Story So Far¶

Act 1 - The Vaunthel Commission¶

The party's first arc began with an invitation to Everlund and a strange abandoned tavern in the Moonwood. Elaris Vaunthel asked the party to investigate the Silent Coin Tavern, a place where ordinary life had started behaving incorrectly.

Arc 1 - Silent Coin Tavern¶

The Call To Everlund¶

The party came to Everlund after receiving silver-ink invitations from Elaris Vaunthel, a scholar interested in old catastrophes, fallen stars, celestial disturbances, and places where ordinary life behaves incorrectly.

Elaris asked the party to investigate the abandoned Silent Coin Tavern. Travelers avoid it, lights have been seen in its windows, doors open when no one should be inside, and nearby animals have acted possessive and territorial.

The Road North¶

Elaris arranged a carriage and driver, Tovin Reed, to take the party north. During the journey, the party was attacked by wolves whose behavior did not seem natural. After the fight, even Tovin was shaken by how wrong the encounter felt.

The next day, the carriage reached the Silent Coin Tavern. The old building stood dark and leaning in a clearing. A candle appeared in an upper window, something moved inside, and the front door opened.

Silent Coin Summary So Far¶

Once the party entered, the tavern shut the door behind them. The outside world vanished from the windows and sound of the road disappeared. An old ledger opened by itself and wrote:

Account opened.

The house then whispered:

Mine.

The party fought through the common room, destroyed mimics, and banished a copper-tongued host. Beneath the hearth, they found a warm black-gold shard that pulsed like a heartbeat.

The shard showed a vision of the tavern as it once was, then revealed a black-gold relic splitting into four pieces: one to the hearth, one toward the guest rooms, one toward the attic, and one below.

What The House Remembered¶

The party cleared the guest-room level and defeated the Keyless Shade outside Room 7. Inside the room, they recovered the second shard and saw a memory of trapped guests, bending keys, unpaid debts, and the house repeating:

Guests stay.

On the fourth floor, the party found the tavern's records layer: ledgers, debt cabinets, the Unsettled Account Box, and a hidden bookshelf mechanism that needed both a coin-shaped inlay and the right account language. After a records-storm fight, the party recovered the missing inlay and opened Oren's hidden records.

Those records revealed that Oren bought the black-gold relic he called the Coiled Coin. At first it helped him protect and control the tavern. Then it helped too much. Ownership became obsession, and the house began keeping guests, debts, keys, rooms, and belongings.

The Attic And Below¶

In the attic, the party found the belongings the house had kept: boots, letters, purses, toys, rings, keys, coats, cups, ledgers, and names. The hoard animated around the echo of Blackpenny, the man Oren became inside the house's hunger. After the fight, the party recovered the third shard.

The party then descended to the basement, found an old locked cell, and saw warnings scratched where warnings should not have been:

Do not open the cell.

The final shard was below, near the old cell and the power beneath the tavern.

The Silent Coin Falls¶

The four shards reunited into the Coiled Coin. For one breath, the warmth did not feel possessive. It felt whole.

Then the house refused to let go, and the old altar beneath the tavern woke. A guardian formed around the relic, and the party fought it in the collapsing basement.

When the guardian fell, the Coiled Coin became a single warm, heavy black-gold relic. The tavern began to break apart around the party. With the stairs collapsing, the party found the hidden river passage below the tavern, opened the release points under pressure, and escaped into the night.

Outside, Tovin was still waiting. The party had experienced only a few hours inside the tavern, but three days had passed outside. Once the Coiled Coin was sealed in Elaris's reinforced case, the pressure around the area eased.

Back at Moongleam Tower, Elaris treated the party's injuries and poison. The party rested, reached level 4, and eventually handed the sealed relic over to Elaris for study.

What Elaris Explained¶

The next morning, Elaris met the party in his lower study and explained what he believed they had found.

The reinforced case was built to dampen and contain otherworldly magic. Elaris had designed it from long study, but the Coiled Coin was the first true test against a relic like this. Once the relic was sealed inside, the pressure around the tavern faded, which suggested the case was holding.

Elaris believes the Coiled Coin is not an ordinary cursed object. He thinks it is a fragment from one immense shattered power or object, something old enough and strange enough to damage the world around it. He called places like the Silent Coin's foundation world-wounds: injuries in reality that can distort magic, space, memory, perception, and ordinary rules.

