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Magic Song
6bf918
DAY 2
Weather: Cold, heavy fog, intermittent snow
Efrel
Scheduled for another afternoon/night shift, Efrel takes spends this morning finding lodgings more in line with a guardsman’s salary. After some asking about, he rents a tiny room in a house shared by eight kobold families.
[Information Gathering 7-1=6 – Average]
While being given the tour, he strikes up a conversation with the landlord – a kobold himself, and one of the few that own property in the city. The owner recognizes Efrel as a Cloudrends native, and from there the topic easily shifts to kobold tribes living in the immediate vicinity of the valley. In its course, Efrel finds out the following:
- There are two major kobold tribes living in the mountains surrounding the valley, the first about 60km west of here, and the other even further away, near the other end of the Dominion.
- There used to be a third tribe, living closer to the fortress, but it has since moved away, as too many young kobolds were departing from it, either to live in the city, or to join up with a mercenary company.
- Contact with the remaining two tribes is limited to the occasional trader showing up in the city to sell animal pelts, or various species of cave-grown mushrooms and fungi, valued as food, and as alchemical reagents.
Once again, Efrel’s information does not contain anything immediately useful – or, at least, I can’t think of any way it could be. Can you?
Mara
Mara jumps at the chance to help out in some way. This being Mara, it means me parting with a large sum of money.
“But you already have a dress.”
>[Mara] “Pah! Deliara Estades, senior representative to the great merchant Artono Linaes would not be caught dead owning just one dress!
“The who now?”
>[Mara] “And it is only by cruel happenstance that her entire wardrobe was lost, when her brave, but careless steed foundered on a patch of ice while crossing a bridge, and succumbed to the depths of the river below. She endured her limited attire because the only other choice was no clothing at all. But now that she’s reached civilization at last, she must remedy this ignominy posthaste! And only clothes by the finest of tailors will do.”
“Oh, of course, only the finest. But that still in no way justifies me handing you a whole fifty crowns.”
>[Mara] “Oh, but what of Deliara’s lodgings! It wouldn’t do for someone of her consequence to stay in just any common inn. Why, the mattresses there might be filled with straw. Straw! And, lest she forget, now that her guards have abandoned her, the disloyal curs that they were, she must procure the services of a reliable bodyguard – she is, after all, carrying around a sizeable amount of coinage.”
“…You’re enjoying this far too much, you know that?”
>[Mara] “She’ll also need a new steed. And she really likes those hairy ponies they have here.”
“What?!”
After some arguing, I bring my expenses down to forty crowns and no pony, then drop Mara off near the city before dawn. She enters the gates as soon as they open, and becomes Deliara Estades.
Deliara represents Artono Linaes, a powerful merchant from the coast – a trader of fish, spices, precious ores, and weaponry, among other things. He is a man unaccustomed to hearing the word “no” – and, as his right hand, neither is she. The owner of Ravada’s finest inn, initially dismissive of a “mere” kobold, receives a thorough tongue lashing to set him straight. The tailors are harangued in unkind words until they agree to have her new wardrobe ready by tomorrow. A hulking minotaur is hired as a bodyguard, any thoughts of disloyalty quelled by demonstrating how vulnerable one’s knees are to a blade wielded by someone of small size. All of it accompanied by the sweet jingle of coins – a sound that suddenly makes it so easy to put up with the monumental arrogance of the very rich.
It’s midday by then and Deliara, declaring herself peckish, heads to an establishment frequented by affluent Ravadian merchants. And that’s where Mara’s work begins.
[Socialite: 9+2=11 – Superb]
To her peers and equals, Deliara is the soul of courtesy, charm, and wit. She quickly gathers a group of – mostly non-human – merchants about herself and, over the next two hours, all but turns them into her new best friends. Between sips of wine, polite compliments, and careful angling to find out just how much danger her employer is likely to pose to the local market’s balance of power – these are merchants after all – she manages to find out the following:
- Thanks to Cyrena, we already knew that the Vellestros have increased taxes on merchants, but Mara learns that the rates are truly murderous, with fully half the yearly profits of local traders landing in the Dominion’s treasury, and Ravada’s staple rights requiring traveling caravans to either offer their wares for sale in the city for a full two weeks, or pay the waiver fee equal to fifteen percent of their goods’ value.
- There is a small number of merchants exempt from this crushing taxation. They’re the ones who supply the dragons directly, with food, luxury goods, and reagents for Ethelira’s experiments – and they jealously guard this monopoly.
