Lore

Otari is a small seaside town on the Isle of Kortos, the largest settlement on the coast between the great metropolis of Absalom and the town of Diobel. It makes its living two ways: fishing the cold waters off its harbor, and logging the forests inland. Timber is milled at the towering waterwheel known as the Giant's Wheel, then sent racing down a massive wooden flume from the clifftop to the harbor below, where it's loaded onto ships bound for Absalom. Roughly 1,240 people call it home. The town was founded by the Roseguard and named for their fallen friend, the rogue Otari Ilvashti.

Otari's biggest celebration of the year, held on 3 Desnus to mark the town's founding in 4244 AR. The day features competitions honoring each member of the Roseguard — Aesephana's Archery, Vol's Swordfighting, Zarmavdian's Riddles, and Otari's Obstacle Course — alongside all-day activities like fortune telling with Wrin Sivinxi, games, food, and drink. The evening closes with a theatrical performance retelling the Roseguard's history.

Aesephana Menhemes, called the Huntress, was the youngest of the Roseguard — the small band of legendary adventurers who founded Otari nearly five hundred years ago. She was their cleric, a devoted follower of Erastil who fought with bow and arrow and kept her companions alive through the band's darkest hours. By all accounts she was warm, steady, and happiest in a small community; when the Roseguard's adventuring days ended, she settled into the town they built rather than return to the noise of Absalom. Every Founder's Day, Aesephana's Archery is held in her honor.

She was the last of the Roseguard to pass away, and Otari did not long outlive her. The town was abandoned, and a tribe of kobolds moved into the empty buildings — lighting false beacons along the cliffs to steer passing ships onto the rocks, then stripping the wrecks. It was Aesephana's own granddaughter, Maklanni Menhemes, who came back for it: she drove the kobolds out, resettled the town, and raised the Giant's Wheel that still turns above the harbor. The Menhemes family has led Otari ever since, down to Aesephana's distant descendant Oseph Menhemes, the mayor today.

All of which makes her grave a mystery. The Huntress does not lie in the Otari graveyard, or in hallowed ground of any kind. She lies in a profane vault beneath the town's fishery, behind a barricade built to seal the passage, in a sarcophagus locked by a holy symbol of Erastil.

Kobolds are small reptilian humanoids, roughly the size of a human child, who dwell underground and hold themselves to be the descendants of dragons. They see perfectly well in the dark, speak Sakvroth — the tongue of the deep places under the world — and are entirely at home in lightless tunnels. Otari has an old and bloody history with them.

They fight with far more cunning than their size suggests, pairing off to pin a single enemy between them and driving their spears into the openings that creates. A wound from a flanking kobold bites far deeper than one from a kobold fighting fair. They favor the spear, thrown as readily as thrust, and their lookouts will hold a doorway with crossbows from behind whatever furniture is to hand. They are fast — nimble, hard to pin down, and quicker than they look at twisting clear of anything aimed at them. Above all, they love traps, and their trapmasters hang back from the fighting to lay snares mid-battle.

For all that quickness, their nerve is brittle. A kobold's body is fast but its will is not, and fear takes root in one easily. They value their own lives well above their orders, and will abandon a losing fight — or a post they were set to hold — rather than die at it. Frighten a kobold and it will run.

Otari's own history with them is not as distant as the town likes to pretend. After Otari was abandoned in 4294 AR, a kobold tribe called the Stonescales moved into the empty buildings around 4300 AR and took to lighting false beacons along the cliffs, luring passing ships onto the rocks so they could strip the wrecks. For roughly a decade they ruled Otari until Aesephana Menhemes's granddaughter, Maklanni Menhemes, returned and drove them out around 4310 AR.

The story is told as though it has an ending. It does not. The Stonescales were driven off the surface, not out of the region: they went down, and they have been there ever since — four centuries of grievance kept in the dark, with a war being prepared at the end of it. What waited below was a warren with a royal line and a contested succession between Queen Zolgran and her exiled brother Prince Kolgan — and it was the Stonescales who were stealing fish from the fishery to feed Zolgran's dragon.

That succession has now been settled. On Gozran 30th the party returned to the warren with Kolgan at their side, and the moment he announced himself — and the eight surface-dwellers standing with him — the kobold warriors laid down their spears. Their brittle nerve cuts both ways: shown a rightful heir and a fight they could not win, they chose the heir. Only the trapmaster and the Queen's own guard held out. Zolgran died in her throne room, the trapmaster died on the stairs behind it, and the last guard knelt and hailed King Kolgan.

