[Homebrew] Assud Peninsula: Mesopotamia-inspired fantasy

[Smirg]

General introduction:

This campaign started out as a play-test for my homebrew system when our group took a break from our regular campaigns (Dark Eye/Myranor) over the summer, as some players were away during that time. Due to problems with getting back to these campaigns, however, the playtest turned into a half-a-year thing, and was wrapped up for the time being at the start of December (though it will probably continue someday – there’s still stuff left for the PCs to conquer).

While my homebrew system is universal, the initial test players preferred fantasy, so I used a homebrew fantasy setting, which I will describe a bit before the actual session logs. The (still somewhat unorganized) system description itself is written in German, but if anyone is interested in the details, I can certainly give an overview.

I did not use any written campaign preparation, and while I took notes afterwards, they are only a few keywords for the first few sessions, so the beginning of the Actual Play will probably be a bit less exact in the details. It is written down mostly from memory.

[Smirg]

Setting introduction:

In theory, the campaign world has technology of about the early 13th century on Earth. In theory, because something big happened about 200 years ago, which still defines the entire setting.

A pretty common form of magic in the campaign world is Chimerology, modifying and combining living things to create all kinds of new life-forms, intelligent or otherwise. While most chimeras are regarded as slaves or dangerous menaces (often both, and rightfully, as this is what they are usually created for, including mindset), some mages like to “improve” themselves.
So while there are only two natural intelligent races (Humans and the rare, primitive Mäanderthals – think Neanderthals, only the valley being named differently) and real-world animals (including Pleistocene mega-fauna), the world is full of all kinds of strange critters, as a few thousand years worth of Chimerologists were bored, drunk or, perhaps worst of all, working “on the advance of science”.

200 years ago, a group of the most experienced Chimerologists met with the goal of advancing themselves to the ultimate life-form, and, after lots of experimentation, succeeded, creating, as they called themselves, the Highborn (because everyone is born “low”, and they are born again “high”). As they are obviously far superior to anyone else (which is entirely true in all aspects, including vastly extended live-spans), ruling everyone else was the logical consequence, though setting this up did pose a problem considering relative numbers (a few hundred of them versus millions of “regulars”).
Resourceful as they were, however, they quickly found a way to resolve this, and crafted the biggest ritual spell ever cast. Today it’s simply called the “Big Death”. Within a few minutes, about 8 out of 10 intelligent beings on the entire world suddenly dropped to the ground in spasms and agony and just died. The remaining people were not feeling a lot better, were shocked and confused and social order collapsed. A few moments later, Highborn teleported into the few places which could still organize some resistance and slaughtered anyone who opposed them. What remained was gathered in their new places of rule and kept as slaves for about a 100 years.

It is still unknown what caused the “Great Liberation”, though Highborn arrogance certainly played a role (if 10 slaves provide good convenience, 100 can provide even more!). Within a few days and without any actual communication or plan, slaves (not just a few, all of them) around the world started to rise up on a strange impulse. This started in the centre of the main continent and worked its way outward, and while the first uprisings were slaughtered to the last man (thus shrouding the event in even more mystery) by the organized, mind-networked and teleporting Highborn response teams, as the circle grew wider, it soon outgrew even the Highborns ability to fight it everywhere at once. Palaces were stormed, Highborn masters and their collaborators slaughtered, and what remained of them retreated to an unknown place (or places), almost certainly plotting a comeback and causing paranoia in everyone else ever since.
While the uprising was costly in lives, it didn’t continue too well either, because almost every religion claimed that their deity was responsible for the Liberation, and almost every small leader during the rebellions saw his triumph over the oppressors as a mandate to take over local rule. Which seriously hindered the creation of any large-scale societies. The loss of knowledge and organization skills during 100 years of slavery didn’t help either.
The world is still fractured into many small to medium-sized kingdoms, allied insecurely if at all, regularly fighting against each other and within. Every now and then, when some kingdom achieves a state resembling stability, some (often imagined) Highborn “infiltration” is discovered and everything dissolves into chaos again.
Population density is low and usually concentrates in or around major cities, partly because the Highborn let everything else fall to ruin while they were in power. This actually gives a reason for the fantasy staple of abandoned ruins in untraceable woods containing lost knowledge.

The region the campaign takes place in is the Assud peninsula, based loosely on ancient Mesopotamia. It is separated from the continent (and more and even less pleasant deserts) by a tall mountain range populated by demons, so there is little contact with the outside world. While a cradle of civilization, the regions development had long fallen behind the rest of the world, in part due to constant strife between the city-states along the fertile rivers and coasts, and in part because of a lack of natural resources, especially iron ore.

Currently there are four more-or-less civilized factions in Assud (plus several tribes of desert nomads, which were mostly ignored by the Highborn during their reign and are mostly ignored now). I will introduce them during the session descriptions, as well as any other details regarding Assud or the world (such as the magic system) when they come up (which was basically the way it was introduced to the players, too). Actually, during the first sessions, a major part of the write-up will be further setting information.

The campaign changed style over the 18 sessions played. It started with a classic quest-based approach I had chosen in order to put as many setting elements as possible into a short time frame. The first quest is a detective story, which allowed players to investigate the various elements themselves. It was already based on player choice though, especially the outcome, and I tried to avoid obvious railroading as much as possible (though there certainly were a few nudges).
Later on, there was more freedom for the players to choose between possible quests and set their own goals besides. Then, towards the end, on request of the players when they got a bit tired of the political theme, the campaign went back to a more classic quest-style.

The main theme of the campaign clearly was setting exploration, with a secondary theme of how the bold actions of a few (more political than monster-whacking) can change the development of a rather unstable region.

[Smirg]

Session 1 - Intro:

The game started in the aftermath of a natural catastrophe. A big tsunami had wracked havoc on the island Hawan, home of the two initial player characters.
Hawan is a circular island in sight of the coastline, with fertile land around a central mountain. It was established as a mining colony, but the richer ore deposits have been depleted 20 years ago, and since then, the island has been on decline.

The former rulers and inhabitants had still held on to the hope that they would find some new large deposits, but in the meantime, the mining could hardly finance itself, and the rest of the island was basically fishers and farmers supporting the miners, not producing any actual wealth either.
Now the tsunami has stroke the death blow to the already lingering island kingdom, killing lots of fishers and farmers in the ocean-side coastal region as well as most of the royal family. Nungal, a formerly unimportant brother of the dead king, took over and decided that there was not much left on this island for his people. Villages, supplies and harvest had been ruined and a lot of the fertile earth washed into the sea.
Staying here would lead to more deaths by starvation, and there wasn’t really anything worth staying either except memories – which had mostly turned bitter too, for most people had lost relatives and friends. Therefore, Nungal negotiated a deal with king Ilu’luana of Chadezz, the city opposite to Hawan on the coast, to take in his people as subordinates in exchange for providing them with supplies and a place to live.


The session starts with the two initial player characters waiting on the islands shore, looking towards the Neshat river delta in the distance where, hidden behind a protective belt of densely forested swampland, lies the city of Chadezz.

Merchio is an agile young man of a slightly shady mindset who thus far had gotten by on his silver tongue, trading among Hawans villages and convincing people he was a guy nice enough to feed without doing much in return.

There soon were two running gags with Merchio. The first was that he would always greet anyone, from beggar to king, with a jovial “Zum Gruße”, a greeting from Das Schwarze Auge (The Dark Eye) which I hadn’t intended (or suspected) to be used in the setting. Combined with his often naive tendency to trust people (including known anarchic sociopaths) and freely give away information, whenever the group met something obviously dangerous and hostile, everyone expected him to go up to it and say “Zum Gruße”.
The other one was that, when we implied that there were voices in his head, he agreed but said he couldn’t hear them because the tune of Tetris was playing in his mind, so it didn’t matter. The disturbing thing was that, during one session (I think the 7th, while the 4th PC was introduced), the Tetris tune could suddenly be heard from a neighbouring table... as a mobile ringtone I believe.

The other initial PC, Nebuk, is a young priest of Hawans main goddess Ishnanna, a deity of water, fertility and healing. He isn’t an active church member as he shuns the daily chores of organized religion, but rather a wandering preacher who spends a lot of time meditating on the nature of his goddess and life in general (the “devoted crazy” type).
He also has decent unarmed combat skills (specialized in throwing and kicking) without much background explanation, this was mostly because the campaign started out as a system test and, naturally, at some point the combat system would be put to the test.

Nebuk uses “mediated magic”, meaning that he calls on the power of one or more entities to work his miracles, providing his body as a channelling point to bring the entities power into the physical world. If his intention is in line with the entities domain and personality, casting becomes easier, going against the entities nature makes it harder or even impossible. Nebuk isn’t much of a spellcaster yet, however, so he has only minor healing and fate abilities.

Fate magic is a subset of Ether magic (healing is a subset of Body). According to the common theories about magic, Ether is the ubiquitous basic magic energy of the world, manifested in physical form as Body, Mind, Matter and natural Forces, the other four major types of magic. The Ether has some sort of rudimentary intelligence, and concentrated pockets of it can develop actual intelligence, personality and will, basically gods and spirits - though priests will of course insist that those gods were there before and stand above everything else, being the source of all Ether and therefore the material world.
Fate magic basically requests the Ether to use its vast power to a certain end, stating what should happen but not how it should happen. On low levels, the Ether usually chooses a subtle and straightforward method to achieve the desired, minor effect. On high levels, you can pose rather crazy wishes and can expect the Ether to find some kind of solution (which usually gets more obviously magical), though the way the wish is resolved can take rather strange forms due to the alien nature of the Ethers unconscious thoughts. For priests, it’s a lot safer, as they request their deity to intervene, and usually can make an educated guess how the deity will resolve the request, though there always is some remaining risk.
If you ask the ether to help you drive a nail into wood, most of the time this will result in an increased kinetic impulse or probably the wood becoming softer for a split second. Sometimes, it results in a major earthquake causing the wood to be driven into the nail, and also destroying everything else within several kilometres (the setting uses metric units).
Fate is the magic of the lazy PC telling the GM “arrange something for me”, but it is also the magic of the GM venting his sadism and getting back horribly on this player if he uses it too much. As Nebuk thus far has only made minor use of it, he has so far escaped disaster, though.

[Smirg]

Session 1 - Setting the stage:

As the boats that had already brought the majority of islanders to the city return for the last round, the PCs climb on board, wondering what the uncertain future may have in store for them (for Nebuk this is more a curious rather than a scary thought, as he has unshakeable faith in Ishnanna providing for his well-being).

During the journey, the boat is accompanied by a few Eels, intelligent, two meters long… well… eels, with sucker tentacles on their back behind their head (whoever created them probably had a reason for this design – the players never investigated, though, so I won’t state it here either). They can understand human speech and communicate with a sign language by twisting their flexible bodies, and survive for some time on land. They are “talking” to the boatman about the recent havoc, and what’s up with all this ferrying from the island to the continent. I included them to introduce the players to the chimera aspect of the setting and to show them that this didn’t mean “elves and orcs”.

Approaching the swamp-belt, the PCs see that their island has broken most of the force of the tsunami. There is still a lot of damage on the outermost parts of the swamp, but the belt has withstood the onslaught of the elements and mostly protected the areas behind it. The boat enters the delta and soon they can see the harbour and city of Chadezz on the left bank of the Neshat river. It is a large sprawl of mostly derelict mud-brick houses, rising up to on a low hill and the palace district, of which, over the walls surrounding it, the top of the palace and ziggurat are visible. Along the river, only ruined rests of walls rise out of the mud, with the state of repair getting better towards the palace district.

Most of the about 1700 inhabitants of Chadezz live in the palace district (which is big enough by itself and kept in good repair, as it was home to a Highborn), the rest in the parts of the harbour and commoner districts closest to the palace district walls. The original size of the city would have allowed for up to 15000 inhabitants.
The harbour is mostly used by fishermen but also has space for a few medium-sized vessels, though those are only rarely seen, because Assud lies out of regular trade routes and has little to offer to traders to warrant coming here. The newcomers, mostly owning little more than the clothes they are wearing, are welcomed by Ilu’luanas soldiers, in the case of the PCs a burly but friendly man called Remo.

The local soldiers are usually called Vultures, because “they make their living from dead bodies on battlefields”. They are a small body of standing army (around 60 in Chadezz) who, in times of war, train and lead the recruits. In peacetime, they act as police and enforcers of the king. They are usually armed with spear or axe and a shield, leather armour and a bronze helmet. Officers usually own bronze mail or scale armour and iron swords, usually heavy, khopesh-like slashing weapons. Ranged weapons are uncommon though thrown spear are regularly used.

Remo takes the PCs and the other islanders up towards the palace district (it has one gate each to the harbour and commoner districts, and none directly outside) where there is a makeshift camp for the people of Hawan. The palace district itself is again divided into three parts: the palace itself, mostly build from stone and including quarters for craftsmen working directly for the king as well as the Vulture barracks; the temple district around the cities ziggurat and including the living and working quarters of the priesthood; and a part formerly intended for upper-crust citizens, magistrates, artisans and craftsmen, which now houses the majority of the population as well as the refugee camp.

