Catch up through Session 9
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10 published recaps through Session 9.
Session 0 · Apr 27, 2026
Session Zero
Characters finalized, house rules set: no Neverwinter, no ammo or weight tracking, level cap 6.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 →Session 8 · Sep 4, 2026
The Town Finds Out, a Deal in the Dark, and a Trap Door
The dragon news gets out, Harbin puts a hundred gold on learning what the guildmaster wants — and two invisible thieves standing in her office get it for nothing.
Read the full recap →Read passages from Session 8
The inn's anger
The man who brought the news about Umbrage Hill did not stay to answer questions. He shouted it into the common room and went back out the door, and the inn came apart behind him.
It was most of the village in there. Everyone talked at once and nobody listened, and the noise of it went up and over the party like weather. Only Hamish could hold any of it. He stood still in the middle of it and picked the threads out one at a time.
How did we not know about this before.
Why were we kept in the dark.
I only heard about the dragon yesterday.
And then, from somewhere off to the side, the one that mattered.
Did Harbin know?
Thom got them all pointed at the door and out into the street, where a person could hear. Hamish told them what he had heard. Nobody had to work out what it meant — Harbin knew, and Harbin had spent the time since paying them to warn the two or three people he cared about and nobody else.
Sage said he had been happy enough to leave the town he lives in sitting in the dark.
Somebody remembered that the scary lady at the Miner's Exchange had known about the dragon too. The one with all the people. The one with the pin — and the pin, Hamish said, was the Zhentarim's.
Harbin had said he would have something for them in the morning. They decided the morning was too far away, and that they had better reach him before the rest of the town did.
Read this scene in the recap →A figure in the shadows
Halfway there, three of them saw the figure.
It was dark out and the man was dressed for it, moving up the lane away from the inn toward the Miner's Exchange, taking the shadows where there were shadows. Dax saw him. Hamish saw him. Barnaby saw him. Sage, Thom, Bean and Rut walked on none the wiser, and got their explanation over somebody's shoulder — a man going to tell somebody about the dragon attack — from three people who were already moving after him.
The party split on the spot. Dax, Hamish and Barnaby peeled off after the man. The rest went on to Harbin's door.
Read this scene in the recap →The first window boost
He darted in and out of the alleys the whole way, keeping off the open lane, and ducked around the back of the Miner's Exchange. A door opened and closed.
The building was shut for the night. The windows on the back wall were set too high to see through, there was nothing in the yard to stand on, and Dax's position was that they had been at crossbow-point in this building once already, that the arrangement with the guildmaster was information for coin, and that they had no information tonight the whole town did not already have.
So Barnaby put Hamish on his shoulders.
Inside there was a single candle burning on the guildmaster's desk and two people leaning into the light of it. One was the man they had followed. The other was sitting where Holia Thornton sits, and Hamish could not make out her face, only the fact that she was in her chair, in a building long since shut for the day.
Dax kept the yard. There was nothing in it but owls and rats.
Read this scene in the recap →Harbin's hundred gold
Thom banged on the door of Harbin Wester's house and told him to get off the toilet.
The bolts took a while, as they always do. Harbin got the door open and found four of them on his step and started explaining that he had told them the morning.
"Cats out of the bag," Thom said. "People know that you knew about a dragon and didn't say anything."
Then Umbrage Hill.
He had not known. Whatever else the party had decided about him in the street outside the inn, they watched the news land on him for the first time — his eyes going wide, then the thought arriving behind them that Adabra Gwynn was sitting in this town instead of that windmill.
I guess Adabra got out of there in the nick of time, huh.
He rubbed his beard and stopped talking for a while.
What came out of him after that was more than he had ever given them at once. He had wanted to avoid the panic and the emptying of the town. Phandalin cannot defend itself and he has known it for some time. He has been planning for a dragon and the planning has not produced anything. And the jobs — every job, the gnomes, the midwife, the dwarves, all of it — had been him sending them out to look for a weapon that would kill the thing.
They had found nothing. He said so himself.
Sage told him the townspeople seemed like they might be angry at him. Harbin wanted to know how they had found out at all, and was told about the man who ran in, screamed it, and ran back out. Then he wanted to know how they knew he had been keeping it from them, and had to be told that too.
"So who else knew about the dragon?"
He narrowed his eyes and started thinking, and Thom — who had by then decided this was a conversation that required tradecraft — attempted to name Holia Thornton without naming her.
