January 18th, 2026
18th I’amondrix, 826
Aida is a young acrobat recently escaped from indenture to an evil circus-master. Annais is fighter, classically trained as a flute player but unable to find work. Gerald is a priest of Dahadrila, the storm-goddess of entropy. Oskraks is a parasaurolophus-headed saurian dragonborn, a holy warrior sworn to uphold justice, who works as a bard relaying the news from village to village.
The four friends retired to the Pink Unicorn to gossip over the events of the day.
Gerald was all gloom, saying that whatever happens at the top, it won’t be good for the common people. He remembered his time in the Legions as a member of the Hellstalkers. The Hellstalkers are an artillery and sapping legion, notable for their wholehearted adoption of gunpowder. He served during the Varn Lodhir Uprising three years ago, in which the Hellstalkers were sent to crush a dwarven tax revolt. The action collapsed several cities at the heart of the dwarven province. Gerald and many others left, Gerald to become a priest, and the disgraced Legion was assigned to the front line of the Khavandri-Shethya war. Annais asked an acquaintance, Arthur, about the ill omen of a red star; he said that the star disappeared in a meteor shower months ago.
The others mentioned other crises facing the empire. On the southern coast of the Great Kingdom of Messara, a subject kingdom of the Empire and Annais’s homeland, pirates are ravaging the towns and trading ports. In the northwest marches, the reborn necromancer king Tethyk of the Thousand Hands was driven away a year ago, but an army of dungeon-born orcs remains, slaughtering anything they can find in a religious frenzy called a Great Earthwetting. The northern Amanis Province is blighted and withering, and the eastern Mynden Province is too distant to govern.
Two of the inn’s regulars, Marcus and Adrian, came in, and the mood shifted. Annais and Oskraks got on stage and began to play. Oskraks attracted young admirers and was voted King of Misrule. Gerald and the prostitute Zdenka slipped out to do business (not with each other).
Oskraks went to bed with a young redhead whose name no one will be in a state to remember the next morning. She wore a thin gold chain around her neck, having already pawned the pendant.
19th I’amondrix, 826
In the early morning (in a few minutes, the cacophony of bells from the Knells will strike three times) Oskraks felt something like a huge cat get into bed with him and his lady friend. He pushed it onto the floor, and the redhead gave a strangled yelp. Throwing open the window, he saw that a goblin had picked the lock on the room and was chewing on the gold chain around the woman’s neck, pulling it taut.
Oskraks punched the goblin to the ground and stomped its chest in. He trumpeted a reveille; Gerald immediately leapt out of bed, pulled on his clothes, and stood at attention, while the others groggily started awake at the noise.
Hearing more sounds downstairs, Okraks and Gerald headed to the common room. They found four goblins: two pouring top-shelf spirits onto each others’ heads, and a third discus-throwing plates for the fourth to catch in his mouth, several already smashed against the far wall.
The group barged down, Aida and Annais catching up, and slew the two goblins at the bar. The other two goblins darted toward the wine cellar. Gerald blocked them and demanded they hand over the stack of plates; the goblin tipped the stack into Gerald’s arms but kept his grip on the bottom plate as they disappeared into the cellar.
Oskraks tried to charge after them in a battle-rage, but the others calmed him and convinced him to proceed slowly.
At the bottom of the stairs, they found a tripwire and several knife-spikes hammered into cracks in the floor beyond it. Aida collected the daggers, which were made of kitchen knives with the handles cut away from the tangs.
In the wine cellar, they found a vat which was so thickly topped with dust that it could not have been moved in years. They tried its tarnished tap and the front of the vat lifted up, revealing a secret tunnel beyond.
They returned to the common room, where the owner of the Pink Unicorn, Wiebeke, was cleaning up. They reported that the goblins got in and out by a secret tunnel. Wiebeke said the tunnel leads to an old smuggler’s dock that she hasn’t used in years. She agreed to give them three months’ free room and board if they retrieve the plate and send the goblins a message.
Returning to the tunnel, the party found a gap in the stones of the wall that led to a staircase down. It debouched on a level of the undercity, abandoned basements and buried interiors from a previous incarnation of the city.
Choosing a door, they came upon two dead goblins and two destroyed skeletons with bloody swords. Pushing on, they reached a room with a few animated skeletons. The skeletons turned to watch them, but experimental potshots did not appear to provoke them. The party threw goblin knives to destroy the skeletons over the course of a few minutes.
Listening at the doors of this chamber, they heard goblins giggling at one of them. Pushing on, they found a zig-zag hallway. The goblins were gone, but they appeared to have left a circular piece of paper hanging on a cord from the ceiling. It had a crude replica of the plate’s markings drawn on it.
Aida threw a dagger at the paper and punctured it. The added weight did not trigger any kind of mechanism. The party approached the bait. Below it, a pit trap sprang open and Oskraks, who was in front, fell heavily into it. The others helped him climb out.
