Sunday, 25 September 2016

Desnus 17th 14 - The Mysteries of Vanhold

In the morning Natalia casts a stone shape spell over the deceased body to form a cairn.

The group continue their approach to Vanhold and as they approach Otto casts a mage armour spell upon himself as he had a feeling something was going to happen.

Stone houses seemed to make up the majority of the buildings in the town of Vanhold, a river also runs through the town pretty much splitting the town in town with a single bridge across for access to both sides.

As they enter town the group dismount and cautiously make their way in to see what is happening.

The town seems very quiet and still and no citizens could be seen anywhere, this worried the group even more as there is no sign of struggle or fight.

As they approached the area towards the river Natalia and Miro notice a large number of flies hovering around an animal pen round the back of a nearby house.

Vaneer takes a look into the pen and finds a couple of severely bloated and decayed corpses of boars, each corpse is filled with arrows and darts.

As they are wondering about the events that happened here a dark voice comes into the mind of the group “Everything all leads to Death eventually”.

Miro breaks into the brewery only to be meet with the sound of pan pipes which is quickly followed by a voice encouraging the Halfling to have a drink.

Kyrander uses his magical instrument to try and counter the musical charm on Miro but sadly his musical talents would make a dying cat sound like a world class performance, which is a shame as shortly after his attempt all apart from Vaneer and Natalia fall under the pan pipe charm, a Satyr then suddenly appears to which Vaneer remembered them fighting before.

The Satyr explains to Vaneer and Natalia whilst the others attempt to drown themselves in ale that he was hiding here as the sprigans didn’t appreciate his musical talents, Vaneer suggests that if the Satyr was to join forces with the group he could get vengeance on the sprigans. In return Vaneer promised that he would talk to Van of Vanhold to allow the Satyr to stay in town afterwards as either a tavern owner or a brewery worker.

The satyr agrees to the deal with Vaneer and lends his bow to the group’s mission.

Once outside of the brewery the group notices some movement over in the commons area, as they approach to investigate Vaneer soon finds himself at the bottom of a 20ft pit and the sounds of hooting laughter could be heard from behind some bushes as the rest of the group aid their cleric out of his pit.

The group then notice a green fellnight sprigan fail at an attempt to be stealthy as he rolls from behind a house to a tree.

Kyrander spots another sprigan hiding in a nearby tree and shoots at it, causing the sprigan to fall out of the tree from surprise.
Kyrander re-shoots at the sprigan that fell out of the tree and kills it enraging the remaining 3 sprigans as they all shoot at the ranger.
Miro faints and attacks one of the sprigans killing it outright with a dagger through the eye,
Otto casts magic missile at another sprigan,
Vaneer charges the other sprigan and barely lays a scratch on it,

Natalia casts flaming blade on the sprigan that Vaneer was fighting.
Bob charges the same sprigan but misses,
Spot also charges the same sprigan and hits,
Satyr shoots a sprigan and hits,
Kyrander shoots at the Satyr’s sprigan killing the creature and then lets a second shot off on the remaining sprigan also killing it.

Does this creature’s fate make you ponder if this could be you one day? Dead, alone and face in the ground?” The dark voice says again in the heads of the group.

The Satyr informs the group that there is about 20 sprigans in Vanhold somewhere and they are being led by a really big sprigan and that they all seem to avoid Inn, the most interesting fact that he mentioned was that vanhold was already empty by the time the sprigans arrived.

The group decide to go check out the Inn, as the get to the Inn they notice a word scratched on the door “NOMEN” (NOMEN is a local Centaur tribe that have been causing Vanhold some issues lately but have agreed a nonaggression pact).

In the Inn’s common room a figure was standing with its back to the group, it was large in size and had pointy ears.

The group slowly approached the figure and attempted to talk with it but it remained motionless and silent, whilst Otto detected a slight necromantic aura.
Vaneer finally looks at the creature and thinks that it’s most likely had its life completely drained from it.

Even a predator can become the prey and a hero can still fall” the voice says again,

Every step squeaks no matter how slow they stepped as the headed upstairs, about halfway up the stairs they could hear the tavern sign start to creak outside even though there was no wind this day.

Once upstairs all the doors along the corridor apart from one were closed, the group slowly work their way down to the open door, the room was a standard Inn room with a bed which appears to have been slept in.

As Miro explores the room, a hand suddenly shoots out from under the bed and grabs the halflings leg which causes him to scream to like a girl, as the group look round they soon see the Boogie man standing in the corner (they met back at the feast of the dancing lady).

The boogie man releases Miro and greets the group, after some discussion it comes apparent that the boogie man came across Vanhold abandoned and was hoping to use it to scare fear into future generations but the sprigans soon moved in and wouldn’t leave.

Otto offers the Boogie man a position on the council of Wyvernshore to which boogie agrees to but only “if” the group survives to leave the town. He also agreed to the group using the Inn as a safe place to rest whilst they were here.

The group relax and take their time to explore the rest of the Inn and amongst the rest discovered belongings they find a letter dated about 3 months ago to a professor and mentions something about a Jade bracelet found on the river back.

A book with a signal of a snake on the front of it, which as Miro looks at the snake the signal suddenly comes alive and swipes at him before it disappears back into the book. A bundle of papers from an academy of scholars further north which Vaneer mentions it would be worth returning as an olive branch of friendship.

The group agree to rest for the evening and discuss their options in the morning.

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