The Adventure

Scrabble spends the next week doing some tinkering. He also offers up repair skills and fixes clocks for caravan. Finally, Scrabble spent the week teaching Seno how to use smithing tools.

Seno used the travel time to study a new cantrip and also joins the caravan as a guard. Ghada researched Goblins (meta: gains advantage one time in a future encounter)

A week later, the caravan arrived at the town of Fernhaven. The party helpe dto unload supplies at The Pierced Hart Inn. They are offered a room at the inn. Scrabble negotiated to play bagpipes or lute for the guests later.

A gardener came into the Inn with a complaint that Ferrren was missing and that there was an explosion at the stables and asked if the heroes would investigate.

Ferren is the gardener’s husband. 7 months ago Eglantine (Ferren’s cousin) became widowed. He’s been helping her with her grief. She gave him a small gift: a small windup horse. Ferren still worried about Eglantine and Ferren was certain that the windup horse was dangerous. The gardener thought he visited Tota and Rafayal. They also have windup horses. Ferren’s wife indicated that the stable was scorched and a Jar of heart-flower seeds was missing. Very atypical of Ferren to be missing.

The team accepted the mission to figure out what happened to Ferren. They investigated the stable and found etched gears stuck in a post from the explosion. Scrabble found calipers and pulled the gear out of the wood. The team looked at it - it wasn’t etched with acids. It looked as though images were embedded under the surface of the metal like they were floating up. Seno noticed footprints in the dirt and followed them to the back of the stables and found a freshly dug hole. Ghada dug in the hole and found remains of the windup horse. Scrabble compared the horse and gear and found that they had similar whorls on it as the gear.

The team visited Eglentine and asked her about her cousin. She tried to get rid of the adventurers. Seno asked if she does all of the work in her workshop herself. Scrabble asked to see one of her favorite pieces. She led him to a clockwork owl. It reminded her of her late husband and she said it was his idea. Scrabble comforted her with thoughts of Lady Rava. She then opened up about Ferren.

Scrabble handed her the gear and she said the horse was bad - he was right. She explained the fact that she often goes foraging for materials for her inventions. She went into a cavern and found a machine. Perhaps there were Thralls here before? She found 4 shards in that machine and made a horse (for Ferren), a ball (for Rafayal), and a bird for Tota. She escaped a giant spider by throwing an invention at it. Made a boat of some sort for the underground lake. Finally, she informed the team that Dabner was writing a book about the thralls.

The team went to Rafayal’s house. He didn’t want to stop painting. Scrabble persuaded him to help the team get the ball. Scrabble charmed him, but still couldn’t convince him to give it up. Ghada tried to steal his painting, but the artist took it back. Ghada rubbed her dead goblin head on canvas out of annoyance.

The team then headed to Tota’s house and knocked to enter. Scrabble told her about the stable explosion and that her bird might be dangerous. Although Tota was hesitant to believe them at first, the artifact animated her armor and the adventurers were forced to battle the animated armor. After the fight, Scrabble is given the bird by Tota.

After the fight Dabner came over and asked what happened. He invited the party over to have some tea and discuss the Thrall who used to live in the area. He investigated the toys. Then he talks about how he retired here to study the Thrall civilization. Thrall were an advanced civilization that lived thousands of years ago and used arcane machines. He believes the civilization fell when the machines broke. Primitive creatures worship the devices. Therren learned the same info from Dabner - including how to destroy. If the machine were destroyed it would destroy all shards on this plane. Concentrating on the shard would lead them in the right direction.

No time for a long rest in town before the team had to head out.

My Thoughts

I did get to continue to have a chance to play Tales of the Valiant with the group from back in February. (This blog post has been a long time coming) After the simple adventure with Dib, it was fun to have more of an investigative adventure. Adventuring as a level 1 bard is definitely scary - not much HP and not too many offensive bits of magic. It wasn’t too bad since this was a very roleplay-heavy session.

• Tales-of-the-Valiant