Actually, as the PCs soon notice, there are two fugitive camps sprawling along the south wall of the palace district. The one they come across first, between the harbour and commoner district gates, is filled with people they do not know, and looks like it has stood here for a few days at least, people going about their business in relative order and the tents and lean-to shacks carefully set up. When asked, Remo mentions some problems in the commoner district, but refers them to Zamquar, the kings highest official who organizes everyday life in the city and who is also responsible for welcoming the Hawan fugitives later.

After they pass the first camp, earning some unfriendly stares from the occupants, they reach another camp at the far side of the commoner district gate, which has obviously been set up only recently, its tents and improvised shacks hastily erected and people running around chaotically trying to secure a place to sleep. Merchio joins the fray and tries to obtain one of the last tents of decent size, but eventually gives it up for a small family moving in. Habik, a former toolmaker and village blacksmith, offers him a place to sleep in his tent, which is barely large enough for both of them. Nebuk simply sits down with the back to the wall, caring little for mundane convenience.
A few minutes after they have found their places, Remo returns and informs the people that Ilu’luana has provided supper at the parade plaza. They are lead to a brick-paved square in front of the relief-covered palace walls, with picture-steles at the corners, artistically depicting long-forgotten triumphs of the city-states former kings.


At the centre of the square, Vultures have brought great cauldrons, baskets and barrels, and there is already a long line waiting. Nebuk gets in line quite a bit before Merchio, and they slowly proceed forward. Nebuk reaches the food distributors: they offer a bowl of barley stew, some bread and a mug of water. Nebuk notices that one of the barrels contains beer for the more important fugitives, and successfully convinces the Vulture handing him his food that he is a priest (currently all of the fugitives are ragged enough that their status isn’t immediately apparent) and needs beer as a sacrifice for his goddess (offered through his body, of course).

As Nebuk returns to the camp with his meal, a commotion breaks out. Some people from the city start brawls with the people from Hawan along the line. Nebuk sees an agitated man approaching, carefully sets down his bowl and mug and prepares for his opponents attack. The man charges at him swinging – and Nebuk catches his arm and throws him to the ground in a single, quick motion. Before the stunned assailant recovers his wits and gets back on his feet, Nebuk has picked up his meal again and is on his way.
Meanwhile, back in the waiting line, Merchio too sees one of the attackers heading towards him, screaming something about stealing food that is rightfully theirs. He quickly picks up a stone from the ground and hides it behind his back. Before the man can take a swing at him, Merchio steps forward and hits him over the head, intimidating him, giving him a slight concussion and effectively killing his lust for a fight. As the man stumbles back, Vultures arrive, break up the fights and drag the assailants back to their camp. As the line is in confusion and disarray, Merchio manages to get to the front and procure extra portions of food and drink, sharing with his grateful tent-mate Habik when he returns to the camp.

Back in the camp, Nebuk has meanwhile climbed onto the top of the wall (there are stairs for defenders leading up to it) and calls together the injured (not everyone was as lucky as the PCs to end their fight in their favour with only one blow each) to pray for their recovery. He performs an extended prayer of half an hour and blesses everyone in the small crowd around him with reduced pain and increased nightly regeneration, earning their thanks and a bit more beer (which is promptly forwarded to his goddess in the usually fashion).

[Smirg]

Session 1 - Yay, a Quest!

Before the people settle for the night, Remo comes again and announces Zamquar, the highest city magistrate who has come to welcome the fugitives in the name of his king.
Zamquar waits for the crowd to gather, then holds a speech praising the charity and goodwill of his king, again informing them about the contract with Hawans king Nungal. Nungal remains formal leader of the fugitives, though he defers to Ilu’luana in all matters concerning the entire city, including the matter of housing.
While the city would contain more than enough empty space in the commoner quarter, that district has been closed off, as there has been a series of ghastly murders over the last three weeks. Witnesses speak of a skinless, two metre tall humanoid monstrosity with long claws that only comes out at night and has thus far successfully evaded all patrols searching for it. It doesn’t eat its victims, and some say it steals its blood, as there have been several attacks of similar, though smaller creatures over more than half a year.

Zamquar declares that while Ilu’luanas own Vultures, the local ancestor-priesthood/mage-guild and a few stubborn citizens who refused to leave their homes are still hunting for the monster, Ilu’luana has decided to let any of Nungals men into the district, too (during daytime only), to join the hunt. Should Nungals men prove successful where his own have thus far failed, Ilu’luana would show his gratefulness by granting the fugitives their own small district as well as help and funding for rebuilding it and settling in. The heroes who bring it down would earn a lot of respect and some favours, of course, and this would strengthen the bonds between the new allies. Any who want to join the hunt should wait at the commoner gate at the next morning, though no one should go alone due to safety reasons.


Merchio sees an opportunity to earn standing in the new community, and, looking for a partner, thinks that having someone blessed by a goddess on his side cannot be a mistake when taking on monsters, so he goes looking for Nebuk. Nebuk, concerned for the wellbeing of the people, agrees, and they go to the gate. Merchio asks around for a weapon (although their mission is primarily to locate the monster, and preferably calling aid to fight it), and another Hawan fugitive, a miner who could save a few of his tools during the evacuation, hands him a big (close to short-sword-size), sturdy knife (“Gotta work together for our people, right?”)

As the gate is opened and the groups enter the commoner district and start to disperse, Nebuk and Merchio decide they need more information about the murders and go looking for some of those stubborn citizens still in the district. They soon find a strange pair: a gnarly old man sitting on a bank in front of his house, talking to a... plant. The chimera is humanoid but with rather flat features, skin resembling a slightly hairy green flower stem, root-like tentacles growing out of arms and legs currently wrapped around their respective limbs and long, fleshy, needle-covered purplish-pink leaves instead of hair. The mandragora (a catch-all term for plant chimeras) is armed with a spear.

As they seem to talk about the monster too, the PCs approach them and they introduce themselves as Old Ovol and Limkuu. Old Ovol says he has lived in his house his whole life and won’t give it up because of some random monster, Limkuu usually hunts wild animals in the south side of the district bordering the river (the sunken, abandoned ruins) or in the swamp-forests on the far river bank.
Asked for the monster itself, they point out a nearby murder that occurred during the previous night, an old woman who, similar to Old Ovol, refused to leave her livelong home. They also state that most victims were elderly and lived alone, as did the old woman, while most of the remaining citizens sleep in groups. They also inform the PCs that most murders occurred between the gate area and the “western bazaar”, a local market near the border to the harbour district. Neither of them has seen the monster in person, though.

Asked about the smaller monsters similar to the big one, Limkuu can tell them a bit more. Since more than half a year, every one or two months, groups of small so-called Bloodhunters appear, usually 3 to 6. They are between a metre and a metre thirty tall, attack with vicious claws, move in a pack, come from the river bank and usually attack whoever they meet first. Overall they seem pretty stupid. When they can kill their victims, they let them bleed out into buckets and carry the buckets off over the river.
Limkuu, who knows the area pretty well, has worked together with Vultures and the local mage-priests to fight them, and they have tracked them to an ancient sacrificial site in the swamp where they unload the collected blood in a basin around an altar. He recalls the mage-priest telling him that Bloodhunters are created by mages who need blood to power their rituals, but strangely it seems that there has been no one near the collection site actually using the blood they gather. They are supposedly created from children, but there aren’t any missing in the city either. Limkuu also states that he has found tracks of a new pack the day before and plans to track them down, as the mage-priests asked for a fresh body for further ritual analysis of their origin. The asks the PCs whether they want to tag along, stating that the king also pays a bounty for their bodies.

The group declines, being more interested in the big rather than the small monsters, thanks the pair for their information and head towards the most recent murder site. Old Ovols directions lead them there, and they find a smashed door that had been barricaded on the inside. The door has been obviously hacked to pieces, probably by big claws, though they notice that the marks of individual strikes that didn’t breach the wood are rather short, resembling an axe blade more than the giant claws the monster allegedly has (the PCs don’t know too much about weapons or carpentry, but they did roll really well). Stepping inside over the rubble of the barricade, they find the corpse bedded on a table (it’s tradition in the region to have a corpse on display in its house for a two days to allow everyone to come and make their farewell. Afterwards, corpses are usually buried below their house), albeit the murder had obviously been in her bed, where she had probably cowered in fear.
Suspicious due to the marks on the door, they check around the bed and notice wood chips hewn out of a roof beam above the bed, obviously made by overhead-motion strikes when attacking her in her bed. The PCs ponder why a creature with claws would use such a motion, especially as it’s supposed to be over two metres tall, and the ceiling isn’t that high.

After checking the house, the PCs decide to head for the western bazaar, the other end of the region in which most murders occurred, considering it a likely place for the monster to cross on its route (they suspect the monster to hide in the highly desolated south end of the district, near or across the river). They arrive at the deserted bazaar around midday and notice they are not the only ones here. Between the market stands in the centre and the houses on the side of the square stand two Vulture guards. Between them, another person lies motionless in the sand. Thinking that someone was killed, the PCs approach, and see that the person on the ground, a man in his forties, has no obvious injuries and wears a white tunic with a dark green sash, a common attire for priests, though Nebuk doesn’t know which deity uses dark green on white.
Asking what has happened, one of the guards bellows that it is none of their business, while the other one sees no harm in telling them, and explains that the man lying on the ground is the honourable Manzazuu Ennuna, here to appease the spirits of the monsters victims and probably learn some more details in the process.
As the PCs decide that lying around below the hot noon sun cannot be good for his health (the guards sigh, and say that their protégée often cares too little for his own well-being when on a mission), they salvage some material from the market stands to improvise a sunscreen. The grateful guards agree to answer some more questions, and as the PCs have no idea what a Manzazuu actually is, they ask for more setting background exposition. The first guard (Zargo) just shakes his head about the ignorance of the islanders while the second one (Rishum) explains:

Beside the priests of various gods (the city patron god being Mamnuu, god of the sky and of rulership), the city also houses the Sha’Etemmu (“those who speak with the dead”), a group somewhere between a priesthood and a mage guild, which shares the cities ziggurath with the “regular” priests. While sacrifices to the gods are usually done in large congregations on fixed days, and serve the well-being of the community as a whole, the personal prayers of the commoners more often go to their ancestors, who care more about the individuals than the gods. The mythology of the region knows no god of the dead and no underworld. Instead, the ghosts of the deceased remain on the earth, invisible, watching after their progeny.
The Sha’Etemmu converse with the dead, both as a source of knowledge which they collect in vast archives (the more mage-guild-like aspect) and to serve as mediators between common folk and their ancestors, forwarding requests for aid and returning the advice of the deceased (the priest-part). The Manzazuu (another word for necromancer) is a special position in the guild, someone who dedicates his life to helping ghosts with unfulfilled desires to pass on to a more peaceful afterlife. While most use more mage-like magic styles, the Manzazuu use priest-style “mediated magic” to obtain their power directly from the ghosts while on a mission to help them pass on. They are both respected and feared, as they sometimes show little regard for the affairs of the living when resolving those of the dead, and have been known to even kill kings to revenge the victims of their iron-handed rule.

After another hour, the Manzazuu awakens from his trance, wonders about the screen and, after being introduced to the PCs, shares some of what he has found out. He was, according to his own words, “sending his mind into the soul sea, to find those unfortunates who had not yet merged with it, still bound to the world by the terrors of their deaths”. He stresses the importance of appeasing them by avenging their murders, as a ghost who finally loses his grip on the world and merges into the soul sea without his desires fulfilled brings his remaining negative feelings with him, poisoning the soul sea, the collective mind of the fully-passed-on ancestors, a bit with his sentiments.
Among the ghosts still lingering after being killed by the monster, Ennuna finds the report of one man particularly interesting, a former soldier who was able to hold his own for a bit against the monster and is now unable to pass on because he feels that the fight wasn’t fair and that he should have rightfully won. He said that he landed a slash on the creatures face, but instead of striking home, the blade just moved straight through. Staggering from the unsuspected miss and recovering from his surprise, he tried to parry the counterattack, but again his aim was off, his sword just scratching the claw with its tip, unable to deflect it, despite his eyes telling him that he hit it spot on. The claw went on and cleaved into his skull, and that was it for him.

Okay, the original description sucked in comparison, but then again I’m improvising almost everything during play, and when you write a summary afterwards, you can as well take advantage of having time to think about the wording.

As Nebuk asks about the Bloodhunters, Ennuna invites his fellow priest to the guild archives to look up additional information about the Numlaks, as he calls them. And that’s the end of the first session.

[Smirg]

Session 2 - State of the city:

The second session picked up immediately after the end of the first, with the PCs still standing on the western bazaar as the Manzazuu and his guards depart to report their findings.

