Catch up through Session 7
This view contains recap summaries and passages only through the session you choose. Start at the beginning or select where to stop.
Other pages and site-wide search show the latest story. Follow a full recap link when you are ready to leave this limited view.
8 published recaps through Session 7.
Session 0 · Apr 27, 2026
Session Zero
Characters finalized, house rules set: no Neverwinter, no ammo or weight tracking, level cap 6.
Read the full recap →Read passages from Session 0
The table and house rules
The table gathered to get the campaign off the ground.
Answered group-relevant questions regarding gameplay, scheduling, etc. Finalized most character information. House rules Owen implemented: not using the Neverwinter location; not tracking ammunition or weight (unless special ammunition or ridiculous weight). Setting: Forgotten Realms, Phandalin region — Dragon of Icespire Peak, D&D 5e (2014 rules), level cap 6.
Read this scene in the recap →Session 1 · Apr 27, 2026
The Road to Phandalin
The party forms on the road, takes the Gnomengarde quest, hears the first dragon rumors, and kills a boar at midnight.
Read the full recap →Read passages from Session 1
The road, the contract, and the boar
The players met on the road to Phandalin, where Thom made a "friend" named "Friend."
In town, the party talked to a townsperson, checked the quest board, spoke with the Quest Master, and visited the inn. Choosing the Gnomengarde Quest — warn the gnomes about the dragon, with a bonus for bringing back any magical objects — earned them the Quest Master's first mention of dragon rumors. The innkeeper offered limited intel on the gnomes (tinkerers, reclusive), and the party noticed a strange person watching them at the inn. Nothing further at the time — but remember him.
They traveled toward Gnomengarde and camped overnight a few miles out. Sage took first shift; Bean was out like a light; Thom and "Friend" enjoyed their mulled earth. On second shift, Hamish noticed a wild boar, attacked, and missed. The boar ran into camp, where Bean tried attacking, missed, and took damage for her trouble. Barnaby hit it with Dragon's Breath for substantial damage; Sage tried to soothe the boar for a close-up attack (failed), then reluctantly landed the killing blow with an arrow.
The party preserved the boar for food and finished their long rest.
Play resumes the next morning.
Read this scene in the recap →Session 2 · May 15, 2026
Dax Joins
A wounded fighter amid five dead orcs joins the party, Gnomengarde is explored, and Facktoré opens fire.
Read the full recap →Read passages from Session 2
Dax joins and Facktoré fires
The party woke and prepared bacon for breakfast. Rut seemed interested in Barnaby and got in his face.
After burying the boar, the party met Dax, a wounded fighter on a similar quest toward Gnomengarde, surrounded by five dead orcs and carrying orc rumors of a dragon in the area. Given food, he cautiously joined the party toward their shared destination — unsure whether joining the group was actually the fastest way to complete his quest.
Inside Gnomengarde, Hamish took an interest in mushrooms growing in the pond and discovered they were being farmed. The party wandered the passageways and found crab-like contraptions sized perfectly for Rut and Bean, then reached the kitchen, where gnomes were preparing mushrooms into oil, bread, and wine. Rut stole a piece of bread; Hamish learned how to harvest mushrooms. The baker told Dax to find the king to complete his quest, kicked Thom in the shins for asking too many questions (a busy woman, after all), and offered a tip to reach the king faster — which the party didn't trust.
Then the party met Facktoré, a crazed gnome eager to test her heavy crossbow ballista on new targets. She immediately shot Thom. Sage and Hamish partially disabled the machine, Thom cast Sleep on the gnome, and Dax tied her up. Bean found her bag of 10 gold — her favorite!
Barnaby carried Facktoré and Bean to the entrance they'd been directed to and were met by several gnomes, less concerned about Thom's bleeding and more worried about their crazy friend all tied up. Poor Facktoré! During a heated argument about letting a lunatic operate heavy weaponry, Rut freed her — and she promptly screeched and ran away.
Read this scene in the recap →Session 3 · May 18, 2026
The Mimics
A paranoid king, a bound queen, a goopy rope bridge, and two very real mimics. The contract is delivered.