"I'm pretty sure that the lady that you know, that we know, that, you know, she knows, and I know, and you know."
Who are you referring to, Thom?
"You know who I'm talking about."
We're talking about Holia, right?
Yes. Holia. And Thom thought she had sent somebody out to spread it.
Harbin looked left and looked right and said he might as well tell them. He thinks she is up to no good. He thinks she is angling for townmaster. He is the banker as well as the master of the town, which means the money is in his house and the influence is in his hands, and both would move to her. He wondered aloud whether the rumor had been hers to start.
Then he asked whether they would stay the night and guard his home from angry townspeople.
Bean said no. Bean said it might be different for a fee.
"We have our best agents finding out information on her as we speak," Thom said.
What Harbin wanted, in the end, was files. Anything of hers, anything about what she was planning, anything at all. He offered ninety gold for it. He was told he was not in a position to negotiate.
The price went to a hundred. Nothing has been brought to him, and nothing has been paid.
Read this scene in the recap →Dax is caught
Barnaby put Hamish up a second time.
The two inside were still talking, and the candle had come round far enough to catch Holia's face properly. She was grinning. Whatever she was being told, she was delighted with it, and neither of them looked anywhere near the window.
Then a second man in the same dark clothes came around the side of the building, looking everywhere, working his way toward them.
Hamish said someone was coming and climbed down Barnaby's scales, and the three of them broke for the corner. Two of them went quietly.
Dax's chain mail did not. The man's head came up and fixed on the sound and he came straight at it, and Dax stopped, waved the other two on, and stood in the open to wait for him.
Hey. What are you doing?
Dax said there was a commotion down at the inn and they were rounding people up to make sure everyone had heard the news, and that he wasn't from around here and was still finding his way around in the dark.
The man did not believe a word of it. He looked closer.
Wait a minute. I have seen you before. You're that sellsword.
"That's me," Dax said. "You got a job for me?"
He mentioned that he had done work for the guildmaster, and that he had information.
Yeah. I'm sure she'd love to talk to you.
He took Dax by the arm and walked him around to the front of the building. Hamish and Barnaby he never saw at all.
Read this scene in the recap →A whispered reply and a name
Thom had a cantrip nobody had seen him use: a whisper he could put directly into somebody's ear from a hundred and twenty feet away, through walls, around corners, with no limit on the words and nothing to spend. It did not need line of sight. All it needed was to know whose ear.
He aimed it at Dax.
Dax, you guys still good? We told Harbin you guys were trying to find some information.
Dax, being led toward a door by a man who had a hand on his arm, answered under his breath without moving his head.
"Miner's Guild. Stand by. Negotiations happening."
Nobody else heard a word of it.
Rut turned into a weasel. Sage, coming up the lane with him, saw two figures disappear into the Miner's Exchange and the door shut behind them. She whistled the panther in out of the dark, nodded him toward the building, and told him to circle wide and watch their backs — that their friends were in there going after somebody, that she did not know who, and that there would be enemies and friends both.
He went. He came back a few minutes later having found Barnaby and Hamish crouched in the dark where they had gone to ground, and announced the discovery by walking into Hamish hard enough to put him flat.
"Phantom. No — this is a friend."
It was the first time she had called him anything.
Read this scene in the recap →Dax's bargain
Inside there was one candle and four people, and only one of them was sitting down.
Well, if it isn't my favorite sellsword. What are you doing lurking around at night?
"Evening, Holia. Have you heard the news?"
Are you talking about our lovely visit from our reptile friend?
She was smiling before he finished. She had all of it already, and she said so plainly: if the attack on Umbrage Hill was everything he had brought, he was too late, and she would not be paying a premium for it.
Dax did not argue the price. He changed what was for sale.
"How about news not on a dragon, but on some orcs?"
Orcs. I'm listening.
He put the terms up before he put up a word of the substance. The dragon news was a freebie, thrown in on top, if the two of them could strike a deal on the orcs.
I like you. You're smart.
Only then did he spend it, and he made sure she understood the shape of what she was getting. The party had been at Umbrage Hill that day. They had stood in Adabra Gwynn's yard and talked her into leaving, and walked her back to Phandalin, and the hill had been destroyed while they were still getting their boots off. The thing had covered that ground in an evening.
Your luck is with you tonight.
And then, working it through: the dragon was close. Very close. A short flight from Phandalin.
Well. I appreciate the freebie. What about this orc information? Let's see how much it's worth tonight.
