Session Logs

The Rune Door

Outside the rune door, Prince Kolgan recognized one of ththe kobolds they had killed the day before. As for the door itself, he had never seen it open; his people had always taken the Dwarven runes for some kind of curse. Herald had a better theory. The riddles, the runework, the sheer age of it — this had the look of Zarmavdian, the dwarven diviner of the Roseguard, whose love of riddles Otari still celebrates every Founder's Day. Which meant one of the town's founders had built something down here and sealed it behind a puzzle. The party reasoned that anything sealed that carefully was sealed for a reason, and that the Queen should be dealt with first.

The Prince's Speech

They unburied the exit and pushed open the door. Kolgan stepped out in front of the party and announced that he had come to reclaim his throne — and that a fearsome band of surface-dwelling heroes, had come to help him do it.

The kobolds dropped their weapons at once. All but one: the trapmaster who stood on the far side of a pair of traps, between the party and the throne room, and did not budge.

Beans flew into the centre of the room and began a peace dance. The trapmaster, confused and terrified, stood still with his weapon raised and watched. Ja-ja, meanwhile, talked one of the surrendered warriors into picking his weapon back up and joining the fight against the Queen.

A short skirmish with the trapmaster followed, until Kolgan disarmed one of his traps and the party pushed into the throne room.

The Throne Room

A large pit in the centre of the room made it a tight squeeze for nine. The trapmaster and a kobold warrior held the line on either side of it while Queen Zolgran cast down barrage after barrage of magic missiles. The royal siblings fired at one another across the pit; Kolgan nearly went down several times, kept on his feet by healing from Corpi, Shiro, and Finn.

Ja-ja broke the line first and slaughtered a ranged guard in a single bite; Herald took down the other in two ravenous ones. Rygel wore the trapmaster down until he fled, leaving a trap behind him. Rather than disarm it, Vega simply walked through it like the mechanical beast he is.

The Fall of the Queen

Beans showed off his shiny new wings, flew across the pit, and dealt the Queen a fatal thunderous blast. Queen Zolgran was dead.

The trapmaster hobbled up the stairs behind the throne and raided a healing potion from the chest there. He had barely gulped it down before Ja-ja was on his heels and executed him with a final blow. After three escapes, the elusive trapmaster was finally dead.

King Kolgan

With the Queen dead, Herald had an easy time convincing the last guard to surrender. He knelt and hailed Kolgan the new king. Kolgan rallied the remaining kobolds and declared that the time of war was over — they were going to slay the dragon.

The Spoils

The party searched the Queen, the trapmaster, and the chest behind the throne, and spent some time squabbling over who got what: a spellbook, a dragon eggshell necklace, a masquerade scarf, a wand of heal, two healing potions, a silver bracelet, and a smoking sword. The scarf went to Kolgan, so he can disguise himself convincingly as a human and return to the surface without fear of discrimination.

Among the Queen's things was also a strange letter from a Dr. Zacchaeus Quagmire III to his nieces Charlotte and Theodora. It stresses the importance of checking the backs of paintings — one with a tiger on it in particular — and mentions secret passageways, ghosts, a squirmy entity, and cannibalistic librarians, along with knowledge and power hidden within a treatise of Jan Dreli Kolai the Sage. The full text is recorded in the lore.

Not Today

The thought of facing an untamed juvenile dragon was too much for the moment, so the party backpedaled toward the Dwarven runes. On the way, Finn tried to loot a chest in the kobold living quarters and was spotted, despite Ja-ja dancing on a table to draw attention away. Pazuzu, Shiro's companion, had better luck and made off with a painting of a horse.

Rewards

Encounter	XP
Slaying Queen Zolgran and rallying the kobolds behind Kolgan	220
Total	220

Party progress: 1026 / 1000 XP — the party levels up, with 26 XP carried over.

Treasure recovered

• From Queen Zolgran, the trapmaster, and the chest behind the throne: a spellbook, a dragon eggshell necklace, a wand of heal, two healing potions, a silver bracelet, and a smoking sword.
• A masquerade scarf, given to King Kolgan.
• A letter from Dr. Zacchaeus Quagmire III to his nieces Charlotte and Theodora.
• A painting of a horse, acquired by Pazuzu.

The Chase

Nobody was willing to rest. The trapmaster had a head start and they had to catch him.

The first obstacle was a bear trap laid across the way. Herald solved it by throwing his pizza rat companion, Herald II, onto the trigger plate. The jaws snapped shut on empty air. Herald II had already sprung clear, entirely unbothered, and was collected back onto his master's shoulder.

