What Thistletop Gave Up

The same night, after the fight. Everyone went to fourth level and then the DM started laying things on the table.

The goblins of Thistletop were "pretty much decimated and scattered." The fort was effectively abandoned. So the party went back — no boat in the dark this time, no sea cave under fire, just a walk through a place that had been trying to kill them for two months.

Lucian's stated reason for going was not treasure.

"I am very interested in making sure that that demon is very secure and is not going to make its way out."

Grace's was not treasure either. "Grace wants to look for information." She wanted the child.

The rooms

They found Nualia's own quarters, below the temple with the jackal-headed statue, in the Thassilonian levels. A large chest, and in it:

630 gold pieces
A small sack of forty gems, worth about ten gold apiece
A Necklace of Adaptation — breathe normally in any environment, and advantage on saves against harmful gases and vapours

About a thousand gold all told, split four ways: two hundred and fifty-seven each. They kept the necklace and agreed to pass it around depending on where they were going.

They also found Lyrie Akenja's spellbook, which she had sensibly not carried into a battle. It went to Thalanadil.

The child

Grace asked directly.

The answer came while they were preparing the body for burial. Nualia's stomach is covered in scars — the kind that look like somebody has been gutted at one point or other.

There was nothing anywhere in her rooms about a baby.

Orik had said there was no child and looked confused about it. He was a bodyguard hired months after the fact and he did not necessarily know. The one person who could have answered is dead in a market square, and nobody ever asked her.

The book

She did not keep a journal. What she kept was a large leather-bound tome, wrapped and bound in a hide nobody could place.

"It doesn't look like cowhide. You think for a second it might be human, but no — it's a little too thick for that."

The symbol of the goddess from the shrine was on the front. Inside were several rituals. One of them was bookmarked, and Lucian sat down and worked through it.

The Blessing of Lamashtu. A multi-step ritual to transform a person into a fiend.

Two of the steps are written down:

The burnt offering of the body of a good-aligned priest.
The burnt offering of a significant number of sentient creatures.

And in the margins of that page, in her own hand, notes about Sandpoint as a burnt offering.

Lucian's reaction was immediate and correct: "they were going to round up all the people and sacrifice them." His second reaction was to say that the book needed to go somewhere that was not Sandpoint — Magnimar, ideally into a vault, ideally in a temple.

Everything the campaign has been about since before the recordings started collapses into those two lines. The fire five years ago that killed Father Tobyn was step one. The goblin alliance, the raid, the horde on the coast road, the siege — the entire war — was step two.

She was working a checklist. The town was an ingredient. Her one transformed arm was the ritual caught partway through, and she died with it still unfinished.

The door

At the very bottom of the complex, they found a carving of double doors — huge, cut into a single block of stone, with a binding circle scribed around it.

There is no gap. There is no seam. Where the doors ought to meet, the stone is continuous.

"It's like a concrete sidewalk."

It is the only place in the entire complex the party cannot get into, and it is what Nualia spent months looking for and never opened.

Set into the seal are two small slots. Not cracks — "they look like they were intentionally placed there."

Two. The party has neither.

The well

In another room, they found something they had seen before: the same kind of well that the thin thing came out of in the catacombs under Sandpoint.

This one is ringed, all the way around the chamber, with carvings of gold coins. Stacks and stacks of them, oversized, not real.

Stone got there first, out loud, without prompting:

"This sounds like it might be dedicated to, like, the Runelord of greed. Was there one of those? Do we know?"

They did not. So they were told.

Thassilon

This is the part that reframes everything, and it arrived as an answer to a question somebody asked in passing.

Ancient Thassilon was tens of thousands of years ago, and its magic was built on the seven virtues.
A group broke away — the Runelords — and built theirs on the seven vices instead. The seven deadly sins. Wrath, gluttony, greed, and the rest.
There were seven of them, each ruling his own nation, each immensely powerful, and each drawing magical energy out of a metaphysical emotional state.
The ruin under Sandpoint is dedicated to wrath.
The ruin under Thistletop is very much greed.

Thalanadil, immediately: "So there's two of them, like, really close to each other."

And the answer to that was the most interesting sentence anybody said all night.

"You guys don't know what areas they were. And to a certain extent the landscape has changed quite a bit due to Earthfall. So you could be sitting on what used to be a border. You don't know."

Earthfall. Ten thousand years ago a meteor struck the continent of Thassilon, destroyed it outright and put it under the ocean. A cloud covered the world for a thousand years. Dwarves and humans were driven underground; the elves left through portals and did not come back for a very long time. What survived, survived in caves.

Sandpoint's coastline is not where the coastline used to be. Where the town stands now was probably the middle of a continent.

Thalanadil read the word greed off a wall on the nineteenth of March and said "how strange" and moved on. Four sessions later it turned out to be the shape of the world.

Downtime

Everyone to fourth level, and about a month of in-world time before the next adventure — deliberately open, with the DM offering threads rather than assigning them.

The catacombs under the glassworks. Cleared, but ancient, and there are collapsed tunnels down there nobody has ever opened. Thalanadil could go down with Brodert Quink and study the altar and the well properly.
Thistletop. Secured, or as secured as a place with a sealed door in it can be.
Magnimar. Two days south. Stone wants splint mail. Grace wants armour and wants to help rebuild the town first. Lucian wants the ritual book somewhere with a vault and a temple, and went to college there, so he knows people.

Standing in Sandpoint is, in the DM's words, excellent. The mayor is pleased with Grace and with all of them. Grace's father has resumed the sheriff's post and is "very pleased," which from him is a great deal.

Where it stands

Nualia is dead. Sandpoint held. The party are the heroes of it.

And they are standing in a month of quiet with a very strange collection of things in their hands: a ritual book with pages nobody has read, a runewell of greed nobody has dealt with, a door with two keyholes and no keys, a set of collapsed tunnels under a building full of civilians, an unanswered question about a baby — and a standing invitation to a boar hunt from a very nice man who keeps turning up.

Nothing after this has been played yet. This is the front of the campaign.