Thom's voice arrived in his head while she was saying it. Harbin was paying a hundred gold for anything about what Holia was planning, Harbin thought she was after his job, and if Dax happened to be standing in front of her he ought to keep that in mind.
Dax kept it in mind, and did not answer her question yet.
"So what are you willing to pay for information? Are you just paying gold, or do we trade information?"
That sounds like an amicable arrangement to me.
With that settled he spent his first question before he spent anything else. What was there to know about Harbin Wester? The party had done work for the man and knew nothing about him past talk.
Something moved in her face at the name — a twinkle in the eye, the corner of the mouth going up — and what Dax read there was a woman extremely pleased with herself.
Then he paid his half of it. The band that came up the canyon at the excavation, seven of them, up from the encampment west of the ruin; all seven dead; and the tracks afterward showing a much larger body moving off west. She wanted to know exactly where, and exactly which way. He told her that too, and she had a small map out on the desk before he finished.
She counted out fifty gold.
Loot Paid for Orcs 50 gold from Guildmaster Thornton — the location and heading of the band the party killed, and of the larger force behind it. Dax has not mentioned it to anyone.
Then he collected the other half of the arrangement, and asked about Harbin again.
This time she answered. Harbin was afraid, she said, and had been afraid of this dragon a long while. She said — and this part she seemed to enjoy — that she had to admit he had done her a real service, bringing her news of that dragon.
Then she stopped herself, and started again more carefully.
Well, let's just say things may be looking up in Phandalin. And Harbin may no longer be a part of it.
Dax had one more thing to sell and one more message to answer, and he did both in the same breath. Out loud, to Holia, he said the party knew roughly how many had gone west, and that things were fine right now, but they were afraid of movement later.
Things are fine. Afraid of moving later. That was for Thom.
She leaned back and looked at him for a moment, appraising.
Your band of adventurers are more resourceful than I gave you credit for.
She wanted maps. He did not have any on him, and said the rest could be arranged another night. She allowed that he had done well, and that she was in a good mood, and then she put the good mood away.
But I want you to understand this. If I catch anyone sniffing around here in the middle of the night again, I know where to find you. I know where Harbin sends you.
And I think I might just start with that gangly wizard.
But for now, everything is going exactly how I want it to go. Anyway, you may go now.
"It was a pleasure doing business with you."
Pleasure as well. Have a good night, Dax.
"You too."
Read this scene in the recap →Rut under the door
Rut had found the gap under the front door and gone at it head first.
He got his head through. He got his shoulders through. The rest of the weasel stayed in the street. He could not go forward and he could not go back and he was, in that position, in the best seat anyone in the party had all night. His head was through into the room. He could see everything and hear everything, and he heard the whole of it, every word Dax and Holia said to one another.
Sage watched him thrash and worked out what was going to happen to a weasel wedged under a door at the moment somebody opened that door. So she went to the panther.
"That weasel," she told him. "He's a friend."
The instruction was to wait until the weasel started struggling, then take hold of him — gently, and without eating him — and pull him clear before anybody came out.
Phantom accepted the terms. Sage was fairly sure he was a little disappointed about the eating.
Read this scene in the recap →Thom and Bean vanish
Thom found a bush a good distance from the building, far enough that walking over to it later would look like nothing, and put his backpack in it. The emerald went in the bush with the backpack.
Then he cast one spell on both of them at once, and the two of them vanished where they stood.
An hour of it, as long as he held his concentration, and it covered everything they wore and everything they carried. What it did not do was let the two of them see each other. If they let go in that room, neither would have any way of finding the other again — so Thom kept a hand on her and did not take it off.
Sage asked whether they were sure nobody in there could see through it.
"We're going to find out."
They waited by the door for it to open.
Read this scene in the recap →The third window boost
Barnaby and Hamish went back to the window. If Dax came out of that building at a run, they wanted to be looking at it when he did.
The third go was the worst of the three. Hamish came down onto Barnaby's shoulders sitting rather than standing, and from there he could see nothing but the tops of the heads inside; when he got his hands on the ledge and tried to haul himself higher he had no leverage at all and stayed exactly where he was, stuck, with the crown of his head showing in the window.
Between the two of them they made far too much noise doing it. Inside, the people in the room stopped talking and turned to look at the glass.
"Go, go, go."
They came down and went, and did not stop until there was a good distance between them and the building.
Read this scene in the recap →A guard and a weasel
It opened for Dax.