He had found old references to an altar placed in the forest to seal one such wound. After hearing what the party saw below the tavern, Elaris believes the Silent Coin was built over or around that old altar. The altar was probably meant to stabilize the wound, but the Coiled Coin changed the balance. The relic pulled at ownership, debt, and claim. The altar pushed back. The tavern became the place where those forces collided.

That collision seems to explain why the Coiled Coin split into four pieces, why the house became obsessed with keeping what it believed was owed, and why reuniting the shards caused the guardian to form. Removing and containing the relic may have allowed the old altar to settle back into its original work.

The party also showed Elaris the blackened copper coin recovered from the tavern. He explained that it was a Resonant Remnant: not corrupted in the same way as the Coiled Coin, but touched by its power. A remnant like that can hold enough fragment-touched energy to create or improve a magic item. The party used it to enchant a greatsword for Kal.

The Road To Brindleford¶

Elaris introduced the next lead: Redmark Keep, an old ruin near Brindleford where caravan attacks and missing supplies have grown worse. Reports mention gnolls, but the signs also point to disciplined armed movement in the area.

The party set out on foot along a safer back-road route. They found red cloth markers, a raided caravan site, gnoll-like tracks, and organized boot prints.

That night, the party camped in old ruins off the road. A gnoll attack struck the camp, but the party was ready and drove the attackers off. Two gnolls fled into the dark. Afterward, the party tried to continue resting.

Later in the night, movement began closing in around the camp from several directions. The sounds were not hungry or chaotic.

They were coordinated.

The shapes around the camp were five hobgoblin soldiers and two captains of the Red Banner. The party tried to explain that they were travelers bound for Brindleford and had already fought gnolls, but the captains declared the road Red Banner territory. They called Brindleford a town under siege, accused the party of bringing aid, and demanded the party's weapons.

The party refused. The hobgoblins fought with formation, command, and poisoned arrows, but the party broke their line and defeated the entire patrol before either captain could escape. After recovering about 60 gp in valuables and usable Red Banner gear, the party completed its interrupted long rest.

The Wagon Trap¶

At dawn, the party continued toward Brindleford. Near mid-morning, they found an overturned wagon, a dead draft animal, blood, red cloth, alarm wires, and a crude pit in a narrow road between steep brush-covered slopes.

The party recognized the ambush before entering the kill zone. Bruce disarmed an alarm line, Nugget scouted from the air, and the group moved onto the slope before gnolls and giant hyenas burst from hiding.

The session ended with the fight still underway. Two gnoll warriors and one giant hyena had fallen, another hyena was badly wounded, and the remaining pack still held the high ground between the party and Brindleford.

Through the Closing Gate¶

Leonidus Deneith joined the fight at the overturned wagon, helping the party destroy the remaining gnoll pack. He was traveling north in search of his brother, Rhaegar Phiarlan.

The party negotiated passage through a fortified Red Banner checkpoint, learning that Rhaegar had entered Brindleford about two days earlier and that a higher Red Banner authority called Command was coming.

Outside Brindleford, the road opened onto a battlefield. The party fought through drainage ditches and broken wagon lanes, rescued the trapped roadwarden Mara Vell from a collapsed shrine, and raced for the town while gnolls and hobgoblins fought around them.

Bruce O'Mordha was struck down during the final crossing and died outside Brindleford's closing gate.

Inside town, Mira Fenwick, Captain Orven Hale, and Old Brenn explained the routes to Redmark Keep. The party chose the western Hunter Trail: a longer, harder ridge path that may allow them to observe the keep and its old runoff systems before selecting an entrance.

Leonidus found Rhaegar waiting at The Bent Wheel. The brothers reunited, and the party completed a safe long rest before the next stage of the Redmark approach.

Beneath Redmark¶

Rhaegar joined the party at The Bent Wheel, bringing the active group to five. The party climbed the Hunter Trail, defeated three ogres attacking an abandoned windmill, and rescued a scavenger who had stolen a red-glass Resonant Remnant from Redmark Keep.

From the western ridge, the party identified the old runoff cut beneath Redmark's guarded gate. Concealed by magic, they reached the forgotten Drainage Culvert and quietly forced its rusted entrance open.

The culvert led through abandoned lower waterworks. The party destroyed gelatinous cubes in a scoured sluice basin and opened a sealed armory locker containing a +1 halberd, a Candle of the Deep, military salvage, and another Resonant Remnant.

