S1 E3: Who Xvarted?

General Summary

In which our heroes find, to their dismay, that they are the targets of a sinister kidnapping plot...
Our party of heroes continued up the road while continuing their debate about the best route forward, and discussing the implications, such as they were, of their encounter with the lizardfolk. They were accompanied by a religious acolyte, presumably one of the two that Parson Naphan Agrippa had mentioned as having taken a vow of silence while under his tutelage. Making the turn north to the much less-travelled section of the road, Mae became aware of an eerie silence descending on the area, silencing the bright bird calls they'd been hearing on the trip so far. Peering through the trees on the eastern side of the road with some help from the others, she noticed a strange bird keeping an eye on them.
The bird had a body and plumage like a small buzzard or large raven, glossy black, with a slightly elongated neck and pustule-pocked head that resembled something like a boiled stork, except with a long, slender, daggerlike beak ending in a sharp point. The bird seemed to be purposely hiding, though it was too large to be completely hidden by the tree trunk.
Before more could be decided, however, a pair of giant rats crashed through the underbrush from the forest on the west side of the road and charged in to attack Blizzard, though a timely casting by Lorfel of Silvery Barbs turned a massively deadly rat attack into a complete miss for the monsters. Battle was taken up with the creatures, but only a few seconds later,, another band of creatures charged in -- xvarts, an ugly race of purple-blue humanoids resembling grumpy oversized Twinkies with enormous feet on spindly legs. They came as a charging mass to overtake Keebler, knocking him down, catching him up n a net, and dragging him a little ways back towards the woods whence they came.
The real battle then picked up, with the xvarts using their abduction skills to their fullest and very nearly making off with Keebler, until the rest of the party overwhelmed them, also killing the rats and the bird when it flew over to threaten Blizzard. Keebler was stabbed a couple of times by retreating xvarts, and Xi Shi had the bad luck of a spray of poison mostly sloughing harmlessly off of a greasy Xvart who then stabbed at her in nasty fashion before disengaging and hightailing it into the woods as well. Rongo, Blizzard and Xi Shi used melee, spells and ranged attacks and Mae even took the wild shape od a giant rat herself to dispatch two xvarts and tree a third, while the others scattered. In all, three Xvarts escaped into the deeper wood, likely to go on to kidnap again some other day, but possibly even more likely to meet some terrible fate in the woods after running away, scattered and alone and without their giant rat brawlers.
The loot from the fight, however, was more than a little disturbing. In addition to some sundry items - slings, swords, a net, some cash - there was also a map, better than the one that the Bailiff had provided to the heroes, with five X's roughly corresponding to places where the party had been in the past day. Worse than that was a note written in a clear hand on incredibly thin onion paper with a black squid ink containing a binder to keep it from leaking through the paper. The note said: "I will pay 40gp for any member of the party with the turtle," signed by an abyssal symbol roughly translated as 'the blasphemer' or the blasphemous one, the outcast, rejected one, etc."
It was right around this point that the party of heroes, picking through the Xvart's meager mortal remains, realized they'd lost track of that silent acolyte.
Mae quickly decided to have a look around for tracks, finding where the acolyte had gone around a tree on the far side a few times and then headed south. An initial fear was that he had been abducted, but the tracks quickly eliminated that possibility; he'd either run away in fear - or on purpose. Keebler decided to go have a look, and to avoid tempting fate a second time, he diluted the threat of being kidnapped by angry blue Twinkies by having Blizzard accompany him on the back of the horse. Blizzard leapt up like a dragonet born to the saddle, and the two made their way a short distance, 400 yards or so, to find a disturbing scene.
That the body on the road - spread over a good 40' of road, in fact - was even the acolyte seemed more circumstantial than proven, until they found his head and confirmed that yes, this was the acolyte they had been looking for. His body had been torn into two sections, and then each section evidently clawed, bitten, and dragged about 20' in opposite directions. Blood and gore stained the ground, and the body was only cool - not cold. A coinpurse was found on the belt of what was most of the man's waist containing exactly 40 gold pieces - the same amount promised in the letter. He also had a grotesque bat-faced monster or demonic holy symbol of some kind, nothing Keebler or Blizard recognized though neither are great keepers of religious or arcane knowledge. Keebler took the gold and the symbol, and rode back to the rest of the group further up the road.
