Rise of the Runelords Recap # 34 [RPG]

[13 Neth 4707 continued]

With a plan to reunite at Artemis’ house at midday, the adventurers find different ways to occupy themselves in the morning.

Kang crafts a new batch of drow poison and then walks to Naos District with a particular destination in mind: a mediocre-looking wine shop named Boria’s.  Inside the store, stocked with a mundane selection of wines and decorated with a silver statuette of Cayden Cailean, Kang is subtly warned by the shop’s proprietor, an old acquaintance, that the two are being scried.  In a conversation ostensibly about samples of rare wines, Kang makes a very lucrative sale of the drow poison.  After leaving the shop, Kang is walking down the street when he sees something he never expected: himself!  A figure who looks exactly like Kang is walking on the other side of the crowded street near an open air cantina where the waiters dress like vagrants to the delight of visiting aristocrats.  The real Kang follows the duplicate Kang, but the latter realizes he’s being tailed and tries to make a run for it.  Kang chases his doppelganger into an alleyway and then gets jumped, as his double grows claws!  The fake Kang repeats, with minor alterations, everything that the real Kang says until the real Kang blows him to smithereens with a cascade of bombs!  The strange altercation has not gone unnoticed, however, and some good samaritans try to detain Kang until the City Watch can arrive, but the nimble tiefling manages to get away and disappear into another neighborhood.

Meanwhile, Artemis walks to Underbridge District, commonly known by locals as the Shadow due to the area literally receiving only a few hours of sunlight a day.  Amidst the enormous pilings of the Irespan that looms above, the Shadow is home to seedy dives, flophouses, and “streets” that are nothing more than muddy, trash-strewn gaps between dilapidated buildings that look like they could collapse at any time.  Artemis makes his way carefully into an abandoned building, the floor of which has collapsed to reveal basements below.  There, he reunites with a band of kobolds he befriended years previously as a teenager when they recognized his mixed human/draconic ancestry.  The kobolds say there have been encroachments on their territory by gangs of humans and mysterious kidnappers from below.  When Artemis asks if they know anything about the recent murders on the streets of Magnimar, he’s told of two different sightings of mysterious flying creatures in the Shadow occasionally plucking someone from the streets and disappearing into the darkness.  Although interesting, the information isn’t quite was Artemis was looking for and he bids the tribe farewell.

"Axetongue" Droeab, Master of Ceremonies

For their part, Bey, Briza, and Arnald go together to Alabaster District to see the city’s most popular public venue:  Serpent’s Run, the largest arena in Varisia.  Capable of seating over 5,000 people, the hippodrome is well-named from the huge carving of a snake winding around its upper rim.  As they walk down Champion’s Walk, Briza sees the newest statue is that of her friend (and current arena champion) “Bonecrusher” Harkam.  She excitedly points this out to her companions, and the three head into the arena and pay for middle-rank seats to watch a massive mock naval battle.  Arnald is keen to enter one of the events frequently open to adventurers such as fighting monsters, other adventuring parties, or even the arena champion, and the promise of gold or magic items by the arena’s Master of Ceremonies certainly makes the proposition attractive.  However, Bey talks Arnald into waiting until after the night’s planned raid on the Seven’s Sawmill so they don’t draw undue attention to themselves.

At midday, the adventurers reunite at Artemis’ house.  Somewhat bedraggled from the battle against his double, Kang explains that everyone should be on the lookout for potential impostors.  The adventurers decide on a code word to identify themselves, just in case.  Various plans are discussed for how to approach the sojourn to the Seven’s Sawmill, but eventually the group settles on simply pretending they’re friends of Aldern Foxglove and seeing what happens.  After realizing just how evil the mask worn by Aldern in his guise as the Skinsaw Man is, the adventurers take it to Father Fendus at Deadeye Lodge and he destroys it after offering the group a bounty for it. The rest of the afternoon is spent buying and selling various goods in Magnimar's markets.

 When darkness falls, the adventurers walk to Kyver’s Isle and again stake out the Seven’s Sawmill.  Seeing nothing unusual, they approach and knock on the door.  A mill worker answers the door but looks confused when the adventurers mention a meeting, but he says they can ask the manager in his office upstairs.  The worker leads the group up several flights of stairs to the fourth floor.  Artemis can tell that there’s something not quite right about the man’s behaviour, and both he and Kang hear the creaking of the stairs below them.  When the adventurers are led into a workshop with a thick layer of sawdust, a trap is sprung!  Over a dozen masked cultists armed with war razors and hand crossbows emerge from the shadows, but the adventurers (either through luck or tactical acumen) are in the perfect defensive formation and are ready for battle. 

The Skinsaw Cult

Lacking both the element of surprise and the ability to surround and overwhelm their prey, the cultists are on the verge of being routed despite their numerical advantage.  Arnald and Bey keep the attackers from the front at bay, while Briza single-handedly holds the rear from four assassins trying to sneak up after her!  In the middle, Artemis and Kang put their devastating ranged attacks to good use.  But the cultists have one last trick up their sleeves.  From the veil of invisibility, a figure suddenly appears wearing a mask made from a single long strip of pliant human skin stitched into a widening spiral by black thread.  The mask glows, and suddenly Arnald is unable to tell friend from foe!  The axe-man begin wreaking havoc in his own ranks, cutting Kang deeply before the alchemist escapes, and laying into Briza when she tries to talk him down.  Artemis’ arrows inflict deadly wounds on the spellcaster, creating an opening for Bey to charge and decapitate him with her bardiche.  After several seconds of mayhem, Arnald comes to his senses to see the battle is won, with all of the cultists either dead or dying (save one, who wisely surrendered). 

After a stunning victory over the Skinsaw Cult, have the masterminds behind the Sihedron murders finally been brought to justice?

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Director's Commentary (28 January 2018)

I've probably mentioned before that one of the few optional rules sub-systems I've used for this campaign is the Contacts system from Ultimate Campaign.  This session is a good example of the pros and cons.  What I like about the system is that it gives each PC one NPC they already have a connection with in a place they're likely to vist, and sets up the potential for some excellent role-playing opportunities.  Kang's encounter with the poison-seller Boria was really fun, and probably wouldn't have turned out nearly as well if Boria hadn't already been developed as Kang's Contact.  On the other hand, prepping a Contact can be a lot of work, and sometimes players don't use them at all--I expected Briza to use (or even recruit for the raid on the cult) her contact "Bonecrusher" Harkam,  and thus prepped a full stat-block.  Instead, the players went in a different direction and he never set foot "on-screen."

The battle of Kang vs. Kang was a fun little random encounter that occurred when the result was "doppelganger."  The Magnimar sourcebook was excellent on having different degrees of dangerousness for different neighbourhoods.

Artemis' encounter with the kobolds stemmed from his backstory.

The battle against the Skinsaw Cult at the sawmill was written to be a series of encounters against small groups of foes.  However, because of the forged note, the Cult knew to prep a trap.  This wouldn't be the last time that the PCs ended up doing things the hard way and fighting every available enemy simultaneously!  However, it often inexplicably works in their favour, as the result here showed.

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