1x04 Welcome to the Dungeon

 We chose the eastern cave, and found it lately lived in; a pot of lamb stew gone cold, one bedroll, and two sets of footprints leading down. So down we went, and near the first door, stuck fast in its frame, we found a dead dwarf slumped where he'd fallen. The rooms past him we opened with care, sending an unseen hand ahead to work the locks, and were paid for our caution with a chest holding emerald powder, a pair of purple lace knickers, and a silver amulet. On one wall, scratched in Orcish was a single word: *broken.*

We had not gone much further when a pair of giant centipedes came at us in a corridor too narrow to swing an cat let alone a weapon. We finished them, though not without a few bites to remember them by. A hidden door in a smooth stretch of wall was opened and we found three goblins (Quakel, Josian, and a third) who, rather than fight, told us their sister Vicaros was held prisoner somewhere deeper still, in the grip of an outfit calling itself the Fiendish Doom. So, unlikely as it sounds, an alliance was struck.

But before any of us could enjoy a moment's peace, there drifted into the room a small floating eye full of menace. It shot out rays of raw terror and unseen force, and hurled me bodily into a wall. Horton answered it the only way Horton knows; he charged in, and drove his greataxe clean through the creatures great central eye. It was dead before it hit the ground...

1x03 Of Mice and Goats

Now, we did not flinch at this ancient wizened woman. We squared up over Horton's crumpled body, an attempt to protect our fallen friend, and a good thing too, for the crone was no crone at all, but a warlock whose very touch could chill the soul. At her side loomed a bugbear with a terrible morningstar. I did what I do. I loosed the one trick that I have. Never once had it failed to settle a rowdy taproom. A dazzle of colour left from my hands. The bugbear didn't not so much as blink. I was, as you can imagine, somewhat surprised. The bugbear seemed less surprised and introduced their morningstar to my ribs, and I was unable to keep on my feet. As I gathered myself off the floorboards, Missenbar went to work (hitting out with fists and feet) and beat the thing down into the dirt. Two of my daggers found the warlock, and Horton, awake now and in a truly foul temper, ended her with a single swing of his hand axe.

Beneath the old cottage we found a cellar that turned our stomachs: two goat carcasses swinging on meat hooks, the lower half of a man who'd been butchered in a similar fashion and a blowpipe and six needles of bone. It was the weapon that had put Griffo in the ground. Beside the weapon lay a Vijala doll, which those who traffic in such things will tell you is the token of a contract for murder.

We brought all we'd found back to Sergeant Malati, who took the news with a calm I found peculiar for a woman just told of butchery beneath her town. Still, she pressed seventy-five gold into our hands, and with that we turned west that same afternoon. We had decided to investigate the map we had found and failed to mention to the sergeant.

Following it we soon found a ring of standing stones and we could see that the fool thing was laid out in the shape of a smiling face. Where the nose should have stood, a stone was missing, and digging were it should be we turned up a tin box of silver coins and a single lion's tooth. Two cave mouths yawned on either side of that grinning circle, and so we bent over the map to reckon which one to walk down first.

1x02 Watching the Detectives

 Come the morning, after breakfast, we set off to the Royal Assurance to make good on our agreement. A Sergeant Suminar Malati walked us north from the market square to a row of terraced houses roped off from the curious, and there (with all the cheer of a woman handing you a bill) she passed the whole business into our hands and left us to it.

Inside we found an alchemist, Griffo Clayhanger by name, now face-down in a heap of purple powder upon his own workbench. The air about him was sharp with brimstone. A prudent person would have retreated and assessed the scene from a safe distance; applied stout leather gloves before handling possibly-dangerous elixirs. Not Horton. That great inquiring mind and towering intellect. He wets a finger, dips it the purple powder, and tastes it. Well, dear listeners I also fell over in shock. I'll spare you the particulars, save to say the world turned some very pretty colours for him for a while after.

Missenbar, meanwhile, managed to draw a half-burnt scrap of parchment from the cold fireplace, and on it a single word still legible in the Orcish tongue: ‘bamagat’, which for those of you unfamiliar with the Orcish tongue means underground. I know a little of languages, and I knew this one was not a place, but a password. The name of a hidden road that spirits the endangered away to safety.