Read the full recap →Read passages from Session 3
The mimics and the king's reply
Deeper into Gnomengarde:
Slime found on the throne room floor, headed toward a door. A hidden passageway in the throne room, and a peephole into the King's chambers — where the Queen was tied up and the King was touching everything, paranoid about a mimic. Disabled a blade trap. Exited to a cave opening and a rope bridge with goop hanging from the ropes. Encountered some guards; Thom reassured them that mimics can't turn into people. Entered a storage room — chandelier, tables, barrels, and two side paths — and fought two mimics. The party won.
Business concluded: the contract from the Guildmaster was delivered to King Korboz, and a sealed envelope from the King was given to Dax — proof of the completed trade.
Read this scene in the recap →Session 4 · Jun 22, 2026
Back to Phandalin, and a Squeeze
Harbin pays out and posts two contracts, Thornton reveals a Zhentarim pin and crossbows, and two manticores meet the party at Umbrage Hill.
Read the full recap →Read passages from Session 4
Payment, crossbows, and manticores
After wrapping up business at Gnomengarde, the party headed back to Phandalin to collect their reward and figure out next steps.
First stop: Harbin Wester's house. After a comical series of unlocking sounds, the nervous, portly townmaster cracked open the door, scanned the sky, and hurried the party inside. He paid out 135 gold total (19 each) for the Gnomengarde job, returned the wand, and offered two new contracts:
Umbrage Hill — convince the midwife Adabra Gwynn, a Colletite of Chauntea, to leave her stone windmill and return to town for safety (25 gp). Dwarven Excavation — warn dwarf prospectors southwest of town that a white dragon has moved into the area (50 gp).
Next, the Miner's Exchange. Dax delivered the King's sealed letter to Guildmaster Holia Thornton — proof of the completed trade — and the letter's mention of the dragon prompted her questions about the threat. Then she drew back her cloak to reveal a pin bearing a dragon symbol, which Hamish recognized as the mark of the Zhentarim, a shadow organization with fingers in organized crime and politics. The guard posted outside — the same strange figure who'd watched the party at the inn back in Session 1 — was one of her people. What started as a conversation turned into a strong-arm: Thornton had crossbows trained on the party and pressed everyone into an information-sharing agreement, demanding to be kept informed of any dragon intelligence and offering payment for updates. With his original contract discharged, Dax stayed pragmatic — happy to keep working with her so long as coin stayed on the table. Thornton also let slip a lead: a ruined temple south along the Trivial Trail, where locals stash their gold.
While most of the party went shopping, a few members made an unauthorized visit back to Harbin's place. Bean turned up some of his personal notes on Thornton. Dax and Rut sat this one out.
The party then set out for Umbrage Hill — and found two manticores actively trying to tear the stone windmill apart. A long, scrappy fight followed: fog cloud, magic missiles, handaxes, sneak attacks, and an Action Surge from Dax, with Barnaby burning a reaction to shield Dax mid-fight. Bean landed the kill on the first manticore, and Sage put an arrow through the second one's eye to close it out.
Adabra's windmill survives. Mostly.
Read this scene in the recap →Session 5 · Jul 14, 2026
Adabra, Orcs, and the Temple of Abbathor
Adabra refuses to leave, an orc camp is bypassed, and the party splits jellies (literally) in a ruined temple to the god of greed.
Read the full recap →Read passages from Session 5
Adabra and the first temple rooms
The session picked up in the immediate aftermath of the manticore fight at the Umbrage Hill windmill, with most of the party badly wounded. Rut spent his last spell slot on Goodberry and Barnaby used Lay on Hands to get everyone back on their feet. Rut also ripped a tail spike from one of the manticore corpses and kept it, offering no explanation.
The woman the party rescued introduced herself as Adabra Gwynn, the midwife and apothecary who brews the healing potions supplied to Phandalin. The party delivered Harbin's warning, but she refused to relocate — she insists she can't brew anywhere but her windmill. She gave the party a free healing potion (handed to Dax, who tossed it to a still-bleeding Thom), mentioned to Sage that she knows Harbin well and that her potion supply matters to the town, and noted that orcs have grown more common in the area lately. Before the party left, she handed Sage a note for Harbin confirming she's staying put. The party agreed to check on her on the return trip.
After a short rest and a home-cooked meal from Adabra, the party set out for the dwarven excavation and soon found day-old orc tracks — a sizable band, most scattering off-road. Sage and Hamish scouted ahead, confirmed a large orc encampment a few miles down a split trail, and confirmed the path to the excavation was clear. Dax attempted a strategic read of the orc movements from his military days and came up with nothing ("Wasn't in the military very long anyway"), while Barnaby's assessment gave the party confidence to push on. They made the rest of the trek in the dark.
