In short
Kintergas, Kale and Gimbal each wake from a vivid nightmare, and Gimbal works out that one of them wasn’t his to dream. Quill has vanished, leaving a bed full of glowing pink soap. A monk of the trickster god Kubazan asks the party to clear his flooded jungle shrine. There they kill four thugs who had tried to steal its sacred bronze basin. One basin is still missing.
Three dreams
Kintergas
He stands in a Waterdeep alley he has sworn to forget. His City Watch badge rusts in his palm. A huge iron gauntlet bearing a red flame comes down out of the fog and presses him into the earth. When he looks up, there is only a smoke-filled desert running towards a jagged mountain.
He wakes gripping his sword, angry and determined. This is unfinished Waterdeep business.
Kale
He stands in black water without getting wet, under a breathing lattice of black roots. When he speaks, his voice sounds like a rusted key turning in a lock. Every step forward carries him backwards. Eyeless figures made of shed skin and bone masks murmur through the water itself:
“The … moon approaches. The vessel walks the surface. She stirs.”
The water turns to glass. Beneath it, thousands of pale snakes coil, and far below them a single colossal golden eye opens.
“The sun is only a scab over the sky, little speaker. We awaken.”
Gimbal
He walks the glowing-fungus tunnels of his Underdark childhood. They turn into rotting jungle roots dripping warm, coppery water. His holy symbol shines silver, but vines lash his wrists and throat and pull him upwards. He reaches for his Twilight Sanctuary, but the darkness is full of millions of tiny blinking eyes. A voice like grinding river stones says:
“Even the night belongs to the… (sea?)”
He wakes with his holy symbol strangely warm in his hand.
What they learned:
- Gimbal prays to Selûne and rolls a natural 20 (26). The dream wasn’t meant for him; he caught it like an overheard conversation.
- Something is leaking: crossing between planes, or breaking out of wherever it was locked up.
- In Chult, Selûne’s light, which usually soothes the world’s nightmares like a blanket, is worn thin and fraying.
- It might connect to Acererak and the Soulmonger.
- Of his companions, the one most likely to be tied to it is Kale, the warlock.
- Kale studies his dream (Arcana 14) and understands his patron better.
- If his patron awakens, it would raise Kale up but do enormous harm: “picking the scab” off the sky so the world bleeds back into eternal night.
- Its goal is to devour the sun.
- He isn’t sure he wants that, and he’s never sure where he stands with his patron.
- Gimbal asks Kale directly. Kale says he’s had dreams like this since the Sword Coast and isn’t ready to talk about them. Kintergas: share when you’re ready, as long as it doesn’t break my oath. Gimbal doesn’t fully trust Kale now.
Where’s Quill?
Quill’s bed is covered in a thick, endless, luminous pink jelly that smells of laundry soap. It oozes off the edge and vanishes when it hits the floor.
Their clothes are back, cleaned and mended, and Kintergas’s armour gleams.
Master Vul
There’s a knock at the door. Master Vul is an elderly Chultan monk carrying a copper-brass holy symbol stamped with a frog. Gimbal (Religion 19) doesn’t know the symbol. From his time at the temple, though, he knows Chult worships nine trickster gods, and this is clearly one of them: Kubazan.
Vul’s request: the Shrine of Kubazan.
- It is centuries old and stands half a day into the jungle beyond the city’s small eastern side gate.
- Last night a gang broke in, apparently to steal its two ancient bronze offering basins.
- They set off a water-sealing glyph. One of the thieves’ feet then jammed the spring that feeds the shrine pool.
- The water is backing up and flooding the farm terraces with brackish water, threatening the crops and the port’s fresh water supply.
- It’s close enough to the walls that they won’t need a guide.
Vul also deals with the slime. He holds a corked ceramic flask to the bed and it sucks up every drop, leaving the sheets spotless. The flask doesn’t trap anything. Vul says it is “meant to keep this shape safe”, and anything inside can come out again by itself. The party keeps the flask. It may be Quill.
Kale tests a dab. It is soap: it cleans brilliantly, flows back into the flask afterwards, and removes every hair from the back of his hand. → Bottle of Pink Soap
Breakfast at the House of Repose is dinosaur steak with marinated dried dinosaur scales, a local delicacy, and herb-scented watered wine.
The road to the shrine
Out of the side gate the party walks for three hours through terraced rice paddies and vegetable plots that push the jungle back from the walls, then an hour of thin jungle, then an hour and a half of thick jungle. The irrigation ditches run with stinking, stagnant water.
The Shrine of Kubazan is a half-sunken stone pavilion carved from a single boulder and choked with vines and moss.
- Two giant stone frogs sit at either end.
- Foul water pours over a flat-stone waterfall and sluice gates into a courtyard that is now knee-deep.
- Kale feels a primal resonance there, and senses that the city’s protection is thinner out here.
- Kintergas’s Divine Sense finds nothing within 60 ft.
The fight at the shrine
Someone is calling for help behind the waterfall.
Inside (Kintergas and Gimbal). The shrine’s sand-and-stone filter is choked. A Chultan man is stuck in it by one foot, with only his head above water.
- Gimbal casts Destroy Water around him.
- Kintergas hauls him free.
- The man stabs Kintergas (3 damage).
- Furious, Kintergas punches him with a Divine Smite (11 damage), breaks his neck and holds him under.
Outside (Kale). Kale finds tracks: hurried prints of three people heading into the jungle, deeper than they should be. One bronze basin is hidden behind vines at a frog statue’s feet. The other is gone. Then an arrow hits him from the brush, and a Chultan man and a dragonborn charge with swords drawn.
- Kale sets the Chultan on fire with Firebolt, hits the dragonborn with Witch Bolt (new at level 2), and finishes the Chultan with Hex.
- Arrows keep coming. The dragonborn crits Kale and he goes down.
- Kintergas and Gimbal come out. Gimbal heals Kale with Healing Word and he gets up. Kintergas tackles the dragonborn 10 ft through the water and casts Bless.
- Gimbal finishes the dragonborn with Sacred Flame.
- Kintergas charges the half-elf archer, who goes pale and runs. Kale chases him, hexes him, and is shot down again (four arrows in him by now). Gimbal stabilises him with his Healer’s training and then heals him with Divine Spark.
- Kintergas pins the archer against a palm tree, draws his sword with a flourish, and takes his head off.
They had wanted to question him.
Aftermath
- Loot: about 12 sp and some trinkets on the half-elf. The dragonborn has worn hide armour, a pitted longsword and 2 daggers. The two Chultans carry 7 sp between them. Everything they own is old and badly kept: local thugs.
- Kintergas pulls the dead man’s boot out of the shrine’s water wheel and the spring runs clear again.
- The mystery: why would hired thugs risk robbing a sacred shrine for a solid cast-bronze bowl that is only worth melting down for scrap? Something bigger is going on.
- The heavy tracks lead into the jungle in the direction the archer ran.
It’s about 1 pm, half a day from the port.
Loot & items
Bottle of Pink Soap · ~19 sp · the remaining bronze basin (left at the shrine) · Kale: four arrow wounds
People met
Master Vul · thugs at the shrine (all dead) · named: Kubazan
Bestiary
Shrine thugs: Chultan bandits ×2, dragonborn, half-elf archer
Threads opened
- The stolen bronze basin: who wants it, and why?
- The dreams: something is waking.
- Is Quill the soap?
- Gimbal’s suspicion of Kale.