PCs: Sir Durhum Lentilles (250 point Paladin of Saturn).
NPCs: Mirko (unknown), Father Robert (unknown).
Due to some unforeseen circumstances, we had to run our
session a bit late last week and that shortened it considerably. That combined
with the general lack of much happening during the session made me think I'd be
best off combining its summary with this week's. So here you have it. Our
intrepid paladin has finally learned what he is fighting!
Two weeks ago, we left off with Sir Durhum and Mirko
approaching Ashby. As they approached, they felt eyes watching them, but no one
was in sight. They passed by an abandoned farmstead on their way to the main
hamlet. Ashby is a small, small community consisting of maybe about dozen and a
half families. It had small buildings and wasn't much to look at. Especially
since there weren't any people there. There weren't any at all. He two
investigators poked around the hamlet a bit and stumbled on a partial track
where someone was dragged into or out of the local temple. Otherwise, there was
nothing – no signs of struggle, whatsoever. It was as if everyone just
vanished.
Sir Durhum didn't want to spend the night in Ashby out of
fear of a midnight ambush, so he and Mirko pitched a tent a bit outside the abandoned
village. The night passed without incident, but when they awoke, they found
footprints encircling their campsite. Human footprints. This unnerved Mirko a
bit, but Sir Durhum remained calm and determined as always. Together they broke
camp and began the journey back to Robston.
Along the way, they came on a pair of goatmen tracking
something. He called to them from afar, but they didn't understand the human
tongue. After some difficult long-distance signing, the two sides managed to communicate
that they weren't looking for a fight and that Sir Durhum was going to just
continue on his way to Robston. That's when the sporebies burst from some
bushes. Half a dozen men with vines sprouting from their necks shambled out of
some bushes. Sir Durhum shouted to Mirko and the goatmen to flee, which they
did, but that only got the sporebies riled up. They began to chase Sir Durhum,
but being slow were quickly lost after a moderate run. The rest of the trip
back to Robston was uneventful.
Once back at Robston and Durhum having had fulfilled his
obligation to get Mirko there safely, Durhum tracked down Father Robert and
reported his findings. Robert confided in Durhum that some of the villagers had
taken to talking to themselves and the miller had told Robert that he was
hearing voices that told him to do terrible things. Over dinner, the two
decided to exhume Will's body and burn it in the middle of the night. They also
decided not to tell the people of Robston just yet, so they wouldn't go
mob-with-pitchforks just yet.
After dinner and after making sure Mirko wasn't telling zombie
tales, Durhum visited Hilda, who, in her usual colorful way, told him that the
sporebies weren't true undead and that Saturn, the
agriculture/plant/civilization god would probably have more to say on the subject.
She also said she might be able to perform some scrying if she could get a
piece of one of the zombies. Thanking her, Durhum left to go grave digging.
At the graveyard, Durhum and Robert found a strange vine
beginning to grow out of Will's grave. Together, they exhumed the corpse and a
rather long tendril of ivy that occasionally moved of its own accord. The
collected the body and brought it to the outskirts of Robston, where the church
groundskeeper had prepared a pyre and Hilda was already waiting with rabbit's-blood-soaked
leeks for her scrying. She has a thing for leeks. As they burned Will's body, Hilda tossed in
pieces of the vine from his grave, which revealed four images: first, a shadowy
figure standing before a heart-shaped cave with an ivy growing about it;
second, a group of people feeding a man to thorn-toothed maw; third, Will being
dragged to the creeper by sporebies and getting stabbed in the neck by the vine;
and last, the visage of a beautiful farmer's daughter at a market stand.
Finally, the pieces came together and Sir Durhum figured out what he was
facing: a Yellow Musk Creeper. One that has eaten or enslaved an entire hamlet.
One that has infected another village. Now he has to find the cave, destroy the
yellow musk creeper there, and prevent any new ones from springing up in
Robston.