At the excavation — a ruined settlement behind a broken black-stone gate in a canyon — Bean crept in to scout, kicked a pebble, stayed unseen anyway, and then announced herself: "I'm Bean!" The camp belonged to two dwarf prospectors from Phandalin, Norbus Ithermel and Dazlyn Grayshard. The party delivered Harbin's dragon warning and shared news of the orc band nearby, which clearly rattled the dwarves — but they refused to abandon their site. Dax offered a formal introduction in Dwarvish, earning appreciative nods. The dwarves explained the site is a ruined temple of Abbathor, god of greed, which they believe holds treasure — but ochre jellies inside have stopped their dig, and they're miners, not fighters. Thom negotiated a 60/40 treasure split in the party's favor, plus food and lodging for the night.
Over the evening the party learned the temple's history: Abbathor, displeased with his priests' sacrifices, buried the settlement in an avalanche — and transformed the surviving priests into the ochre jellies. There is no known way to change them back. The dwarves also warned of secret doors.
In the morning, Thom lit the way with Dancing Lights into the main chamber, where one jelly clung to the ceiling and another to the wall. Highlights from the fight:
Dax's thrown handaxe caused a jelly to split in two (axe embedded in the process), and his follow-up longsword slash did nothing — slashing only makes more jellies. Rut absorbed a nasty acid hit with Absorb Elements, then Wild Shaped into a boar to tank. Thom's Magic Missile triggered a Wild Magic Surge that aged him several years — actual stubble now. Bean landed a natural 20 with sneak attack. Barnaby blessed the front line, Sage went in close with dual daggers to finish a split jelly, and Hamish — after pouring longbow fire into the original wall jelly all fight — leaped in with his shortsword for the final kill.
After the fight, Dax discovered a hidden door in a pillar base concealing a coffer of gemstones — rubies, emeralds, topaz — which went to Thom, with the empty coffer quietly returned behind the door. The dwarves don't know about the find. Hamish located two secret doors in the chamber. Rut spotted a gold chain inside a dead jelly's acidic remains and fished it out with the Pole of Collapsing: a gold necklace, its nameplate illegible, overwritten in ancient Dwarvish. Sage read the inscription aloud: "This is what happens to those who displease me." Rut pocketed it.
One secret door revealed a dark bending hallway with something glinting in the rubble; the other, a short passage to a closed door. Rut Wild Shaped into a rat, while Hamish went in to investigate the glint — which turned out to be not gold, but one more ochre jelly lurking in the rubble.
Session 6 likely opens mid-fight.
Read this scene in the recap →Session 6 · Jul 24, 2026
Doors, a Broken Deal, and Seven Orcs
The last jelly falls, the temple gives up its dead and its ledger, the dwarves walk away from the deal — and seven orcs come up the canyon looking for a new fort.
Read the full recap →Read passages from Session 6
The last jelly
The session opened mid-fight, exactly where Session 5 left off: one last ochre jelly waiting in the dark at the end of the rubble hallway.
Sage opened with an arrow down the corridor. Rut — still Wild Shaped as a rat from the session before — ran the length of the hall on all fours, slipped past the jelly entirely, and found a third secret door seamed into the wall beyond it. He climbed the frame, hauled on the mechanism, threw himself at it again and again, and could not move it a fraction. He was audibly squeaking with frustration by the end.
The fight behind him went quickly. Dax sprinted in and staggered the jelly; Bean put a shot into it from across the chamber without being spotted. The jelly climbed the wall and onto the ceiling to creep past Dax, who opened it further on the way by. Barnaby stepped into the mouth of the passage and let his breath weapon go — and the lightning tore a piece of the thing loose, which promptly stood up as a second jelly. Sage came in close with dual daggers to finish the one on the floor; Hamish sheathed his bow, drew his shortsword, ran, jumped, and drove the blade up into the one still clinging overhead. A heavy glop of it slid off his coat as the rest came apart.
He picked Rut up by the tail on the way out. Rut twisted around and snapped at his hand, hit the floor, and ran off into the room without comment.
