Chapter 01 Session 01 Wrap Up

Narrative Recap

Four strangers answered a slate chalked up by the door of the Starving Stirge in Reme, and found one man at the corner table with a rapier on his hip, a cup he never drank from, and an eye that kept going to the window facing the north road. Corian made no speeches. He told Darla and Azren plainly that spellcasters were the thing he needed and could not advertise for, told M’Ari that a woman who could feed a party off the country was worth as much to him as a sword, and told Cevis he recognised a man who was good at a job and did not want to discuss it. Ten gold each, provisions found, an even five-way split of a dead wizard’s keep west of Fairhill — and the books to whoever could read them, because he could not read a line of any of it himself. They took the coin and left at dawn with two mules.

Four days north in unbroken rain, they made the camp that decided the journey. M’Ari built a lean-to against the hillside and put the fire under it where the weather could not reach, and Cevis walked a hundred feet of wet dark and came back with the shape of what lived there: hooved tracks with the wrong gait, two sets with the small one stepping inside the large one’s prints, and old bones cracked open for marrow beneath a carrion smell far fresher than the bones. That night a child began crying up the slope, and Darla — alone on first watch, with the fire at her back and no way in the world to know better — believed it completely. She woke the camp instead of going up, which is the only reason all four of them are still walking. The mother Leucrotta switched to a man’s voice thirty feet further along; Azren shouted into the dark and heard the child stop mid-breath in a place no living throat could stop; and Cevis, hidden in a bush the yearling never checked, found the ambusher lying flat ten feet inside the treeline with its eyes fixed on the gap anyone would walk through to reach a dying girl. Both leucrottas died in that clearing. Both mules ran and did not come back.

The pattern held for the rest of the road. Three Stirges were found asleep in a split dead oak eighty feet from camp and killed in the tree before the encounter could happen. Eight giant wolf spiders cost them spell slots and nothing else. On a hill west of the Tradeway they climbed two hundred tons of standing stones arranged into a grinning skull that faces the road, found no grave and no chamber, and took away one small dark stone that somebody had hidden at the base of a tooth long after the monument was raised — unidentified, because nobody in the party can cast detect magic. And on the seventh night, with the weather finally broken, Corian asked them all to sit and told them the truth: eight years apprenticed to his uncle and released for having no talent whatsoever; the visits to Feriblan the Mad’s library in Reme; the compartment in the reading stand with dust in it older than he was; the parchment and the silk-wrapped amulet he stole at nineteen from an old man who had shown his uncle nothing but courtesy. Eralion’s letter about becoming a lich. Feriblan laughing at him years later — the magic was far beyond his grasp — and then rambling out the keep, the staff and the unreturned spellbooks. And the raven that had sat on his windowsill in Reme three weeks running. Talon was in the thorn branch fifteen feet away while he said it.

Two days on, they came to a farm with the gate standing open and the animals loose, and found the farmer in his own yard, his wife and two children inside the door, and the third in the pen. Vortigern had murdered them for corpses to throw, and he sprang his trap from sixty feet of treeline with two thugs, a scroll and an imp. What the module calls quite an accomplishment happened instead: the party killed everything — Vortigern, Grenag, Slaaroc, five Fiendish Skeletons, the three risen farmers and Talon. It was the only fight of the nine days that drew blood, and it drew it close: Darla finished standing on one hit point. Vortigern died with his dust of disappearance still in his pocket and never once touched Eralion’s Amulet.

Corian stood over the body of a man he had known since he was twelve and did not celebrate. He said out loud that he had hired four strangers because he was too frightened to walk a road alone and had told himself he was buying muscle; that the family in the yard died because Vortigern needed bodies and they were nearest the road; and that both facts were his, earned by a theft he committed at nineteen. Then he restated the five-way split and released anyone who wanted to take their coin and go at Fairhill. They barred the door of a murdered family’s house, set a watch in the room where three of them died, and slept badly. It rained in the morning, and Fairhill is two days ahead.

World Fact Findings

All four ruled CANON at reconcile on 2026-09-13 and written into geography and _World/_flags.md. Retained below as the record of what was staged.

1. Megalithic monuments predate the Tradeway. The Smiling Skull is two hundred tons of undressed stone raised without iron tools, in dug and backfilled sockets, and it is substantially older than the road it faces — implying the Tradeway follows a much older track along that valley floor. Established by Azren in play, and it is a setting fact rather than an encounter detail.
2. Somebody is still visiting the monument. A small dark stone of a different rock type, edges still sharp, was hidden and turfed over at the base of one of the standing stones long after the monument was built. The module treats the stone as a red herring; the fact that someone put it there recently is not addressed anywhere.
3. Leucrottas breed in the hills north of Reme, hunt the Tradeway by mimicry, and lair with the remains of earlier victims. A mated pair with a yearling was cleared from one such hill.
4. The Tradeway is not safe between Reme and Fairhill. In nine days the party met two leucrottas, three stirges, eight giant wolf spiders, a murdered farm family, and a wizard’s ambush.