5e: Yartar... again...

From: Fulhoff of Clan Balderk
To: Helja and Adrik of Clan Balderk

Mother and Father:

By the Great Digger, sometimes life takes you round in circles.

In Silverymoon, we checked in with Hilda. She seemed surprised that we were still alive, and didn’t have anyone in town to directly help us out. She did, however, suggest that we could bring in other members on a trial basis, and as Joda and Journey were off exploring the town, we hired on Casper the Paladin and Valna the drow thief.

Somehow they’re a couple. I guess opposites really do attract.

Thankfully, they proved immediately useful. Casper, a lesser scion of a minor noble house, secured us an audience with Lord Zymorvan. We traveled out of Silverymoon proper and onto the Zymorvan estates. Zymorvan Hall is something of an old rockpile of a keep, but still fairly stately. The same can be said of Lord Zymorvan himself. After we informed him of why we’d come, he sadly informed us that his son stole the Giant Slayer when he ran off with a thief…

From Yartar.

…

Clearly there was a lesson the Great Digger wished us to learn.

We enjoyed a lovely dinner with the lord, where he regaled us with tales of his time as an adventurer, and then bid our farewells. We hustled back to Silverymoon, and then onto Everland, and used the teleportation circle to return to Yartar. Keeping a low profile, we went to visit the Hand of Yartar. Valna went in, while Bran, Rin, Thorin and I sat across the street. We shared around a scoop of mixed roasted nuts while we waited. It wasn’t long before Valna came out with several angry looking members of the guild. We followed behind them to a nearby house, and listened through the door as Valna and the woman confronted a man within. Valna’s ploy, that she was his lover worked long enough for us to find him, but once she messed up his name, we barged in and he quickly admitted that he’d lost the sword, that it had been taken by a corrupt guard captain down by the docks.

We quickly found out where he and his crew liked to go to enjoy the spoils of their deeds, and made our way in the early evening to the dock district. The warehouse was relatively small, with only one main door. I made Valna invisible, while Bran made himself look like an overweight overworked bureaucrat. Bran pushed his way in, and started waving a sheaf of papers talking about inventory. The guards were completely taken in by the act, and then with a thunderous clap, we charged in. It was a minor skirmish, but it had clearly been too long since Thorin had enjoyed combat. We had to pull him off of the bloody pulp that had been the guard captain.

Sword in hand, we find a druid named Thara Shyndle heading up to Hawk’s Nest. Erglass the Elf, one of the experts in giants is said to be in that direction, so we agree to be her bodyguards. Rin and her hit it off, and it turns out that she’s also looking for Erglass on the advice of a treant.

We arrive late to Hawk’s Nest, but do see the impressive fortification of the town, as well as several of the locally breed hippogryphs that make up the elite guards of the town. We spent a significant amount of time discussing getting hold of several of them for ourselves.

The following morning, we went to investigate the possibility of just that, and found out that a pay wagon had been attacked by fire giants. Word had only just arrived of the attack, and we decided to head out and see if we could track it down. Finding the site of the attack was easy, following the tracks of the giants was remarkably hard.

Rin, with complete confidence, had us circling the same stump for hours before we figured out where the giants actually went. The smell of sulfur should have been a hint, and it wasn’t long that we came across a pair of fire giants, and their hellhounds. Thankfully we’d arrived downwind from their position...