From the journal of Truck, Windling Warrior.
I heard that somebody was hiring Adventurers at the Drunken goose. When I (and several other Adepts) arrived at the specified hour we found a middle Aged dwarven gentleman (Firgeg Opalcloak) who represented the Throalic Mining Guild. He told us that a merchant of the mining guild visited Moscva (3207) a small town that operates the Moscva living crystal mine. He reports that the town has a new citizen (Rasputeen - human) who has turned the heads of all the town's women. The merchant found all the townsfolk acting differently. When he made inquiries he was ejected from the town. Mine production is continuing, but output is slightly down. He hired us to investigate the situation and make sure it did not affect future mine production.
We traveled to Sossanopa and hired a boat "Howl of Liberty" to take us upriver to the point nearest Moscva. At one point the boat hit something underwater, so the captain stopped for repairs, On the shore we found a colony of Pangolus females and babies which we left alone and simply waited for the hull repairs. The next day we disembarked at the trailhead that led inland to the town. We spotted some Blood Ravens and tried to ease by them, but they attacked us and were killed. There were about 20 of them.
It was mid-afternoon when we arrived at the town. There was no activity, nobody outside. Warak Nendul (Swordmaster) knocked on a random door, and talked to a middle aged human man. Apparently they both made bad first impressions on each other and said unfortunate things, but the man did say that nothing was wrong in the village. We found some people half-heartedly working in the mine, but they said they were not from the village, but lived in the mine. they said that after Rasputan came the townspeople were all a flutter about him, but then slowly stopped coming to work. They said that they (for some unexplained reason) don't go into the village much and had never met Rasputin. Before going back to the village we circled around it and explored the area fairly good. We found no new paths or signs of migration or foul play.
We went back to the village and went to the house that the minors told us the foreman (who they had not seen for weeks) lived in. There was no sign of the mine foreman, instead we found Rasputeen attended by 18 village women, aged 16 to 20. Rasputeen also had 2 large hounds of some (unusual) sort. Rasputeen told of how he had arrived at the village some months before starving and neer death, and how the village people had nursed him back to health.
It was very frustrating talking to Rasputeen or any of the villagers. They were all very calm, unnaturally serene, and evaded most questions. We slowly got a story about a village that had been in what anybody sane would describe as a crisis for a generation. It seems that the village opened up and left the mine a generation ago (more than 10 years earlier than Throal), but that as soon as they did so, their birthrate fell to zero. There were no villagers less than 16 years old. We never figured out a reason, and they never seem to have done anything about it except pray (and for some reason were praying to Astendar instead of Garlen). However now many (maybe all) of the 18 women around Rasputeen seemed to be with child and everybody seemed very happy about that. After giving us the runaround for a long time, Rasputeen sang a song in praise of Astendar and then he (and his hounds) disappeared.
We are all very confused. Why was the birthrate zero for so long. Why didn't the villagers do anything about it, or ask for help, or leave. This Rasputeen character seems to have solved the birth rate problem by knocking up all the young women. Is this a permanent solution and they are all now normally fertile? (we still don't know). Was Rasputeen a manifestation of the Passion Astendar himself? Was he a Questor of Astendar? The impressions I get is that he must be one or the other, but also that he could not have been either. We did a greeting ritual and Rasputeens artistic talent was acceptably good, but was not extraordinary. I am not certain that Astendar COULD produce art so mundane, and don't think that ether Astendar or a Questor of Astendar would purposely do so.
So we have no idea what we witnessed, other than that the villagers are all happy and back at their normal routines. The Passions work in mysterious ways. Statistics:Posted by ChrisDDickey — Mon Jan 11, 2021 3:12 pm
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