The Lookouts

The stair wound down into the dark and opened onto a room of overturned furniture. Three kobolds had made a firing line, crouched behind tables and barrels with crossbows trained on the bottom of the steps. Bolts came whistling up before anyone had both feet on the floor.

It was an ugly fight from a bad position, and Herald came within a hair of falling in it. Worse, it worked exactly as intended — while the party was pinned at the stairs, the trapmaster slipped out through a narrow passage, and left one last trap armed behind him to seal the way.

Pressed against the northern wall for cover, Herald and Beans found something that had nothing to do with kobolds at all. The stone there was carved with pictographs, and set into it were four plaques engraved with Dwarven runes. Not one member of the party could read a word of it.

The Mermaid Fountain

Ja-ja was not going to let the trapmaster walk away twice. He unbuckled the fine short sword he'd taken off a dead kobold a level above, laid it carefully on the trigger, and stepped back. The trap spent itself harmlessly on the blade, and he was through.

Beyond lay a chamber dominated by a great marble fountain, crowned with a mermaid whose lips were pursed as though caught mid-kiss — or mid-whistle. Finn came through after Ja-ja and stepped a little too close.

The mermaid began to spin. Torrential blasts of water shot from her lips, sweeping the chamber at random and hammering anything they caught. Through the far doorway, Finn made out the shapes of four more kobolds — and the trapmaster hauling that door shut behind him.

By the time the last of the lookouts fell among the overturned furniture and the rest of the party pushed through, the fountain was still turning. Four mechanisms sat at the corners of the basin, one already broken. They proved easy to hit and stubbornly difficult to break. Corpi gave up on them and swung at the mermaid herself, only to find her a maddeningly hard target. Finn and Beans went at the mechanisms with tools and technique and came agonizingly close to disabling them — but in the end it was barbaric strength that did it, one corner at a time, until the water finally died.

The coins in the basin were still there: 28 cp, 8 sp, and 2 gp.

A Dozen Voices

The obvious move was to follow the trapmaster. The party got as far as the door and stopped, because they could hear what waited on the other side of it — kobold voices. A lot of them. Perhaps a dozen.

So they took stock instead. Spells spent, potions drunk, more than one of them a bad hit from the floor, and no proper rest since the fishery cellar. Rather than open that door, they buried it, piling up the rubble the fountain's own water had eroded out of the walls until the way was blocked. Rygel carefully copied down the Dwarven runes to find someone who could read them, and the party climbed back toward daylight.

Tamily's History Lesson

Tamily Tanderveil was horrified — not by the spiders, or the undead, or the sarcophagus, but by the word kobolds.

She told them what the town remembers. After Aesephana Menhemes died, Otari was abandoned, and kobolds overran the empty streets — lighting false beacons to lure passing ships onto the rocks so they could strip the wrecks — until Aesephana's granddaughter came back and drove them out. It seems they never actually left. They went down. They have been living beneath the town ever since, nursing the grudge and waiting for their moment.

She told the party to rest and come back tomorrow, and offered half the promised reward up front. Ja-ja, Finn, Rygel, and Corpi took the 5 gp advance. Beans, Herald, and Shiro turned it down and said they would take their pay when the job was finished.

A Night in Otari

The party rested, healed, and traded alchemical recipes. Ja-ja cooked down the meat he'd been harvesting off the rats and the kobolds, then went looking for self-improvement at the Dawnflower Library — the largest building in town, which smells of baking and is run by the tiny blonde halfling Vandy Banderdash. He came away with a library card, a healer's toolkit, and two borrowed books: Healing for Dummies and Founders of Otari.

Beans took his new sword to Wrin Sivinxi and recounted the whole expedition. Wrin spotted the rune set into his blade is a potency rune, and for a price, a blacksmith can transfer it onto any weapon he likes.

He went on to the Rowdy Rockfish hoping for a gay night out and found the quietest room in Otari — Brelda Venkervale, the mannish dwarven woman who runs the place, sitting alone with her grief over her missing son Lasda.

Finn went to see his contact Yinyasmera at the Crook's Nook and laid it all out: spiders, undead, a sarcophagus, kobolds. Only the last of it meant anything to her. There had been a kobold sighting in town lately, at the Ruins of the Thirsty Alpaca.

The Haunting of the Thirsty Alpaca

Rygel, Herald, and Corpi spent that night in the ruins — the collapsed shell of what was once Otari's largest tavern, and where Herald once worked a kitchen.

They were woken by four spectral blue lights, which drifted together into a single amorphous glow and announced, in a suitably sepulchral voice, that this place was haunted and they had to leave.