The guard walked him out and stood holding it — his presence forgiven, but not by much — and Thom steered Bean through the gap beside them and into the room they had just emptied. Neither the guard nor anyone in the building heard a thing.
Outside, the same guard turned around and found Sage standing in the lane with a weasel at her feet.
Hey. What are you doing?
Sage told him the truth in the shape of a lie. She had lost track of her friend earlier, she had been looking for him ever since, and she needed him — he had to come with the rest of the band so they could work out what they were doing. Every word of it was true.
He bought it. He picked the weasel up and shoved it at her.
Well. She was looking for you. She found you. You can go on your way now.
"Yeah," Dax said. "She's a good tracker. Thank you, sir. We'll be heading out."
Then the guard looked down at the weasel and said what people say about vermin and threw a knife at it.
It missed. It went into the dirt beside him. The weasel held still and stayed a weasel, and the party walked away up the lane.
Read this scene in the recap →The five keep watch
Five of them, and no idea where the other two had gone.
Sage said Thom and Bean had been with them a while and then simply were not, and that she did not know where they went and they had not told anyone. Dax knew slightly more and it did not help: Thom had told him they were up to shenanigans.
"That's never good," Sage said.
She also told him which of them the weasel was. Dax put an arm down and let it climb up onto his shoulder.
He tried the sending stone anyway, and got the silence of a thing that will not work again until tomorrow. He could not start a whisper of his own — he could only answer one. If Thom wanted him, Thom would have to call.
Dax told them the rest of it: that she had threatened them, all of them, if anyone was caught sneaking around here again.
So they left where the building could see them leave. Dax and Sage went out up the lane toward the inn, unhurried, Barnaby walking with them and the weasel riding where it was, and then circled back through the town and settled in near the little shrine on the square. Sage came back further than that, splitting the difference, close enough to keep an eye on the Exchange and on Dax at once.
Hamish went a different way and lost anything that might have been following him. He took up a position in one of the burned houses — one of the ones that have been standing open to the weather since the last time something came through Phandalin — and put a broken wall between himself and the street, and watched, and rested as much as a person can rest sitting up in a ruin.
Dax noted, on the way past, that the Lionshield Coster was just around the corner and that he badly needed better armor. They had only ever been there by daylight. Nobody could say what hours it kept, and it was not a night for finding out.
Read this scene in the recap →Thornton's declaration
Inside, Thom and Bean stood in the middle of the room and let their eyes adjust.
Three guards. Holia at the desk. And behind her, set into the floor beside the desk and standing open, a small trap door with a thin flickering light coming up out of it.
Then she started talking, and they were close enough to hear all of it.
Well done. Well done on your scouting. I am very happy with how tonight went. Soon Harbin will be out and I will be town master. This is exactly how I hoped this would go. Those foolish adventurers have brought me everything I needed. — Holia Thornton, in a room she believed was empty
She turned to one of the guards.
If you catch any of them sniffing around here again, they all die. You understand? I want you to sic our entire troop on them.
Yes ma'am.
I think that's enough for tonight. Let's head on back to our recon point. We have a lot of work to do this evening.
She packed up her things and went down through the floor. One guard locked the front door. The other two went round the windows pulling the shutters across, and at the last of them one stopped and looked out into the lane at the party walking away, and squinted at them a moment before he moved on.
Then two of the three followed her down the stairs, and the man who had been at the window was the only one left in the building.
Thom and Bean stood perfectly still while he came around the desk, close enough to touch, and went down the ladder.
Then the trap door closed behind him, and there was a soft click, and the floor was flat.
Not a seam. Not a handle. Nothing to say a door had ever been there. If they had not watched four people walk down through it they would not have known where to stand.
Read this scene in the recap →The hatch and the ladder
They searched the office anyway.
The desk gave up exactly what a mining exchange's desk should give up: transactions, exchanges, the day-to-day of the business. Gold dust in, small diamonds in, gold paid out. Town names down the margins. There was nothing illegal in any of it.
There was one line Bean read twice. Gold paid out to Dax, for the job Dax did for Holia.
They went over the desk again for false bottoms and hidden drawers and found none. They walked the room feeling for pressure plates and found none. They ran their hands along the wall for a lever or a mechanism or a book that would pull out of a shelf, the way it always works, and there was nothing there either. There were side rooms off the office, and a balcony on the floor above looking down into it, and they had no hour to spare on either.
Thom got a dagger into the seam of the trap door and felt it stop against something — not a lock with a keyhole in it, something more like a bar laid across underneath. It would not shift for a dagger.