Merchio looks around for a suitable lookout post, spotting a former warehouse which, with the exception of a collapsed roof, looks mostly intact. It’s a good bit taller than the surrounding houses, and Merchio climbs up onto the roof beams, getting an overview of the surrounding streets and planning to spend the night here looking for monster activity.
He spots smoke from cooking fires a bit south of the plaza and they decide to head there. They find a few people gathered together for lunch. The PCs are invited to more barley stew (the people don’t own much, but hospitality is a point of pride) and talk a bit with them over their meagre meal.
The family and their local neighbours had worked on a few holes in the roof over the morning as the wet season is approaching, planning to head out to their regular work at the fields outside the commoner district after lunch. Besides the family members themselves, a couple, the husbands father and their 8-year-old son, another couple from the neighbourhood and a young woman from down the street attend the meal, though the latter leaves after a while with some stew for her sick brother. The rest discuss work on the fields, repairing some irrigation channels for the wet season, and answer some questions by the PCs. They say that the monster hasn’t struck so far south this far, but that they sleep armed and in groups anyway, except for the woman with the sick brother, a local herbalist and healer, who says she doesn’t want to risk anyone else catching his nasty disease.

After finishing their stew, the PCs accompany the departing workers for a bit (a main street from the bazaar leads strait east to a gate outside the city), getting a description about the nearby streets in the process. They take a look around those streets and find an alley up north towards the palace district.
All the houses here look derelict and long deserted, partly broken down for building material elsewhere and any items still useable long salvaged. What remains are crumpled mud-brick walls, broken and rotted furniture and the occasional rusted remains of cooking implements and broken shards of dishes. Eerily, they still stand on collapsed, mouldy tables and set up in fireplaces as if the forgotten proprietors had just suddenly stood up and left during lunch, leaving everything as is. Which is mostly how it happened anyway, only they dropped dead instead as the Big Death hit them.
Despite its run-down state, the alley shows signs of someone regularly coming through. The PCs assume that this is a route the monster takes to traverse between its suspected southern hideout and its hunting grounds. They therefore search for a suitable lookout post to spy on (and probably ambush) the monster and finally find a small square around a disused well. One of the surrounding houses still looks stable enough to not collapse when climbing and lying down on the roof. They memorize the location for later, as there is still plenty of daytime left, and head south.

On their way they pass Womu, the young boy they dined with earlier, who unsuccessfully tries to shoot some birds with a sling to get some meat for supper. He waves at them as they pass and tells them the fastest way towards the river.


As they move towards the river shore, they leave behind the deserted but at least still recognizable houses and enter an area of overgrown rubble, once part of the city, now sunken into the swampy delta of the Neshat.
They spot Limkuu the mandragora crouching behind a collapsed wall, patiently observing something. As he notices them drawing near, he leaves his post and winks them to follow him a small distance away. After they follow him, he tells them that he has discovered the location of the most recent Bloodhunter pack and was waiting for one member to stray a bit from the other three so he could take it down, though with little luck so far. Nebuk and Merchio offer to aid in an all-out fight, and Limkuu estimates the three of them should be able to take them on without too much risk. Bloodhunters are rather weak and clumsy fighters, and are usually only dangerous against unprepared and outnumbered foes.

This is of course a shameless setup for an actual combat test (the brawl in the first session was over too fast to offer useful evaluation beside “you can decide a battle quickly”, which was intended anyway), although I would have simply let the PCs ignore it if that was what the players wanted. They were eager to test a little bloodshed themselves, though. Limkuu was obviously there to help out in case the fight turned against the PCs.

On a side note, expanding a bit on Chimerology lore, when people in -game refer to Limkuu as “he”, this is mainly because of his appearance, which when compared to a human (which is part of his species source material) bears a closer resemblance to the male sex. What remains of human sexual organs, however, is completely non-functional, and the species which was originally never intended to reproduce by itself does so as plants, via the bud on top of their heads (which is currently latent for Limkuu, and he doesn’t like humans to eat his allegedly tasty fruits anyway if he produces any – yes, Merchio asked when they first met).
Despite his looks, Limkuu is genetically a female, as are most apparent males, while most female-looking species members are genetically males. Not that it really matters to them. A common case of Chimerologists tinkering without really understanding the source material. The species was originally intended to serve at and guard remote locales in the desert, being able to tone down their metabolism by rooting and burying themselves in the ground and functioning via photosynthesis. They remain more alert than common hibernating animals, though, and can recover to the full, food-powered metabolism of their human parts almost instantly.

Now enough with the boring and pointless setting exposition and on to joyous slaughter.

[Smirg]

Session 2 - Bloody Bloodhunter bloodshed:

The PCs move to Limkuus previous hiding place to survey the layout of the area and come up with a battle plan. The Bloodhunters are restlessly milling about in the inside of a former house, its walls now no more than knee height, with their obligatory, still unused buckets in the corner to carry off the blood of their prey. The PCs muse that charging right in wouldn’t be too smart and decide to try and draw them out, possibly not all at once, letting them run into a prepared defensive position. Limkuu and Merchio would wait on what used to be an alley, while Merchio plans to sneak closer, throw a rock at a Bloodhunter when it is a bit further away from its companions to get its attention and then hide behind one of the low walls, hoping the Numlak will then go for the other two and throw some more rocks from the flank.


So while Nebuk and Limkuu position themselves down the road – now marked merely by the heaps of broken wall bricks occasionally sticking out of the ankle-deep muck on both sides – Merchio uses those same heaps as cover to sneak closer. Picking up a chunk of debris from the top of a still recognizable section of wall a bit over knee high, he notices one of the Numlaks stepping out onto the road, takes aim and throws. The only moderately aerodynamic stone falls a bit short of its target, however, but nonetheless captures the creatures attention. With Merchio ducking behind his cover, it lets out a loud hiss and starts towards the other two, not waiting for its fellows who, alerted by the hiss, also begin a charge.

Mercho has meanwhile picked up another stone to throw, rises from behind his cover and hurls it at the first Numlak, which has already passed him, aiming for the back of its head. Throwing stuff, however, is not his forte, he misses and is spotted by one of the other Hunters who changes course. Limkuu, grasping his spear in both hands with his arm roots wrapped around it for extra support, thrusts at the first Bloodhunter as it approaches, but it manages to dodge to the side.
This brings it closer to Nebuk, who in turn steps forward, quickly grabs the creatures arm as it clumsily and fruitlessly slices at him with its claw and pulls it towards him, tripping it over his leg. It stumbles and falls into the mud with a loud splash. Hit by his stamping follow-up kicks and impaled by a spear thrust from the mandragora, it is left unconscious and bleeding in the mud, the pair turning around towards the other two approaching enemies just in time as they arrive.

The fight now dissolves into three duels, as each of the three combatants is attacked by one of the Bloodhunters. Merchio, who is nearest to the mob of the midget monsters, gets attacked first.
As he sees one of them breaking out of the group and heading for him, he draws his big knife and steps forward onto the wall he was ducking behind, hoping for a height advantage. Indeed the Numlak can now only target his feet and legs. Merchio quickly steps around to dodge the attacks, slicing downwards in return. The first few swings from both opponents miss, then Merchio connects with a stab to the Numlaks shoulder. But as he is carefully watching his guard while attacking, his probing blow is not too strong and the creature is not disabled by the hit. The stronger and determined follow-up stab misses, however, and now both combatants need to pause for a second to catch their breath and regain a stable stance.

Meanwhile, Nebuk is also drawn into another fight, going for what seemed to become his standard trick again (though this is actually the last time we will see it in this campaign): As he steps right into his enemies charge with an arm grapple, the sudden distance shift surprises the dumb creature, causing it to falter in its step, its initially determined attack turning into a poorly aimed, easily dodged stab. Nebuk catches its forearm as he evades, using both hands to pull it up, haul it in a high arc through the air and crash it down into the mud behind him.
His first two kicks at the prone foe only splash up more mud, however, as the creature rolls to the side and tries to get up again. But the third kick, well aimed and forceful, catches it square in the guts as it is almost back on its feet again, sending it back into the mud with a painful hiss.

Rising his foot to finish it off, Nebuk is suddenly startled by a loud, painful scream. Merchios opponent has recovered from his wound and, flailing wildly, the claw of its unharmed arm bites deeply into the flesh of Merchios right leg with a furious blow, tearing into muscle, sinew and, by sheer dumb luck, his femoral artery. Pain washes over him and his leg buckles beneath him, sending him backwards off the low wall and onto a patch of earth and grass. Blackness starts to engulf his field of view, but adrenaline and will can drive back the looming unconsciousness. As his sight clears again, gritting his teeth, Merchio holds up the knife still clenched firmly in his right as the Numlak vaults over the wall, eyes gleaming with anticipation of the kill.

Nebuk, not wanting to give his own foe a chance to recover, strikes down his foot with full force, shattering the creatures skull as it squirms on the ground with the pain in its guts. Not waiting whether it stops moving – which, after a few final spasms, it does – he turns around and hurries towards his companion.
Merchio by now is in serious peril. His pursuer was smart enough not to impale itself on his upheld knife when jumping over the wall, and comes at him as he lies on his back, while Merchos lifeblood gushes out of the cut artery with force, staining the mud around. With his dwindling strength he holds his knife above him, barely able to ward off the furious blows. Just as he becomes assured that this graveyard of a once glorious city-states ambitions will also become his own wet, dirty grave, Nebuk appears behind the enemy and tries to catch it in the back.
On the verge of panic himself out of fear for his new friend, his attack goes astray, but it catches and diverts the Bloodhunters attention. Merchios hand sinks into the mud beside him, finally dropping his bloody weapon, as his companion unleashes a flurry of furious but poorly aimed strikes and kicks at the monster, driving it backwards and away from its victim. Just as his onslaught loses its momentum and falters, Limkuu finally joins up and takes over, skewering the out-of breath Numlak with his spear and sending it to the ground.

[Smirg]

Session 2 - This ain't no D&D wound!

With the fight decided – Limkuu has also downed his own opponent before rushing over, receiving a minor scratch to his side in return – there still is the problem of Merchio quickly bleeding out.
It is times like these for which any serious fantasy party brings along a priest of a deity of healing, and this common modus operandi again proves its worth.
With zealous fervour fuelled by fear, anger and the conviction that the righteous will not fall, Nebuk musters all his devotion to send a desperate plea to Ishnanna to save this warrior for her faithful community. Ishnanna, not willing to let Merchio die herself, sends her power through him and into the wounded leg, staunching the flow of blood and mending the gash in the artery.

This sickeningly pathos-filled description should indicate that Nebuk just used a special system mechanic: Every character point spent towards improving one of his traits – in this case Body-magic – also goes into an “unused points” pool for this trait. These points can then be spent (once only) for several purposes, one of them, the “Heroic Deed”, adding a significant bonus to a roll (greater if the roll is less important, to make players willing to spend a few of them in not-life-or-death situations to show off). Other uses include making magic spells permanent, learning sub-skills of a trait (such as literacy for the Knowledge skill or improving special combat manoeuvres for the Melee skill) or buying “temporary specializations”, optional half-way-points for the improvement of the entire Trait.

With the immediate threat of death by blood loss avoided, Merchios leg is still in very bad shape (healing magic in general is not too effective in this setting, and Nebuk has only the minimum level anyway). There is also the danger of infection.
Limkuu who has meanwhile finished off the dying opponents suggests that he knows a healer not too far away, and Nebuk agrees to take Merchio there. As Merchio is unable to stand upright by himself, Nebuk and Limkuu carry him as gently as they can, bringing him back north to the inhabited regions of the district. Luckily, the healer, Lima, lives on the southernmost edge of reasonably intact dwellings, just below the southern bazaar. Indeed, as they arrive, the characters recognize her from their lunch just a few hours ago. She’s the young woman tending to her sick brother.

Seeing Merchios wound, Lima quickly hurries them inside. The front room of her house consists of a large table taking up most of the space, a fireplace and a shelf with clean bandages, other dressing material and a big collection of herbs, their strong smells mingling to an intense but pleasant aroma. Lima tells them to heave Merchio onto the table, immediately puts a pot of water on the fireplace to clean the wound and starts to select some herbs from her collection to crush them and make a salve.
As she works, she asks the others to wait outside, both because of the limited space in the room and because she wants to minimize their exposure to the presence of her sick brother, hidden in another room behind a closed curtain. They step outside but Nebuk stays by the door and watches her work. He has no clue of mundane medicine (neither has Merchio), but she seems like she knows what she is doing.
While her work is quick and shows a lot of practice, she seems a bit distracted the whole time. After she is done sewing and dressing the wound, she urges them to leave so she can get back to tending to her brother. She gives Nebuk the rest of the salve and tells Merchio to get a few days rest.

Limkuu and Nebuk help Merchio back to the refugee camp where Habik volunteers to look after his tent-mate, getting food for him and changing his bandages. Limkuu and Nebuk then head back to the field of battle, taking two other men with them to help, and carry the bodies of the Bloodhunters back to the palace district, earning some cheers from passer-bys.
Limkuu and the other men take their load to the palace itself to collect the bounty – Limkuu assures Nebuk that he will bring them their share at dusk – while Nebuk takes his corpse to the priests quarters for further examination, as he wants to take a look at the Sha’Etemmu guild archives anyway. At the gate, he tells the guards that the Manzazuu has invited him to visit. One of the guards, confirming that his visit had been announced, takes over the body and carries it inside.

