Midnight Assembly Arc
In-Game Dates: 20th of the Rotting, 1470 - 28th of the Rotting,1470 (8 Days)
Session Dates: 01/18/19 - 03/08/19
Our heroes began their quest scattered on the shores of Dominion after being shipwrecked during their ferry-ride to Port Quinn. Only a day's ride south of their destination, the group of strangers boarded a wagon destined for Port Quinn and continued on through the Shaded Wood.
The wagon contained a ragged assortment of strange individuals: Guntir, an crotchety ancient hill-dwarf garbed in soiled rags and bandages; Heinrich, a young tiefling with deer-like antlers and a collection of journals; Shae, a standoffish and quiet human wearing the garb of the monastic order known as the Xinyi; and Morwen, a black tabaxi clad in the garb of a swashbuckler who proved quick to crack a joke. They were an odd group, but when they found themselves confronted by bandits, they showed themselves to be skilled warriors and slew the foes easily.
Arriving in Port Quinn, the individuals found that they’d each come to answer a similar posting for help, from the Merchant Council of Port Quin. They met with the Merchant Council and received a mission: discover what was digging up corpses from the cemetery across the trade road, and stop it. Upon arriving at the graveyard, the group immediately split up, each suspicious of the others. Eventually, by coincidence as much as deductive skill, they each found their way to the Tomb of the elvish prophetess, Vera Waithe.
Accidentally awaking an undead ghoul in Vera Waithe’s tomb, the four adventures were forced to prove their skill in combat again. As the undead creature was slain, the spirit of Waithe, (who's body had been stolen) spoke as it faded, no longer able to remain with its physical form missing:
A blue star, not from our skies/
Now appears before my eyes/
It's master is maker, and father, and son/
If it's teeth gain purchase, Alberon is done/
The first was found by a man/
his hair is orange, his mind expands/
He is not too far away/
but tarry too long, and to The Valley he'll stray/
The second resides in a purple maw/
I smell brimstone, and gore that's raw/
As her brood claws toward the light/
Kol Taram's dwarves will take flight/
The third I see, but do not hear/
For the eye of The Squall is near/
But at it's center, it rests in the ring/
Upon the hand of a cold, cruel king/
The fourth is lost out to sea/
None have found it, though many seek/
The fifth exists within a mind/
That whisper's lies and leads the blind/
The sixth I see in a massive tomb/
Giant boots walk by this room/
The final piece gives me unrest/
For she who speaks it, smells of death/
After finding some iron cogs, and a strange symbol carved into a nearby wall, the group skillfully tracked a wagon from the place that Vera Waithe’s body had been abducted through town, and eventually found their way to a temple of Helm. They arrived and met Dr. Twee Lightfoot, a gnomish cleric of Helm who used his ingenious clockwork tinkering and divine magic to mage miraculous, complex prosthetic limbs.
The gears Heinrich found matched the type seen in Twee’s workshop. With the temple filled with poor folk awaiting help from Twee, either to restore an arm or leg or beg help on an broken prosthetic, the group left and waited until night, to avoid hurting innocent bystanders.
The group broke into the temple in the early hours of the morning, and found a hidden ladder that led to the sewers. There, the heroes discovered a complex network of tunnels that had been converted into holding cells, bizarre torture chambers, and even a dark cathedral. Facing off against cultists belonging to the Midnight Assembly, a cult that had woven clockwork machinery and corpses together to for Assembled Souls, undead servitors and guards. Proving their hunch correct, Twee Lightfoot was serving as a leader for the Midnight Assembly. They fought and defeated him almost losing Shae in the process, and collected the bounty placed on whatever was abducting the bodies from the Merchant Council hastily.
Morwen used the money to invest in a store given to her by Rhodesia, who had formed a bond with Morwen in an earlier visit as they both had similar backgrounds smuggling and had decided to move upon discovering her husband had been slain by the Midnight Assembly, and hired the 13-year-old Ezra, a clever girl hustling people on the docks, to watch after the store.
It had been the Sandy Assortments, a general store specializing in items that had gone missing from the many ships that came into port, complete with a smuggling operation operating out of the basement, which connected to a hidden canal to the ocean. Morwen convinced the orcish captain who ran the Yellow Banner smugglers to “go easy” on the young girl. She then left a sack of gold beneath the counter with a note that said: “I believe in you! Good luck” and rejoined the rest of her traveling companions.
The reluctant friends agreed to escort a studious, long-winded wizard named Bernal Ossarius, who was obsessed with the stars. Bernal had noticed the arrival of Aurillion's star, a blue star that is only seen toward the end of an era, and he wished to find a shard of it that he had observed falling into the Devil’s Eye, an ever-churning ocean far to the south-east.
The group, when prompted for a name, Heinrich made the impulsive decision to call themselves “The Finger Gang” upon having the epiphany that every member in the group, save Shae, possessed a dismembered finger somewhere on their person.
Nervous that murdering Twee Lightfoot without significant proof of his wrongdoing may have consequences, The newly-named Finger Gang took an abandoned ship to the nearby island of Byss to acquire supplies and hire most of the crew.
Before departing from Port Quinn, Ska, a friend of Heinrich, nervously asked him to take a stolen item to Byss. Having stolen it from a monastic merchant caravan, Ska feared the monks would come after him. Since Heinrich and Ska were friends, Heinrich accepted and found himself in possession of a beautiful metallic chest with an almost imperceptible holographic pattern across it, and with no discernible cracks or openings. It was an ancient thing fused with the forgotten practice of orebinding, and only the paired attuned rod would open it.
An Assembled Soul
Copyright © 2023 Adventures in Alberon - All Rights Reserved.