Bean had thieves' tools.
She got them into the gap where the blade had been, thin enough to reach past the edge and work the catch itself, and lifted, and the door came up off the floor with enough of a gap to get fingers under.
Ten minutes gone. Fifty left, and no way to stretch it.
Going back for the others meant crossing the town and crossing it again, and the hour would not wait for them. So they took the smaller version of the idea: down the ladder, far enough to hear a conversation, and not one step past that. Nothing crazy.
"Alright. Let's do it."
They went down the ladder into the passage, Thom seeing it perfectly well and Bean seeing nothing at all — and Bean, already on the rungs, asked whether it was too late to get hold of Thom.
It was. Their feet hit the bottom, into cool air and stone.
Read this scene in the recap →Session 9 · Sep 18, 2026
An Alibi, a Name, and the Price of an Escort
Thom and Bean return with a story that requires an alibi, Sage learns what to call Friend, and a paid escort to a gold mine becomes a negotiation at its door.
Read the full recap →Read passages from Session 9
Waiting at the inn
An hour later, Barnaby was at the inn with a ginger ale, and nobody had heard from Thom or Bean.
He had tried the Lionshield Coster first. There was a light upstairs, but the shop below was locked, and the bow he wanted would have to wait until morning. Dax saw him go into the inn and followed him to the counter.
The room had quieted. People were still anxious about the dragon, but the shouting had worn off, and Barnaby had been there long enough to notice that Norbus was no longer at the bar. Dax asked about the other two. Barnaby had not seen them. The rest were scattered around town — Hamish in the burned building, Sage somewhere between it and the shrine, and Friend had been a weasel on Dax's shoulder the last time he could account for him.
"Well, we're never going to find him then," Barnaby said.
Dax suggested they finish their drinks and go looking.
Read this scene in the recap →The backpack and the alibi
Rut saw them coming up the alley.
He was back in his own shape, watching the Exchange from the ruined building with Hamish and Sage, and the two figures approaching were Thom and Bean. They were coming from somewhere else entirely. He stepped out to meet them.
Thom wanted to know where Dax and Barnaby had gone, wanted everyone away from this spot, and needed his backpack. Bean went with him to find it. The bush was harder to pick out than he remembered, but Phantom got the scent and led them to it, and Thom put the pack on and immediately slowed under the emerald.
They reached the inn before Dax and Barnaby had got out of it. Thom found a table in a corner, away from the other patrons, and was about to sit down when he thought of something else. He went to the bar, beckoned the innkeeper close, and put three gold pieces in his hand.
If anyone asked, they had been here for the last hour. An hour and a half.
The innkeeper looked at him with some suspicion, then at the money.
You've been here for the last hour.
Thom gave him a wink and went back. Sage sent Phantom outside to watch for anything that might need interrupting them.
Read this scene in the recap →Fifty gold and the tunnel account
Dax put Holia Thornton's fifty gold on the table.
He gave them the negotiation: the dragon news she already knew, the orc information she had paid for, and the information about Harbin he had got in return. She wanted maps. He had not had one to give her. She had also made clear what would happen if she found them creeping around the Exchange again.
"Long story short, Thom, you should probably stay as far away from her as you can."
She had called him out specifically. The money, Dax said, was for all of them. The information had come from all of them.
Thom said that lined up with what they had found. Then he and Bean told the table where they had been.
The guard had left the door open, Thom began. They had to go in.
"Basically an invite when the door's open," Bean said.
They were invisible by then, and had stood in the room while Holia told her guards to kill anyone caught snooping. Everyone had gone down a hatch behind the desk. Dax had not seen it. Bean had opened it after them, and below it there was a mining passage running hundreds of feet under the town — Thom able to see, Bean unable to see anything, and neither able to see the other. They had tied themselves together with a rope.
Thom nearly stepped in a bear trap. After that he had made a point of looking for bear traps, pressure plates and tripwires, and stepped on a pressure plate. They both got shot. It was not too bad. They were all right. Bean had pulled him back from a tripwire farther on, so they had only set off one of the traps.
At the end was light under a door and voices behind it. Through a sliding panel they could make out a large hall, a dining table, people drinking, and the sound of pots and pans. They could not hear enough to learn anything. So they opened the door and went in.
"There was a big, big table and like twenty guards," Bean said.
Considerably more than three. Perhaps thirty, in the later telling. Holia had gone into a room of her own. There were maps and papers on the table, and chests around the hall, which Bean mentioned separately.
