The Smuggler’s Warehouse
This was our usual Monday night face to face Zweihänder game, but due to potential contagion issues we decided to do things using Roll20 and Hangouts. It went mostly smoothly, though there was a bit of confusion at times over location descriptions. As usual, Eva continues her account of events.
After our conversation with Victor Hoffman at the Green Dragon inn, the city gates were still open so we decided to head down to the river to have a look at the warehouse which Victor wanted us to break into.
The roads between the city walls and the river were unpaved and muddy, flanked by wooden houses which were inhabited by the poorer residents of the city. Some of the taverns towards the waterfront looked decidedly dodgy, filled with unskilled labourers and dock hands.
Across the river though it was quiet different, and the area was occupied by a number of warehouses owned by the wealthy merchants of the city. An old wooden bridge ran across the river, and the warehouse of Elias Svim could be seen on the water’s edge.
We headed across to take a look at the buildings, and noticed patrols of city guards doing the rounds here, as well as private guards standing around outside each of the warehouses.
A planked street led along the western bank in front of the warehouses, and boats were docked alongside it in the process of being loaded and unloaded.
Floquert heads over to the guards and starts talking to them about finding work as a guard. Though there were no open positions here, one of Svim’s guards suggests he tries at an inn he knows in the city, and Floquert heads back to the city to try there. To be honest, I’m not entirely certain what Floquert was planning on doing here, and seemed to be actually looking for work as a bouncer rather than simply using it as an excuse to talk to the guards and find out some information.
Djarin and myself head to one of the less reputable taverns across the river and keep an eye on the place whilst it gets dark, whilst Calthar goes to find a group of her countrymen at another tavern.
There are some limited guard patrols on the street as dusk falls, but most of the guards seem to be around the warehouses. The streets themselves are mostly dark, though the guards have lanterns. Moving around in the dark might be tricky, but at least we probably wouldn’t be seen.
We headed back, paying our 1 penny tax for entering the city after the gates had closed and settled down for the night in our private room at the Drumhead.
I spent most of the day pretending to fish on the eastern riverbank, watching the coming and goings of traffic to Svim’s warehouse. At one point a small boat pulled up to the quayside and whilst well dressed man got out onto the top, another went through an obscured door we hadn’t noticed down at the river level. Whether it was locked or not I couldn’t tell, but it may be a quieter way in.
We met up later on in the afternoon to plan a foray in the early hours of the morning. The plan would be to spend the night in one of the dodgy inns near the waterfront, so we wouldn’t be seen going through the city gates after our break-in attempt.
We’ve made it back to the inn all in one piece, and with quite a few books and papers to show for it. Things had gone both smoother and more exciting than expected.
Floquert managed to distract one of the guards at the warehouse, whilst Djarin tried to slip in through the lower door, but found it to be locked. He slipped off without the rest of us noticing, so by the time we caught up with him, he had come back to the warehouse proper.
Player’s Notes: We tried to plan our break-in using the city scale map, which didn’t work very well since some of us (possibly mostly me) got very confused about which building we were talking about, and where the guards and doors were. In the end, we created a larger map in Roll20 and finally managed to make sense of things.
Two of the guards were sleeping, so Floquert continued to distract the remaining guard in ever more intimate ways whilst Djarin and Calthar got up onto the roof to break in from above, opening the side door to let me in. At some point he heard the sound of something inside, but weren’t sure what. The far wall of the warehouse was enclosed in a cage, which had a couple of levels of office as well as some crates and boxes. There was no easy way into there – so we headed outside again and the two got back onto the roof and broke in a second time directly above the office space.
They grabbed a large amount of paperwork, including some heavily used books which may turn out to be code books (the accountancy book may not be, but the books on philosophy and erotic poetry seemed out of place) and then decided to hand it over to me before examining the crates in the other part of the cage.
Player’s Note: We spent all our fortune points tonight on re-rolls. Floquert spent the point he gains from having sex with someone (he is a Prostitute after all) to turn his charm attempt with a guard from a failure into a critical success. More points were spent trying not to drop tiles off the roof onto the guards below and also in running away at the end.
As Djarin opened the door out of the office, he set off a bell just as Calthar knocked over some books. There was a noise from the crates, as if some strange beast was stirring – the shadows around that area beginning to shift, and they both decided to run, coming tearing out of the side door and slamming it behind them just as something large and heavy slammed into it.
I grabbed the books from Djarin and ran, followed shortly afterwards by the rest. We have all made it back to the inn, and Floquert has mentioned that the guard said that the warehouse was haunted by something, possibly a river spirit or something. Whatever it was, hopefully it is still inside the warehouse, though we had no way of locking the door from the outside so it’s possible that it is now roaming the city streets. Whatever happened, I’m sure there will be a lot of fuss in the morning when Elias Svim realises what has happened.
