Outside obligations have caused us to take a couple of weeks off of our usual game, which means a couple of one-shots for the remaining players! Here’s the first one, as we run through the module Haskenport Manor. While the characters are not our usual, the campaign setting is the same, including the pantheon lifted from Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard series.
The Heroes of Ellas—gnome druid Rabbit, human monk Mir, dwarf sorceress Dagnar, and Cosme, the mysterious priest of Aza Guilla—got word of an opportunity to make a bit of easy money—clear a manor house of some hobgoblin squatters and earn 100gp each! The town of Haskenport on the northern shore of the Sea of Fermia offered free room and board in addition to the monetary reward, and the siren song of free access to the town's famous mushrooms was as much incentive as Keeper Cosme needed. They convinced the rest of the team to take the deal, and together they boarded a ship that would take them around the southern coast, past the Whispering Mire and upriver to the inland sea.
With Rabbit leading the charge and doing most of the talking (and Mir ensuring that they didn't drift into too-trusting territory), they met with local officials. The mayor and the town's high priestess of Perelandro assured them that this roving band of hobgoblins, while unusual, shouldn't be much of a problem for a group of experienced mercenaries. The Heroes also met with the local druid, and his enthusiastic sea-cave-exploring companion, and were once again reassured that the seven hobgoblins should be an easy enough group to rout. So bolstered, the group cautiously made their way to the manor house and the promise of easy money.
Having been willed to the church of Perelandro, who lacked the money to maintain its upkeep, the house had lain forsaken for the past ten years, abandoned to the ravages of the sea winds. The garden overgrown, the wooden doors swollen until they no longer fit in their casings, one front window broken in—the building was an ominous sight to behold, though the beauty it once held was still evident beneath the disrepair.
There was no sound of creatures within. Moving carefully, they shoved the swollen door open and made their way inside.
An empty dining room and a simple chapel dedicated to Perelandro flanked the foyer, all of the rooms scattered with dust and leaves blown inside over the years. Straight ahead lay a sitting room, and evidence of habitation in the form of some sort of meat still roasting fragrantly over a fire built up in the hearth. As they moved into this room, a voice called out and, from their left, a tall human woman stepped through from another room. Dressed in fur-lined leathers and brandishing an enormous greatsword, she demanded that the heroes state their business there.
After some moments of tension, the woman introduced herself as Genna, a traveler from the north and once a member of a small clan that had been traveling south only to be slaughtered by bandits as they made camp one night. She alone had escaped, she told them, and finding this abandoned house had thought to find some brief sanctuary here. The hobgoblins who had been squatting inside had fallen to her sword, and she had thrown the bodies over the balcony behind the house. Sensing their suspicion, she offered to show them the evidence; Keeper Cosme, ever concerned with the fate of the fallen be they stranger, friend, or foe, followed her out to take a look. Mir, as wary as ever, went with them as well, as did Rabbit and her faithful dog-friend Eedee.
Their caution proved prescient, as with Cosme leaning over the railing to look at the bodies below, Mir saw Genna reaching out towards her and instinctively moved to stop whatever she was doing. Unable to grab her wrist as she intended, Mir nevertheless drew Genna's attention to herself instead—as Genna swiped out with a hand suddenly larger, fingertips growing into deadly sharp claws, Mir found herself snatched up in a powerful hold and unable to break free. Prize now in hand, Genna dropped the illusion that had shrouded her until now and her true form was revealed: an ancient-looking woman towering nearly ten feet tall, with pale blue skin and lank, stringy black hair. The creature let out a cry that only Dagnar, still inside, understood.
“Wait, what about ogres??”
A pitched battle began on the balcony. Unable to free herself from the creature's hold, Mir suffered claws continually raking across her body while Cosme battered the creature with a flaming mace. Dagnar stepped outside with the others and, entirely forgetting that she had a crossbow strapped to her back, unleashed an arcane bolt of lightning as Rabbit drew the natural powers she served into her diminutive form and swelled into a fierce and angry bear. The ogres, emerging from the kitchen, took up posts at both balcony doors, one targeting Mir and the other Rabbit, though their strikes went thankfully wide. With the creature holding Mir aloft blocking access to both the other doorway and to the monk herself for healing, Cosme lost patience and, with an incantation in an unfamiliar and terrifying language, their body burst into flame before they threw their arms around the larger creature and let the fire burn away the last of its ability to stand against them.
The ogres were easily dispatched after that, and the bloodied Mir healed through the judicious application of a magic potion and Cosme's frustrated channeling of their own divine magic. No sooner had the heroes regrouped, however, than a loud thud sounded from somewhere below, and they knew that their task was not yet complete.
Investigation of the kitchen revealed a stone stairway leading down, and Mir took the lead followed by Rabbit—now back in her gnomish form—and Eedee. Below, a metal door stood open at the end of a dark hallway, and a crumpled body lay on the floor near the bottom of the stairs.
As Rabbit rushed to check for signs of life, Mir crept towards the door and found that it led to small sea cave open to the morning air, with a rickety wooden dock ringing the lower level of the house. Around the corner lay the bodies of the slain hobgoblins, clawed and nearly rent in pieces, though the mark on the armor that they wore was still visible on some: a round yellow circle, like a rising sun, overlaid with a stark red handprint.
Inside, Rabbit investigated the body of what seemed to be a human girl, still alive but unconscious and fading fast. She managed to stabilize her through her skills in basic first aid, and the group continued to search the area they found several more bodies in what looked to have once been a small hidden room near the stairs. All four possessed the same golden brown skin and dark matted hair as the girl outside, and all were clothed in the same threadbare rags and barefoot as she was, and all were growing cold to the touch. One, lying half in and half out of the open doorway, looked as though he had been struck down while trying to escape.