- Needless to say, this has earned them the positively vitriolic hate of every other merchant in the city. Once the topic is brought up, the conversation descend into a quarter of an hour of loud expletives, heartfelt curses, and muttered oaths. Deliara is quick to assure everyone that her employer has no plans to become part of that unsavory group.
- As the meal draws to its end, Deliara receives an invitation to a formal dinner and party taking place tomorrow, at the house of one of her new acquaintances. Mara gathers that it’s a major event, one that will bring the cream of Ravada’s merchant class under one roof. She, of course, cordially accepts – then rushes off to the tailor again, to order yet another dress.
I don’t think I’ll be getting any of my money back after this.
Irga
Irga spends half a day exploring the empty, labyrinthine corridors of the fortress. Even though she doesn’t venture too deep, focusing on finding a way around the blocked off passages, it’s clear that these tunnels honeycomb a large part of the mountain – it must’ve been a home to thousands of dwarves once.
[Infiltration: 6+1=7 – Good]
She eventually discovers an entrance into a network of copper pipes, stone aqueducts, and half-flooded canals that once must’ve supplied water to the entire fortress. After a few hours of crawling, squeezing, and swimming, her inerrant sense of direction leads her to the shaft of a well – with torchlight flickering in the opening above.
However, at this point she is tired, soaked from head to toe, and shivering uncontrollably. I tell her to just find an out of the way place to get dry and rest. Hopefully she’ll be able to begin collecting information tomorrow.
Cyrena and Ramirez
The duo begins their day with a tour of the mercenary camp. My earlier comparison of this place to a town seems apt – between the camping grounds, there’s a somewhat chaotic network of streets lined with smithies, armor and weapon sellers, horse traders, and pawn shops. There’s even a town square, containing a dozen or so taverns and brothels.
The mercenaries themselves are as diverse a bunch as one could expect – all manner of races and nationalities are present, from fair-haired northerners with thick beards and shaggy minotaurs hailing from the Broken Coast, to horsemen from the eastern plains and cold-eyed nagas used to the much gentler climes of the South.
The quality the companies represent is just as varied. There’s the disciplined and militaristic – often former soldiers, displaced when their nations in the League ceased to exist or changed hands, and who decided to maintain their principles, even as they were forced to sell their swords. And on the other end of the scale there’s bands of crazed cutthroats who are in the business as much for the thrill of killing, as they are for the money.
Keeping to the combat enthusiast story, Cyrena and Ramirez begin asking around for someone who can describe the aerial battles the Vellestros fought against the challengers. Frankly, I don’t have much hope for them finding anything satisfactory – even should they find a reliable witness, the problem with the lesser races is that, being incapable of flight, they also lack the innate understanding of its mechanics. This lack of knowledge would rob their description of details vital to any flier.
[Information Gathering: (10+10)/2=10 – Double Critical Success!]
So you can probably imagine my surprise when my kobolds are pointed to the absolute best kind of witness imaginable – a drake!
Those of my kind who choose the mercenary path, given choice, would probably elect to spend winter somewhere warmer. Herid would’ve done so as well, but an unlucky spear thrust through a wing joint left him the equally poor options of either recuperating here, or making the journey south on foot. After weeks spent in his tent huddled to a stove, he is bored out of his mind, and very glad for the company – and probably more talkative that he normally would be.
- Of course he’s seen Oramar and Ethelira fight. It was against some no-name who, like them, lost his previous Dominion in the League. Doesn’t matter anyway, cause now he’s dead. Crashed right on top of the Red Daggers barracks – lucky them that they were all outside, watching the fight. How it happened? Oramar crashed into him, forcing a clinch and a tumble, then Ethelira dived in and tore up the poor sucker’s wings. And that was that.
- At this point I start telling Cyrena what questions she should ask. Herid, pleasantly surprised by her awareness of factors affecting aerial battles, is all too happy to tell the not-for-idiots version of the fight. By the time he’s done, I feel like I have some understanding of my opponents’ strengths and weaknesses in the air, as well as the nature of air currents around the mountain.
- Perhaps unwilling to deprive himself of an audience so quickly, Herid smiles slyly and mentions that he used to – briefly – serve Oramar during the dragon’s rule over his first Dominion, and would you like to hear about how he fights on the ground?
- Soon I learn that Oramar is gifted with above average size and strength, but lacks matching speed and stamina. Therefore, instead of exchanging blows and bites with a nimbler challenger, he seeks to overbear his opponent as quickly as possible, pinning him to the ground with superior bulk. He lost his original Dominion to a dragon who was simply too fast to be pinned – the challenger got a few good hits in right at the start, then stayed out of Oramar’s reach until the latter succumbed to exhaustion and blood loss.
