Travel by cart and riding takes several days, even non-stop. The smart thing to do is to stop when at the edge of Oatman Canyon, get some rest for people and critters, then head in fresh in the morning.
This is not what
Dacio Bicchieri wants to do, of course! But he does not get to go along despite his best arguments, because
Chef listens to what
his mentor and the rangers
Zhang Sephia and
Bruthazmus say; and Chef is well-skilled at using his ladle to put an injured Goblin child to sleep.
The party arrives, does what they are going to do, then investigates the wreckage of the caravan's last known location.
Components
Treasure available:
- Clues!
- Blood Loss!
- crates stamped "Bicchieri Caravan" and buried partially under the edges of the trail, each crate packed with mostly intact glassware containing balls of dried wicks, or jam, or liquor, or cigars, or seeds, or herbs
- oatman hats!
Backdrops
Bicchieri Caravan campsite
This is where the hurricane was born. This is where the eye of the storm stayed for over a week!
SNAFU Guild should do some investigating.
Things We Might Detect:
Miro Teague uses Stormborn Skills:
(nat 20) Whatever Stormborn was storm-mastering here, must have died while levitating at least 20 feet into the air. That will alter the ballistic trajectory for where their body could have landed! (And where was their stuff meanwhile?)
(high roll) This is the legendary kind of storm that happens when a Stormborn throws his life into something ... or when someone murders a Stormborn in the middle of storm-mastering and tries to RAISE THEM FROM THE DEAD!!! (Roll for chance of hysterical fit. Or don't roll, and just go ahead and have one. Whatever is the more fun!)
(medium-high roll) At some point around halfway through, someone lost control of the storm and it started to move. East-northeast at first. And then directly north. Did someone else get control of it? Anyway, it moved far enough north to start blowing this camp around pretty hard. Anything that used to be here, got blown away ... probably northeast?
(medium roll) The eye of the hurricane was too small by an order of magnitude -- a thousand yards instead of twenty nautical miles. That is not how hurricanes work. Also it was stationary for days, driving a visible mark into the world at its perimeter. That is NOT how hurricanes work!
(low roll) Yup, the eastern edge of the eye of the storm was here at the caravan camp for a long time. Look how the soil is fluffed upward from the low pressure! Look how the rock face around the edges is raw and scored, as if that part of the ancient river bed was carved out of what has been flat dirt for a long time! And just outside the perimeter -- this is an oval about half a mile across -- the ground is scoured away to a depth of several feet, the grass and shrubbery and few trees have been ripped up, the only stuff to stay rooted in the soil is that patch over there of cabbages, which are growing more or less at random so they must be from seeds blown wild this past winter.
Rangers and Druid use Nature Skills:
(nat 20) Strange: heavy hoof marks from the north-northwest here, here, and here, and going back whence they came; but only back hooves. Never forehooves. Even stranger: lurch-and-drag marks to the west, coming and wandering around through the wreckage and then going again, as if whatever their foot shapes, they had wrapped themselves in loose sackcloth and stuffed it with wads of whatever they could find.
(high roll) Most of the debris from this area should be to the north, but the tallest items and the lightest items might have gone *south* instead. Any person searching this area would have already looked north.
(medium-high roll) An arc of protective fires had been built in to the eastern edge of this camp area, with enough space between them for a caravan wagon in each gap. The fires had burned for days, based on the marks you can find in deep-buried rocks, before the entire thing was blown apart by strong northward winds.
(medium roll) Although it surely rained at least as hard in this area over the past several weeks as it rained in Aquitaine, this area did not flood. It should have. It should still be three feet of sloshy mud. The area south of here is a better match for your expectations of natural phenomena than north of here, which is still a better match than right here at the caravan camp.
(low roll) Your companion is unusually adamant about staying right here on the established path. Not that there IS much path! Strong winds wiped away all of the topsoil in a matter of hours, leaving hard stone exposed everywhere.
(critical botch) What lovely cabbages! Someone went to a lot of trouble to shelter this patch, even though (given how random their planting) they must have been half-wild to start off.
Wait.
Perhaps the cabbages are concealing an important message from the Bicchieri Caravan, left behind to tell their rescuers what they learned before they were captured??!
Lee Chung uses Perception or Knowledge (Geography):
(nat 20) Sifting through a bit of the rubble, you happen to find the broken pieces of a heavy chain silver necklace, melted and warped, tarnished with blood. Its pendant -- also broken into so many pieces that you have to search around to find enough fragments -- was once about the length of your hand from fingertip to the heel of your palm, a now-scorched length of dark wood in the shape of a quarterstaff with acid-burned bits of colored silk tied to one end.
(high roll) Sifting through some of the rubble, you find a discarded hat. It's not a style you have seen before, really. It seems to be made of animal fur matted into a felt, then treated to repel water (maybe with lanolin mixed with some sort of plant extract?), then shaped into this tall-crown, wide-brim combination. There's a broken cord that connects to the hatband (which is either resin-coated leather or maybe even an unidentified substance), goes through holes in the hat base near where the brim connects to the crown, and then the cord is meant to tie under a bead somewhere maybe half a foot below the wearer's chin. The hat is awfully beaten up, but the hatband is in GREAT shape!
(medium-high roll) The debris has been disturbed more than once since this caravan was destroyed. Perhaps five times in all before the SNAFU Guild arrived. If Dacio truly traveled for nine or ten days to get help and his people were alive enough to put up a ruckus of a distraction as he fled, and it took the Snafu Guild seven days to hurry here, that means this campsite has been investigated approximately once per two days since the earliest it could have been breached? Which suggests more than one "someone" is still looking for something important!
(medium roll) The people of this caravan removed their stock from the wagons at one point in the siege. They moved the glassware to the eastern edge, to either side of the road, and buried it -- not deep enough to truly hide it, but perhaps their intention was to keep the glassware from being shattered and added to the storm winds?
(low roll) The people of this caravan either died or were captured once their defenses were exhausted. For Dacio's sake, you hope most of them were captured. In either case, you expect to find some bodies not far away, and possibly some of their smashed wares. And for that matter: what happened to the caravan animals? Where are the donkeys? Where are the caravan guard dogs? These were conscientious people, they would have done something for their creatures.
(critical botch) Hey, free cabbage! If you take a whole leaf from each plant, you can use them to make Cabbage Rolls for lunch, and the plant will continue to grow just fine.
Everyone is going to look around at some point. Possibly some people will get their hands on the Cabbage. NPCs will not be able to figure anything out, but they make great sounding boards.