The Vulture comes back with Zargo, the unfriendly one from the pair of bodyguards the PCs met at noon, and Zargo shows Nebuk to the main archive – the guardsman calls it the “safe archive”, as the really dangerous knowledge is kept separately, with only senior guild members having access. He also tells Nebuk to put back things where he found them and to return straight to the gate when finished. The local priesthood hasn’t entirely accepted the newcomers yet – Ishnanna isn’t worshipped at all in this city, and known only via accounts from Hawan – and doesn’t want visitors to run around their grounds unchecked.


Chimerology 101: Fun for sadists age 16 and up!

Nebuk rummages a bit through the archive until he finds the Chimerology section. It’s actually pretty small, as neither the Sha’Etemmu necromancers nor the regular priests they share the site with really use it. He quickly finds a book giving a rough overview over various local Chimeras, though, and soon finds the entry about Numlaks (he also comes across entries about Eels and the local mandragora variant but isn’t really interested).
It quickly becomes apparent that the book considers Bloodhunters a severely flawed design. In part because it was written by a Sha’Etemmu researcher, and the guild holds blood-magic, despite it being a Necromantic practice, in serious distain – at least the use of someone else’s blood.

Necromancy manipulates the raw Ether stored in a living body. The main concentration of this energy is in what they call the soul, according to their theories the medium between Mind and Body, the primary life energy reserve and the part of a person that lives on in the soul sea after the individual passes away. The second largest amount of raw Ether energy in a living body is stored in the blood.
While a necromancer practices a lot of self-study to become intimately familiar with his own personal life and soul energy, and can thus cannibalize it rather efficiently to transform it into magical energy for his own use, the distant connection and unfamiliarity with the patterns in the blood of anyone else makes the use of this foreign Ether energy terribly inefficient. It can still be used as extraneous fuel for a large ritual, but It really pays off only if you use most of the blood of at least a few human-sized victims. Not worth the carnage except for the most callous wizards (Sha’Etemmu, on the other hand, tend to hold life in rather high regard due to their study of its processes and the whole ghost mess that painful lives and especially deaths often leave behind).

This limited usefulness is further diminished by the fact that the “default configuration” of a Bloodhunter mind, the one used in the original ritual, doesn’t even contain any feeding functions, which means that a Bloodhunter will perish from starvation after a few days. The reason that they are usually weak and small is that they are usually created from children (up to about 12 years of age) rather than from adults.
This is the usually procedure in Chimerology if you want a “blank slate” mind you can “program” yourself. After reaching a certain level of mental maturity, deleting and reprogramming a mind always has a risk of (usually only partial) recovery of the original state, which can come as a nasty surprise if your creation suddenly shows different behaviour (and is often pissed at you). Hence the use of not fully formed children minds. Of course, the creation will usually be programmed to look after itself enough to reach actual maturity, giving time for training and further magical “enhancements” before being put to action.

According to the book, the reason for the extremely inefficient and wasteful design of the Bloodhunter ritual can be found in its history. It dates back to a pre-Highborn-era local tyrant who, when learning of imminent betrayal through one of his generals, got quite mad. He imprisoned the would-be traitor and instructed his court wizard and chimerologist to conceive of a punishment unprecedented in cruelty. Ever one to push the status quo of Chimerology science given a proper excuse, the good man came up with a two-part plan, the first of which was to transform the generals many underage children – polygamy was the norm for the aristocracy back then – into the first Bloodhunters before the traitors eyes. They would then be set loose on a poor district housing many rebellious citizens, bring back their blood and then starve in front of their father while their creator used the procured blood to empower another ritual, an even more gruesome spell to punish the traitorous general. That one, fortunately, seems to have passed into oblivion.

[Smirg]

Session 2 - Waiting for a monster

While Nebuk performs some more healing magic on Merchios leg before going to sleep, Limkuu makes good on his promise and hands them a few small rods of copper. As the economy collapsed with the Big Death and was only slowly rebuild after the Great Liberation, most communities still use a barter economy. In this region, metal is still rare enough to be valuable even in small quantities.

Merchio rests the whole next day, and good dice rolls combined with the recovery boosts from Limas medicine and Nebuks magic mean that he makes an amazingly fast recovery. It seems that the muscle injuries were only superficial after all, and his temporal inability to stand or walk was more due to pain and shock rather than actual crippling.

Nebuk checks the archives a bit more and attends the funeral ceremony for the former children at the ziggurat, a joint prayer by various priests – the locally leading Mamnuu priesthood as well as Ateli, the surviving Ishnanna priestess from Hawan (the one that tended to the temple while Nebuk ran around preaching wildly) – and the Sha’Etemmu clerical branch.
After the ceremony, he has another talk with Manzazuu Ennuna and asks a few more questions about the Bloodhunter ritual and source material. He learns that the ritual can be performed rather quickly – in less than a day if the user knows it well – and that the bodily alterations are pretty basic. The magically more demanding part of the ritual is clearing and reprogramming the victims mind. Ennuna repeats that he has no idea where the source material comes from, neither the city nor the surrounding villages have sufficient amounts of missing children. He suspects that they are abducted from Arach, another city a few days travel up the river, which is inhabited by several autarkic clans who only agree on one thing: that they don’t want to be ruled by Chadezz.


At the morn of the following day, Merchio feels well enough to continue the investigation. He’s still injured and his leg still hurts a lot, but his zest for action is strong enough that he doesn’t want to rest another entire day. Habik and Nebuk can convince him to wait at least until the afternoon, as there is not really a lot they can do anyway before holding a night watch for the monster.
They move out a few hours before dusk. Merchio insists to first go to Lima to pay her some of the bounty he earned for her help. He also asks Nebuk to provide some distraction as he wants to check on the sick brother.

Before they reach her, however, they meet the two other women they dined with near the western bazaar. They look tired, bleary-eyed and worried, one of them seems to have cried a lot recently.
The hysterical woman asks whether they have seen her boy, Womu. He hadn’t been home when they had returned from the fields the previous day – he had left earlier because he cannot yet work as long as an adult – and she fears that he had gone bird hunting again, forgetting about the time and then found by the monster when returning after dusk. The PCs haven’t seen him, but Nebuk tries to cheer her up, telling her that all will be well if she has faith in the gods and that she shouldn’t give up hope. They promise to look for him on their way.
As they pass the families house on their way to the healer anyway, they take a quick look around there. A few toys lie scattered in front of it – horses and warriors roughly carved from wood – and they appear to have been dropped in the midst of play. Womu had obviously planned to collect and return them later, when coming back. Or he has been grabbed and abducted right during play, during daylight hours. Unable to find any really conclusive evidence, they continue down the road to the herbalist.

Lima seems distracted by her other worries again, and even more nervous than the last time, but she is astonished to see Merchio up and walking already. He reacts by praising her healing skills and their role in his quick recovery, making her obviously proud although her response is quite humble. She is also a bit surprised to be paid in cash (or what passes for it in this community). Mostly she helps people for future favours or provisions over the next few weeks.
Nebuk then picks up on his partners praise and asks about the herbs she uses in her salve, pretending he wants to complement his knowledge of magical healing with mundane one (he isn’t really interested – he acknowledges the synergy effects but sees himself fully in the “granting Ishnannas blessings” department).
Lima shows him her collection. She doesn’t have a lot of different or rare herbs, but she explains how to get the most out of each of them, and how to cure a large amount of illnesses with just the few herbs by preparing them in different ways. Nebuk, despite not being really interested, notices that she skips one of the herbs during her explanation, a small batch of jagged leaves. When asked about it, she seems to get even more nervous and hastily explains that it is a mild sedative used to make tea. She skipped it because it doesn’t really have much healing power.

Merchio meanwhile sneaks around the house. He finds a window to the back room, but it is closed by a dense black curtain. He tries to brush it aside to peek inside but notices that it has obviously been nailed in place to cover the whole window. Unwilling to leave any obvious proof of his curiosity, he leaves and limps back to the front. After all, Lima seemed pretty trustworthy so far (yes, Merchio is in general a firm believer in the inherent goodness of all people unless thoroughly proven otherwise).
Before they leave, Merchio asks about Womu. Lima says she barely leaves the house and therefore doesn’t notice much of what happens outside. She only heard about his disappearance when his mother came over to ask her the same question.

Night approaches and the heroes head to the small square with the well they discovered two days before, the one on the uninhabited road they suspect the monster to take to head north towards its victims. They climb onto the roof of the only remaining building that still appears structurally sound. All buildings have only one storey around here, and indeed in most parts of the city, so it isn’t too difficult. Nebuk gives Merchio a leg up and he easily reaches the flat roof (Merchio is a good climber, so his injured leg doesn’t bother him too much). Merchio then reaches down from the top to in turn help his friend. They then lie down on the more intact parts and wait.

The hours drag on slowly, and the vigilantes have to fight sleep. Merchio has some help from the throbbing pain in his leg and is pretty well rested while Nebuk has to make do with his will. They both manage to stay awake, though, until well after midnight, when they suddenly hear shouting in the distance, from the northwest. They quickly spot the faint, flickering light of torches behind some far-away rooftops. As the shouting seems to get louder, they quickly climb down from their post and run towards the commotion (yes, towards – they didn’t think of trying to cut off the path of whatever was coming). Nebuk takes the lead as Merchio fights the pain in his leg.
As they stumble out onto the big plaza of the western bazaar, they see a group of a dozen armed torch-bearers entering from the north. One of them points towards them, likely seeing them only as dark silhouettes, but the group slows down as Merchio shouts at them, asking what is going on. The group starts to disperse and look around the bazaar, though they obviously seem confused and frustrated. Limkuu, one of the foremost of the group, comes over and explains that they were chasing the monster but lost it.
The hunters had slept in a group and kept alternating watch when they heard some chopping from the nearby home of Old Ovol. They burst out onto the street to see the monster hacking away at the old mans barricaded door with its claws while Ovol shouted and ranted that he had seen worse in his day and wasn’t afraid. When they showed up, the monster turned tail and ran south. They managed to almost catch up with it when it suddenly put in a burst of speed, racing away incredibly swift. They saw it heading towards the bazaar and had already given up hope of catching up when they spotted the PCs. Obviously it must have passed them and crossed the plaza before the PCs arrived.


At least content that another murder could be averted, the PCs return to their post, despite having little hope of the monster trying again this night. They alternate watches now and manage to avoid collectively dozing off until sunrise, then wearily make their way back to the camp where they collapse. They awake after a few hours rest around noon, when their fellow fugitives, who are for the most part helping out with the preparation of the irrigation system for the wet season sowing, return during the hottest hours of the day for a meal and a short rest.

They get up and decide to find a herbalist in the palace district first, as Nebuk wants to inquire about the herbs Lima didn’t want to tell him about. Asking around they quickly find one. Nebuk describes the jagged leaves and tells the vendor that his nerves are still suffering from the catastrophe at Hawan and that he has been told that these herbs make a nice sedative. The vendor laughs and replies that whoever told him that was obviously planning a nasty joke. Sedation is too weak a word: these leaves contain a strong drug that, when cooked up and ingested, will knock someone out within a few moments, and the effect lasts for a few hours.
Merchio decides to get a few of the herbs anyway (you never know when such a thing might come in handy), investing the rest of his share of the bounty. He suspects that Lima has for some reason kept her brother drugged all this time. Nebuk isn’t quite so sure what to believe but agrees that they should go to Lima and find out.

Upon entering the commoner district, they spot Old Ovol, again sitting on his bench. He seems rather pleased with the locals chasing away the monster, saying it’s a big coward after all. The PCs ask him about Lima and her brother. Ovol tells them that the rest of her family passed away when she was 10, when a devastating fever hit the town, leaving her alone to care for her brother Ambu who is three years younger. Before that, she has been quite a cheerful girl and was a favourite among other children her age because she had some natural knack for producing coloured lights that could dance around.
This captures Nebuks attention, and inquiring further he finds out that Lima obviously hasn’t used that trick after her family died, turning quite serious and learning the trade of a healer from a local herbalist to help prevent such terrible outbreaks in the future. She has also raised Ambu mostly on her own, growing a bit overprotective in the process, to the chagrin of her brother, who was often teased by his friends that he couldn’t do anything on his own.

Now convinced that there is some nastiness going on at her house, the PCs head to Lima and the second session ends.

[Smirg]

Session 3 – The more the merrier:

At this point, it had become pretty likely that the campaign would go on a bit longer than the originally planned playtest part. So I agreed for another player to join in. Nebuks player was missing this session, so his character won’t do much. Before Merchio and puppet-Nebuk arrive at their destination, we have to go back a few weeks and to the city of Arach to bring the third PC into the story.

Ximolac, a day labourer, has been working as a carpenter on house repairs in the south-western part of the inner city of Arach for most of the dry season.
The inner city of Arach – everything outside the inner city walls is now just rubble, if visible at all beneath the sand – is separated into various clan territories, most clans having around 60 members. This means that it is fairly difficult to find decently skilled labourers, as most of the permanent inhabitants are peasants or thugs (who work as peasants most of the time too because there is not enough to rough up). Asking for skilled labour from another clan requires you to do them a favour in return, and most clans seek to avoid owing too many of those.
Therefore, despite the run-down state of the city, it’s not a bad place for day-labourers to visit if they are content being paid in food. The reason it doesn’t get many is that reaching it requires a march along the Neshat river of about a week, which, while not overly dangerous, is a rather strenuous exercise.

