Inixon - Dwellers of the Isle of Dread (5th Ed.)

[Yora]

Day 3 (13th Day, 7th Month, Year 507)

The party decided to use their limited funds to store up on healing potions and then set out with a boat in the late morning to travel down the river to the abandoned town by the sea.

By the evening they reached the coast and left their boat behind when the first roofs appeared in the distance and continued to the ruins on foot. Finan and Ilmari scouted ahead and found some other boats dragged up the shore next to a collapsed bridge and an overgrown road leading up to a nearby hill. They came upon a group of cultists that had set up a guard post at the edge of the ruins but didn’t put much effort into actually guarding.

The group decided to simply circle around the cultists and follow an old path up to the top of the hill. The path led to a series of caves that housed a giant bee hive, that the people of the town used for harvesting honey. They tried not to disturb the giant bees as they descended into the caves, but Ilmari slipped on a slope covered in honey and landed in a honeycomb wall, which greatly agitated the bees. The giant bees were easily fought off, but Ilmari got stung and fell to the ground paralyzed.

Once Ilmari had recovered and night had fallen outside, the group continued to an old wooden door that had been mostly covered up in wax and honey. Haren managed to break through the door with relatively little noise and they discovered a passage leading into a larger network of tunnels. The only people they encountered awake were two people busy in a large central cave serving as a kitchen and three guards watching the main entrance, none of which had taken notice of their presence inside the tunnels. Finan and Ilmari killed two acolyte in their beds without raising a noise, and the door to a room with sleeping cultists was quietly blocked by several sacks of grain from a nearby store room.

Eventually their luck ran out and Ilmari peeked inside another bunk room where two cultists happened to be awake. They didn’t buy his story that he was a new arrival from Orlane and looking for kitchen, so the group had no choice but rush in and overpower the four residents. With the acolyte in the next room already dead, still no alarm appeared to be raised, and Alamar learned from one of the captives that their priests were all residing in the lower tunnels.

Taking a dark and apparently rarely used passage in the deeper parts of the tunnels into the lower caves, the group crossed a creaking bridge over an underground pool and where attacked by two giant eels. Ilmari and Karim were badly bitten and starting to bleed out, but Haren and Finan managed to kill one of the eels and drive the other back into the dark depths of the pool.

The walkway led to a small underground harbor that connected to the sea, which had been covered up by a mud coated tarp to hide it from ships getting close to the shore. Down there they discovered a group of prisoners who told them of a mute priestess with a golden mask who had turned the other captives into loyal followers. All of them had resisted her magical gaze and they had heard the cultists talking that they would be taken away by a ship to serve as slaves. They freed the prisoners and told them to take the boats hidden in the cave and travel back up the nearby river to return to Orlane.

They continued to explore the lower tunnels and found the rooms of the priests. Fearing that their assault would be discovered soon, Haren and Alamar started to search one of the rooms and woke up one of the priests, but with only his mace in reach he stood little chance against the two of them. At the same time Finan and Ilmari sneaked into the room of another priest trying to assassinate him in his sleep. He woke up just long enough to reach for his serpent staff next to his bed before the two of them shanked him to death. Searching the quarters of the priests, they discovered a recently written and unsent letter addressed to a captain, which revealed that the missing captives were being taken to a place called Inixon and that the priests were afraid that the raiding of ships near their hidden temple would draw the wrath of the local smuggling gangs.

Spoiler: Garban's Letter

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