Read this scene in the recap →What was behind the doors
What was behind the doors
Rut's door opened easily for someone with hands and a shoulder. Beyond it the passage straightened out and ran east to a cave-in, floor to ceiling, with a plain door on either side.
Hamish took one and found a skeleton half-buried in fallen stone, a holy symbol resting on its collarbone — a small jeweled dagger on a silver chain, worked with Dwarvish runes. Lifting the chain rolled the skull loose against his boot. He pocketed the symbol.
Barnaby took the other and found two more dead dwarves laid out in red vestments. Their armor came apart in rotted chunks in his hands and the robes spilled spiders. An empty stone font jutted from the wall, dry for centuries, and behind it was another seam — a sleeping chamber with three bed frames, a body crushed under a section of collapsed ceiling, and, half-buried in dust, a longsword. Whatever else had rotted in that place, the blade had not.
Loot Abbathor's Holy Symbol & a Preserved Longsword A jeweled dagger on a silver chain, its Dwarvish runes reading "Greed is good" — carried by Hamish. And a longsword found under a bed frame in the priests' sleeping chamber, still sound after centuries in the dust — carried by Barnaby. The sword is a +1 longsword , with no additional special properties; nothing about the holy symbol has been identified.
Dax held the mouth of the passage while the others spread out, listening into the black. Behind him, the party. Ahead and faint: footsteps and voices — the dwarves, moving somewhere in the ruin, looking for them. When Thom brought a light down, Dax found what the dark had been hiding — a stretch of smooth, seamless wall with a mechanism behind it. One good pull swung it open onto the main chamber and its altars. This passage looped back to where they had started.
Rut spent the hour trying to force both cave-ins, squeezing into gaps and digging at loose stone, and got nowhere — the rock is packed tight and too large to shift. Thom, Sage, and Bean followed another branch into the same wall of rubble, and found a dead dwarf with a few coins around him and a tattered book half-buried beside the body.
Read this scene in the recap →The deal breaks
The deal breaks
Norbus and Dazlyn came for their share.
They found Hamish first and asked what the party had turned up. Not much, he told them. Jellies. They took it badly, quietly, and went looking for everyone else. Dax gave them dead bodies and rubble and no gold at all, and they heard the shape of the lie before he finished it. Thom talked over the top of it — loud, fast, generous with detail: bones, secret doors everywhere, an altar, a medallion, all dead ends — and they believed him. They believed only him. Everyone else made it worse in turn. Rut, still a rat, darted in and bit a dwarf's ankle and was not even noticed. Barnaby tried intimidation and got nothing.
Then the dwarves stopped talking and put their hands out: we had an agreement, sixty-forty, we'll let it slide — split it now. Bean dug five gold pieces out of her own purse and handed them over.
They looked at the coins, at the party, and at a temple full of doors these adventurers had spent all day opening. Then they turned and stamped out through the entrance hall and were gone.
Read this scene in the recap →The ledger
The ledger
Sage took the book off on her own. It was a temple ledger, written in an older dialect than she's fluent in but legible: page after page accounting the gold, gems, and offerings laid before Abbathor across generations. Two things stood out.
The offerings thin out over the years, and the entries beside them grow defensive — Abbathor will be pleased with our investments. And there is a description of a room the party has not seen: a sacrifice chamber, dark, flanked by two statues. Nowhere in the ledger does it say where the wealth went.
Hamish found her in the hallway and showed her the holy symbol. She turned the little jeweled dagger over and read the runes cut into it.
Greed is good. — the runes on Abbathor's holy symbol, read by Sage
They talked about leaving and decided against it. Whatever's left here is behind the rubble, so they got down and started moving it — bare hands and Thom's shovel, the larger pieces heavy enough to need two or three of them at a time. Somewhere in that hour Rut let the rat go and came back to himself, still crouched on all fours and still making the noises, until the others stopped digging and stared at him in open disgust and he looked down at his own hands.
Sage went outside with the ledger to see whether the dwarves could still be talked around. The camp was stripped bare — bedrolls gone, tools gone, the fire kicked apart and cold. They had packed and left without a word, and nobody is likely to learn where they went.
Standing in the empty camp, she heard footsteps carrying through the rock of the mountain and echoing off the canyon walls. More than two of them. Coming their way.