Kolgan's first command was to end the war his sister had spent generations preparing. The Stonescales will no longer wait beneath Otari for their revenge; they will unite behind their new king to slay the dragon Zolgran raised. How many of them are left, and how far their loyalty will stretch toward a prince who arrived flanked by the people who killed their kin, remains to be seen — Kolgan himself recognized one of the dead in the tunnels, and knows exactly what his new allies did before they became allies.

Queen Zolgran was raising a dragon in the halls beneath the town.

This is what the stolen fish were for. Everything taken from the Fishery's cellar went to feed the creature, and on that diet it has been growing at an alarming rate. When it was large enough, Zolgran meant to loose it on the surface to destroy Otari and slaughter the people living in it, settling a debt her people have carried since the day they were driven below ground.

Zolgran is dead now, but the dragon is not. It is still a juvenile, still untamed, and still somewhere below the throne room — and there is no reason to think losing the queen who raised it has made it any less dangerous. The dragon eggshell necklace she wore is the only piece of it the party has seen. King Kolgan has sworn his people to killing it; the party, having just fought their way through a kobold war, took one look at the road down and decided the dragon could wait a little longer.

Goddess of the sun, healing, honesty, and redemption, and by a wide margin the most followed deity in Otari. Sarenrae teaches that almost anyone can be turned back from evil if offered an honest chance at it, and that mercy is the first obligation of the strong. She is no pacifist about it: those who refuse redemption and go on harming others are to be cut down without hesitation, and her faithful carry the scimitar to do it. Her symbol is the ankh, the sign of life.

Her house in Otari is the largest building in town. The Dawnflower Library is temple and library at once — an airy, Qadiran-style hall of book stacks built around her shrine, with smaller shrines to Cayden Cailean, Erastil, and Gozreh set along its walls. It is where Otari goes for healing magic, divine scrolls, and books alike, and it is kept by the halfling head priestess Vandy Banderdash, who receives visitors with lemon cookies and spicy Qadiran tea, keeps a careful eye on matters touching the dead, and has an uncanny knack for putting exactly the right book into a stranger's hands.

God of the hunt, the harvest, and the family hearth, and the patron of hunters, farmers, and small close-knit communities rather than great cities. Erastil is a stern and provincial god who prizes duty, honesty, self-reliance, and the obligations people owe their neighbors and their kin. He asks that hunters kill to feed their families rather than for sport, and that no one place themselves above the community that sustains them. His holy symbol is a hunting bow formed from a pair of antlers.

Aesephana Menhemes, the Huntress, was his cleric. The shallow indentation carved beside her name on the sarcophagus beneath the fishery is shaped to receive that symbol — a keyhole waiting for a holy symbol.

God of nature, the sea, and the weather — worshipped as two aspects, a woman rising from the water and a bearded man in the clouds, and revered as much for the fury of the ocean as for its bounty. Gozreh cares nothing for civilization and everything for the wild balance of the world. Sailors and fisherfolk pray for calm water and full nets, which makes a shrine to them unremarkable in a harbor town like Otari — except that this one is buried underneath it.

The forgotten shrine below the fishery holds a stone statue of a giant squid, its tentacles reaching toward a central altar. Mold and rot have claimed every surface in the chamber but one: the silver bowl on the altar is untouched, and the water in it is perfectly clear. It still carries a trace of the god's magic. Whatever corruption has soaked into this place, it has not been able to touch that bowl.

God of cities, law, merchants, and wealth, and keeper of the First Vault — a perfect treasury said to hold the ideal form of every thing that exists. Abadar values order, honest trade, written contracts, and the civilizing weight of coin; his clergy serve as judges, bankers, and merchants, and he expects those who deal with him to deal correctly. His holy symbol is a golden key.

His chamber beneath the fishery guards its treasure with a riddle rather than a monster. A towering statue holds out both palms above an altar of nine gold coins, one of them counterfeit, and offers only two judgments: "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." Behind the statue lies a sealed vault that opens only for those who judge correctly, and the chest waiting inside it is neither locked nor trapped. Abadar's tests are transactions rather than ambushes, and he honors his side of them.

Something is deeply wrong beneath the Otari waterfront — an unholy energy with no business under a fishing town, and strong enough to be felt from the streets above without ever setting foot below. It radiates most fiercely from the sealed stone sarcophagus of Aesephana Menhemes, raised on a platform at the center of an ancient burial vault, and whatever rests inside it is far too strong to trifle with.