Upstairs, the tale deepened further. An empty wicker cot, a child's picture book (‘The Very Hungry Carrion Crawler’), and a sealed letter holding a coin. A coin older even than myself, if you can believe such a thing. On the coin was a lion-faced figure that had been stamped upon it and the words ‘Until the fall of the gates’. It was Horton, having recovered from his dalliance with the purple powder who in the end found the truth of the murder. A needle of bone no bigger than an eyelash, caught in the dead man's collar, and the little dark wound it had left in the back of his neck.

I decided to call next on the neighbours. I went to the left and met a man so eager to talk he'd must have spent years with his ear to shared wall between his and our murder victim's cottage. From him I learned that Griffo had had a caller most evenings at dusk (a pretty young woman the man told me), and that the night before the killing there had been a baby crying fit to wake the dead. A second woman, older and hooded, had left carrying the child away into the dark. The two of them, he swore, had spoken together in no tongue he'd ever heard before.

Horton, meanwhile, was sent to charm the little old lady on the other side of out victim's cottage. She welcomed him kindly and set before him a mushroom omelette. Now Horton is a growing lad and likes his food, so he ate it. Not long after finishing the first few forkfuls the rest of us heard a terrible crash, loud enough to bring down the roof. We decided we should investigate, and found Horton stretched senseless on the floor, with a great dark-furred shape attempting to haul him away by the hair heading toward the back door…

1x01 Beginnings and Bar Guests

Gather in, listen carefully, for every tale must start somewhere, and this one starts with rain. That sort of rain that seems to set in around mid morning and you just know that it isn’t going anywhere today. Now, at a cross roads in the kingdom of Sacken, there is a town called Ettmoss, and in that town a tavern by the name of the Giant's Heads. It is kept by a good woman called Amity Kama. It was there, on an afternoon that was suitable only for ducks, that fate, that fickle mistress, did what fate does best: it wove the paths of strangers so that they found themselves all sat a the same table. 

The first of these strangers was Horton, young and blond and never more than an arm's length from his axe. The second was Missenbar, a halfling with hair the blue of a summer sky, who swore up and down he was some sort of monk. And lastly there was an elderly teller of tales plying his trade from town to town. I feel dear listener, I should point out that I was that storyteller. And that what I now recount to you is a true and honest retelling of the events that I myself witnessed. 

We had scarcely taken our seats when the door blew open and a battered band of adventurers staggered in, carrying one of their own (a tiefling, out cold). Sent to clear a cave of goblins, so they told it, they had been ambushed by a sort of blue skinned goblin wolf hybrid. Barely had they caught their breath and sat down when the door banged again, and in strode a blue dragonborn with two guards at his back, all bluster and pointing fingers. He wanted the noblewoman, with the crest of some minor house stitched on her clothing, travelling with the battered band of adventurers (a warlock, we would learn later, named Ast Ata Keseau).

Well. You know how it is when faced with such rudeness. Especially in a room full of strangers who've had just enough to drink. My companions of chance moved as one. Missenbar slipped in to draw the brute's eye as Horton put both hands to his chest and shoved. I did my small part from the back, an unseen hand I conjured to knot the guards' bootlaces together, so that the two of them went down in a heap the moment they tried to charge. The blue dragonborn, meanwhile, was learning hard lessons from Missenbar's fists, and when at last he turned to flee, he found he'd left it too late; down he went, beaten senseless by the little monk! Horton dragged the great lizard out by the collar and dumped him in the street, the better, he said, to tidy the place up.

As the dust settled, we did what any sensible folk do after a fight: we sat down together over food and drink. Ata told us she'd run from her home, and begged us to carry a small ornate box out of Ettmoss. Inside it lay a platinum figurine she believed her own family were using to hunt her across the land. “Take it to a town called Oitti,” she said, and hand it to a man named Pollitt. This she hoped would lead her pursuers astray. Horton being the upstanding young chap that he is agreed straight away and as he did in walked two of the Royal Assurance (the king's law, for those unfamiliar). They promptly offered to forget the small matter of the dragonborn in the street, if only we fate-touched strangers would look into a small matter of a murder. We were to bring them the guilty party. We naturally agreed and so the night ended: Horton to bed with an axe beneath his pillow, myself in my favoured chair by the fire with a cup of tea, and Missenbar shown up to his room, the three of us saddled with two jobs apiece before we'd so much as finished our first drink together.