This summary sounds a bit different than my usual summaries. The intro to last session explains why. I believe only 2 more will be written this way before we get back to my usual writeups. (although the audio is not returning)

The Story

Time elapsed so far in campaign at start of this adventure: 97 days

Summary

Session Recap: The Ghost Ship of Velder’s Rest

Party: Storm, Valery, and Beatrice (with a scorpion friend along for the ride) — GM’d by Eric

Picking up right where they left Gutmangle’s corpse cooling in his trophy room, the party turned their attention to the second staircase behind his chambers — the one leading down into the dungeons carved out beneath Velder Keep. After a quick debate over strategy, the group agreed: sneaky.

Traps and Trip Wires

The stairs opened into a wide hall lit by little more than a pair of smoking, near-useless torches, with a cobweb-choked iron chandelier looming overhead. A round of perception checks paid off — Storm and Beatrice both caught the trip wire strung across the floor before anyone found out the hard way what that chandelier was rigged to do. A quick cut of the wire later, the trap was disarmed, and the party pushed on toward a cavernous chamber that reeked of wet fur, its floor littered with gnawed bones.

Beatrice’s stealth game was, in a word, immaculate — invisible-level rolls got the party in close before anyone downstairs so much as blinked. From a ledge overlooking the room, they spotted two kobolds walking a pair of mastiffs on leashes, guarding a door. With full surprise on their side, Valery didn’t even bother closing the distance — she let loose with Shatter from range. The kobolds failed their saves outright, and between the spell’s damage and the blast radius catching the mastiffs too, the entire guard post was wiped out before the fight even technically started.

A Nightlight Named Valery

Looting the bodies came with a complication: Valery’s wild magic flared, and for the next minute every piece of metal she wore crackled with lightning, lighting up a 20-foot radius and daring anyone who touched her to eat a jolt for their trouble. Valery, unimpressed with her new career as a walking nightlight, pushed on anyway as the party shoved the guards’ bodies aside and opened the door beyond.

The Kobold Warlord Behind the Warlord

The next room told a very different story than the one they expected. Eerie blue-white flames burned in four braziers, and a fur-piled cart sat over a suspicious-looking chest — suspicious enough that the party spent a solid minute convincing themselves it was a mimic before deciding it probably wasn’t. It didn’t matter much, because the room’s actual occupant turned around first: a kobold, sharp and clearly unbothered by three armed intruders standing in her doorway.

She didn’t waste time on pleasantries. Gutmangle, she explained flatly, was an idiot she’d let believe he was in charge — the real brains of the raider operation had been hers all along. And now that the party had gotten past him and found their way to her, there was only one way this was going.

The fight that followed was scrappy and full of near-misses. Beatrice opened with a solid axe hit, Storm followed up with a Magic Missile that found its mark despite the kobold’s mage armor, and Valery’s chaotic magic decided to chip in with a burst of true sight and an hour-long inability to tell a single lie — useful, if oddly timed. The kobold warlord fired back with a frostfire ray and, when things started going poorly, blew a silent whistle that summoned a large, snapping guard-dog into the fray. Valery’s scorpion companion, for its part, spent most of the fight distracted and out of position. In the end it was Beatrice who closed it out, burning through her luck points to land the hit that finally broke the kobold’s resolve. She threw up her hands: surrender.

A Bargain and a Hard Truth

Wary of a double-cross, the kobold demanded an oath — sworn on the party’s ancestors, or failing that, on Wotan — that they wouldn’t betray her. Valery obliged, with the reasonable caveat that the deal was off if she betrayed them first. Terms accepted, the kobold finally gave up what the party had come all this way for: the captured villagers hadn’t stayed with the raiders. They’d been handed off to the Deep Ones, sea-dwelling worshippers of aboleths, in exchange for coin — the same grim trade that had apparently been standing arrangement between the two groups for some time. Whatever the raiders had been running out of Velder Keep, it was over now.

She also mentioned something else lurking further into the dungeon complex: a haunted ship, marked with the same family crest as the longship the raiders had used — and very possibly tied to whoever the party was really after.

With the guard dog called off and calmed, the kobold led the party through the complex to the prison cells, freed the captive villagers herself, and pointed the group toward a long tunnel leading further down. Then she left them to it.

Velder’s Rest

At the end of that tunnel, ghostly orbs of light revealed a full-sized raiding longship propped upright in an underground cavern, shields lining its hull and a snarling dragon figurehead curling over the bow. Runes on the starboard side named it Velder’s Rest. Inside, the mummified remains of a warlord in a golden crown sat among eight long-dead crewmen, still armored, blades in hand — and as the party climbed aboard, gray smoke rose off the bodies and resolved into the spirits of Velder and his honor guard: skeletal, bearded, and very much aware they had company.

Velder explained the situation bluntly — he and his crew were bound here, stuck between worlds, and wanted out. After the party knocked loose the supports holding the ship in place (with Valery catching a bonk on the head for her trouble), the ship slid free into the underground river, and the ghost crew solidified enough to man the oars themselves — rowing with the kind of eerie, perfect synchronization only the dead seem to manage.

Given the choice of where to sail first, the party opted to head straight back and report what they’d learned rather than chase the villagers into aboleth territory themselves. Velder didn’t argue — his crew were the ancestors of the very villagers the party had set out to help, and grateful for it. Before they made port, the ghosts handed over their grave goods, no longer needed where they were going: 1,000 gold, 200 copper, and 1,000 silver, split among the party.

Homecoming — and a New Complication

Back at the Veil, the news landed as a double victory: the missing villagers had been located, and their long-lost ancestors had finally been freed to pass on. The celebration didn’t last long, though — a ratatosk, one of the same squirrel-spirits the party has crossed paths with twice before, came sprinting into town with an urgent request for help.

What that help entails is a story for next session.

Running total: one kobold warlord out-negotiated, one haunted ship successfully repossessed, and Valery remains a certified magical liability.

GM Notes

This was mostly straightforward. The kids have finally learned to be careful in dungeons and check for traps.

• Tales-of-the-Valiant