Read this scene in the recap →Seven orcs
Seven orcs
Hamish, Sage, and Bean slipped out the main doors and worked their way into the ruined town, and there they were: seven orcs coming up the canyon at a raider's pace, armed and unhurried, looking the place over. This'll make a good fort, one of them was saying. Good new base. Then one of them saw Sage. Fresh meat, boys.
The three of them ran. The orcs came after.
Dax dropped his end of the rubble the moment they came through the door. He was a soldier once, and whatever he can't read about an enemy at distance, he understands a doorway: the entrance is a funnel, so the orcs would have to come through one and two at a time. Archers behind the pillars, where the stone gives full cover. Everyone else back and out of sight.
The first orc through was the biggest, and it stopped when it saw Dax. Something moved behind its eyes.
Were you near Gnomengarde?
"Why do you ask?"
Answer the question, maggot.
"I was."
So you killed our men.
"I sure did."
It came at him roaring and buried its greataxe in him.
What followed was long, ugly, and very nearly killed the party. They put the leader down fast — Hamish and Thom softening it, Sage finishing it with an arrow through the front of its skull — and after that nothing came easy. Barnaby scattered a bag of a thousand ball bearings across the entryway, and orcs went down hard on the stone all fight trying to cross it, which is most of what kept the fight winnable. But the axes kept landing. Hamish took a javelin and went down. Dax took an axe across the chest and dropped where he stood, bleeding out with nobody close enough to reach him.
Thom, working from behind the altar, sent a mage hand across the room with a healing potion and poured it into Hamish's mouth, and in the same breath dragged sleep down over the orcs at the door, catching one. Barnaby crossed to the sleeping orc and killed it where it lay, then went down himself.
Rut took the shape of a wolf and fought at the front line, killed one outright with his teeth in its throat, and when an axe finally broke the shape he came back to himself bloodied and standing. He spent everything he had left healing Barnaby off the floor. Barnaby got up and went straight for Dax, taking a swing on the way, and knelt and pushed the last of the light in his hands into him — six points of nothing much, and enough.
Dax got up. Too battered to trust his own hands, he used the Clockwork Amulet to guide the blade in, and it bit deep. Rut put a dagger through another orc's ankle and Hamish opened its head. Bean — who spent the entire fight behind one pillar and was never once found or hit — put an arrow through another and killed it.
Then there was one. Barnaby went to meet it and caught a full-strength swing that dropped him a second time. It stood over the bodies and promised to kill every one of them and take the temple and that fine new sword. Rut sprang at its face and split its eye open with a dagger. It was still standing, barely, when Dax stepped over the leader's corpse and came for it.
I killed your brothers before, and I'll continue to kill everyone I come across. — Dax (played by Samuel)
He took its head off.
Rut got to Barnaby and worked over him until his breathing steadied, then lay down beside him and did not get up again.
Seven orcs and three jellies dead. The dwarves gone, the deal broken, their fate unknown. And somewhere behind all that rubble, a sacrifice room with two statues that nobody has found yet.
Read this scene in the recap →Session 7 · Aug 25, 2026
The Hidden Chamber, a Debt Paid, and a Dragon
A sealed room in the temple gives up an emerald and written permission to take the offering, a dead dwarf is carried home to his brother — and a messenger reports a dragon attack.
Read the full recap →Read passages from Session 7
The orc dead
They woke on the floor of the temple where they had fallen, among seven dead orcs going stiff in the cold.
Nobody was in a hurry to touch them. Bean went through their clothing and found she did not want to put her hands anywhere near it, and came away with nothing. Barnaby had fewer objections: he sat one of the bodies up, opened its throat, and held his waterskin under the cut until he had collected a measure of something dark and red and cold, then stoppered it and put it away. Hamish did the honest work, hauling bodies off one another where they had fallen in a heap, and found their packs clear of the blood on the floor — rations, waterskins of their own, ten gold in a small pouch, and a child's doll with its head torn off.
Dax went to the leader. The armor was the thing that had bothered him since the fight: chain mail, well made, nothing orcish about it. He worked the straps loose and lifted it off over the body's head, and what he saw underneath the blood was human work — the kind that comes out of a Neverwinter garrison and gets sent north to sit in a border post. He said as much aloud. This band had been taking things off people who could not stop them, and taking them from somewhere close.
In the leader's pack was a rough piece of sheep hide covered in orcish scrawl, and a crude map of the Sword Coast. Hamish read it. Leilon was marked. So were the mountains, and the Triboar Trail, and the High Road, and a note about Phandalin. The markings were scouting notation — places worth raiding, ranked by preference, with a clear taste for high ground.
