I heard that Langren, a human Shaman, was asking for help in dealing with some issues in the village of Synevir. Having little else going on I decided to go check it out. That is how I found myself in an inn listening to an elf called Lonesome Karyn talk about his invisible friend named Smoke, together with Azurea, Dalodorer, and Moe.
Turns out something was spooking the dyre herds in the region and another, probably unrelated issue, was resulting in the villagers being attacked by a "ghost cat". We agree that Karyn would look into the dyres while we go look into the ghost issue.
The next morning we asked around town and found a goat herder that was heading towards the area where the attacks has happened. Once we reached the location, a non descript bit of brushland, we did not really have any better plan than wait and see if the herder got mauled. After a couple of hours the goats started getting nervous and astral observation revealed a "young" huttawa spirit prowling around.
Langren managed to talk to the spirit who after some initial distrust informed us that there's namegivers tainting a watering hole about a day of walk away and that the taint is corrupting the local spirit population. We saw evidence of this when Langren tried to summon his spirit companion and instead got an emaciated huttawa with black orbs for eyes.
Armed with this knowledge we started walking towards the watering hole. By dusk we reached another non descript bit of grassland, where we started thinking about making camp, when we spotted some kind of large flyer overhead. While we tried to puzzle out what it was, Azurea spotted three catlike creatures in the nearby bushes.
All four of these creatures seemed to have decided we were a meal so we found ourselves in a fight against a manticore and three feluxes. The manticore had a staring contest with Daldorer and decided food could be found elsewhere, meanwhile Azurea and I got to experience the wonders of felux flashing its eyes at you, which I can report is about as nauseating and debilitating as those horror construct I had encountered near the cloister of silence over a year before.
Other than me losing my lunch while hosting an angry boar spirit, the feluxes were dealt with fairly quickly.
The next day we resumed our trek towards the watering hole, some tracking by Langen suggests that it is also where the feluxes came from. Azurea once again spotted something in a nearby copse of trees: some kind of deformed human child, or maybe a really thin dwarf, with purple skin and black orbs for eyes. After some fruitless attempts at communication, we resumed our journey with Azurea carrying the creature.
Not long after we reached the watering hole, which was tainted enough we could notice it from several hundred yards. Ready for battle we approached to find the filthiest dwarf I have ever seen ranting about "finishing the work that was left undone". I enquired if it he meant the scourge and upon receiving an affirmative response I decided there was not much else to discuss and charged.
The dwarf's pet espagra tried to claw at me, but I just kept running over it to kill its master. As a side note espagra necks cannot take a full grown troll stomping on them. The dwarf realised his predicament and tried to flee, which is rather hard to do when your attacker is twice your height.
The other did not fare as well, the creature turned out to be a Triplicant, and it three bodies mauled Langren and Azurea before Moe and Daldorer literally melted them with their spells. As another note to any Nethermancer that will read this, Foul Vapors is a terrible name for that spell.
Fight over, we took care of the wounded, and I thought that making a puppet out of Princess, the dead espagra, would cheer up Azurea when she woke up. I don't think she liked it, maybe I should have tried to hide the crushed side of the skull better...
Afterwards we turned our attention to the water, it turns out someone had dropped a horror corpse in it. Some rope work and Moe's flying carpet let us remove it and burn it with out too much risk, then Azurea started working on purifying the land, while we searched the surroundings. We found the dwarf's hut and correspondence with other members of the "The Scourge", a fraternity of nutjobs that want to wipe out life.
Azurea managed to clear most of the taint in a couple of days and then we made our way back to Synevir. On the way back we met the huttawa spirit that had given use directions, who seemed most pleased. Karyn also seemed happy with our work and offered to train Langren in the way of the spirit rider.Statistics:Posted by sigfriedmcwild — Mon Jul 20, 2020 9:58 pm
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