Deep in the kobold tunnels beneath the fishery, a stretch of the northern wall is carved with pictographs and set with four plaques of Dwarven runes. Brelda Venkervale translated them as four riddles, each naming an element — fire, air, water, and mountain — and pressing the matching pictographs opened a flooded passage that forks: one way toward the source of the flooding and a faint glowing light, the other toward a horrid stench.

Prince Kolgan had never seen it open. His people lived beside that wall for generations and never touched it, taking the runes for a curse-mark and giving the whole section a wide berth. Herald has a likelier explanation: the work is Dwarven, it is riddling, and it is older than the warren, which points squarely at Zarmavdian — the Roseguard's dwarven diviner and the man Otari still honors with a riddle contest every Founder's Day. If so, the founders of Otari built something under the town that they wanted sealed behind a puzzle, and the kobolds have been camped beside it for four hundred years without ever going in.

Founders of Otari adds a detail worth chewing on: the town once whispered that Zarmavdian kept a laboratory of elemental magic somewhere beneath Otari — a vaulted workshop of fire, water, air and stone — and that no such place was ever found.

The party agreed that a door sealed for a reason could stay sealed a little longer, and dealt with the Queen first. With Zolgran dead, they have turned back toward it. The passage beyond remains unexplored.

Among Queen Zolgran's belongings in the throne room, tucked in with the spellbook and the eggshell necklace, was a letter. It was not written to her, and it has nothing to do with kobolds. It was written by a Dr. Zacchaeus Quagmire III to his nieces, Charlotte and Theodora, and left for them behind a painting of a tiger in a place he plainly expected them to follow him into. How it ended up in a kobold queen's hoard is anyone's guess.

Dearest Charlotte and Theodora,

It is with the utmost confidence that I write – confidence that you will find first this letter, and later myself. I am certain that you have not forgotten the lesson I taught you: always check the backs of paintings! And this one even has a tiger on it. Ah, you used to love tigers, Charlotte.

What a remarkable place this is! And so unexpected. You will already have observed, by the time you find this, that it is not particularly welcoming. No matter! Esteemed members of the Historical Society such as yourselves will not be fazed by such trifling difficulties, I am sure. A bit further down you may even find one or two friendly faces. It is just as I have always said: not all librarians are out to devour your rotting flesh.

You might also be cautious of ghosts, and not friendly ones like your old great-aunt Maud back at the manor. Poor souls! And so delightfully macabre. Furthermore, a rather squirmy entity is roaming about these parts, with whom I advise an approach of considerable caution.

The collection below is as extensive as it is surprising. I know you might wish to stop by and have a look, Theodora, but I’m afraid the poetry section is a bit slim. Nevertheless, knowledge is power, and I have hidden both within a certain tome you are bound to be familiar with. It is the third formally accepted treatise of Jan Dreli Kolai the Sage, whose work I know you have encountered in the course of your studies. The illustrations are lacking, alas, but the translation is quite good. I left it amid the carrels to the east. You should find it helpful.

I know that you will be careful to search for hidden passageways. I have noted quite a few myself, as doubtless you have the secret door adjacent to this painting. A respectable member of the Historical Society leaves no stone unturned! Which is why I must proceed further. Perhaps you will catch up! My old legs aren’t what they used to be.

I believe one of those fascinating but unfriendly mechanisms is approaching, so I must wish you well.

Ever Onward!

Your Affectionate Uncle, Dr. Zacchaeus Quagmire III

What the letter gives away

• The place it describes is a library — a "collection below" with a poetry section, carrels to the east, and librarians who, at least some of them, want to eat you. Nothing the party has seen beneath Otari matches it. Yet.
• Its hazards, in the doctor's order: ghosts, a squirmy entity, and fascinating but unfriendly mechanisms — one of which was closing in as he wrote.
• Somewhere in the eastern carrels sits a translation of the third formally accepted treatise of Jan Dreli Kolai the Sage, and hidden inside it, "knowledge and power."
• The letter was hidden behind a painting of a tiger, beside a secret door. There was at least one painting in the kobold living quarters; Pazuzu has already liberated it (a horse, not a tiger). It would be foolish not to check the back.
• Charlotte, Theodora, and their uncle all belong to a Historical Society, and the family keeps a friendly ghost — great-aunt Maud — at "the manor." Otari has several manors.
• Dr. Quagmire went further down, on old legs, some unknown time ago. He has not been heard from since — not that anyone was listening.