Nobody at the table could say what the note beside the map meant. Dax looked over the body one more time, found no rank markings, no tattoos, nothing to say the thing had been anyone important. A captain, maybe. A troop leader. Then he drew his sword, put it into the corpse once, pulled it out, flicked the blood off the blade, and walked away without saying anything.
Thom, meanwhile, had dug a thumb into the leader's eye socket and pulled the eye out whole, optic nerve trailing, and handed it to Rut, who wanted a trophy. Rut had a manticore spike and a mimic tentacle already. He put the eye in his pack and asked what color orc eyes were supposed to be. Green, as it turned out.
Read this scene in the recap →The emerald and the offering
It was Thom who remembered the rubble.
There was a wall of it at the end of one of the temple's dead branches, packed too tight to shift by hand, and they had given up on it the night before. Rut looked at it and became a giant badger, and went at it with the claws for that, and after a while there was a hole through the far side big enough for a person to crawl through on hands and knees.
Beyond it was a round chamber, and in it two pedestals. On the left stood a statue of a horned dwarf, its stone face bent toward the enormous green gem cradled in its hands. On the right, another statue lay in pieces, scattered outward across the floor in a wide circle, as though it had come apart from the inside.
Thom, Bean, and Barnaby crawled in after him. Dax, Hamish, and Sage stayed outside.
Thom felt the draft first — a thin current of air moving through a room that had been sealed for centuries. He ran his hands along the wall until he found the seam, so fine it took a man who knew it was there to see it at all. There was no lever. There was no mechanism. Barnaby put his shoulder into the slab at a run and it did not move a fraction, and he came away with a bruise for it. Rut tried to burrow beneath and found solid rock. They searched the room together and found nothing, and eventually the only thing left in it worth looking at was the statue and the gem in its hands.
Bean checked for traps twice and was confident there were none.
Thom put up a mage hand and ran it along the edge of the gem, and nothing happened. He worked the hand under it and lifted.
The whoosh came first. Then the statue's eyes lit, and it shook, and it burst.
Rut took the worst of it and lost the shape he was wearing, coming apart out of the badger and back into himself in a spray of stone. Barnaby, further off, got most of it turned by his armor. The gem was untouched.
Outside, the others heard the blast roll up through the tunnel and felt the dust come down off the ceiling. Rut crawled out first, soot-black and battered, and could not say much about what had happened beyond the fact that it had. Sage kept him outside and spent a spell on him, closing the worst of it. Dax and Hamish went in.
Thom held the emerald in front of him and gave them the story: a draft, a wall nobody could open, a gem nobody could resist, and a statue that had been waiting a very long time for someone to try. Where the statue had stood there was now a fresh pile of rubble, scattered in exactly the same pattern as the old one across the room. Nothing in the room told them when the other statue had broken.
Hamish went to the pedestals — both of them — and looked at what the explosion had opened up. Under the base of each, sunk into the floor, was gearing. He asked whether he could work them, and did, turning and worrying at the mechanism until it clicked, and then crossing the room and doing the same to the other.
The seam in the wall opened wide enough to get fingers into.
Behind it was an alcove barely larger than a closet, with a vent in its ceiling that explained the draft, and a pedestal with a small chest on it, flanked by two idols in miniature — the same figures that stood at the temple's front doors, bent in prayer toward the box. Barnaby put himself on the far side of the room. Thom tried the latch with a mage hand and found it locked. Bean stepped up and had it open in a moment.
Inside: a small pile of tarnished silver, a larger one of gold, and a note. It was written in Common, which nobody could explain.
May all offerings to Abbathor forever cease. If you have found this room and you have survived, take what remains. Let the memory of Abbathor be forgotten. — the note left in the last offering chest
A hundred and fifty gold, seventy silver. They took it. Thom kept a tally and put the emerald, the coffer of gems, and the coin into one pot to be divided later, and made the point that they had been formally invited to rob the place. He showed the note around so that nobody could say otherwise.
Loot The Great Emerald & the Last Offering A diamond-cut emerald the size of both fists, about eight pounds, taken out of the statue's hands — carried by Thom, who can lift it one-handed without trouble but slows to half his pace with it in his pack. And the alcove chest: 150 gold and 70 tarnished silver , left with written permission to take it.