In the flooded maintenance gallery, ghouls, a ghast, and a carrion crawler attacked from among the old dead. The party survived the crawler's paralytic tentacles, defeated the creatures, and recovered Redmark payroll, relief supplies, tools, a maintenance key, and another piece of red-gold Resonant material.

After a short rest, the party solved the three-valve pressure mechanism and opened the service gate. The session ended at a broken supply-lift rise beneath the keep, where red-gold light pulses through warm stone and heavier movement waits above.

The War Altar¶

The party climbed into Redmark's command vault and found the Redmaw Tyrant trying to tear a red-gold gemstone fragment out of a damaged War Altar. The altar reacted to the violence around it and pulled combatants toward the trapped relic, but the party defeated the warlord and recovered its Horn of Blasting.

After a quick search produced 50 gp, the party freed the fragment. The old vault began to fail, and the group escaped through an eastern drainage route. Back in Everlund, Elaris accepted the relic and described Redmark's influence as force becoming conquest.

The party reached level 5. During three days at Moongleam Tower, the three Resonant Remnants recovered around Redmark became a +1 Moon Sickle, an Adamantine Plate, and a +1 Longsword. The party purchased Bracers of Archery and a second Adamantine Plate. Kal and Leonidus each received one plate, and Kal took responsibility for a new containment case.

Arc 3 - Farstep Descent / Waymark Crossing¶

The Road to Waymark¶

Elaris's next lead pointed to the Farstep Works, a crystal mine whose routes had begun shifting and leading people astray. He warned that the suspected relic might distort movement and space: the party should move with purpose, pay attention, and avoid separating below ground.

Tovin drove the party toward Waymark Crossing. Empty ore carts, injured travelers, hungry faces, and people abandoning the town showed that the mine's failure was already spreading beyond its tunnels.

The White-Eye Raid¶

The party arrived as Waymark's alarm bell began ringing. Raiders marked with ash-white paint around one eye were taking witnesses, demanding names, searching records and maps, and pushing toward the mine.

At the Lower Road, the party saved pinned guards and townsfolk, recovered the containment case after the raiders tried to steal it, and left one unconscious captive bound with Tovin. The party then chose to defend the Supply Shed, where raiders were preparing oil, pitch, smoke, and demolition materials.

The Horn of Blasting survived its first use but exploded on the second, badly injuring its user and destroying itself. The party still won the fight and saved the mine supplies.

With the containment case hidden safely away, the party followed Mercy Road through a town still coughing smoke and running on fear. The raiders had expected to catch them in the open, but a watchful scout found the trap before it sprang. Steel and magic settled the ambush, leaving scattered valuables in the road and one frightened enemy running uphill toward the mine.

Mercy House stood at the bend like a last safe light, its doors barricaded against attackers already worrying at the back entrance. The party drove them off before they could break through. Inside, Caldus Venn gave the exhausted group time to breathe and heal, then told them where the raiders had gone: toward Farstep Works with prisoners, records, oil, and the tools needed to force a way below.

At the mine gate, the party broke the last of the raider line, but their arcanist slipped into the dark and brought down the entrance braces behind the retreat.

Into the Farstep Works¶

By the time the way was cleared and the party had rested, the mine was waiting: a place where old passages no longer trusted their maps. Chalk marks led past a stripped Survey Gallery and into a blue crystal seam, where the party gathered pale dust that seemed to remember a route.

Those marks finally led to the missing shift. Three miners were alive in an old work pocket, held there by an Umber Hulk far from any place it should have been. The fight was brutal, but the monster fell.

The miners had hidden from the raiders rather than being taken prisoner. Their foreman, Celia, and the two other survivors followed the party's chalked route back toward Waymark after the group treated the miner with a crushed leg. A cache in the pocket yielded healing supplies, a spell scroll of dancing lights, and another piece of Resonant blue crystal.

At a sabotaged lift, a frightened voice seemed to move from place to place with the mine itself. The party could not reach its source, but recovered a self-repairing Rope of Mending from the collapsed shaft. A wrong-cave breach then opened in the route, bringing gricks and darkmantles into the mine. The party defeated them and pressed on.

The deeper trail ended at a raider barracks and staging ground. The party cleared it, rested, and found a map showing prisoners farther ahead, followed by a larger headquarters. The prisoners and the arcanist who escaped into the mine are still ahead.