- When asked about the dragon forced to walk down the mountain, he starts by commenting on this being classic Oramar handiwork. “See, little ones, strong as our wing bones are, they still snap like twigs with two dragons piled on top of them.” Unfortunately, Herid wasn’t in the valley when that fight took place, and doesn’t know the name of the dragon. “Though I think his lineage was… Ilrosso? I’ve heard something about them raising a stink over one of their own being nearly crippled for life. Can’t tell you anything more though.” Arcel lets me know that Ilrosso is one of those large, branching lineages, and gives me five likely candidates from across two generations and four clutches. It’s better than nothing, at least.
- Finally, as the kobolds are preparing to leave, Herid asks them whether they’d be willing to enter his employ – if only for a couple weeks. There’s errands he needs taken care of in the city, and between dragons generally looking askance at unaffiliated drakes in their territory, and this dragon in particular being his former boss, he’d prefer to keep himself out of sight. He’d pay, of course, both in coin, and in war stories.
I don’t know… I think I’ve learned everything I could about Oramar and Ethelira from him, and I may want to give Cyrena and Ramirez another goal to pursue. Should they accept Herid’s offer?
Arcel
Arcel continues to serve as the ex-servant’s drinking companion, patiently enduring the man’s sodden rambling. He tells me he gets the distinct impression that the reason the drunkard is so willing to talk to a kobold is because everyone else got tired of listening to him.
I tell Arcel to focus on finding out more about the Seneschal. You’re right – a man in his position would be a great source of information, as well as a valuable ally.
[Information Gathering: 6 – Average]
Octavio Mares is a great man. A great man. The only good man left in the entire castle. On this entire thrice-damned world. Great man! Octavio Mares. It must kill him to put up with those… those overgrown lizards. It must kill him right to the heart.
- Specifically, Octavio’s position as Seneschal is hereditary – his family has acted as overseers of the fortress since imperial times. The Empire has fallen, the rulers have come and gone, but the Mares line endured, continuing to fulfill their obligations.
- Octavio is greatly respected by both the fortress staff, and the citizens of Ravada. According to the servant, even the clan lords have a measure of regard for him. Like his ancestors and predecessors, he has a reputation for impeccable character, utter impartiality, and complete devotion to his duties.
- He is also quite old, well into the sixth decade of his life. Yet the increased workload brought on by Oramar’s incompetence and Ethelira’s indifference precludes him from properly preparing one of his children to replace him, as is the tradition.
Shortly afterwards, the servant becomes too incoherent to provide anything useful. Arcel apologizes, saying that he may have been too generous about refilling the man’s tankard.
So, another day, another batch of information. What’s your take on it, and what should the Crew do?
Efrel has yet to find out anything I can use to my advantage in the coming fight. I’m starting to think that the city guard may be a dead end. Maybe I should send him after the bandits? On the other hand, outlaws are usually outlaws for a reason. I’m uneasy about potentially including them in my plans.
Mara – though doing her best to bring about my financial ruin – will spend tomorrow evening hobnobbing with some of the most affluent people in Ravada. Is there any specific information she should seek out? Or maybe you can think of some sort of agenda she could pursue?
Irga is finally in a position to infiltrate the fortress proper. Should she focus on observing Oramar and Ethelira, looking for a weakness? Maybe she should attempt to contact Octavio? If so, what would be the best way to approach him?
Cyrena and Ramirez, though out of their usual element, have so far provided some of the most useful information on my opponents. Where should I send them next? Or should they accept the job offer from Herid?
Arcel’s find is certainly useful, but maybe the other sources of information I’ve since discovered are even more so – as well as being more reliable. And coherent. Is there another task you can think of for Arcel, or should he remain where he is? And in that case, what should he ask about?
Also, I’m getting worried about the weather. If it continues getting worse, it might force me to face the dragons inside the fortress, and based on what I learned today, I’d feel a bit more confident with fighting them in the air. On the other hand, more information is always good. I don’t know. Opinions?
[You know the drill, six more rolls. And be aware that I can’t do very much with just a number. The more detailed your suggestion, the more I have to work with – and the faster the next update happens, since I have a better idea of what to write about]
Thank you for the words of appreciation. I’ll see about including more pictures, but given that they effectively double the time it takes me to prepare an update, I make no promises
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