Herald was unmoved, and attempted to charge the spirit rent. Corpi began reading the Raven Queen's last rites over it. The lights insisted. The three of them refused to move, and after a while the ghost simply gave up and winked out.

Pay No Attention to the Kobold

In the morning Finn walked over to tell his friends about Yinyasmera's kobold sighting, and found them already camped in the middle of it. They searched the place properly, and in the wreckage of what had been the storeroom, Rygel uncovered a trap door.

The ghost reappeared at once — and its dread pronouncements had acquired a distinctly pleading edge. It begged Rygel to leave the trap door alone. To go away. To pay it no mind.

They were far too tempted to listen. Beans and Ja-ja were fetched, with a stop at the Rowdy Rockfish to put the copied runes in front of Brelda, and then the party came back and opened it anyway.

Below was a crawlspace, mostly caved in; if a passage had ever led out of it, that collapsed long ago. Crouched inside, hands raised mid-incantation, was a small green kobold.

The lights said, with waning conviction: "Pay no attention to the kobold."

Ja-ja was down the hole in a heartbeat and had him thoroughly terrified in about the same time. Whatever else he was, the kobold plainly wasn't a threat — and once he stopped shaking, he talked.

The Prince's Tale

His name is Prince Kolgan, second-born of the kobold royal line, and he is an exile. His sister, Queen Zolgran, cast him out.

Zolgran is raising a dragon beneath Otari.

She has been feeding it stolen fish — which is precisely where Tamily's catch has been going — and it is growing at an alarming rate. When it is big enough, she means to loose it: destroy the town, slaughter the surface dwellers, and settle a grudge five centuries old. Kolgan fought her over it, unwilling to start a war he believes will be the end of his own people. That fight is what brought the Thirsty Alpaca down on top of them.

He has been hiding beneath the ruins ever since, too frightened to go up. He is certain that any human who spotted a kobold walking Otari's streets would see him lynched before he could get a word out — and after the history Tamily had recited the night before, nobody could tell him he was wrong.

Finn talked him around all the same: come back to the fishery, stand against your sister, and give your people someone else to follow. Corpi bundled the prince into a winter coat, and the party walked an exiled kobold heir straight through the middle of town without a single passerby looking twice.

The Riddles of the Four

Brelda's translation turned the four Dwarven plaques into four riddles, and each riddle named an element: fire, air, water, and mountain.

Back at the carved wall, the party pressed the pictographs the riddles pointed to. Stone ground against stone, and a passage opened — flooded, and running deep.

It forks. One way leads toward the source of the flooding, and a faint glowing light. The other leads toward a horrid stench.

Rewards

Encounter	XP
Kobold Lookouts	80
The Mermaid Fountain	80
The Dwarven Rune Puzzle	50
Recruiting Prince Kolgan	50
Total	260

Party progress: 806 / 1000 XP.

Treasure recovered

• From the mermaid fountain: 28 cp, 8 sp, and 2 gp.
• From Tamily: a 5 gp advance each, for those who took it — Beans, Herald, and Shiro declined.
• From the Dawnflower Library: a healer's toolkit, a library card, and two borrowed books — Healing for Dummies and Founders of Otari, due back in two weeks.

The Huntress's Tomb

Before leaving the burial vault, Herald turned his attention to the stone sarcophagus on the raised platform and read the worn inscription aloud:

Here lies Aesephana Menhemes, the Huntress. May she rest in peace.

Beside the words, a shallow indentation had been carved into the stone, clearly waiting for something to be set inside it — shaped like a hunting bow formed from a pair of antlers. Whatever belonged there had not been placed in a very long time. The party recognized the shape: the holy symbol of Erastil, god of the hunt, the harvest, and the family hearth.

The name was familiar too. Aesephana Menhemes was the Huntress — the youngest of the Roseguard, the small band of legendary adventurers said to have founded Otari itself some five hundred years ago. She was their cleric, and she fought with bow and arrow. She was the last of the Roseguard to pass away, and her distant descendant, Oseph Menhemes, is the mayor of Otari today.

Which raised an uncomfortable question. Why is one of the founders of Otari buried in unhallowed ground beneath a fishery, walled in behind a barricade someone built to keep the way shut?

Ja-ja, ever the empiricist, rapped the sarcophagus with one of his new skeleton-bone toothpicks. Shiro had been tracing the dark aura of this place since they arrived, and noted that it radiates most strongly from this very stone — whatever power sleeps inside is almost certainly beyond the party's strength, and the dead are best left to rest. The heroes left the Huntress where she lay and moved on.

