Freeport Campaign

Rewards Earned

• Experience Points: 500
• Treasure: None to speak of, other than favors owed by some of the upper crust

After returning from a quick milk run to Coral Bay, the group received invitations from Bobbin Brandydale, owner and manager of the Last Resort, to the Grand Reopening of the city’s premiere hotel. Spike and Carmina spent a fair amount of time getting decked out in new finery, while Chow saw to some personal business about town.

The group arrived at the Last Resort a half hour before the doors were scheduled to open and took their place in the long line of ticketholders among the crowd of onlookers. While waiting, they ran into Father Peg Leg Peligro, who introduced them to a fellow ship captain and follower of Harrimast, Richard “the Hawk” (last name).

After being seated by Bobbin himself, Chow, Spike, and Carmina invited Peg Leg and Richard to join them at their table. The group swapped numerous stories over dinner, while generally keeping an eye on their fellow diners and listening to the conversations around them.

The pleasant evening was punctuated with several notable events:

• One Henry Tranco, tenant of the Last Resort, was visited by a couple of large guys in ill-fitting suits, who left the hotel after a quiet but heated conversation with the man. Chow bought Tranco a drink, but learned little from the ensuing conversation. Later, several other fellows joined Tranco for a couple of bottles before retiring upstairs for what sounded like a high-stakes game of poker. In fact, the stakes were apparently high enough to draw Captain Lydon from the table he shared with his new comrades on the Captain’s Council.

One by one, Tranco’s buddies returned downstairs in varying states of inebriated despondency. Lydon was last to return, and seemed put off when Spike rebuffed his efforts to borrow “just enough for one more buy-in.” The thugs returned around midnight, and seemed disappointed when they came back downstairs with a pair of jingling bundles under their coats.

• Countess Matilda, an elderly noble exile from Eisen, made a grand entrance to the delight and scattered applause of the gathered diners. She was seen to by Bobbin and the hotel’s head chef, and was soon joined by Baron Philippe de Clorevin, a noble visiting from the mainland nation of Montaigne. The Countess held court at her corner table all evening, and passed some small talk with Chow regarding trade opportunities in Eisen.

After a full evening, the Countess retired to her suite. Baron de Clorevin, deprived of his sparkling companion, sipped a glass or two of fine brandy and headed upstairs to his suite.

A while later, one of the Countess’s servants discovered that her Lady’s famed necklace, the Tears of the Sea, was missing. The Countess upbraided her staff and the hotel guards, but was soon assuaged by the Baron, who took immediate charge. Unfortunately for the Baron, Chow and Spike were upstairs investigating another matter, and found the necklace hidden in the Baron’s chamber pot. The Sea Lord’s Guard took the Baron into custody after Spike apprehended the man, and the Countess thanked the group and the Guard for returning her (since cleaned) property.

• More events to follow…

Rewards Earned

• Experience Points: 500
• Treasure: None to speak of

After a couple of blessedly uneventful days working on Four Gulls Mercantile paperwork, Spike suggested to Carmina that they spend an evening taking in the city’s various interesting sights. She agreed and said she’d meet him at the Indecipherable Scroll later. He ran into Chow, who had just finished delivering another batch of Freeport Four cookies to Finn’s headquarters, and the two of them headed back across town to the Scroll.

At Wilmina’s request, Spike graced the dinner crowd with the rawest sailor shanties he could muster, much to Carmina’s delight as she strolled through the door with her friends and “business associates,” Jenna and Barb. After a leisurely dinner, Chow and Spike agreed to meet the girls’ “guy friends” at the raucous Mermaid next door in a couple of hours for a crawl through Drac’s End. Spike explained the Daughters’ standard operating procedure (dress up as masked men, get drunk, and cause trouble) to Chow, who offered to disguise the two of them for the evening’s festivities.

An hour or so later, a couple of strange “holy men” wandered into the Mermaid and proceeded to confuse the hell out of one “Jim of Freeport” by taking notes and sketches of the fellow’s speech patterns and such for their “research.” After a reasonably fashionable interval, three masked fellows stumbled into the bar and joined “Jeff” and “Club” (?) for several drinks.

The rest of the evening passed as a series of vignettes linked by boisterous singing through the streets of Freeport:

• An escaped owlbear charged Spike and got him in a crushing hug before Omar Nkota, proprietor of Omar’s Exotic Pets, calmed the beast down. Nkota used a healing unguent to repair Spike’s wounds, and agreed to let Four Gulls Mercantile and Edo’s Tropicain know if he had need of any particular jungle specimens.

During the fight, Chow panicked and fled to Will’s office in the new Teach Investigations building in Old Town. He later explained that a similar creature had mauled his brother during one of Chow’s earliest hunting trips in his homeland.

• Chow recognized a Syndicate bookie in the Fields of Honor, though there wasn’t much action there at that relatively early hour.
• They grabbed a quick bite and some watered down beer at the Dead Pelican in Scurvytown.
• They wandered along the Docks to the One Ring, where they caught the end of a bareknuckled fight between a halfling and a gnome. The next bout ended with a minotaur messily beheading his elvish fencer opponent after an even fight. Jenna and Barb turned a bit green at the gore, but fortified themselves from their hip flasks.
• The group made its way back to the Field of Honor after Barb challenged Chow to a duel to first blood. He agreed and smacked her almost immediately from third distance with his whip. Honor satisfied, the group headed back to the Mermaid.
• After they dropped off Jenna and Barb at their parents’ Merchant District estate, Spike and Chow verified that the competent-looking fellows that had been shadowing the group all night were indeed guards looking after the twins.

Their eventful evening concluded, the fellows (and Carmina) headed to their respective domiciles.