Session 9: The Great Stock Caper

Morning came to the Blue Water Inn with the smell of death.

Kellen had returned from his night of drinking and cards to find the room transformed into something out of a nightmare—bodies strewn across the floor, mist fading from the pages of an open book, and only Lorian conscious enough to offer any explanation. "We've been busy," was all the blood hunter managed before collapsing into bed. Kellen, a man of pragmatic sensibilities, had decided this was a problem for the morning and done the same.

When daylight crept through the shutters, the problem had not improved.

A Body Out of Time

Getafix was dead. That much was certain. What was not certain—what defied every reasonable expectation—was why his body looked the way it did.

The druid had been alive less than twenty-four hours ago. Yet the corpse cooling on the floor was weeks gone, at minimum. His skin had taken on the sunken, blackened quality of old death. The wounds from the vision—sword cuts, burns from radiant energy—were bloodless, the flesh around them already turned to something dark and foul. When the party moved him, spores puffed from between his lips in small, silent clouds, and beneath his clothing they found a blackened lattice of fungal growth threaded through his tissue like roots through soil. His eyes, usually bright and unsettling beneath his furs, were collapsed and dark.

Lorian, no stranger to death, ran a careful examination. The wounds didn't bleed because the blood had long since settled and congealed. The druid mysteriously seemed to have been dead for a long, long time.

The party then debated the logistics of a body in an inn with uncomfortable directness. Kellen was the one to go downstairs.

The Innkeeper's Counsel

Urwin Martikov was doing what innkeepers always do in the early hours—counting coins, polishing glasses, pretending to be unsurprised by whatever came through the door. When Kellen summarized the situation ("my friends came back through a book, one of them is dead, and he's upstairs making your hotel stink"), Urwin absorbed this with the controlled expression of a man who has lived too long in Barovia to be shocked by anything.

He followed Kellen upstairs anyway.

The smell hit him before the door was fully open. He surveyed the scene—Getafix on the floor, Gowain still breathing shallowly in a heap nearby, Lorian barely upright—and went about the practical business of getting Gowain into a proper bed. Then he drifted toward the Tome where it lay on the table, paused, opened it with trembling fingers, and shut it again without a word.

"I need to discuss some things with Danika," he said carefully. He suggested a church burial, or a pyre. He did not ask what the book was. He just took them out the back.

Farewell to Getafix

Behind the stable, away from the inn's guests, Urwin had already stacked a modest pyre. The party carried Getafix out in a pine box—his body too far gone for much ceremony—and slid it onto the waiting wood.

The fire took quickly.

Urwin watched it burn and then, in a measured voice, asked about the Tome. Lorian told him what he needed to know: they were not with Strahd. Whatever the book was, it had come to them, and they were trying to use it rather than be used by it. Urwin gave him a long look, then turned back to the fire.

"I am sorry for your friend," he said. "I will not ask how you got such a book. You strike me as already in enough danger. Should you need help—just let us know."

He paused on the way back inside, seeming to remember something. He'd been out that morning, getting supplies, and had noticed a pair of peculiar folk in the town stocks. Small people. Not from around here. The sort, he allowed with a pointed look at the party's unusual composition, who might have some things in common.

The town square. The stocks. A gnome and a halfling.

Kellen looked at Lorian. They had a body to mourn and a near-dead cleric upstairs. They also, evidently, had an errand.

The Town Square

Vallaki's square announced itself through bunting and dread in equal measure. Tattered garlands sagged between posts. Wooden boxes of dead flowers lined the cobblestones. Freshly posted proclamations advertised the upcoming Wolf's Head Jamboree with the mandatory enthusiasm of a decree: ATTENDANCE AND CHEER REQUIRED. ALL WILL BE WELL. —THE BARON.

At the north end of the square stood a row of stocks, occupied by men, women, and children in plaster donkey-head masks. At the far end of the line, two of the stock frames had boxes underneath them—because otherwise, the small figures locked inside wouldn't have reached the stocks at all.

A halfling and a gnome, confined in a town that ran on mandatory happiness, bickering with the cheerful resignation of people who have clearly been bickering for years.

The halfling, who would come to be known as Tavin Underleaf, noticed the party approaching and offered his assessment immediately: "Oh, great. The big ugly ones. Probably here to throw tomatoes."

"There's nobody throwing tomatoes," Kellen said.

"Could have fooled me, twinkle-toes."

The Great Stock Caper

What followed was approximately two hours of creative failure.

The party learned quickly that the stocks were the province of one Izek Strazni—a large, bald, hard-jawed man clad in heavy armor. The prisoners had been sentenced by decree of the Baron for pickpocketing during a festival. Strazni was not interested in bonds, bribes, community service, appeals to mercy, offers to hang decorations, or any other avenue the party could think to suggest.

Ireena Kolyana, recruited against her better judgment to make a direct appeal, achieved the remarkable feat of getting Strazni to walk over—she seemed to draw his attention in a peculiar way. Negotiations collapsed quickly, however.