Ximolac, besides being a day labourer with decent skill in carpentry (especially in detailed carvings), is also a very powerful Forces mage. He developed his abilities naturally at a young age. Natural talent is not a prerequisite for working magic – anyone can learn to use it given enough time and preferably a teacher – it just takes too long usually to get people decently skilled to do so for everyday tasks, large numbers of or only moderately smart people.
Ximolac, however, has a natural talent, and he has scared the other people in the small fishing village he has been born in with uncontrolled outbursts while still a child. Which lead to everyone else mostly shunning him and him taking off to the wandering life of a day-labourer early on, keeping his abilities secret in general. He has used them for a little personal gain and mostly for having fun by mildly tormenting people – it has no obvious signs when he is using magic. He is 34 years old by now and has had a long time to develop his abilities to a very high level – he is the most powerful Forces mage at the peninsula already, specializing in Kinetic and Temperature, although he has not developed any magical abilities outside his natural focus of Forces.

Ximolac uses will-projection magic, which is the most common among naturally gifted wizards and basically consists of being more stubborn than the universe when telling it how things should be, insisting on his opinion until the universe (as governed by the Ether) just decides it’s easier to give in and bend reality a bit than continue the argument. Practitioners are usually rather strong-willed as a result, used to getting their way, as is Ximolac.
Ximolacs player, by the way, is one of those who show up to the game with a character fully built but without a name for him. Therefore, he took it off a bottle standing on a table, spelling “Cola-mix” backwards. We will see this “naming convention” return when the fourth player joins in the seventh session.

At the start of the session, work for Ximolac in Arach has run out – not uncommon among communities with little division of labour when the wet season approaches, as everyone works on the fields then, not something Ximolac likes to do – and he decides to head down the river to Chadezz, a better structured society where he will likely find work for the next half year.
During his last week in Arach, as he finished his current job repairing the roof of a storehouse for clan Uron, one of the clans peasants, Werun, has a nervous breakdown when he returns from the fields one evening to find his two young sons missing. After recovering from the initial shock (his wife is dead, so he raised them with the help of the rest of the clan), everyone starts to look for them, including Ximolac.
When they cannot be found in the clans territory for several days, Werun, clan chief Uron and Ximolac, who has mostly finished his work anyway, ask around at neighbouring clans, and after a few more days the chief discovers that some of the clans east of the river have also “lost” children during the past half year (clans don’t like to talk about incidents that could be interpreted as weakness by their neighbours). Searches in the city haven’t turned up any of the missing kids, so most suspect outsiders, possibly nomads or the people of Chadezz who are generally disdained (both because they surrender their freedom to a king and because they have tried to capture Arach a few times).
Werun asks Ximolac whether he can come along when the labourer leaves for Chadezz – he has never left the city on his own – to look for his sons, as the ties to his children are a lot stronger than those to his clan. Uron is loath to let a peasant go but agrees, seeing that Werun wouldn’t get a lot of work done in his current state. Plus he couldn’t do much anyways – people in Arach are generally free to do what they want, with a clan chief being mostly a trusted judge and administrator for his own people and a diplomat to other clans.

So Ximolac and Werun follow the Neshat river downstream towards the sea. At first, they make good progress. The bank of the river is fertile, mostly covered by trees and the shade makes the heat bearable enough (though they still wisely avoid marching during noon). The air isn’t as dry as in the desert either. Every now and then, they find ruined remains of long-forgotten settlements, low rests of walls sticking out of the mud which provide nice places for rest.
They also pass some nomad camps. The nomads retreat to the rivers and coasts during the dry season and leave during the wet when their livestock can graze out in the desert. As the first rain hasn’t come yet, they are still encamped, which means they aren’t too dangerous. The tribes that do raid settlements usually do so only during the wet season, when they can retreat to the safety of the desert where they can shake off any pursuers or engage them at their own terms. Not attacking even lone travellers during the dry season is also part of their unwritten code of honour which they adhere to rather strictly. Ximolac and Werun obviously don’t possess anything worth breaking the code.

Two days before they reach Chadezz – on foot, the journey takes about a week – Werun starts to lag behind. He says he’s feeling weak, and his condition gets worse as the day progresses. Ximolac suspects some kind of fever – he doesn’t have any medical expertise but it’s pretty obvious that the strenuous walk has weakened his companion (who is unused to long marches, as is most of the populace) which has caused him to become ill. As he doesn’t get better during rests – his condition rather seems to get worse – Ximolac decides it is best to get him to the city and to a healer as fast as possible, as there is little he can do out here.
They push on the next day, even when the noon heat comes up, as the city is already within sight. Werun has to lean on Ximolac, as he is barely able to walk on his own by now, and they reach the fields around the city a bit after noon, rather exhausted. There, one of the workers agrees to show them to a healer and helps Ximolac to carry the sick peasant the rest of the way. He, of course, takes them right to Lima (who conveniently is the only healer still in the commoner district) and takes off after placing the patient at her table. Lima gets right to work making some herb poultice and tea while Ximolac waits at the side of his companion, unable to do much.

[Smirg]

Session 3 – Monstrous confusion:

After Weruns initial treatment is finished – Lima tells them about the monster and the quarantine of the district when Ximolac wonders there is no one around – Merchio and Nebuk show up.

Merchio enters the house and directly starts accusing Lima of drugging her brother and being involved in the whole monster affair. The woman tries to answer but only manages some incoherent stammer (Ximolac and Werun are just baffled by what’s going on), then she turns around and runs to the back, crying for her brother Ando.
Ximolac, realizing she is somehow involved in a crime (although he couldn’t make much sense of Merchios accusations) uses kinetic energy to sweep her feet from under her as she passes through the curtain separating the two rooms of the house, planning on making it look like she got caught up in the curtain while brushing it aside. The spell works, but Lima manages to catch herself on one of the two beds in the darkened back room instead of falling to the ground.
Merchio draws his knife and rushes after her. He catches and grabs her before she can retreat further into the room. While Merchio grapples with Lima, Ando, her brother, gets up from his bed a bit confused and reaches for an axe leaning at his bed beside him. Ximolac is faster and pushes the axe under the bed with a kinetic impulse before Ando can grab it. Before Ando can join the fray and pull the attacker off his sister, Merchio manages to get his knife to Limas throat. He shouts at Ando to back off and stay away. Which Ando, reluctantly, does. The most important thing to him is that his sister isn’t harmed.

Merchio demands an explanation of what the siblings were doing. Both he and Ximolac also spot a third person, a child, lying tied-up and unconscious on the ground behind Andos bed. Merchio recognizes Womu, the missing boy, while Ximolac pretends not to have noticed him. Instead, he tries to defuse the situation (he isn’t exactly sure what is going on and who is the villain), appealing to everyone to be reasonable, for Merchio to lower his weapon and for the siblings to meet his demands and explain what was going on. After all, nobody has been hurt yet, and if no one overreacts, a solution may yet be found (he doesn’t want to get involved in a slaughter either).
At the same time, unnoticed by the others, he uses his temperature magic to set fire to a wooden beam sticking out of a half-collapsed house across the street, hoping that the smoke will attract a few more citizens or guards that may help to get the situation under control.

Merchio agrees with the strangers approach of de-escalation and lowers his knife – a little bit. He repeats his suspicion that the siblings have something to do with the recent murders and, once again, demands an explanation. The confused and terrified Ando, as usual, defers to his sister. Lima, with a sigh, states that it is all over anyway, and confesses that it was Ando who has committed the murders to save his own life. She has helped him by devising the illusionary disguise, using the Bloodhunter attacks during the previous months as cover.
Ximolac inquires further about the reason for the murders, and Lima explains that Ando recently turned into a vampire and needs to drink blood to survive. Her brother was hanging out with a few friends at an evening about a month ago. Suddenly, the group was engaged by another clique of aggressive youngsters, claiming that one of Andos friends slept with the wife of the gang leader a few times (Ando has no idea whether this is actually true). The situation quickly escalated into a knife fight, Ando got stabbed in the stomach and collapsed, dying. Then the corpse of a member of the opposing group fell on him, blood from his slit throat pouring in the dying mans mouth who was just losing consciousness.
As he came to, the survivors of both sides had fled – Ando and the guy who fell on him apparently were the only casualties – and he felt an immense rush of power inside him, his wound having mostly closed. He stumbled home, already guessing what had happened to him from all the tales he knew. He confided in his sister, as he always did, and as it was well known that the abominable undead are destroyed when discovered, she decided that it should be kept secret (as Old Ovol said, she is more than a little bit overprotective). She hoped to find some kind of cure to alleviate his condition – her attempts were unsuccessful so far – and, in the meantime, to satisfy his thirst with the blood of those who likely wouldn’t live much longer anyway.

Ximolac, who has basically taken over the interrogation with Merchios consent as a “neutral party”, asks a few more questions about the condition. Apparently Ando starts to feel increasingly weak and sick after a couple of days unless he can consume more human blood (animal blood doesn’t seem to work). He can call upon unnatural strength and speed, but this only leaves him weaker afterwards unless he can replenish his reserves. He has experimented with going outside during the day, but he immediately started to feel sick, sweat and tremble when stepping into daylight (or just holding his hand out). The murders are so messy because, contrary to the legends, he didn’t grow any fangs or other means of controlled feeding.
He feels he is actually pretty much on the brink of expiring now (though he does seem fitter than that for the observers) as he spent his remaining energy during the failed attack at Old Ovol and the subsequent chase. Lima, getting desperate, has kidnapped the neighbour boy, Womu, for him to feed on (that’s what she used the drug herbs for), but, standing up to his sister for a change, he has refused to drink a boys blood.

Ximolac notices a bunch of citizens drawing near, and, deciding that the situation is under control anyway and that he doesn’t want a spontaneous lynch mob, extinguishes his small signal fire with his magic. As the leader of the group asks about what happened, Ximolac said that they already got the fire under control (the other people in the house are a bit confused because, as intended, they hadn’t noticed any fire, but they decide to say nothing). Merchio asks the group to send for Manzazuu Ennuna, as he has found some new clues about the monster that he wants to discuss with him (trusting the Sha’Etemmu more than the worldly authorities).
While they wait for the priest, the obviously repentant Ando appeals to his captors that, ultimately, he is the one responsible, and that he is willing to accept any punishment as long as his sister is spared. She has done and still will do a lot of good for the community, which he can’t. Lima, of course, demands the opposite, that it was her idea and that her distraught brother would have probably turned himself in after discovering his transformation if it wasn’t for her, so it’s her fault in the end.
Ximolac wants to leave judgement to the appropriate authorities (partly out of conviction, partly because he doesn’t want to get too deeply involved) and Merchio, while showing some pity for their situation, decides that the committed sins can’t be ignored. He leans more towards Andos suggestion, though, as it is he who ultimately spilled the blood (he doesn’t care about getting rid of a vampire though). He also agrees that killing them both would be more punishment than necessary.

The rest of the time waiting for the Manzazuu is spent silent, everyone present busy with his own thoughts about the situation. When he finally arrives, Merchio asks him to leave his two guards (Rishum and Zargo, as usual) outside. The necromancer listens calmly and silently to Limas confession, just sighing a bit when the vampire transformation comes up. After she finishes retelling the tale, he sadly shakes his head. “And another one. I should have guessed. Such a pointless waste of life.”
Merchio first thinks he means that he would have known a cure for the condition, but Ennuna shakes his head again. “There is no cure. There doesn’t need to be one. He wasn’t transformed into anything. It’s just the stupid folk tales that cause these tragedies to happen again and again. Yes, he seemingly is a vampire. But he has always been. He certainly isn’t undead.”

Ennuna goes on to explain that vampirism is a condition people are born with, seemingly at random. A quite common one, actually – guild estimates have it at one in about 250 people. Most affected people just go through their lives never noticing, because they just never happen to consume a significant amount of someone elses blood.
Vampirism, as the guild classifies it, is a specialized form of inborn magic – mostly Body magic affecting the afflicted persons own Body, tough other abilities can be developed as well – using the Ether power in other peoples blood as fuel. It is more efficient than regular blood magic and therefore necromancers have tried to replicate it for a long time, but mostly unsuccessful so far.
When a vampire first tastes a sufficient amount of foreign blood, he experiences an incredible rush as his dormant abilities suddenly become available. This is usually only triggered by the blood of sapient creatures. Non-sapient creatures such as animals have a much simpler soul and their bodies and blood therefore contain a lot less Ether energy.
The problem is that a vampires body cannot store too much stolen Ether energy at a time, and not for a long time either, as it soon starts to dissipate (the storable amount can be vastly increased with training, though, as can available abilities). At this point, clueless victims usually think they start dying, simply because the stolen Ether energy acts like a very potent and addictive drug and they come down from the initial rush. In reality, nothing much happens when they run out, besides their abilities becoming unavailable until they take another drink. They just feel incredibly wretched, as any other drug addict would, and in combination with wild legends and resulting irrational behaviour, this often leads to tragedies such as this.
Ando never died when stabbed. Either his abilities include some form of self-healing which he unconsciously activated or he just went into shock when wounded, which isn’t too uncommon either for someone being injured in a fight for the first time (the latter is what actually happened). The supposedly burning sunlight was just his imaginations, fuelled by legends and his own terrified, nervous and confused state of mind.