"We didn't touch them though. Unfortunately."
"That took a lot of restraint, by the way," Thom said.
People were talking about orcs. Bean worked her way close enough to look at the map, and Thom had to yank her back before somebody walked into her. What she could see looked like movements being tracked. She could not get a proper look with so many people there, and they withdrew to the wall.
They went to Holia's door next. Thom listened through the wood and caught pieces of a conversation with a man inside — things were moving, she was pleased, something was happening in Phandalin — and then footsteps approaching. They got out of the way. The man came out. The door began to close.
"We made a very rash split-second decision," Thom said.
"Because the door was closing," Bean said.
They went in before it shut.
Holia was at her desk. The spell was running short, and the two of them were standing in her room with no way to leave that would not involve opening the door in front of her. Thom moved a little. She turned toward the sound.
After that they held still. They could not speak without being heard, could not see each other, and had a rope to tug on in place of a conversation. When Holia got up and went to her dresser, they crept toward the desk. Thom read what he could without moving the papers: shipping business, references to orcs, something he took to mean a new foothold along the Sword Coast. He thought they wanted to use Phandalin as a base. He had read the headings, not the pages beneath them.
With the invisibility nearly gone, they opened the door just enough to get through and slipped out. Thom did not think Holia noticed. Somebody outside did, and they got clear of that person and began working their way toward the door they had entered through.
Then the cook tripped over Bean.
He spilled the food across the table. The room went quiet. Everyone turned toward him, and toward the exit behind him, and he stood next to the two invisible intruders feeling about for whatever had caught his foot.
There was another ladder in the hall. They had not wanted to use it because they did not know where it went. Now they had no time to find a better way. They climbed it, lifted the hatch, and got out before the spell ended.
"They never saw our faces," Thom said.
They had heard the hatch close. But they had never seen their faces.
Rut asked whether the people who already knew they had been sneaking around might suspect them anyway. Thom thought they would be all right.
“I’ve done so many odd jobs…” Dax sighed heavily. “…but I’ve never met people who are so eager to get themselves killed.” — Dax
They had a back way into the hideout now, Thom said. And they knew Holia wanted Harbin out, though whether that meant removing him from office or killing him was another question. He thought the tunnels might be for smuggling. Hamish asked whether the orcs were enemies or something she meant to use, and Thom could give him no more than an impression: they seemed interested in keeping track of them, perhaps to stay out of one another's way. He had not stayed to rifle through the papers.
Read this scene in the recap →Drinks, rooms, and searching figures
Dax took his share of the fifty gold and bought the party drinks.
Rut announced that he was tired, got down from his chair, and lay underneath it. Dax asked what had happened at Harbin's house.
Rut got back up.
There had been the warning about the townspeople, the argument over keeping the dragon secret, and the request to return in the morning. Rut remained of the opinion that people ought to know when there was a dragon nearby. Dragons ate people unless they were well fed.
Dax had no particular interest in who ran Phandalin. He did have an interest in people who paid them, and in people who threatened them. Harbin had provided work. Holia had paid well and threatened their lives. They would see Harbin in the morning and keep away from her for now.
Thom was still too wound up to sleep.
When it came to rooms, Rut saw everyone handing over money and offered the innkeeper a gold piece without knowing quite what he was buying. Thom explained that they were renting beds, and that sleeping under a chair in the common room was generally discouraged.
He paid for modest lodgings for himself and Rut. Dax took a room of his own. Bean paid for Sage to share hers.
Rut noticed Thom's injury and gave him a handful of Goodberries. Thom ate one.
They were on the stairs when Phantom came in and hurried toward Sage, moving to shield her. Three hooded figures were searching the common room.
Sage used Speak with Animals. Phantom had seen dark-clad figures moving through town, searching. He had avoided them and come back to warn her. He did not know whom they wanted.
Sage had a good idea. She passed the warning to the others.
Rut went farther up the stairs and crouched behind the party. Thom and Bean continued behaving like people who had spent a long, uneventful evening at the inn.
"My butt hurts from sitting in this inn for the last hour and fifteen minutes," Thom said.
"I know," Bean said. "We should have gone out and done something."
One of the searchers was talking to the innkeeper.
No, no, I believe everyone who's in here has been here quite a while.
Some people had left for bed or gone home. Nobody had rushed in. Nothing like that.
The party went upstairs. Phantom joined Sage and Bean. Rut chose the floor behind the bedroom door, where an opening door would conceal him. Dax worked through his stretches and light exercises in his own room before bed.
