Session #16

For the session tonight, the party consisted of Gwydion (5th level bard), Aoth (4th level paladin), and Dan'del'leon (1st level druid) (new player and pc).

The party decided to track down a lead they haven't followed up on for more than a month.  The last time the party was working on this lead, they broke into a noble family's house and killed their extremely tanky guard captain.  In that session the party was hoping to find the "stone of golor" a magic item which is apparently the key to "Neverember's enigma" (a rumored stash of 500,000 GP hidden in a vault somewhere in Waterdeep).  The end result of their efforts in that session was that two of the main player characters were forced into hiding and actively wanted by the City Watch, and the remaining character was taken into custody on somewhat trumped up charges.  And the stone itself wasn't located.   It's been a month of in-game time since this all went down, so the trail of the stone has gone somewhat cold.

The party started off by getting some information from a Pinocchio-like construct, which had possession of the stone briefly a month ago and told the party it was delivered to a treasure hunting mage in the dock ward (one of the poorer slums in Waterdeep).  The party located this mage & she informed them that she was supposed to deliver it to the Xanarhar Guild (thieves guild run by a beholder, but she had instead given the stone to her familiar, to deliver it to her family's burial Crypt for safekeeping).  Unfortunately, her family's Crypt was the very same Crypt which the necromancer had been using as a base of operations.

Based on this information, and by process of deduction, the party figured the stone of Golor is now either being held by the necromancer, or the Wolf Pack (a rival adventuring party), or the Xanathar guild.  they decided to try to track down the Necromancer first, since they had information from the Waterdeep Wazoo that the Necromancer fled into the city sewers earlier this week.  They found the Necromancers trail in the Sewers, which led them to a random encounter with two Ogres.  Fortunately the Druid was able to stay behind the two more experienced characters, and the Party emerged relatively unscathed.  Picking back up on the trailed them to the basement of a "skooma house," where there were some signs of the Necromancer's presence, and also it appeared that the Necromancer and his they/them Cthonic Warlock gf were behind Waterdeep's drug trafficking problems.

But here again the trail seemed to go cold...  Until the Party found another secret door, leading to a room strewn with bones.  The Bard went around the room poking at the various piles of bones until one pile ambushed him.  This pile swallowed up the bard and nearly killed him, until the Paladin managed to turn the tide in their favor.  After killing the undead Bone monster abomination they decided to call it a night.

 This was an interesting session because the party was finally circling back to the "original module", However the original module assumes that the party did not take a month between the instigating events and the party beginning to investigate them. So a good deal had changed in the intervening time period.  And the module's assumption that the stone of Golor hasn't fallen into the hands of one of the main villains is likely incorrect.  It has been interesting running this campaign with the modules more railroaded campaign being one of many threads that the players can pursue, Because the players have pursued other threads that I created, and/or threads which were developed by the players themselves, instead of the 'railroad.'  Because of Downtime I have had to keep track of how this thread has been developing without the player's Involvement.  Given the fact that the PC's are now a month "behind" the other factions, it will be interesting to see if they can beat their enemies to the massive hoard of 500,000 gold.

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