grip on reality. Brother Egil believes that the snake-cult-people we found are still in Freeport! He even believes that someone (perhaps a snake-man) was searching through his rooms while he pretended to be asleep. Apparently, there is a scroll missing but Brother Egil doesn’t know what scroll it was. When we spoke about checking with Milo, we found out that he had already been executed for his crimes. This happened very quickly given the volume of paperwork usually involved when a prisoner has been sentenced to be hanged.

Brother Egil did have a lead for us at least, in the seedy section of town. Milo was known there as Devlin the merchant and had a room at the Marquee Moon Inn. We went to investigate the Inn (it’s a dump!) and with a couple of coins the innkeep was happy to let Ving, Fenaik, and Endrin slip up to “Devlin’s” room. Noewyn and I attempted to talk with some of the regulars, and we did find out from one very drunk dwarf that he had seen some strange people leaving the room in question, and the people smelled like tunnels. Then the dwarf passed out…I may have bought him too many rounds in my enthusiasm.

Up in the room, the rest of our group did a thorough search and found some weird books and some rats in jars of fluid, but the rats were still alive! Ving decided to bring them…I really don’t know why, they’re pretty creepy.

We left the tavern and spotted three orcs attacking a messenger boy. We rushed to his aid (that’s our job, after all) but it turned out to be a scam. The kid and the orcs were a team. We managed to knock out the orcs and restrain the boy, and then another Watch team showed up. They were far more surprised to see us than the criminals, and told us that They even offered to keep our presence a secret from the captain, for a price! Luckily Benton didn’t hear them, he would have been writing them up for hours. We handed the prisoners off to them, and headed back to the warehouse where we first found the snake-folks.

The warehouse was now guarded by…well, lets call him Mr. Q…Mr. Q’s men. We bluffed our way in as a cleaning crew there to speed up the work being done. We moved quickly through the familiar areas, everything had been removed by Mr. Q’s men. We finally caught up to the ‘cleaning’ crew…they were snake guys of course, and we had quite a fight but we won. The only catch was that the messenger boy was there, and he got away from us. While Fenaik and Endron tried to figure out a way to go after the kid through the water exit, Ving started to check out some crates that were in the room. They had some very strange split-able bricks in them, with a strange symbol on the inside faces. They seemed to be bricks for the new lighthouse, so we were very concerned. We took as much as we could and quickly left the building with the cleaning cart.

We went to the hall of records to see about old sewer tunnels, and the guy there was very helpful…since he doesn’t much care for Mr. Q. It seemed our quarry had been by earlier and was very rude, bossy and cheap. The clerk was more than happy to show us exactly what Mr. Q was looking for, and we found what seemed to be an entrance to an old part of the sewers…I guess I can’t really tell you where it is. We were very pleased with ourselves and headed out right away.

We didn’t get very far, more Watchmen showed up and told us the captain wanted to see us right away. We were ‘escorted’ to the Hall of Justice (you know, right beside the Watch house?) and left to wait in a small boring room. When we were finally told the captain would see us, we entered a room to find Mr. Q with the captain! I think we all assumed our captain wasn’t such an honest guy, so we stood there while Mr. Q lectured us on staying out of the way of his men. Finally he left and we were alone with the captain. He was frustrated but not really mad, seems that Mr. Q has been throwing his weight around and it’s been landing on our boss. We agreed that we would investigate quietly and unofficially, and do our best to stay out of Mr. Q’s way. In the meantime, we had our cart of evidence locked away in the barracks in case we need it later.

Well, we’re going to try out that sewer entrance next, so be well, and remember that I’m not in town!

Love,
Lyran

 

[Seule]

It's very lonely in this thread all by myself. Does anyone have a comment on anything? The format? The content? The lack of updates? My players are welcome to comment too...

Hello? Anyone out there?

--Seule

 

[Willtell]

Updates?

How oftern do you play?.

Had any problems running the module? - It's difficult to tell with the Freeport Storyhour because without the module you don't know what's been changed.+

How much fun are the player's having - do they like the surprises and are they finding the challanges interesting?.