Bishops and Redheads
Continuing our Zweihänder campaign on Roll20 due to isolation, we return from the Mine to the town to follow up on some leads. The GM has moved us to weekly ‘turns’, so time can move a bit quicker as we investigate things. As usual, Eva records her account of what happened (and has now ‘levelled up’ and taken the profession of Preacher).
Having returned to the Sielzen, I have had some time to spend reading through Elias Svin’s books in a bit more detail. According to his diaries, there seem to be three principle people whom he has had dealings with:
- Someone called “The Boss”
- A person referred to as “The Lady”
- “The Red Headed Killer”, whom he is particularly apprehensive about.
It’s difficult to determine exactly what his relationship with these people is, or what purpose they serve in the various machinations going on, but finding out more about them will probably turn up useful information.
Going through his business accounts, there seems to have been a fair amount of money being shuffled around, and as much as 1,000gc seems to have vanished off the books in the last month alone. There has also been a lot of goods moved around for free.
Finally, there seem to have been some special monthly shipments which are all encoded and marked with a stylised tiger’s head. There are no details for these, merely mention of “special deliveries” and some numbers for unspecified items.
Whilst I was reading, Calthar and Djarin were out and about chasing up leads. i.e. doing “real” work. Apparently Svin has gone missing. There were rumours going around that someone broke into his warehouse (who could that have possibly been?), but these have now been squashed and the news is that he has returned home to deal with some “family issues”. He has been succeeded by his second Heinrich Stoen.
There has also been a meat shortage of late, because apparently some creature has been crawling out of the sewers into butcher’s shops and stealing the meat. Our guess is that it’s the ‘basilisk’ that Djarin and Calthar fought off whilst protecting the labourers, and that it’s now looking for other sources of food.
There have also been an unusual cloaked person at the market who a long line of peasants were queuing up to see. He had a guard as well, but Djarin wasn’t able to find out what he was doing.
On my way to church I came across a preacher at the market, who was preaching some very strange heresy. He claimed that anyone can arise to the level of the divine. When people die, they are reincarnated another step closer to the divine, and the nobility are the closest to it. The heresy calls itself the Order of Redemption, and also claimed that the Baron was at the top of the pile. This seems incredibly heretical, and somewhat concerning. I don’t see how the Baron (or at least someone working with him) isn’t behind this somehow.
Asking at the church, they tell me that they aren’t able to do much about the Order because they are protected by the Baron’s men. They also seem to have a lot of money, since they are purchasing some property to preach from.
I slipped the Bishop’s secretary a couple of silver to get an appointment to see Bishop Tremain tomorrow, and plan to spend the night reading up on heresies to try and persuade him to do something about it.
Bishop Tremain has heard of the Order of Redemption, but can’t really do much about them and he’s not hugely concerned. He says that they do have links to street gangs, and use them for protection, so if a direct link to criminal activity could be found then that may be a way to force the Baron to put a stop to them.
He seemed happy for me to investigate them, as long as there’s not a connection back to him. I don’t think he was quite sure what to make of me – initially I think he assumed I was here on official inquisitional business or something, and seemed to relax a lot when I explained I was acting in a private capacity. I did ask about Annette, but he didn’t seem that interested in why she had been cast out.
When I got back to our room, Calthar was talking about her night at the opera, where she had met some red headed woman named Stephana Rochu. I wonder whether she is the redheaded killer mentioned in the diary. Apparently she wanted a local wine merchant named Helen Baukamf intimidated – something neither myself nor Djarin have much interest in, so we let Calthar go and handle that herself. Since she returned back safely, I guess things went okay.
Taking a look at our options, we have an every growing list of things to look into:
- There are a group of bandits out near the village of Foxton to the northeast. A reward of 10gc is being offered.
- There is also a similar reward being offered to slay the monster in the sewers.
- The village of Middleton to the south has reported that strange noises, possibly undead, have been heard in the crypt and are looking for someone to help.
- There is the Order of Redemption to investigate.
- There is the gang known as “The Heavies” within the town which Djarin is interested in.
- There is an upcoming party at the White Orchid which may be a source of information.
- Finally, we still haven’t looked into what happened to the artefacts which came back from the mine.
First we are planning on going after the sewer monster. Djarin seems interested in this, and it’s threatening the local common folk so it would be the right thing to deal with. They’ve already been paid once to deal with the problem, and seem more than happy to get paid a second time to deal with the problem permanently.