Animated discussion ensued. Lorfel had already been advocating for a return to the safety of the keep, to regroup, or possibly retire completely, from adventuring. Surely this sort of thing never happened in the library back home, and being specifically named in the letter was deeply unsettling. Seeing the bat-faced holy symbol only added to his distress, some boogeyman thing he remembered hearing from tales as a young softshell but couldn't bring up the name of. Trying to reassure Lorfel, Rongo pointed out that, if a person was going to describe their party to a pack of dim-witted Xvarts, the obvious thing to tell them to look for was "the Turtle," which was more than a little offensive to Lorfel, akin to calling a human 'the monkey'.
Nevertheless, the xvarts were clearly directed by someone with some knowledge of them to make this abduction attempt, but it appeared that the acolyte had already been paid for it; in any case, the abduction was unsuccessful, and the fellow with the money had been ripped and splashed across the cobbles of the road, just minutes and meters from where the group had been fighting, possibly even at the same time and before their fight had even ended.
Going after the three fleeing Xvarts was also discussed, but the deep wood certainly posed unknown dangers while the Keep would be, at worst, running a gauntlet back through where those X's had been drawn on the road on the map. Xvarts being greedy and stupid, it seemed unlikely that they'd had any direct contact with the person staging the abductions - if they had, why bother with a letter? So the value of actually questioning one was less than the risk of heading into deeper woods. However the party did snoop around the xvart's large-footed, shallow-depression tracks enough to determine where they had been waiting, until the party passed by, to make their attack - and that they had been waiting in that place for some time, and that they had come from more or less the direction of the Caves of Chaos, not the Wizard's undercroft and not from the south where the Lizardfolk camp and gods knew what else might be, unless they had taken a ludicrously indirect route from either of the latter.
Eventually Lorfel's impassioned - arguably hysterical - plea to return to the Keep seemed to carry the majority, but no decision whether to go ahead or back seemed obvious or comforting. Xi Shi mentioned that the fight had already exhausted her, but the group had barely been awake two hours at that point and camping out in these woods all day again seemed to just be asking for trouble or obliteration from whatever beast or monster or pack of monsters had done in the acolyte. Better to make their way carefully back to the Keep, do a little snooping perhaps, or ask more pointed questions, and then get a rest and some hot food while perhaps seeking to uncover the identity of "The Blasphemer." The suspect matching most of the clues thus far appeared to be the shady Pastor Naphan Agrippa, inasmuch as the acolyte torn up on the road with the kidnap money - who was almost certainly connected to all this - had taken a vow of silence, a strange detail they all recalled from Naphan's description of his acolytes. The party had not, however, actually seen them before in order to make a positive match. Perhaps Naphan's reaction would tell them something, but they mutually agreed to discuss a plan for exactly what to ask, of whom, while they walked and rode their single horse on the 2-or-so-hour journey back to the (relative?) safety of Raven's Rock Keep. The only looming threat now, other than another ambush at the site of another X on the map, is perhaps ending up in the Tavern in time for the opening night performance of the Zeffirelli Collective's performance of his newest play, "Pretty Pretty Peacock".

Rewards Granted

• Net
• 3 slings
• 2 small hammers
• 2 short swords
• 27 gold
• map with 5 X's marking places the party had been, and more or less the place where the attack occurred
• Ominous note in Abyssal written with squid ink on onion paper: I will pay 40gp for any member of the party with the turtle. a squigggly signature at the bottom was found to be an actual abyssal symbol, meaning blasphemer, outcast, rebel, etc.

Missions/Quests Completed

• "Xvart Kidnap Gang"
• "Orders and Payoffs"

XP

425

Report Date

13 Apr 2022

Primary Location

The Borderland Marches