While this makes the whole affair even more tragic as it could have been easily avoided had he confided in a priest, it doesn’t change the fact that crimes were committed, Ennuna makes clear. He doesn’t care about mundane law and punishment, but he definitely cares about appeasing the angry ghosts Ando left behind. As they tend to think in rather simple ways, they demand his death, although he could possible convince them that extended torture inflicts a lot more pain and would thus be better suited.
For Merchio, however, worldly justice is as or more important, and he decides to turn Ando in to the kings Vultures which will almost certainly lead to his execution. He does agree to spare the miserable Lima, though (the clueless ghosts don’t care about anyone beside their killer either). The group resolves to tell that Ando has fooled his sister, using medical knowledge he had adopted from her to fake an illness. They will also report that he created the disguise himself, using magic his sister taught him.
They also send someone to get Womus parents. As he has been drugged and unconscious the whole time he won’t remember what happened. The effects of the drug will also blur his memory of what happened immediately before taking it (being offered a refreshing beverage by his seemingly friendly neighbour). He will have a splitting headache and feel very ill when he wakes up, though. The group settles on a story of Lima finding him delirious in the swampy south while looking for herbs, where he has lain since going missing, bitten by a poisonous snake while hunting for birds.

Ennuna sends one of his guards to get some of the kings men, but this turns out to not be necessary, as the citizens they sent to get the priest also informed the authorities, thinking any clues about the monster should be brought to them as well. So it doesn’t take long until a patrol arrives and arrests Ando, who by now has fallen into a fatalistic stupor. The rest tags along to the palace to report what happened (or their “official” version of it).
The palace is a large and imposing, albeit mostly empty, building of dark grey, formerly painted stone blocks and mosaic-inlaid floors of white marble, likely imported from outside the peninsula. The outer walls are decorated with reliefs of various symbols of political power – lions, eagles, marching soldiers and other pictures – but the interior is pretty plain. There is a high, white-marble tower at the backside of the structure, not matching the other architecture with its finely carved details, which was erected by the local Highborn tyrant and has been closed off since the Liberation.

King Ilu’luana and his right hand Zamquar await them in the mostly bare throne room, the former wearing scale armour and full battle gear (which doesn’t look ceremonial at all), the latter silver-embroidered robes. Ilu’luana first asks the Manzazuu to report, ignoring the others until the priest has finished the tale they had agreed upon. Ennuna doesn’t seem to have any qualms about lying to the king, and seems pretty competent at it too. Zamquar looks a bit suspicious but doesn’t say anything, either because he isn’t sure or because he just doesn’t want to risk an incident with the guild.
After asking them to confirm the priests report (he is content with a simple “Yes”), Ilu’luana lauds the player characters, especially Merchio and Nebuk, as Ximolac insists that his role was only a minor one and the others had done all the investigative work. He also sends for Nungal to officially thank him for his subordinates excellent work and making true on his promise of a new Hawan quarter in the commoner district. He also sends messengers out into the city to announce the capture of the monster by Nungals valiant men and an execution and celebration for the next evening.
After discussing matters with his advisor, the king also asks everyone present to keep silent on what actually happened and Lima to provide another monster disguise for the execution. Vampirism, illusions and citizens killing each other is too complicated for the common man. Let them have a spectacle instead of provoking them to think about such complicated matters, that’s what the authorities are there for.

The group is provided with luxurious quarters in the palace. Soft cushions on the floor, a hot bath, fresh fruits and fine wine. Ilu’luana sends his personal physician as well as a Body mage from the Mamnuu priesthood to take care of Weruns illness and Merchios leg (which will still take a few days to fully heal). To honour Nebuk, the king also asks the Mamnuu priests to fully acknowledge the worship of Ishnanna in the city (he can’t really tell them what to do, but his suggestions are usually heeded).
The group spends the rest of the day resting. On the next day, Merchio and Nebuk are busy being praised, by the kings guards and servants while inside and by their fellow Hawan fugitives and Chadezz natives when they step out. A lot of exaggerated stories about their valiant fight with the monster are already told, and they are asked for their version wherever they go. They are also offered free food, beer and wine by everyone who has some to spare, and Nebuk gets lots of opportunity to sacrifice to his goddess (who, of course, was ultimately responsible for the success of the mission). Ximolac, who was left out of the official story on his request, accompanies Werun on the search for his sons, but with little success, as everyone is just interested in talking about the heroic capture.

In the evening, the whole city gathers around the parade plaza where the guards have already prepared the execution and subsequent feast. The crowd cheers as the two official heroes enter behind the two kings (who, at Ilu’luanas order, march side by side as a symbol for future cooperation, although he would usually march in front by standard protocol). They step onto a raised pedestal erected in the centre of the square and Ilu’luana raises his arms to demand order. He wears similar gear as the day before, though clearly ceremonial this time, covered in gold an inlaid with gems. The others have also been supplied with newly fitted clothing fitting the event.
As the crowd goes silent, Ilu’luana raises his magically amplified voice: “Brave citizens of Chadezz, dear friends from Hawan. As you all have without doubt heard by now, these two outstanding heroes, fighting for both of our kingdoms, have defeated and capture the vile abomination that has plagued us for the last weeks. The terror it has sown will end here and now.” He isn’t a man of long speeches.
The cheers turn into gasps as the “monster” is brought out, bound on a cart, the illusion even sporting gaping wounds from the fictional fight. Lima is standing near the palace entrance, barely managing to stand. The Vultures draw the cart onto the platform and the one leading the procession, obviously a highly ranking officer, presents a huge, decorated executioners sword to his king.
Ilu’luana takes the sword but passes it on to a surprised Nungal. This hadn’t been planned in advance, but Ilu’luana obviously wants to make sure further cooperation with his new allies will go smoothly by honouring them now. It takes Nungal a bit of effort to lift the oversized, ceremonial blade – he isn’t much of a warrior – but when he brings it down, the “monsters” head is cleanly cut off, rolling off the platform to the deafening roars of the crowd. “Praise king Nungal! Praise the heroes!”, Ilu’luana shouts, but no one can really hear him, despite the sound magic used to increase his volume.
The rest of the evening is spent eating and drinking. There likely won’t be much field-work getting done the next day.

[Smirg]

Setting note:

During the walk from Limas house to the palace, Merchio had a little talk with Ennuna I previously forgot to mention. Baffled by the notion that vampires aren’t undead, he asked the necromancer of what undead beings were actually around. Ennuna said that he didn’t know of any that could really be called undead. Ghosts, according to his guild, are considered dead. After all, the difference to the other dead souls in the soul sea is marginal. And he wouldn’t know of any way to create zombies, skeletons or similar walking corpses that had anything to do with necromancy.

Sure, he admitted, one could create a walking corpse by creating a simple Mind automaton and configuring it to control a number of Kinetic Force effects to move around parts of the corpse unless it was too stiff. Or Earth Matter spells (which include all once-living organic matter) to manipulate what is left of the muscles for a similar effect. This process would be no different from building a golem from materials that never lived (except that the result would be less durable but more frightening), though, and thus couldn’t be classified as creating undead.
And while ghosts can and do use minor magic effects to call attention to their unfulfilled desires (or try to correct them themselves), they do so more directly than by reanimating their corpse in this way, which is a rather difficult endeavour to begin with and beyond the power of most ghosts anyway.
So, as far as anyone knows, no classical undead in this fantasy setting.

Also, Ximolac went back to Limas house to get Andos bronze axe. Ando won’t need it anymore and Lima didn’t need a reminder of the tragedy either, and there might come a situation when the small hatchet from Ximolacs carpenter toolset literally won’t cut it.

[Smirg]

Session 3 – Not quite Sherlock Holmes:

Merchio and Ximolac are, like almost everyone else in the city, sleeping away the morning. The palace starts to get active again around noon and servants bring them cold remains from the previous nights feast for breakfast.
Ximolac first wants to talk to Werun and go searching for his children again, but Werun is not in the room he was assigned. Talking to a guard, he hears that the poor peasant has been arrested. Being from Arach and asking around about things, Zamquar suspects that he is a spy. Arach is, after all, suspected to be involved in the Bloodhunter business. Werun will be questioned later, and Ximolac may not see him. So he goes to talk to the only other persons he knows in the city.
Nebuk is busy praising Ishnanna for the successful monster hunt but Merchio doesn't have anything to do and agrees to help. Ximolac has a bad feeling that Weruns children have been part of the last bunch dispatched by Merchio and company, but he at least wants to get the peasant out of prison by finding the real culprits of the kidnappings and transformations. Merchio wants to find the root of the problem too, so they collect their stuff and head out of the palace together.
Outside the palace, the smell of the burnt monster flesh still lingers. Guards are cleaning up the remains of the pyre erected for it on the parade plaza during the night. The monster had been on display there for a few hours for everyone to curse, spit and shake fists at. Then it had been incinerated at the height of the feast. The charred remains now rest impaled on stakes above the palace gate, still protected by Limas illusion spells (it was everything she could do to save her brothers honour in the minds of the people – Ando will officially die later today from his wasting illness).
At the Hawan fugitive camp, Zamquar and Nungal are discussing the position and size of the new Hawan quarter and the resources required to build it over a decently current map of the city. They are surrounded by the Hawan refugee crowd which again breaks into cheers as Merchio passes by. The other camp is already being dismantled as the inhabitants of the commoner district reoccupy their homes.

Ximolac and Merchio decide to take a look at the temple the Bloodhunters brought the stolen blood to so they head for the harbour district to get a boat. Asking around, they quickly find a fisherman who ferried around the previous search party from the Sha’Etemmu guild and who offers to take them there himself. He is happy to be of assistance to the monster-slayer, not doubting he will be able to solve this other problem too.
The fisherman steers out of the harbour, across the delta and into the southern swamp in his flat coast boat, safely navigating through the shallow channels and stinking muddy pools between the reed- and tree-covered isles of dirt scattered throughout the bog. It takes him almost an hour to reach a larger island in the midst of this labyrinth, rising more than a metre from the surrounding mire and covered in dense if seemingly unhealthy vegetation. He tells them that the temple ruins lie at the centre of this island, hidden behind the trees, but that he doesn’t want to set foot on this likely cursed land. Long-abandoned temples can’t be anything but bad news and Merchio is the hero here.

Merchio tells the man to wait in the boat and pushes through the brush, closely followed by Ximolac. It is not dense enough necessitate the use of the heavy knife and they surprisingly reach the ruined temple after less than a minute – the thick foliage had them fooled into thinking the island was larger than it was. The temple, or what is left of it, is a small, slightly uneven stone platform with crumbling, ivy-covered pillars, moss-overgrown shards of the collapsed roof strewn about and an altar it the middle.
The altar, hewn from a single stone block, mostly defied the teeth of time. Sacrificial scenes can still be vaguely recognized in the eroded reliefs covering its sides (the sacrifices seem to include only animals, not humans) and the round cavity on the top is still encrusted with dried, black blood, as are the four channels going out from it, down the sides of the altar and into a low trench surrounding it. Flies are buzzing around.
A search of the site doesn’t turn up anything of interest beside some buckets dropped into the vegetation around the temple, discarded by the Numlaks after they completed their horrible task. Merchio still wants to topple the altar, just in case, and manages to do so with the (non-magical) help of Ximolac and an improvised lever. There is no secret compartment below it (what kind of temple is this anyway?) and after a short while, they return to the boat.

Back in the city, the characters once again consult Ennuna, their primary source of knowledge for all things magical. They ask him about the Bloodhunter creation ritual and whether he knows any wizards or priests capable of performing it. Ennuna says that the minor physical transformations the ritual requires could be performed by a couple of guild and priesthood members but that, as far as he knows, only one member of the guild (and none of the priests) has a sufficient grasp on Mind magic. There are a few other wizards of unknown power in two other mage-guilds in Nurashi, a mining town to the south, but the few times any of them have come to Chadezz during the previous months the Sha’Etemmu had an eye on them and they didn’t raise any suspicion.
Algon, the Sha’Etemmus most knowledgeable Mind wizard, has taken part in the investigation of the slain Bloodhunters but hasn’t been able to find anything useful. The creation ritual has been executed in the basic form so that no recognizable individual touches of the performing mage could be found.
As Ximolac wants to know more about Algon, Ennuna tells him that he is an old man obsessed with his work. He has been working on methods to cure mental illness. Madmen often leave ghosts, either their own, bound by desires almost impossible to fulfil because they only exist in the isolated world of their own minds, or those of others, by leaving marks on their relatives and former friends or simply by performing crazy, destructive or violent deeds.
Ximolac wants to talk to Algon and Ennuna sends a guard to him to ask, but as Ennuna predicted, Algon declines. Over the years, he has become so focused on his own, only slowly progressing project that he only rarely and reluctantly interrupts it, even on request of fellow guild members. Not exactly an uncommon trait among accomplished wizards, but one that Merchio nevertheless interprets as an attempt to hide something.