The Forgotten Shrine

Deeper through the caverns, the party climbed a rough ten-foot cliff to a ledge and a door that was easy to miss from the passage below. Beyond it lay a ruined chamber, mold and rot staining every surface. On the far side stood a stone statue of a giant squid, its tentacles reaching toward an altar in the center of the room. The scum covered almost everything — but it had not touched the silver bowl sitting atop the altar, and the water inside it was perfectly clear.

They identified the shrine as one dedicated to Gozreh, god of nature and the fury of the ocean. Corpi made a gesture of respect toward the statue, but no one dared drink from the bowl, reasoning that centuries of stagnant water was a fine way to make oneself sick, blessing or no.

The Abandoned Storeroom

Angry chittering carried down the passage ahead. The room beyond had once been a storeroom for some building above; at the far side, what was left of a cage or cell stood packed with crates and barrels. Six lizardlike creatures the size of human children were clustered around its door, prying at it without success — kobolds.

The kobolds fought with discipline, working in pairs to flank whoever stood closest and driving their spears into the openings that created. Ja-ja went down under a flurry of them and was hauled back from the edge by one of Finn's healing potions.

With four of their number slaughtered, the last two broke and ran. Finn was first after them — and promptly put his foot on a pressure plate, bringing a rain of stone down from the ceiling. The wily halfling threw himself clear as the blocks came down, and the fleeing kobolds were caught up with and swiftly killed. While the chase played out, Beans went to work on the cage's lock and popped it open.

Inside the crates and barrels, most of it long-spoiled, was a small pile of treasure: 200 silver pieces, a gold ring, and a beautiful +1 shortsword. Beans relieved the room of all of it, Ja-ja harvested some kobold meat for the cart, and the party took a moment to breathe and regain their focus before pressing on.

Abadar's Judgment

The next chamber was long and quiet. Two stone priests stood in the corners, facing a towering statue of a man holding out both hands, palms up. On the altar before him lay nine golden coins. As the party entered, the statue spoke:

In my hands I judge the value of all wealth, raising up whichever is greater. One of these coins is a deception. Find it using only two judgments and receive my blessing.

The statue depicted Abadar, god of cities, law, merchants, and wealth. Every coin looked and weighed the same — but one was false, and the god's hands would only weight the coins twice before resetting.

Several attempts came and went, the coins vanishing and reappearing in a new order each time the party guessed wrong. In the end it was Shiro who saw it: split the nine into three groups of three, weigh two groups against each other to find which trio hides the fake, then repeat with a single coin in each hand. Two judgments, no more.

The fake turned to lead, the true coins fell to the floor, and a stone door ground slowly open on a hidden chamber.

Abadar's Vault

The small room beyond held an old wooden chest emblazoned with a key, and behind it a massive contraption of gears and pulleys. The chest was unlocked: inside were coins (214 cp, 22 sp, and 3 gp), a single emerald in a glass box, and a rolled parchment that proved to be a scroll of force barrage.

Ja-ja examined the machinery and determined it was the control for a trap somewhere else — and it was currently set to the disarmed position.

The Audience Hall

The final room of the level was a massive chamber that must once have been an audience hall. A broad set of stairs on the far side climbed to where a throne had stood; pillars held up the high ceiling, ruined tatters of decorative banners still hanging from them. Beneath the grime on the floor, a decorative tile pattern showed through at the center of the room.

The kobolds waiting here were better trained fighters than the storeroom rabble. They fought from cover, ducking behind pillars to loose spears and vanishing again, while a kobold trapmaster stood at the back, methodically laying snares across the ground in front of the stairs leading down.

The fight was long and brutal. Beans slipped out of the room to spring the trap — three spears shot from the western wall into the middle of the battlefield. One flew wide, the second narrowly missed Finn, and the third caught Rygel square in the chest, dropping him unconscious and dematerializing Vega with him.

Finn poured a healing potion into Rygel while Shiro called up spirits of comfort and respite, knitting the party's vitality back together as the melee raged on. As the others cut down the last of the kobold lackeys — Ja-ja finishing the final one — Corpi vaulted clean over the trapmaster's snares to meet him face-to-face.

Then Herald threw his dread ampule struck the trapmaster dead center, flooding his mind with terror. Back to the wall, surrounded by seven proven kobold-slayers, her warriors dead, he broke — and fled down the spiral stairs and out of sight.

Whoever waits below will hear about the heroes before they arrive.