Read this scene in the recap →The dwarves and the squirrels
Sage did not feel good about it.
She said so — that she had tried to keep the peace with the dwarves and the dwarves had spent it, and that the treasure was theirs by right of the work, and that she still felt they had done them dirty. Thom's answer was that if there had been a reckoning for the lie, the party had already taken it in the ribs from seven orcs, and that whatever it had cost, the expedition was now funded.
Rut had a different answer. In the forest, he said, squirrels put their nuts in trees, and he found the trees, and one winter was cold, so he ate the nuts. The squirrels came and chittered at him about it. But he was bigger, so they left.
Sage understood every individual word of that.
They filed out through the tunnel and into a morning that had barely started, the sun not yet up over the crags. Thom came last, well behind everyone, hauling a backpack that seemed to be trying to sit down.
Read this scene in the recap →Dax and Rut on dragons
On the road down, with nobody else in earshot, the talk between Dax and Rut came round to dragons. Dax told him that dragons eat people. He says everything the same way — flatly, reasonably, no tell in his face at all — and Rut believed him.
Then Rut looked over at Barnaby, and gestured.
"That's why we make sure to keep him well fed."
By the time Sage caught them up, Rut had the whole thing and was explaining it to her himself: dragons eat people, and that is why Barnaby is kept well fed.
Dax confirmed that dragons do, in fact, eat people.
Read this scene in the recap →A panther finds Sage
Hamish and Sage went out ahead to scout, the two of them faster than the rest and better in the rock than anyone.
The tracks told a clean story. The seven that had come for them had come from the west, from the big encampment, and from the vantage point on the rocky crag the rangers could see that the main body had moved on — the grass trampled flat in a wide line running away over the horizon, well clear of the road north.
What the tracks did not explain was the animal.
It came out of the underbrush at a trot, making no effort to hide, and it was a panther, and it was coming directly for Sage. Hamish drew and held on it. Sage stopped him. She could not have said why, only that she felt something for the creature that she had no business feeling for an animal she had never seen, and she wanted to talk to it before anybody put an arrow in it.
She spent a spell and asked.
I found you. I finally found you. He had been asking after her — every animal that had watched the party pass had heard the question. He had no idea how the cat distribution system had managed to overlook him for so long, and he was, at last, extremely pleased to have a person. He would follow her commands. He had come from the west, and he could tell her the orcs had gone well away, and the road ahead was open.
Sage, who had known this was a thing that might happen to her and was nonetheless entirely unprepared for it to happen, said she would think about a name.
Hamish lowered the bow.
Later, the same conversation happened again about the panther. He would have to be kept fed as well, on the same principle — though a panther, Dax allowed, is a good deal easier to kill than a dragon, if it ever came to that.
Rut raised the feeding question with Barnaby directly.
Read this scene in the recap →Dazlyn on the trail
North on the trail, they found the body.
It was one of the dwarves. He was face down with an orc javelin standing out of his back, and when Hamish turned him he found the fingers of one hand closed hard around something. He worked them open — they had been stiff a long while — and took out a smooth stone cut with runes.
Thom looked at it and knew it: a sending stone. Like tin cans on a string, he explained, if the string were gone and the distance did not matter. Which meant there was another one somewhere, and someone holding it.
He used it.
Hello there. We found this stone. Please let us know how to find you. I have bad news about the person who held it. My
The stone gives you twenty-five words and takes the rest. Thom said "my name is Thom" out loud, in the ordinary way, standing on the road. What arrived at the other end stopped at my.
The answer came back in his head in a voice he had heard before, and it was short.
Bring my brother back to Phandalin. I will bury him. P.S. Pay me what you owe.
That settled the argument about what to do with the body. Rut, whose position was that nature would take care of it the way nature takes care of everything, was talked around on the grounds that a dwarf would want burying and a brother would want a brother. Barnaby picked him up. They carried him north.
Read this scene in the recap →Adabra packs
Adabra Gwynn was still at her windmill, and put her head out of an upper window when they came into the yard, and came down pleased to see them.
She was less pleased about the dwarf.
They had told her about the dragon last time and it had not moved her. This time Thom told her about the orcs — the encampment, the seven that had come up the canyon, the one now over Barnaby's shoulder — and the color went out of her. She remembered the raids. A century back a war band had come through and burned Phandalin to the ground, and they had been picking at the region ever since, and orcs, she said, are quite devastating.