Summoned by the alarm of their companions, Cosme descended the stairs to heal the fallen girl. Before they could move either her or the bodies of her fallen companions, she woke—disoriented at first, then alarmed at the unfamiliar faces, all other concerns were pushed aside when her franticly searching eyes fell upon the body in the doorway. With a heartrending wail, she crawled as quickly as she could manage to pull the body into her lap, imploring him in a language that none of them understood between her sobs.
When the Heroes had all gathered in the basement, they realized that none of them understood either of the languages the girl tried to speak, and that she could manage only a handful of words in Common. Thus, they turned to one of the bits of treasure pulled from the blue-skinned creature above—an amulet fashioned like a pair of hands clasped at the wrist, the holy symbol of Azri, The Lady of the Clasped Hands, goddess of pacts and contracts. By donning this amulet, Rabbit was able to understand the girl's words as she begged them to help, swearing that she would go back with them without struggle if they would only wake her brother again.
The girl, they managed to discover, was Phenisa, a selkie taken by slavers along with her twin brother Cybarus and several others. Their pelts had been stolen and hidden away, and they'd been loaded onto a ship as cargo to be sold. Two of their fellow captives had jumped overboard in human form and, she believed, drowned in the unforgiving sea. Others had found their pelts and managed to escape, but the slavers had somehow managed to track them no matter how far they got, she believes by somehow using blood that had been collected from them all when they were brought aboard. One of the other captives—selkie or not, she could not say—had told them of rumors of a magic item in this house, supposedly able to shield one from detection by any magical means. With no more than that to go on, the group had escaped together when the ship passed near the river delta, swimming upstream and traveling partway through the Whispering Mire until they reached Haskenport and the house with the coral trim.
They had made their way into the basement, she told them, found the secret room and the box within. However, upon opening it, a burst of magic had brought one of the driftwood statues of Perelandro to a semblance of life, and it had begun swinging wildly at anything and everything in reach as it stormed its way blindly down the hall and out the open door. Exhausted, weak, and malnourished, they had been no match for it, and all of them had fallen.
Though they could bring none of the fallen back themselves, Cosme did manage the magic required to keep Cybarus's body in stasis for a time. With Dagnal's help, they guided Phenisa and carried the bodies upstairs while Rabbit and Mir investigated the hidden room. Calling Dagnal back down, they had her attempt to dispel any magic that might be on the chest, ready to beat a swift retreat if their efforts awoke the other driftwood statue left in one of the adjacent alcoves. With the chest temporarily untrapped, they emptied all its contents into Mir's bag.
Unfortunately, the chest was still standing open when its magic reasserted itself, and just as they had feared, the statue did indeed begin to move.
Deeper into the room than the others, Rabbit took the brunt of the construct's swings, nearly falling before Mir could distract it with her own attacks against it. Taking refuge once more in her bear form, Rabbit escaped, followed soon after by Mir and Dagnal, who shut the door behind them as they all fled up the stairs. Though the sounds of the construct battering against the door continued for several breathless moments, soon enough the basement once again grew still and quiet, and the entire group hurried outside with the bodies they carried.
In the garden, they looked through what they had pulled from the chest below. Along with a great deal of coin, a beautiful ruby, and several magic items, in a red leather bag they found the prize that the selkies had lost so much to seek: a pair of manacles, the chain between them long-since broken, with the power to shield their wearer from any sort of magical location or detection. Unfortunately, there was one large problem still standing in their way: though they had been promised the rights to any treasure pulled from the bodies of the monsters that they found, they had given their word not to plunder anything belonging to the house itself. And while Rabbit and Dagnal had no qualms about ignoring that promise for the sake of a greater good, Mir and Cosme were rather less sanguine about the idea.
Eventually, they hit upon the means of solving their dilemma: the mayor had told them, when they inquired about the job, that the church of Perelandro had been hoping to sell the house for quite some time and was actively looking for interested buyers. With the aid of Azri's holy symbol and Dagnal's force of personality, they managed to convince her to take a down payment of the money they had between them—some twelve thousand gold or so—so that they could purchase the house themselves. With its contents thus legally theirs, they could dispose of them as they wished.
One of the manacles went to Phenisa and, after the money from the chest was donated for the cost of his resurrection, Cybarus took the other. The bodies of their friends were kept in stasis through Cosme's continual attentions, and laid in temporary repose in the chapel they converted to the worship of Aza Guilla.
Together, they began to restore the house to order. The garden bloomed into vibrant life under Rabbit's care; Mir set to work improving the seaward side of the house with a sturdy new deck and additions to allow her to keep her training up; and Dagnal charmed a handful of town members into helping them clear out the worst of the mildewed interior.
Even as they labored, however, they did not forget that their other work had only just begun. Phenisa and Cybarus found some comfort in aiding with the exploration of the area's sea caves, but still they were restless and ill at ease this far from the open ocean waters, and the bodies in the chapel stood as a silent reminder that justice must still be served.
In scrying upon the stolen pelts, Rabbit saw the ship that carried them, sailing across the water towards The Ghost Cliffs of Ephane. They would find the ship, the group decided, however long it took. They would free the other captives, whether they had been sold away or not, and punish those who had made the mistake of bringing the wrath of The Heroes of Ellas down upon them.
However long it took, whatever the price, retribution was coming.
