Freeport Campaign

Rewards Earned

• Experience Points: 1250
• Treasure: 3 masterwork breastplates, 2 masterwork falchions, masterwork composite longbow (+3 STR rating), 20 arrows, 83 gp, 60 pp, white opal (1100 gp), +1 greatsword, wand of cat’s grace (22 charges, 3rd caster level)

The group went to the temple of Harrimast to get their wounds healed, and then checked with Will and the Wizards’ Guild to verify that the things they had seen dancing around a fire in the former dining room were in fact babau demons. Spike went off in search of weapons to exploit one of the demons’ suspected weaknesses. That done, the party holed up to recover for their next foray into Cresh Manor.

After a restless night, the party reassembled at dawn in the Eastern District. This time around, Richard brought along one of his crewmates, a tall cloaked figure named Lumineaux, for backup and additional muscle.

Chow led the way back into the house. The group discussed their options and decided to clear the first floor before moving upstairs. Chow was set upon immediately when he opened one of the interior doors off the entry hall.

(More flavor text later…)

Rewards Earned

• Experience Points: 1250
• Treasure: 500 gp each (reward from Countess Matilda)

After a good night’s rest, the group had audiences with deposed King Albigensius IV of Avalon and Countess Matilda.

Following the events at the Last Resort, Spike, Chow, and Richard spent a few quiet months seeing to their various business and personal interests. A couple of weeks into the dry season, Chow received a message from Finn, requesting his assistance in a disturbing matter in the Eastern District. After an initial meeting, Chow brought in Spike and Richard to discuss the matter with Finn.

Apparently, many children had gone missing over the last few months in the District and elsewhere in the city, and Finn’s “constituents” wanted them back. The Syndicate’s questioning pointed to Cresh Manor, an abandoned house at the edge of the city with a dark reputation.

The group agreed to investigate and set off to talk to the families that lived nearest the manor. The families and friends of the missing children told similar stories – little Paitr or Jenny had gone to the manor wall on a dare, or been playing stickball near the house, and just didn’t come home. After cataloging these unfortunate tales, the party grabbed a few hours of sleep, and met up to stake out the manor to verify the reports of strange lights and noxious odors emanating from the house.

Shortly after dawn, the group entered the front gate of Cresh Manor. Rather than follow the path to the front door, they bushwhacked through the overgrown vegetation to a clearing around back. While investigating a disturbing fountain in a clearing behind the house, the party was surprised when a massive hedge sprang up out of nowhere to separate Chow from the rest of the group. Spike, Richard, Balama, and Isaac heard Chow engaged in a fight on the other side of the hedge, but their efforts to hack and burn through the vegetation were largely unsuccessful. Frustrated, they turned their attentions to the barred back door of the manor and crashed through it in half a minute or so. Spike, Balama, and Isaac charged through the front door and back around the house in time to fight off a small, strangely resilient lizard that was trying to drag Chow’s unconscious body through the hedge.

Meanwhile, Richard was distracted by a babbling apparition that coalesced in one of the fireplaces in the main hall of the house. He huddled fearfully in a corner for the duration of the fight with the devil lizard, but used a brief moment of lucidity to wrap himself in silence and escape the allip. He quickly joined the rest of the party outside the house and entreated Harrimast to bring Chow back to consciousness. That done, the group exited the manor grounds to rest and regroup.

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.

Rewards Earned

• Experience Points: 4000
• Treasure: +1 frost rapier; +2 leather armor; bead of force; cape of the mountebank; potion of cure serious wounds; 2 smokesticks; finely wrought gold bracelet studded with 4 red garnets (580 gp); 70 gp

Using one of Will’s dimensional doors, the group surprised the hell out of Zelkema in Spike’s old room at the Last Resort. The warehouse owner barely had time to look up from the letter he was composing before Spike, Edo, Gor-bob, and Will dispatched him. Chow grabbed the letter from the man’s desk as the party made their way out of the hotel.

That loose end tied up, the group discussed how to approach their other outstanding nemesis, Boss Tillinghast. Gor-bob entreated with Pawgma to narrow down the former commissioner’s current location to an inn in Eisen, around 3000 miles to the northeast of Freeport. Using the proceeds from the sale of the nice heavy crossbow carried by one of the orcs in Parnass’s basement, Will bought a couple of scrolls containing the greater teleport spell. The group talked for a while, then rested up until the small hours of the morning.

Will verified with his crystal ball that Tillinghast was asleep in his room. The wizard then read one of the scrolls, and the group appeared suddenly in the distant city. Before the former commissioner could raise an alarm, the group grabbed him and teleported with Will back to the basement of Ztorage. They immediately threw him into the combination-locked vault, told him that the two barrels inside contained food and water, and slammed the door closed.

A while later, Lady Elise responded to the group’s invitation to have a few words with Tillinghast. Gor-bob softened the fellow up with a bad word from Pawgma and watched the Councilwoman from outside the vault. After she spoke briefly and left, Will took first watch outside the vault, waiting for Tillinghast to get thirsty and trigger the trap awaiting in the barrels. Will stewed for a couple of hours, mentally replaying the Freeport Four trial and the chaotic events surrounding it. He then opened the door and sprayed a handful of magic missiles into the former commissioner. The group quickly and covertly moved Tillinghast’s remains to one of the more prominent gibbets in town.

A couple of days later, the party accepted an invitation to meet with Finn, the leader of the Halfling Benevolent Association, and Patch Carty, the leader of the Buccaneers (a recently acquired wholly owned subsidiary of HBA, Inc.). After some hours of discussion at the Temple of Harrimast, the Freeport Four came to an equitable arrangement with the two organizations. Carty agreed to “convince” Gitch to go legit and perform his firefighting service without the attendant protection racket, while Finn agreed to provide the group with leads on any activities that would generally be considered bad for business and for the city.

That last loose end settled, the group turned their thoughts to their respective futures. Will finished setting up Teach Investigations, and immediately started looking into various missing persons cases around town.

Edo opened Edo’s Tropicain, specializing in exotic goods and foods from the jungles. In an unrelated development, word spread quickly about a new “specialist” on Dreaming Street in Scurvytown.

Spike finalized the paperwork for Four Gulls Mercantile, officially becoming a part of Freeport’s shipping industry.

Gor-bob consecrated the new Re-Fectory of Pawgma in the abandoned inn in Scurvytown.

Chow helped out his friends in a variety of capacities, not least of which was delivering a guilt-ridden note from Zelkema transferring ownership of Ztorage to the Freeport Four in an effort to make amends for his role in the recent bombings.

Thus established as Freeport businessmen, the Freeport Four (plus n) started concentrating on their individual pursuits with a promise to assist each other in the future as needed.