Rewards

Encounter	XP
Kobolds in the Abandoned Storeroom	68
Abadar's Puzzle	80
Activating the trap (you learn from your mistakes)	30
Elite Kobolds in the Trapped Chamber	136
Total	314

Treasure recovered

• From the caged storeroom: 200 sp, a gold ring worth 5 gp, and a +1 shortsword.
• From Abadar's vault: a single emerald, 214 cp, 22 sp, 3 gp, and a scroll of force barrage.

The Hook

A few days before the Founder's Day Festival, Tamily Tanderveil — the peg-legged owner of the Otari Fishery — gathered a band of unlikely volunteers. Something had been creeping up through a new hole in her cellar and making off with her fish, night after night. With a shipment of rare exotic fish due before the festival and the town guard away chasing highwaymen, she offered 10 gold each to anyone willing to venture below.

A would-be dragon-slayer named Franz Frangelico swept in, declared the culprit was merely rats, and stormed off when no chimera or dragon was on offer. That left eight: Finn the thief-turned-alchemist, Corpi the devout follower of the Raven Queen, Herald the talking rat and out-of-work chef, Shiro the reclusive animist, Jaja the taco-cart cook, Rygel of the notable Starwing family with Vega his construct eidolon, and Beans the sexy twink of a circus performer.

Before anyone ventured below, Tamily poured coffee for the whole crew — she doesn't drink anymore, having put her pirate days firmly behind her — and proudly declared herself the first to ever have coffee. She was left in open-mouthed shock when Herald calmly produced an espresso of his own.

Into the Cellar

Jaja was the first to descend. The party found the first room in disarray — crates and boxes burst open, their contents scavenged. Herald crouched low and spotted something telling: claw marks left by a reptilian humanoid, not a rodent. Beans and Jaja slipped quietly toward the back to hide in the shadows.

That's when the rats came. A tide of them poured out of the hole, tumbling over the heroes and swarming the room. Because Rygel and Vega share their vital essence, the pair took dangerous, mounting damage — until Finn saved them both with a well-aimed healing vial. With the swarm broken, Rygel and Corpi patched one another up, and Jaja, ever the opportunist, scavenged some usable meat from the carnage.

The Descent

Beyond the room, a cliff dropped away into darkness. Shiro's light cantrip revealed a cave dotted with softly glowing mushrooms. Shiro sent the spirit familiar Pizuzu floating ahead to scout — and it returned with an unwelcome discovery: a giant spider's lair below.

Jaja and Beans were reluctant to climb down, arguing the rats had surely been the fish thieves. But Herald reminded them of the claw marks above — something else was still down here, and it wasn't finished.

The Spider's Lair

The party rappelled down the cliff and pressed into the lair, where a giant spider immediately loosed webs to snare them — but every shot went wide.. As they closed in to attack it, a second spider dropped from the shadows behind them, catching the group in a pincer.

Mid-fight, everyone was struck by a sudden, visceral vision — Rygel, dead on the cavern floor. They shook it off to find him untouched and whole. A trick of the mind, perhaps... or the unholy energies of this place reaching out to them.

With both spiders slain, the party found a grim clue in the webbing: a dead kobold, one of the underground dragon-kin whose people have long clashed with Otari. From his body they recovered a healing potion and a fine short sword.

The Barricade

Further down the hall stood a crude barricade, dark unholy energy seeping through its gaps. The party smashed through it loudly — and were answered by moaning and banging from the room beyond.

The Burial Vault

The corridor wound down into an ancient burial vault, lit by a strange blue crystal. Alcoves lined the walls, each holding a rotten wooden coffin, and a raised platform at the center bore a stone sarcophagus. Tiny undead spiders and beetles — animated exoskeletons — skittered aimlessly across the floor. The whole place felt profoundly wrong.

Corpi prayed to the Raven Queen, calling down a blessing on the party for the fight against the restless dead. Vega tore open a coffin and smashed the zombie inside; Jaja finished it with a brutal thrust of his sword. Finn charged in with a torch, hoping to set a coffin alight — but a skeleton burst free before he could. Soon the vault was crawling with undead, and the heroes found many of their blows strangely ineffective against the animated bones.

Still, they prevailed, cutting down every last one. In the aftermath, Jaja stripped the fallen skeletons of their bones to use as toothpicks, while Beans swiftly plucked the glowing crystal from the wall — though Shiro was quick to note it served no purpose beyond casting light.

Rewards

Encounter	XP
Rats in the Cellar	67
Descending the Cliff	10
The Spider's Lair	45
Breaching the Barricade	10
The Burial Vault	100
Total	232

Loot recovered: a healing potion, a fine short sword, and an everlight crystal.