Tour de Grimewater

Helewynn walks her Nan through town to the Shrine of the Shadowbound. Selawynn is well-respected, even by the town guards who pay her deference. She sings to the passersby and they stop and greet her, offering her food and copper coins.

“You’re taking care of yourself?”

The winding streets go through the slums: some homes have walls of mud brick or wood, but most are canvas and poles. People walk barefoot in the muddy streets. But people chat and eat, some mull around, but they are snapped out of their misery when Selawynn and you walk by. Selawynn begins to sing. Helewynn takes up her grandmother’s song and they go together.

The people of Grimewater follow in their wake, singing along, beating on drums and playing flutes, and strumming harps and lyres that they’ve learned how to play on so well they can account for broken and untunable strings.

“I hope you remember the people of Grimewater. These are your people. Keep them in your heart. They keep you in theirs, even if they don’t always show it.”

You reach the shrine, followed by cousins and aunts and uncles who are not related to you by blood, but you know them like family. You and Selawynn step up to the ancestor shrine, up a small set of worn stone stairs. At the top, there is a broken stone niche with a stone statue inside. In front of the statue is a bowl that is empty. The features of the statue are weathered away, the face unrecognizable, but it is your ancestor, the first shadow sorcerer who died centuries ago, Shrine of the Shadowbound. A flower crown is placed on the blank-faced figure’s head.

Selawynn places a copper coin in the bowl. “To our ancestor who consumed the shadow that we wield today.”

Your 13-year-old “cousin” Rosaline comes up to you and asks if you’re going on an adventure soon. Hespero summoned you to lunch to discuss a job.

“Sounds cool!”

You know that she is the shrine’s attendant and puts flower crowns on the statue. She is dressed in her uniform: long dingy white robe with red-tipped sleeves. It is the cheapest color after all. You also know that she takes the coppers. It is an open secret but Selawynn tells her to do it.

“Good luck. You always make me proud.”

je suis la jeune aberration

Skadi and Buck are in the basement of a pub in the Anvil Quarter where the language classes are held. You and three other students sit in a circle around the teacher.

Muzmuzax is an 8 foot tall creature that looks like a green mound of sea anemone. They have orange eyes and contain an unknowable darkness within.

Skadi and Buck are in celestial class (Hespero doesn’t teach it, doesn’t speak it, doesn’t like it). The tutor Muzmuzax has some other people in the class.

They are worshippers of the deadgod, which they call the Divine Fallen, and call themselves the Diviners. But people call them deadheads and they never come back from the Godsbody alive. But that’s fine, it is an honor to die as the god did.

Fisk, Prim, and Luger are the three deadheads in the class. They are all from the Grimewater. They have never tried to convert you to their religion, thinking of you as unworthy of the truth of the deadgod.

Buck writes a paper about the Godsbody. Does OK. The research was good, but few examples of the impluperfect and the subjunctive. Skadi writes a paper on something but I forgot what it was, sorry it’s been like a whole month, but it also came out OK. The deadheads wrote really terrible papers and failed the class. Whatever, they brought really bad snacks too.

Muzmuzax accepts your snacks happily. But sorry, also forgot what they were.

Blikz at the Quartermaster

Blikz goes to pick up his payment for a bounty:

A bandit who had killed and robbed a traveling family. Blikz was able to track him down after he found all three of his fellows standing with a gut wound.

Blikz, you captured a bandit, who you are parading through the streets right now on the way to the military quarter. As you wait your turn at the entrance, where the guards, as usual, confiscate your weapons, you see a multi-mustachioed dwarf retrieving his great-axe. You know him as Bourbon Maduro. His mustaches are dyed blue and his beard is dyed red.

Blikz, a few more pennies for you, lad? Be better off going back to fixing mining equipment for my Pa at this rate.

Bourbon just turned in a counterfeiter named Baxter for a big reward.

You find yourself before [[ Bertrand ]], the quartermaster, at the barracks, having handed over the bounty to a guard. Blikz is offered 5 gp, much less than the stated bounty of 25 gp, “Which was for all six of them. I should really give this guy the money. Take it or leave it. I appreciate what you did by recovering that cargo, but I’m no charity, Blikz.”

Meeting Hespero

The four of you meet with Hespero of Meretesk to discuss the retrieval of a book. He pays for lunch of course.

• There is a valuable book there: The wizard’s notes about other planes. Pick up anything else that seems valuable too and I might buy it off you.
• I will pay you 200 gp for the book called “Interpretations of the Many-Bodied”
  • You negotiated up to 240 gp. Nice work.
• Offers Buck access to the arcane library to learn more about the world at large

Loose Ends

You all run into the bandits by the river. The ones that Blikz was looking for. You completely brutalize them, though Buck gets knocked out. You escort one of the prisoners and Buck on a stretcher and get back to the city to pick up the rest of the reward from Bertrand and maybe come up with a different plan, renting a raft from a friend of Helewynn’s but have it back in time for the festival!

On the way back upriver, Buck retrieves his handaxes that he hurled at the bandits. Their corpses still lay in the grass, ravaged by passing predators, though headless, since you took their heads back, I think.

The Tower

The heroes search around the tower, finding a dead elf with a rope. Looks like she fell. The heroes decide not to climb up the tower and instead use the circular key that Hespero provided for the entrance. Blikz tries to turn the key all the way around and feels himself start to grow quills before his wisdom saves him.

Anyway, you get into the first floor, start poking around. Helewynn finds another adventurer, his legs broken, and far above there is a scaffolding that leads further up the tower. He was hired to “get a stupid book” by a wizard that does not seem to match Hespero’s description.

Hespero did mention that the book in question will have a name, written in Celestial, meaning “He Who Visits.”

Blikz meanwhile sets up a bunch of rope to pull the three levers at the far end of the wall safely. One by one he pulls them down (as they all stand by the doorway) and bones fall out. They seem to be the bottoms of spike pit traps. They take one step forward and the bones stand up and the corpse that also fell rips its skin off! Surprise, it’s two monsters!

The heroes run outside, shutting the door for the skeletons and killing the bag of skin.

The heroes are outside the Tower of Glass, near their rented raft. They just fought off a bag of skin and there are multiple skeletons inside the tower’s first floor. Through a hidden crack in the wall, the heroes had met a member of an expedition (which seems to have claimed the life of another member).

Next Episode: so thats where all the glass is