Nobody disturbed them that night.
Read this scene in the recap →Rut tells Sage his name
Rut sat up straight on a stool at the bar and put down a gold piece for breakfast. The innkeeper looked concerned. One gold was far too much.
"Well, all I have is gold. What do I give you? I've got berries."
The innkeeper made change and went to get his food. Sage joined Rut at the bar and ordered a raw steak for Phantom.
She asked him about his name. Friend was not really his name. They had called him that because they had nothing else to call him. Was there a name he wanted to share?
It had been a long time since anyone called him by it, he said. He had lived in the woods, with nobody to talk to but animals, and animals — squirrels especially — did not care.
He used to be called Rut.
Sage thanked him. She would like to use his name, if he would let her.
"You can keep calling me Friend too if you want. I've not been called anything in a while, and Friend is good. It's good to have friends." — Rut, to Sage
She asked whether she could tell the others. He agreed. They were his friends too.
For the moment, she was the only one who knew.
Breakfast arrived. Rut regarded the panther with suspicion and advised Sage to keep him fed. Panthers would eat a person in their sleep. It was the same principle as the dragon in their group.
Sage had fed him that morning. She considered getting another steak.
Phantom rolled his eyes.
Read this scene in the recap →Morning purchases
Thom went to Barthen's Provisions for ink, paper and a component pouch. He wanted to make spell scrolls. For now, he needed the supplies.
The total was fifty gold, which was all he had. He suggested thirty-five.
Barthen considered his new customer and agreed, on one condition: Thom was to tell his friends where to shop.
"Dude, Barthen's is the best."
Thom showed him the condition of his clothes — torn, stained, full of holes — and asked whether he looked like a man made of gold. A store for the common man. A store of the people. The shopkeeper took thirty-five gold. Thom left with his supplies and fifteen still in his purse.
Barnaby bought a healer's kit, then went to the now-open Lionshield Coster for a shortbow and arrows. He sold his old longsword for seven gold and kept the better one from the temple.
Dax asked about a shield. Ten gold. He offered eight, and the woman behind the counter accepted. She could put a design or emblem on it for an extra fee whenever he wanted.
He would think about it.
Hamish bought a whip.
Purchases Morning in Phandalin Thom: scroll-making supplies and a component pouch, 35 gp together; no scroll completed. Barnaby: shortbow 25 gp , arrows 1 gp , healer's kit 5 gp ; ordinary longsword sold for 7 gp . He retains the temple's +1 longsword , with no additional special properties. Dax: shield, 8 gp . Hamish: whip, 2 gp .
Read this scene in the recap →Harbin buys the information
Harbin Wester was at the job board, putting up the work he had promised them.
There was an orc attack at Butterskull Ranch to investigate, a cart of provisions to take to the Loggers' Camp, and a man who needed escorting to Mountain's Toe Gold Mine. A hundred and fifty gold for each.
He noticed Thom looking tired. Thom explained about the giant gemstone in his backpack, and asked whether Harbin bought gemstones that made people tired. They had found it at the dwarves' excavation. He was not to mention that to the surviving dwarf.
Harbin suggested Holia Thornton. He was suspicious of her, certainly, but she was still the guildmaster and still did legitimate business for Phandalin.
Dax leaned toward Thom and asked whether they ought to tell him. They discussed it in front of Harbin: he had done well by them, gave them steady work, and they did not want him dead. Thom put an arm around his shoulders, discovered he was too short to do it comfortably, and went up on his toes. He had already committed.
"We like you, and I wouldn't want anything to happen to you. But if something did happen to you, I would know who did it, is what I'm trying to say."
Harbin looked at him without understanding.
"I think you should just watch your back in this town, Harbin," Dax said.
Thom mentioned the locks on his door. Harbin looked toward the Exchange and back at them, and gave a knowing wink. Thom pressed on: did he know she was Zhentarim? He had suspected it. Good to have that confirmed. Did he know she was after his job? Harbin nodded. The dragon news had not helped him there. She knew more about keeping secrets than he did.
"Yeah, they got tunnels all under this town, buddy."
That was news. Harbin had thought the old mining tunnels were out of use. Thom told him they were not, and that he thought the Zhentarim meant to make Phandalin a base, and that Harbin was not to tell anyone he knew.
Harbin went home and came back with two hundred gold. They had saved him quite a bit of investigation. Thom asked what he would pay to learn where an entrance to the hideout was.
