The Zhentarim
An unscrupulous shadow network expanding its influence across Faerûn — ambitious, opportunistic, and meritocratic. Publicly a mercenary and protection outfit; secretly running smuggling, extortion, and worse.
The party’s entanglement
- Guildmaster Holia Thornton of Phandalin’s Miner’s Exchange wears the Zhentarim dragon pin. Hamish recognized the mark (Session 4).
- Her guard — the strange figure who watched the party at the inn back in Session 1 — is one of her people. The Network had eyes on the party from their first night in town.
- At crossbow-point, Thornton pressed the party into an information-sharing pact: all dragon intelligence flows to her, and she pays for updates (Session 4).
- Dax, whose original contract was with Thornton, remains pragmatically willing to keep working with her so long as coin is on the table.
- Bean holds Harbin’s stolen private notes on Thornton — contents so far unexamined at the table.
What Session 8 exposed
The pact was never a trade. The dragon intelligence the party has been selling Thornton is what she is using to take Phandalin, and she said so to her own people in a room she believed was empty: soon Harbin will be out, she will be town master, and the foolish adventurers have brought her everything she needed.
The Network’s footprint in town is bigger than one guildmaster and one watcher at the inn:
- Four of them in the Exchange that night, plus the man the party tailed there. Thornton speaks of setting “our entire troop” on people.
- A trap door in the floor behind her desk, which she and three guards went down and which then sealed flush — no seam, no handle, nothing to say it had ever been there. She calls what is down there their recon point, and said they had a lot of work to do that evening.
- Standing orders on the party: caught around the building at night again and they all die, starting with Thom.
Dax sold her the orc band’s position and heading for 50 gold the same night. What she wants with a large orc force moving west is not clear.