The book Ja-ja borrowed from the Dawnflower Library — due back on Desnus 13th, and Vandy Banderdash keeps records. Its four chapters, one for each of the Roseguard, as written:

I. Vol Rajani, the Rose Knight

Exiled from Nidal in her youth, Vol Rajani carried out of that shadowed country only her ancestral longsword, the Rosa Argentis, and a claim to a throne she would never sit upon. She made her name in the fighting pits of the Inner Sea and in the slaying of monsters, and it was her family's silver rose that gave the adventuring party its name, the Roseguard. It was Vol who first proposed, on the Absalom docks with a dead beast at their feet, that four strangers should become one party.

It is recorded that when offered a crown restored, she answered: "I would rather be a hero than a princess." The line is carved above the door of the Otari garrison, and every child in the town can recite it.

She lived out her years in the town she helped raise, and died some four decades after its founding, in 4285 AR, of a fever taken from an old wound that had never truly closed. Her body was interred in a mausoleum in the Otari graveyard. The Rosa Argentis now sits on display in the Dawnflower Library.

II. Aesephana Menhemes, the Huntress

The youngest of the four — barely more than a girl when the company formed — and by the reckoning of every source, its true leader. A cleric of Erastil and an archer of rare gift, Aesephana Menhemes was the one the others looked to when the choice was hard. Those who knew her wrote of a quality in her presence that made frightened people brave. She was never seen without the Cloak of the Huntress, a mantle of mottled green and grey said to have been blessed by Erastil himself, which turned aside the weather, hid its wearer among leaf and stone, and would not be taken from her shoulders by any hand but her own.

She and Otari Ilvashti were betrothed, and had exchanged vows only shortly before the party set out for Gauntlight.

Aesephana survived her companions and died in 4290 AR, the last of the Roseguard, mourned by the whole of the town. Her place of burial is unknown. The town was abandoned within four years of her death, and its local archives were lost; when Otari was resettled two generations later, no one living could point to her grave. The Menhemes family descends from her and holds her holy symbol still. Of the Cloak of the Huntress there is no record after her death.

III. Zarmavdian, the Watchful

Least known of the four, a dwarf of uncertain origin, Zarmavdian was a wizard of formidable learning and a collector of secrets, some of them foolish. He wrote poetry, mended clocks, painted landscapes, and pursued conspiracies that his companions indulged with affection.

It was Zarmavdian who first read the signs that a sorcerer had built a lighthouse on an empty coast for no honest purpose, and Zarmavdian who convinced the others to go and see.

It was rumoured in the town that Zarmavdian kept a laboratory of elemental magic somewhere beneath Otari — a vaulted workshop of fire, water, air and stone. No such place has ever been uncovered.

He did not die in Otari. In the town's early years he departed one night without farewell, leaving his rooms in good order but taking with him his great grimoire, Thresholds of Truth, in which he had set down every spell he had mastered. This great tome is held today in a warded collection in Absalom.

The common account holds that he returned north to his studies. He left no descendants, and no grave.

IV. Otari Ilvashti, the Osprey

An orphan of Absalom, a thief by necessity, and for some years a pirate. Otari Ilvashti was spared by a cleric of Cayden Cailean, the Drunken God, when his crew lost a battle after boarding the wrong ship. After that he turned away from piracy and used his talents against the slavers of the Inner Sea, falling upon their vessels out of thin air. This gave him the moniker osprey, the name of the bird that hunts along the coast.

From that day he carried the Cailean Key, a slender skeleton key he named for the god who had spared him, and which would open any lock — a thief's tool turned to honest work.

He was the company's conscience and its humour.

At Gauntlight, in 4244 AR, the evil sorcerer Belcorra Haruvex brought down the ceiling of the chamber in which they fought. Otari Ilvashti was buried beneath it. His companions avenged him within the hour. They returned afterward to dig for him but found no body that could be brought home.

His dearest ambition, often spoken of, had been to give up adventuring and settle in a small town by the sea. His three friends spent the bulk of their savings building one, and gave it his name. He has no grave and no descendants.

Between the lines

• The book says Aesephana's grave is unknown. The party has stood beside it: a sarcophagus in a profane vault beneath the Otari Fishery, locked by a holy symbol of Erastil — the symbol the Menhemes family "holds still." The Cloak of the Huntress, which no hand but hers could remove, has no record after her death either.
• Zarmavdian's rumoured workshop of fire, water, air and stone has never been found. The Dwarven rune door in the kobold tunnels opens to riddles of fire, air, water, and mountain.
• Two Roseguard relics are accounted for: the Rosa Argentis on display in the Dawnflower Library, and Thresholds of Truth under ward in Absalom. The Cailean Key is presumably still wherever Otari Ilvashti lies.