She would go back with them, if they did not mind. She went up to pack the equipment she needed for brewing.
She would not give up a bedsheet to wrap a corpse in, but she found them a burlap sack meant for hauling herbs. The dwarf went into it. His boots stuck out. Sage went out into the field and gathered what flowers she could find, and Rut coaxed the buds open for her, and they laid them on top.
Rut showed Adabra the orc eye. She told him it was very good work and patted him on the head. He also explained, while she was being pleasant to him, that the panther has to be kept fed so that he does not eat anybody.
Well, that's advisable.
Read this scene in the recap →Harbin pays
They came into Phandalin in the rain, muddy and slow and very tired, and Thom slower than any of them — by the end of the walk the emerald had him down to half his usual pace, though he could lift the thing out of his pack and throw it one-handed without trouble.
They left the body outside the Quest Master's house, in a bush, in the rain, with the boots sticking up.
Harbin Wester let them in, delighted, and asked how it had all gone. Adabra told him the party had convinced her — that they had brought word of orcs in the area, and she had not felt safe. He said he was glad she was home.
Then he asked whether they had warned the dwarves about the dragon.
They had, they said.
And how had that gone?
"They left."
They left! Excellent. Sounds like a job well done to me.
He paid out two bags, one heavier than the other: thirty-five gold for warning the midwife, seventy for warning the dwarves. Somebody pointed out that they had gone further than asked and actually brought Adabra home, and ought to be paid for it. Harbin shook his head and said he had already paid them more than he would have paid another group. It was mentioned, in front of her, that this meant Adabra's life was worth thirty-five gold.
On the way out he said he was compiling some reports that concerned him, and that there was some unfortunate work that would need doing, and that it was part of the job. He would have more for them tomorrow.
He stood in his doorway a moment and sniffed the air and said it was probably nothing.
Read this scene in the recap →Norbus at the bar
The inn was fuller than they had ever seen it, and the noise in it was wrong — too many townspeople, too much low talk, everyone worried about something they were not saying.
Norbus Ithermel was at the bar.
Barnaby carried his brother in and set him down at his feet.
He looked at the bag, and up at them, and started to cry. Around the room the patrons found other places to look and did not quite manage it, and did not want it known that they were watching, in case whatever had happened to the man in the bag turned out to be catching.
We could have just settled this together, he said. And then maybe my brother wouldn't have died.
"You did run off," Thom said.
Well, of course. What are we going to do against a bunch of heavily armed adventurers? We're just miners. I'm not going to fight you. Do I look like a fighter?
He told them how it had gone. The orcs had caught them on the road — the same band that had gone on to the temple. They killed Dazlyn before he could react. He ran, and lived, and had been in this room ever since.
Dax told him the orcs were dealt with. "If it gives you any peace, they're long dead."
Rut held out the orc eye to him. Of everyone he had shown it to, Norbus was the first not to recoil. He said it was good, and then he hugged the gnome, and a rat squirmed out of his arms and bolted across the floor.
Then he put the second sending stone on the bar and pushed it away from himself. They had been a gift, he said — from his and Dazlyn's mother and father, for the brothers to use on their new mining venture. He would not be needing it now.
They gave him twenty-five gold and seventy tarnished silver. The bag sat up fat enough in his hand that he thought it was more than it was, and he said it was decent, and thanked them. He asked to be left alone. They had more dwarves to swindle, he supposed.
Thom took one stone. The other went with the party.
Norbus turned back to his drink, and reached down and patted the boots, and then hunched over the bar with his head down and his shoulders shaking.
Read this scene in the recap →Dax's private offer
The others drifted toward the door.
Dax waited until they had, then went back and put down a second bag — fifteen gold, on top of what the party had already paid, and none of them saw it. He leaned in and said it low.
"If you ever come across another job that needs a sword, come find me."
Norbus looked up and nodded.
What was your name again, sir?
"Dax."
Dax. I'll remember that, Dax.
He walked away.
Read this scene in the recap →The messenger
They were turning for the door when it banged open ahead of them and a man came through it at a run with a report he had only just been handed.
Umbrage Hill had been attacked.
It was a dragon.
There was nothing left of it.
Read this scene in the recap →