Another hundred.
Thom wanted a hundred and fifty. Harbin began to draw the bag back toward himself, and Thom accepted the hundred. Three hundred altogether.
Dax asked about the gems again. Their business with Holia had turned sour; was there anyone else who could buy them? Harbin suggested Barthen. He might end up selling them on to Holia himself, but he had good standing in town and could handle the transaction.
"He's a man of the people, that Barthen," Thom said.
Read this scene in the recap →The mine job and the gem sale
They would start with the mine. After that they could return for the cart of supplies, take it to Harbin's half-brother at the logging camp, and go on to the ranch.
Harbin gave them all three notices. The mine business was part of an arrangement he had with Neverwinter. He wished he did not have to send them on it, but the work needed doing and they would be paid.
They were to collect Don-Jon Raskin from the inn.
He was waiting in a leather jacket and an upturned-brim hat, watching the door. When they came in, he appeared to consider them overdue.
Harbin had told him there were adventurers in town. He had expected them to be sent along. His pack was ready, and he wanted to go.
Before leaving Phandalin, Thom sold the gems to Barthen. The smaller stones brought a hundred and fifty gold. The great emerald brought three hundred and fifty, and ceased to be Thom's burden.
With Harbin's payment added, there were eight hundred gold to divide.
Thom counted out a hundred and fourteen for each of them.
Payments & Sales The Information and the Gems Holia's earlier 50 gp payment was disclosed and shared at 7 gp each . Harbin paid 300 gp for intelligence and entrance information. Barthen bought the small gems for 150 gp and the great emerald for 350 gp . Those last three sums were pooled and shared at 114 gp each .
Read this scene in the recap →On the road with Don-Jon
On the road, Barnaby explained to Rut that he would not eat them. He was a fake dragon.
Rut took this to Dax.
Real dragons flew, Dax suggested. Barnaby did not. There was still the panther to watch, though. Could Rut turn into a panther himself?
Rut did not try it. Sage heard enough to reassure him that Phantom would not eat him.
Thom passed around the Goodberries he had left. He had eaten one the night before and another for breakfast. He gave one back to Rut.
Don-Jon talked the whole way. Neverwinter, Neverwinter Wood, Baldur's Gate far to the south — wherever the story went, he had been there and done something worth telling them about. He was getting to an entire horde of mimics when a low ridge rose beside the trail and they found six dead orcs strewn across the rocky ground.
Ain't that something.
Thom examined the bodies first. There were scratches. They were cold. He could not make enough of it to say what had killed them.
Bean, Hamish and Rut looked together. The damage reminded them of the reports from Umbrage Hill. Something had killed these orcs with cold. It looked like the work of the white dragon.
They searched the ground and the sky. Nothing showed them which way the attacker had come or gone. There was no creature nearby that they could see.
They were in the open and the mine was close, so they went on faster. Don-Jon had fallen quiet. When he spoke again, it was to say he hoped they were nearly there.
Read this scene in the recap →The dispute at the mine
Half the day was gone when they found the tunnel, tucked among bushes at the foot of a snow-capped mountain. The sky was overcast. A wooden board above the opening had Mountain's Toe carved into it.
Don-Jon had never been inside. He had no map. He was ready for them all to go in and see what they found.
"I'm pretty sure we were paid to just bring you to the mine," Thom said.
Don-Jon wanted to be brought safely inside. He said he had paid for the place back in Neverwinter and had not yet inspected it. Once they made sure it was safe, he would give them a note for Harbin confirming the escort.
Thom said Harbin trusted them. They could tell him themselves. Going inside was extra.
I think some trouble might be heading Harbin's way if you don't help me out with this.
His employers would want to hear how the venture had gone.
"Are you threatening my man, Harbin?"
Thom accused him of being one of the Zhentarim. Don-Jon did not confirm it. He maintained that this was part of the job. The party had the written notice and did not agree.
Dax offered a separate arrangement. Harbin was paying for the escort. Don-Jon could hire them to get him safely inside as well.
Whatever loose gold that you find here inside is yours.
"All right," Thom said. "If it's not bolted to the ground, we're taking it."
Bean switched to Halfling and called Don-Jon stupid. He frowned at her as though he had not understood a word.
Well, I'll take that as a compliment, I hope.
Dax asked whether he could fend for himself if a fight started, or whether they would need to protect him. There had been that story about the mimics.
Don-Jon went first into the mine.
They followed.
Read this scene in the recap →