Merchio then asks whether Ennuna has any theories of his own. He explains that a common suspicion of the authorities is that Arach mages want to test Chadezz defences, terrifying the populace and preparing for a raid.
Ximolac states that he hasn’t heard of any planned raids or powerful magicians during his stay in Arach. The clans in the city are too occupied with their own problems and too much at odds with each other to even think about such a big operation. Ennuna agrees. He has been to the other city only a couple of times – the old centre of the Sha’Etemmu guild is in Arach but the locals think the guild is too intertwined with the government of Chadezz now to tolerate them in their city for long – and he hasn’t met any really powerful mages there either, just a couple of moderately competent priests.

Ximolac speculates that some wizard could use the rituals as training, probably planning a bigger assault or more elaborate ritual later on. That would explain why the blood isn’t used too. Ennuna agrees that this might be possible.
Ximolac also conjectures that the Bloodhunters are just a cover-up for other experiments on the children before the transformation. Ennuna replies that no traces of such experiments have been found in the analysis of the bodies.
Ximolac finally come up with yet another theory about a broken and recently reactivated automated magical process chain. Children are kidnapped and turned into Numlaks to collect blood for another link in the process chain – only that one is broken, so the blood is never used. Ennuna doubts this one- the temple is so old that any magical processes attached to it would likely have completely broken down by now unless regularly maintained. And there wasn’t any sign of active magic around the temple, not even recognizable remains of previously cast ones.

Ximolac also asks whether he can talk to Ennunas guards. He wants to know whether there is any way to contact Werun in prison and let him know he is trying to help. Zargo offers to help by passing on a message via the jailor, an old friend from the time when he was still serving with the regular city guards. Ximolac gratefully accepts and aks him to tell Werun that he will continue to look for his sons and also for the real culprits.

After leaving Ennuna and discussing matters among themselves, the characters realize that they don’t have any way to verify any of those theories. The only thing they could check was whether Algon was involved, which they consider the most likely theory anyway. They try to come up with an excuse to see him at his workplace. Probably one of them could pretend to be mad. But Merchio is too well-known by now and Ximolac doesn’t think he could fool an expert for long. So they need a proper madman.
Merchio actually knows one, another survivor from Hawan, a fisherman called Sof, who is sometimes overcome with a desire to eat dirt, much to his own embarrassment. They head down to the commoner district where most of Hawans population is currently surveying the derelict houses in the area granted to them, trying to figure out which of the bigger ones can be easily restored. Asking the first Hawanite he meets, Merchio finds out that the fishermen have gone on to the harbour to start building new boats. King Nungal wants his men to be able to feed themselves again as quickly as possible, to alleviate the burden they place on Chadezz’ population.
In the harbour, they quickly find Sof. He is trying to organize the cutting and transportation of suitable trees with the local labourers. He readily agrees to a treatment by an accomplished wizard. Merchio promises to pick him up tomorrow if he can arrange a therapy session. On the way back, however, the characters suddenly decide that they could probably learn much more (and much faster) by breaking into Algons home and workplace in the temple district. So the Sof plan is sidelined.

[Smirg]

Session 3 – Breaking and Entering for the common good:

Discussing how to safely break into a house on the palace grounds, Ximolac comes up with a cunning plan. If illusion magic can create a believable monster, it should be even easier to create an “average guy” disguise. So off they go pestering Lima again.

The magic system was the only part of the game I had to work on during the campaign, as balancing free-form magic from the get-go without any test is more or less impossible. I actually started out with broad ideas of power levels only.
Ximolacs own light magic level is 2 (his “general” Forces level), which is enough to create some “broad stroke” illusions like changing colour of clothing or skin, but not detailed enough to create a believable disguise. Under the revised magic rules, he would have been able to boost his effective level to 3 – Limas level – for a single spell by expending one of his “unused points” in Forces magic, as previously mentioned. I had actually planned this from the get-go but then totally forgotten about it.
Not that it really matters, though. Using up those precious “unused points” if you can just tap into another resource is a bit of a waste anyway, so going to Lima was a likely solution after all. Also, Ximolac never really experimented with his light capabilities before, and, being self-taught, he probably didn’t even know he could create such a detailed illusion with a bit of effort.
Basically, I changed the magic system only in ways that would allow previously used effects to still be possible (albeit often a bit harder than they originally were). I don’t like outright retcons.

Lima, as can be expected, isn’t too happy to see them again. She has returned to her house and is currently occupied with staring into empty space, tears on her face, blaming herself for everything that happened (which isn’t really wrong after all). When she recognizes the visitors, she yells at them to leave her alone. Ximolac replies that despairing won’t change what has happened and that she still owes them for not turning her in together with her brother. She stares at him in disgust but acknowledges he has a point. They should say what they want so she can get it over quickly.
Ximolac asks for an “average poor person” disguise for both of them during the night. Lima replies that her disguises only last a couple of hours at most so they should return to her before they need it. She doesn’t ask what the disguise is for as she believes she is better off not knowing. Also, she doesn’t really care about anything beside Andos death right now. She does make clear, however, that she will consider any debt settled with this favour.
Merchio also asks Habik for some tools he might need for the breaking and entering. Nobody really uses locks around these parts – the art of fine mechanics is mostly lost as most remaining examples are too rusted to allow detailed analysis and there are more important crafts to relearn anyway – so the standard technique on house doors is simply hook and eye. Bolts count as advanced tech already and are what can be expected in a guild members house, probably several of them on one door. The basic defence against thieves is staying alert and discouraging them with draconic punishment.

Properly equipped, Merchio and Ximolac return to Limas house during the night. Lima, doing her best to show contempt (she doesn’t have to try hard), paints some strange symbols on their clothes and faces using coloured clay. It takes her an hour for both of them but as the magic takes effect, the results look really convincing.
Lima uses yet another kind of magic, “bound magic”. Bound magic can use any kind of ritual (depending on the user) to create a flow of Ether and manifest it in the desired effect. Most users know only one or two kinds of ritual. Rune-drawing, dancing or singing are common. Bound magic is also pretty useful to create spells and store them for later, usually by brewing potions or empowering some talisman that releases the magic when broken. It takes a bit more time than other types of magic but has the advantage that it doesn’t need too much training. Using rare material components or extra-complex rituals is more important than a strong mind (it’s the only type of magic not dependant on the Mind Attribute).
In Limas case, she obviously uses drawn symbols to achieve the desired effects. Like Ximolac, she is a naturally talented spell-caster. She hasn’t learned the craft from a master. Instead she gets impressions of shapes and symbols in her mind whenever she looks at something, and, after experimenting a bit, found out how to alter the appearance of things by modifying those shapes.

The thieves march back to the palace district, making haste to conserve the spells duration, and decide to enter the temple grounds from where it borders to the palace area. Ximolac gives Merchio a lift. Merchio peeks over the wall and sees a single guard patrolling (another is standing watch at the gate), making its rounds around the ziggurath in the centre of the area. The temple district has only halve a dozen guards in total so this is the best security they can manage.
The Sha’Etemmu have their homes and workplaces at Merchios side of the grounds, along the wall separating it from the palace, while the priests live at the far side, near the wall to the commoner district.
Merchio waits until the guard disappears behind the ziggurath, pulls himself up onto the wall and helps Ximolac to climb it. Then, they quietly drop down on the other side and hide behind the nearest building.
They wait for the guard to pass again – this takes a few minutes – and then start to check houses. This isn’t easy as most windows are closed with a shutter and even if they can peek through a gap it is too dark inside to really see anything. A few houses also have small windows, not much bigger than arrow-slits, which are only closed off with a curtain or not at all to let in the cool night air. Behind one of those, they can hear the raspy breathing of an old man.

Merchio manages to silently draw aside the two bolts on the door with some wires, pausing and hiding when the guard approaches. He glances inside the small chamber and sees a small old man with a light grey beard sleeping on a narrow bed, mumbling and rolling about a bit in his sleep. He now realizes they have no idea what Algon looks like, beside being rather old. They can just hope that there aren’t too many old men in the guild. They quickly slip inside and close the door behind them. They hold their breath for a while but despite his movements the old man seems soundly asleep.
Despite two open arrow-slit windows it’s very dark in here. They cannot make out much more than shapes – a desk with a chair, a trunk and a shelf. Beside the door, there are two hooks. A coat hangs on one of them – not too common in the region because almost no one goes out during the cold nights and people rarely care about getting wet during the day – and a ring with a pair of keys on the other, a small one and a pretty big, slightly rusty one.
Merchio and Ximolac first check the documents on the desk but don’t find anything conclusive. They only contain writing, and neither of them can read (as they suddenly realize – they should have thought about that before). They then check the “books” on the shelf. What passes for a book around here is usually a rolled-up bundle of papyrus scrolls, bound together and often kept in leather cases.
Opening them and holding them into the little light coming in from the tiny windows, they quickly find one containing pictures of Numlaks in the making, seemingly depicting steps in the ritual (together with instructions they can’t read): Regular children, unskinned ones (with a diagram showing how to do this, though the means are obviously magical rather than using a knife or other mundane tools) und finally close-ups of the arms which are modified for striking power and sharp claws. It looks like a recent copy guessing from the state of the papyrus and the still-strong colours.

Silently signalling that both of them think this is likely the culprit – any official research on the dead bodies would likely be done in the shared workspaces rather than the private homes, which most people just use for sleeping – they decide to simply take anything they can find.
They first take all the documents, ornate candle holders and a much simpler oil lamp from the desk. Opening the desk drawers, they find writing utensils, two flasks of lamp oil, blank papyrus and strange bronze instruments for measuring one thing or another. They take everything they find, putting it into a different bag than the documents. A regular thief wouldn’t just steal documents, after all.
They then take the books from the shelves and finally check the trunk. It’s locked. The trunk itself must be pretty valuable because it has a lock, and it seems to be painted too, although they can’t make out any details in the dark. The smaller key fits – the other is far too large – and they quietly look through the things stacked in there. Various clothes, plain and ornate ones, a few valuables – a silver mug and plate and other mundane things as well as a few more implements of unknown purpose – and more, seemingly older, documents. They take everything except for the plain clothes.

They manage to do all this without waking the sleeping old man. They wait until the guard passes once more and slip out. Merchio wants to climb the wall right away but Ximolac signals him to wait. He whispers to him that, as they have a magical disguise, they should make the best of it by letting themselves be seem – so that it obviously were some regular lowlifes who committed the theft.

So far so good, only the plan they come up with to let themselves be seen is a bit... questionable, in my opinion. As can be guessed from the previous theories about the Bloodhunters and Limas drug herbs, the players in general are pretty good at collecting the right clues and then coming to strange conclusions and solutions. It wasn’t the last time in the campaign either.
The plan they come up with goes like this: Move to the far corner of the temple area, the corner between the palace grounds and the higher outer city walls, to get away from the immediate crime scene. Then wait until the guard comes round to see them and pretend to struggle with climbing onto the wall to give him time to come near. Then, to let the disguise be clearly seen, light a fire on top of the wall with one of the oil flasks and a tinder box they stole from the house they broke in. To prevent the guard from following them over the wall, of course. Oookay.
That’s pretty much how the plan is executed, too. Ximolac spontaneously adds a bit and throws a broken brick he picked up at the guard to further prevent pursuit.
Actually, the player just wanted to try out his kinetic magic, so he gave the brick some extra oomph, only pretending to throw it. In fact he was guiding and speeding it up with a spell.
Ximolac hits the guardsman square in the chest and, despite the leather armour, gives him quite a bruise and makes him stagger and fall down. Ximolac then yells “Quick, let’s scram!” and jumps down the wall on the far side, closely followed by Merchio who first sets fire to the oil.

The rest of the escape goes pretty well. Now on palace grounds, they run along the cities outer wall for a bit, then pause to climb it. As before, Ximolac gives a lift and Merchio climbs up and then helps his colleague. This is harder than climbing the walls within the city as the city walls are a bit taller, but they still manage pretty well. They jump down the other side, but as there is a ditch at the foot of the walls on the outside, Ximolac who lacks any athletic training sprains his ankle a bit.
They then move south to the river. Near the shore, the city wall has collapsed so they can easily enter the uninhabited part of the commoner district. Looking around for a hiding place for their loot, they find a chimney that is still partly standing and place the bag with the documents and instruments in there. The valuables are just tossed into the river. They are too easily recognized to be sold, and making money wasn’t their intention anyway.
This became another running gag. Whenever they wanted to hide something or look for something hidden, they would first look for a chimney.
They wait for the disguise to wear off, wash off the remains of the magic sigils and walk back to their rooms to get some sleep.

[Smirg]

Session 4 – Numlak Production Inc.:

This session, Nebuks player is back so there is finally someone available who can read the evidence they “secured” last session.

In the morning, Nebuk, as usual, goes to the ziggurat for a small sacrifice. He immediately notices that something is going on. Guild members and priests stand around in groups discussing something. As he asks what is going on, one of the priest tells him that someone broke into Algons house last night.
As Nebuk returns, Merchio and Ximolac are already awake and looking for him. Meeting him as he comes back to the palace, they ask him whether he can read some documents for them. Nebuk frowns and asks them to hand them over and Merchio tells him they must first get them from the swamps. “It’s you who committed the burglary last night, right?” “Ummm... Yes.”

