In short
Quill wakes up outside Baldur’s Gate with no memory and joins Kale, Kintergas and Gimbal, who were summoned in a dream by the archmage Syndra Silvane. Syndra hires the party to sneak into the lair of the lich Zaldara Kordris and steal her phylactery while the Harpers besiege it. The session ends at a rusted grate inside the sea-cave entrance, with two dead coconut crabs.
A man with pockets
A man in his fifties stands in a small farming town just outside Baldur’s Gate. He has a wild salt-and-pepper beard and wears a once-blue coat with pockets sewn onto every surface. One eyebrow is thick and the other stops halfway. He has no idea who he is.
In the bottom of one pocket he finds a battered pink journal with rainbows on the cover. It holds four childish entries about adventures with someone called Glimpse:
- Day 2: “I lost my favourite brass button in the garden today and cried.”
- Day 3/4: Glimpse and the writer ate mud (or sand). “It tasted like stars.”
His other possessions:
- an ink-stained potato
- sixteen pairs of eyebrow tweezers
- a peacock quill tucked behind his ear
- a beautifully made pocket watch
A fruit seller gives him an apple for free, turning down a pair of tweezers as payment. The seller tells him he is just outside Baldur’s Gate and points him to the inn across the road, where the barkeep is called Ted.
The party in the inn
Kale, Kintergas and Gimbal have been on the road together for about a week, travelling from Waterdeep to Baldur’s Gate. Each was summoned in a dream by Syndra Silvane. They stopped at the inn for a last drink before meeting her.
The stranger comes in, startles at the door closing behind him, and sits down next to a half-orc barbarian. The half-orc slides his tankard away and sends him over to the party.
- Kintergas reads him (Insight 17). He sees an honest man down on his luck who needs help, and nothing sinister.
- Gimbal quietly uses Divine Sense and detects no celestials, fiends or undead.
- The stranger knows how the world works in general but nothing specific about himself. He guesses he was a merchant (all those pockets) or a teacher (the child’s journal).
- Gimbal goes outside to check a plant the stranger mentions. It is foxglove: the stems are medicinal, the rest is deadly. He adds some to his herbalism kit.
- Kale casts Prestidigitation to scrub him clean. The scrubbing scares him, and that is how he discovers his missing half-eyebrow.
- The party names him Quill, after the peacock feather.
- Quill writes a line in the journal. His handwriting is neat and practised, but it is not the handwriting in the journal.
- He sings an old Elvish drinking song, The Alchemist’s Liver, very badly. It establishes that he speaks Common and Elvish.
- Kintergas tosses his pack at Quill, who nearly falls over catching it. His Acrobatics is apparently 0.
Syndra Silvane’s estate
The walk takes two to three hours: through farmland, then up an oak-lined lane to a stately mansion on a hill outside the city. Most of the party know Syndra by reputation:
- a powerful archmage and retired adventurer
- a long-time ally of the Harpers, though not a Harper herself
- wealthy, famous, and getting old
The door opens before anyone knocks, and Quill stumbles in onto a plush carpet. Syndra lays her hands on Quill’s head and admits that his memory loss is “outside my purview”. Something is seriously wrong up there.
The job. The Harpers are besieging the lair of Zaldara Kordris, the Duchess of Rot, a lich who lives just outside Baldur’s Gate and preys on its countryside. Syndra wants burglars, not fighters:
- Slip in through a secret passage at the base of the cliffs, behind an underwater waterfall.
- Steal the lich’s phylactery so the Harpers can bargain with her and hold her to account.
- Syndra describes the phylactery as a cup, “the most bejewelled and decorated item in the entire lair, and under the most guard, right at the back.”
- The intel on the passage came from Remi Haventree, the Harpers’ top coordinator on the Sword Coast. It cost many Harper lives.
- Two other adventurers answered her dream-summons first and have already gone ahead. (These turn out to be Elias and Nyx.)
- Payment: “Gold, weaponry, armour, everything your heart desires.”
Kintergas’s passive Insight catches that she is a little too poised: slightly over-dressed for the weather, a touch too much make-up. He finds nothing untrue in what she says.
The room of curiosities
Kale spots a back room full of odd objects, and Syndra happily shows them around:
| Curio | What happened |
|---|---|
| Glowing obsidian skull (green light pulsing in the eye sockets) | Bought from a street merchant in Port Nyanzaru in Chult. It flares whenever someone comes within 5 feet. Syndra doesn’t know what it does. |
| ”Phylactery” jar (iron-banded, runed, dark swirling smoke, thumps) | A Halloween fairground prop she made by accident while trying to make a nice lamp. Touching it makes your hair stand on end. |
| Huge gnomish astronomical clock ticking backwards, one tick a minute | Her sourdough timer, made “extra ominous”. It doesn’t match Quill’s pocket watch. |
| Gaudy stained-glass serpent eating the sun (glows neon pink and orange every 30 seconds) | Bought from the same Port Nyanzaru merchant. Kale falls into a trance in front of it and hears a distant, hissing voice. It is a voice he knows, but not this time from its usual source, and it sounds deeply offended: “That’s supposed to be me. Why am I magenta?” |
Quill offers Syndra one of his tweezers. She declines: “You never know when you might want to sort that out.”
The sea cave
Syndra sends them off at about 3–4 pm. The lair is half an hour away. On the walk, Kale admits he had no stable childhood and fought his way through the world. Gimbal says he comes from the Underdark.
They take the waiting rowboat along the base of sheer cliffs to a vine- and mangrove-choked cave. Inside:
- The surf is deafening.
- Explosions and shouts of the siege carry down from the cliffs above.
- The air smells of brine, rotting kelp and the ozone of necrotic magic.
Gimbal (gnome) and Kale (tiefling) have darkvision. Kintergas discovers he doesn’t. Gimbal casts Light.
About 50 feet in, a rusted, century-old iron grate blocks a 5-foot tunnel. Kale’s crowbar only makes noise. Kintergas, with help, rips the grate out of the wall with a crash that echoes through the whole cave.
Fight: 2 coconut crabs.
- Kale Eldritch Blasts one into flambéed crab.
- The other grabs Kintergas’s leg for 3 damage.
- Kintergas cuts it cleanly in half.
The fight lasted one round. The party were jokingly dubbed “the Two Shots”.
Loot & items
- Quill’s starting oddities: Glimpse journal, ink-stained potato, 16 eyebrow tweezers, peacock quill, artisan pocket watch, coat of many pockets.
- Gimbal: foxglove stems.
People met
Ted (named only) · Half-orc at the inn · Syndra Silvane · named in passing: Zaldara Kordris, Remi Haventree
Threads opened
- Who is Quill, and who is Glimpse? → Quill
- The obsidian skull and the magenta serpent came from Port Nyanzaru. → Syndra’s Curios
- What does Kale’s voice want? → Kale