GH, Year 704 - Slap-Style BBQ

General Summary

The following is a transcription of an interview between Prof. Jezebeth Rahal and Ghost#4483-E on 8/3/912...
Jezebeth: Do I have your name right, Mr. Linhad?
Ghost: Please, call me Keebler. All my friends call me that, and you've been nothing but friendly to me.
J: Very well. I saw you passing through one of the residential sectors of Kassædeia, have you lived in the city long?
G: Certainly not! I'm just passing through to visit family for the New Year's celebration. if I had my way, truth be told I'd be out of the Empire journeying with my good friend Helemir.
J: This isn't the first time you've mentioned Helemir, could you tell me more about her?
G: She's a headstrong one, I'll tell you that much. I warned her against participating in the Golden Hunt, but she insisted on taking that prize money no matter the cost. I supposed 10,000 platinum pieces will make a person do many foolish things. 
J: It's been a while since the last Golden Hunt¹. What year did she participate?
G: Many years ago, several lifetimes ago for a tiefling such as yourself. Bahamut was still a part of the Empire at that point, so it must have been in the early 700's. The years blend together I'm afraid, but I do recall Helemir's excitement at getting to traverse the Golden Forests and defeat the Aurelian Stag. 
J: Would you mind telling me more about this Stag? A lot of Elflands customs don't to translate well to Rakka.
G: Centuries of hostilities will lead to that it would seem. The Stag is a powerful fey creature that appears in our lovely forests every ten years. It's said to travel across time and space, collecting new powers and abilities wherever it lands. It's a beautiful creature, but also a dangerous one if it travels too close to a settlement as large as Kassædeia. And so adventurers are called forth to slay the powerful beast, like my good friend Helemir. 
J: Did she have any help when she fought the Aurelian Stag?
G: A sizeable group of adventurers volunteered that year, from all corners of the Empire. There was a sickly little half-elf fellow from Galway, were it not for his magic powers he would certainly have perished in those woods. They had a druid on the team, one of those wood elves native to the Forests capable of guiding them through the densest thickets. The bard they had on the group seemed more comfortable in the city than out in the wilderness, and there were a couple of fighters from the Empire's frontier over near the Campanel Desert. I didn't even realize that the Empire had any thri-kreen or goliaths in its population, but judging from their fighting styles they must live a rather hardscrabble existence out there. 
J: Could you elaborate on those fighting styles you mentioned?
G: Certainly. The thri-kreen seemed capable of rendering both soothing balms and searing pain with his blows, switching deftly from healing to fighting in the middle of combat. The Empire's wizards would scry on the adventurers every half hour, granting all of us at the festival with reliable updates on the party's progress. The goliath seemed to favor unarmed combat as well, but rather than blows he preferred smacking his opponents around with devastating slaps. 
J: Slaps? 
G: Indeed, we were just as surprised at the festival when we learned that he had slapped a giant boar to death. A truly incredible way to fight, I heard rumors that he founded a monastery devoted to his fighting style somewhere far north. 
J: I'll have to look into that. You said that the wizards provided updates every half hour on the party's progress. How long were they out in the Forests?
G: The adventurers, Salty Yogurt as they called themselves, had until midnight to find the Stag and slay it before the Empire's military would be called in to finish the task. There were setbacks, that sickly half-elf incinerated a nest of perytons and had to deal with the fury of the parents, but overall they made remarkable progress. By dinnertime the adventurers had found the Stag at a pond in the middle of the Forests, glowing with all of its otherworldly majesty. The details seem to change depending on who you ask, but in every description the Stag always stands more than 15 ft tall with the most incredible set of antlers. Helemir was eager to show me part of them, even after the beast's death they glowed with some magical energy from planes beyond our own. 
The scrying updates became more frequent during the fight with the Stag, especially when the Stag split in two and radiated waves of necrotic energy towards the adventurers. The fight appeared dire when a couple of giant boar joined the fray, but those fighters held on till the end and defeated the Stag without a single casualty. The way the group worked together to heal and defend one another led some to believe that they had been adventuring together for years, but to my surprise they'd only known each other for a couple days! This impressed even Emperor Polonius, and it a victorious day for the safety and glory of the Empire. 
J: It must have been a fun day to see that happen in real time. Do you know what happened to all the adventurers?
G: Few beings have the elven blessing of a long life, I'm afraid that half of those brave adventurers passed away sometime in the past century. The bard and druid are still in the Elflands from what I've gathered, but with all the recent unrest following Polonius' passing it's hard to get reliable information². As for Helemir, her and I used that prize money to travel the world from the gorgeous palaces of the Northern Territories to the natural beauty of Hakon's forests. We're planning a tour through the Campanel Desert in a couple of years, there have been recent breakthroughs in the search for the legendary city of Thrah-Kezaam.
J: That sounds like a wonderful trip. What will you do in the meantime?
G: Suffer through the many family gatherings here in the city. It's not often that the Linhad clan is assembled in the same city for so long, and my relatives will not allow such an opportunity to be squandered. They're family, to be sure, but their worldviews have become so insular here in the city. 
J: How so?
G: Would you believe that I'm one of the only person in my family to have set foot outside the Empire? Some in my family are over 500 years old, but they've spent their entire lives here and can't imagine people having a different lifestyle or worldview. That's why I always loathe visits to the capital nowadays, my elvenkin have become so set in their ways that they refuse to accept that the world will industrialize with or without them. I'm afraid it will be a rather rude awakening for the Elflands when it realizes that the world no longer needs our Empire. 
Post-Inteview notes from Jezebeth: The Reminisce Method proved successful in its first field experiment, subduing a spirit showing wraith-like traits and returning it to a pacified state. The priests in charge of overseeing the city are still suspicious of my work, but if I conduct a few more interviews they'd be foolish not to see its effectiveness in preventing the corruption of the spirits they seek to preserve. 
There are so many ghosts haunting this city, each with centuries of stories and experiences preserved within them. Many scholars have bemoaned the loss of thousands of manuscripts from the Imperial Archives, but if any of them are willing there's plenty of interview material here to write a cultural history of the Elflands Empire's last millennium. 

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¹ As of the time of this interview, it had been nearly 20 years since the last Golden Hunt. The event was formally ended by Queen Rosalind Avon after the collapse of the Elflands Empire.  ² Both Aster the druid and Rynna the bard were killed during the Sunken God's Reign of Terror in 897. I hope to conduct interviews with both of them during my stay in Kassædeia.

Rewards Granted

• Everybody in the party received 10,000PP

Character(s) interacted with

• Polonius Avon III - Emperor of the Elflands Empire from 435 - 896.
• Keebler Linhad - a high elf man and Helemir's friend
• Jezebeth Rahal - a tiefling researcher specializing in the study of undead spirits

Report Date

21 Nov 2020

Primary Location

Golden Forests

Featured Players

• Arjun 
• Aster 
• Coronatus 
• Helemir Whitlock 
• Patriclus Pontificus 
• Rynna