The group takes a morning stroll to the south of the city. Merchio quickly spots the chimney they hid their evidence in and hands the bag to Nebuk. “I suggest you start with the documents from his desk and then take a look at those books.” “Okay, but this will take a few hours even if I only skim over it.”
So Nebuk starts reading while the others sit around. The documents from the desk don’t contain anything useful, they are just notes about Algons regular project. He tries to cure mental illnesses by cutting out those parts of the subjects mind and memory that are related to it. The big problem he faces is cleanly removing them without affecting too much else. A surgical mind-wipe doesn’t seem to be an easy thing.
Nebuk then checks the book with the Numlak illustrations. It is indeed a manual for the creation ritual, probably copied from a larger book a few months ago. It also contains notes from Algon on how to optimize the rituals mind wipe to cover up previous partial attempts he made and erase the personal signature these spells left with the generic ritual signature. He cross-references his most recent notes on his madness-curing project so his work on the Numlak document was likely also currently in progress. Probably, when checking the dead Bloodhunter Nebuk brought after the fight, Algon noticed some traceable magic marks he had left and that he wanted to correct for the next bunch of Numlaks.

Nebuk checks the rest of the books but doesn’t find anything important. Most concern Algons regular work and one is a fairly generic treatment of Body Mutation magic, describing what concentration techniques are best to perform those ritual castings depending on what part of the body should be transformed.
While the priest looks at those remaining books, Ximolac gets bored and takes a walk along the river. Near the harbour district, he finds a young man standing on his boat spear-fishing in the delta. Ximolac uses kinetic magic to cause the fisherman to stumble and fall into the water. He then innocently asks the fisher whether he needs help. The young man, obviously embarrassed by his accident and angry at anyone who saw him as a result, says he is fine, climbs back into the boat and continues. Ximolac waits a bit, throws him into the water again and then returns to the others, advising the young man to work on his technique.

By now Nebuk has finished his quick check of the documents. The notes on Algons regular project are so detailed and pedantic that he wonders how someone like this didn’t leave any notes at all about this other project of his. Merchio mentions that there was no other evidence pointing to the missing children either, and Nebuk concludes that the ritual must be performed at some place other than the guilds regular workplaces. Algon wouldn’t have been able to keep it secret otherwise. They both agree that the rest of the guild likely doesn’t know what is going on.
The group returns to the palace for a meal and to discuss how they can find the ritual place. While they are at it, they are interrupted by a servant. Apparently, Ennunas guards have been looking for them and want to talk to them.
They ask Rishum and Zargo to come in. Rishum greets them and Zargo only grumbles something incomprehensible. The group returns the greetings and Rishum fills them in on the burglary last night (as if they didn’t know).
Ximolac asks whether they already know who did it and Zargo grumbles and nods. “Quick, let’s scram!” he says. The group is puzzled about what he means. “Your voice. I recognized it from the talk you had with Ennuna in the evening. About Algon. Very subtle, making your move just a few hours later. And remind me to pay you back for the stone some time.” He rubs his chest.
The group looks surprised, not sure whether they should put up a fight. “Really, we don’t mind what you are doing.”, Rishum quickly adds. “Zargo didn’t tell anyone else, though Ennuna probably suspects you too. He doesn’t care though. You didn’t produce any ghosts. I hope you at least found something out about those Bloodhunters. If you can appease the dead by bringing the culprits to justice, the guild will surely just glance over the theft.”
Merchio is surprised they are willing to just ignore the crime. They are guards, after all. “We used to be guards until a few years ago, but now we only work for the guild and priesthood.”, Rishum explains. “And I doubt the authorities do much to investigate the Bloodhunter problem anyway. As long as they can blame it on Arach and instigate the populace against our neighbours, they likely even think it’s convenient. After all, these pests don’t do much damage.” Rishum sounds pretty angry about that.
“Could this be the reason Algon did this?”, Ximolac asks. “To frame Arach?”
“I doubt it. Algon just cares about his mind project. So it was him?”
“It seems so. He had a manual for the ritual in his house, and the notes suggest he has experimented with it. We haven’t been able to find the ritual place though. We don’t think it’s on the guilds grounds. Do you know whether he regularly goes somewhere else?”

Rishum thinks about the matter a bit. “He sometimes leaves for the palace at night. Says he is treating someone there who doesn’t want this to get public. I can’t remember whether this coincides with new Bloodhunters appearing, though.”
“I do”, Zargo adds. “At least for the most recent ones. He left two nights before your fight with the Hunters. I was on duty back then.”
Merchio hands him the big, slightly rusty key they found in Algons small home. “Do you know what this is for?”
“Hmmm. Looks like it could be in the palace. It has a few locks, and they are pretty big. Pretty old too, but cared for at least enough to not totally fall apart. Probably in an unused part of the palace. Ilu’luanas court isn’t big enough to require all of the available space. Most of the eastern wing is abandoned. If Algons laboratory really is in the palace, you should be careful, though. Someone must have let him in, after all, and someone has to get the kids for him. I doubt old Algon captures them himself.”
“I guess we will check it out tonight.”

Around midnight, the three of them leave their quarters in the palace west wing and meet up. They move into the east wind and, after passing the rooms and workshops of the cities master craftsmen, reach the abandoned parts. The rooms and corridors are still in decent repair and only slightly dusty – the palace staff still maintains them for the few times they can actually be used, and the guard doesn’t want any possible weaknesses in the structure either – but mostly empty, except for a few used as storehouses for junk that will probably never be used again.
Tracks in the thin layer of dust covering the floors at the regions farthest to the east – the neglect of maintenance increases with the distance to the inhabited parts – show that at least some of the corridors were recently crossed. Merchio, the party member most adept at stealth, scouts ahead.

Right before reaching the eastern outer wall of the building, the tracks turn left into a room. Merchio peeks through the open archway. The small chamber seems to be empty except for a closed door at the far side. The wooden door sports a large keyhole. Merchio nevertheless stops for a minute to listen and hears some quiet noises from within the room, from the corner to his left, a rustling sound as from cloth adjusting to the wearer shifting his stance. He risks a quick glance and sees a guardsman standing in the corner, likely waiting for intruders to enter the room from a not immediately visible position.
Merchio moves back to the group and tells them what he has seen. A short discussion ensues how to get to the door. A suggestion to overwhelm and subdue the guard before he can raise an alarm is deemed unlikely to work and therefore too risky. None of the characters is an expert at such things. An attempt at distraction might also lead to the guard alerting others just in case – the Vultures they met so far seemed to be quite disciplined and not likely to give a “Probably nothing, but I’d better go and take a look anyway” reaction. Sneaking by the guard seems right out – even a master thief couldn’t cross the room, unlock the door and slip inside without being seen.

Without any option they can reliably pull off, the group finally agrees to wait and observe. They have to wait for half an hour, then the guard comes out of the room. Instead of walking down the corridor, he only takes a short look around (the group has hidden in the entranceway to another room and isn’t noticed) and approaches a door opposite the archway he just came out of, knocks and whispers “Time for the change.”
Only a moment later, the door opens and another guardsman comes out. He nods to the first and moves into the antechamber of the supposed laboratory while the previous guard enters the other room and closes the door behind him. Ximolac thinks that the whole setup is probably a trap, perhaps there are even more guards waiting in the room.
The group decides they cannot overcome several guards and need to bluff their way past them instead. As the guardsmen all know each other, they decide to pose as a servant of Algon instead. This will require some preparation, however, and they withdraw for the night.

The next morning, they first go see a tailor. They already know the one who clothed them for the execution, and he managed to tailor some fine, though not elaborate, clothes within a day. As he does most of the sewing work for the palace, the man is well-fed and friendly (or at least convincingly pretends to be).
The tailor is a bit surprised as they ask him for the traditional Sha’Etemmu wear for Ximolac – a long white tunic and cap and a light green sash (darker shades are for well-established members and the darkest green for the special Manzazuu position) – but Merchio relies on his recently acquired reputation and just tells him that this is important. The tailor should trust him that this was necessary for the common good. This seems to work and Nebuk pays the bill with what is left of his share of the Bloodhunter bounty.

The group then goes back to the chimney at the river (they still hide the stolen documents there) to create a forged message from Algon to allow them entrance into the laboratory. They go over the magicians notes to get a feeling of his style and decide on a brief, matter-of-factly and self-confident order.
They discuss the wording for a bit and settle on: “The recent events force me to make some changes in order to continue my work. As I currently can’t afford to go myself, I’ve sent a servant to fetch the things I need.” They decide against being too precise or signing with his name “in case the message falls into the wrong hands”, as anyone in the know would get the meaning anyway.
Nebuk writes down the short message. Everyone tries his hand at forging Algons handwriting and Ximolac comes closest. He doesn’t know how to read and write but his years of carving decorations have given him a steady hand, good manual dexterity and an eye for fine details. He copies a few sentences from Algons notes to get the individual letters right and then tries to transcribe Nebuks message. The first attempt doesn’t convince Nebuk when he scrutinizes it but the second one seems pretty good.

The group also takes a trip around the palace to peek into the antechamber and supposed laboratory from the outside. There is still a guard sitting in the antechamber, so either everyone important in the palace knows what’s going on or one of his fellow conspirators is covering his absence on his regular post.
The look through the next window shows a small corridor behind the door. Some stairs go down to a basement – not all parts of the palace have a cellar but some do – and more doors lead to what was once a small apartment, although one of the finer ones in the palace. Mosaics cover the floor and the walls are covered in murals, though the colours are faded and parts of the paint have already peeled off the walls. Nebuk is slightly reminded of the guild archives he visited and speculates (correctly) that this was once the court wizards home.

At night, Ximolac dons the disguise – he isn’t the smoothest talker but both Merchio and Nebuk are too well-known by now – and heads off to the laboratory. Entering the antechamber, he takes a quick look around until he “notices” the guard. The man has already stood up and readied his spear but hasn’t raised an alarm yet, staring undecidedly on the guild garb. “I have been ordered to fetch some things.” Ximolac whispers and hands the note to the Vulture.
The man gives him a suspicious look. “I have to check. Come with me.” Still pointing his spear at Ximolac, the Vulture signals him to go back into the corridor with a wave of his hand, then approaches the door his colleagues are hiding in, knocks and enters. Three guards are dozing in the small chamber beyond but they quickly stand up and ready their weapons as he comes in. “What’s up” one of them asks. He wears a sword, so he is probably an officer.
The guardsman hands the fake order to his superior. The officer removes the shutter from a lamp and light fills the room. He then squints at the note, diligently looking it over thrice while Ximolac tries to hide his nervousness. “Alright. Let him in.” If a Mind mage trusts this servant, who is he to argue?
The guardsman heads back to the antechamber. Ximolac lights his own lamp, follows him and tries to open the door. It’s locked. As the guard doesn’t appear to do anything about it and doesn’t even seem to have any keys, Ximolac takes out the one they stole. He just hopes that the guards don’t know what exactly has been stolen from Algons house. Apparently they don’t, and the large key indeed fits. Relieved, Ximolac unlocks the door, takes the lamp and heads down the stairs.

The cellar is a single large room. At the centre, there’s a big table with dark stains and shackles attached. Some wooden boxes with bolted doors and small barred windows line the far wall. That is probably where the captured children were kept. They are empty now, so Weruns children have obviously been “processed” already.
A large shelf contains lots of books and a collection of implements of unidentifiable purpose that sport a worrying number of sharp points and edges. In a corner lies a pile of ragged, child-sized ragged clothes, some of them blood-stained. Another pile seems more... organic... like skin. The whole room has a nasty smell.
Finally, Ximolacs eyes fall upon a desk with scattered notes and another, currently unlit lamp. Some of the pages contain sketches that look like they are part of the ritual and more arcane diagrams, annotated with Algons immaculate handwriting. Some are just blocks of text. At one side, there is a stack of pages each labeled with some numbers that appear to be dates.
Ximolac collects all the papers from the desk and takes a quick look at the books on the shelves. None of them seems to be written by Algon so he decides they don’t contain any useful clues. He goes back to the stairs, locks the door again, nods to the guard, extinguishes his lamp and leaves.

Back in their own rooms, Nebuk takes a look at their quarry. The stack of numbered papers seems to be a diary of the rituals performed. Major parts of the entries do not refer to the ritual itself, however, but to Algons own experiments on the children before he transformed them. The detailed descriptions don’t make much sense to Nebuk, as the form of magic used is quite unlike his own. From what he can gather, Algon tried to remove certain personality traits and memories from his victims minds before completely wiping them.
Looking through the diary, Nebuk spots one short but particularly interesting comment from two months ago. It is not related to the experiments: “My petitions have been finally heeded and the agents in Arach have been replaced. I have been shown the reports of Wedem and Renkos previous assignments and they seem competent enough. I just hope they can put an end to the constant delays in delivery. It gets really tedious to rearrange my schedule every time they screw up the procurement.”