The halfling, watching all of this from his box, offered ongoing commentary.

Boom Boom—the gnome, whose full name was Horatio Ignis and who had opinions about everything—demonstrated his arcane education by using Mage Hand to punch an adjacent prisoner in the kidneys, producing a commotion that drew the guards' attention at precisely the wrong moment. Kellen attempted to slip through the crowd and steal Strazni's keys from his belt. He was spotted. The plan unraveled.

The Turning Point
The gold ring gambit was Tavin's idea, technically. Or rather: Kellen produced a gold ring, and Tavin identified a sufficiently believable mark in a crowd of peasants. While Kellen distracted the group with a knock-knock joke from outside Barovia—which baffled them thoroughly but held their attention—Tavin's sleight of hand found its mark. The ring vanished into a peasant's pocket without a whisper.

The subsequent accusation, the guard's shrug, and the sound of one set of stocks clicking open were deeply satisfying.

One down. One to go.

The second liberation proved harder. After several more failed schemes—including a brief consideration of framing Izek for accepting bribes and a debate about the physics of pantsing someone—the party settled on a cruder solution. Tavin, now free and agile, ghosted through the square and stuck his foot out in front of a hunter named Dimitri, who went down in a spectacular crash of scattered sticks and injured dignity.

Dimitri, attributing the fall to his companion Pavel, threw the first punch.

The guards moved in. Two men went into the stocks. Tavin's erstwhile cellmate—the man Boom Boom had been punching in the kidneys for the better part of an hour—was released as a matter of space. Tavin slipped out in the shuffle.

It had only taken three falsely imprisoned peasants to manage it.

The Party Grows

Boom Boom's formal introduction was delivered at some length and at increasing volume. "My name is Horatio Boom Boom Ignis. You can just call me Boom Boom." He seemed comfortable with the number of times the phrase "Boom Boom" appeared in conversation, and deployed it liberally.

Tavin Underleaf, the halfling, was more economical. He and Boom Boom had arrived in Barovia through a mishap involving magical reagents, a student's poor judgment (Boom Boom's), a displeased dean, and a spell that neither of them had fully anticipated. They had been in Vallaki for approximately ten hours before the stocks. In those ten hours, Tavin had allegedly found a purse lying on the ground and was attempting to return it to its owner. Allegedly.

Ireena, who had watched the entire caper from the sidelines with her arms crossed, surveyed her potential new companions and made a decision. She had spent years waiting in a house while the world happened outside. She had spent the last week watching a group of strange, reckless, impossible people fling themselves at every problem Barovia put in front of them. The church could wait.

"I've been surrounded by people who feel like shells of people compared to you," she said. "Until now. So sure. Why not."

She tucked a strand of red hair behind her ear and gave Boom Boom a (perhaps meaningful) sidelong look.

Commerce in Vallaki

The afternoon was spent on more prosaic matters.

At the Cracked Anvil, the party met Dimitri Valestov—a blacksmith who, by a remarkable coincidence, was not the same Dimitri who had just been involved in a fistfight in the square. Kellen sold four purple gems from the Sword Coast at twenty gold apiece after Boom Boom helpfully implied they were magical good-luck charms. Tavin sold two gold statues and secured a reasonable price through charm and persistence. Valestov, as they left, mentioned that he didn't think the Baron was doing much to keep them safe. He said it quietly.

At Stefanovich & Sons Apothecary, Boom Boom encountered a kindred spirit in the proprietor—a man of bottomless enthusiasm for his own products and an impressive command of ailments no one had ever heard of. Boom Boom bought two bottles of Stefanovich's Cure-All Elixir at thirty gold apiece and walked out with two potions of healing as a new-customer gift (though the proprietor did not know they were potions of healing). Whether the elixir cured snake-itis as advertised remained to be tested.

A Suspicious Tail

Walking the back streets of Vallaki in the late afternoon, the party picked up a shadow.

He was a slender man, human, keeping careful distance—or what he imagined was careful distance. Kellen noticed him two blocks back. After a quick coordination, the party turned a corner and waited.

The man walked right into them.

His name was Ernst. He worked for Lady Fiona Wachter. He was, he admitted under some mild physical pressure from Kellen and the business end of Tavin's stare, not very good at following people. He produced a letter with a wax seal and explained that the Lady had observed their activities and found them...interesting. She extended an invitation to dinner that evening at Wachterhaus.

"Don't tell her about this," he said, of his performance. "She doesn't need to know."

They accepted the invitation.

The Lady Wachter

Back at the Blue Water Inn, the party put their question to Urwin: what did he know about Lady Fiona Wachter?

Urwin considered carefully. She was a pariah in certain circles—old family money, old family ties to Strahd, and a reputation for saying things like "I'd rather serve the devil than the madman" in earshot of people who repeated them. Her sons Nikolai and Karl had been in the stocks more than once. Her daughter, a girl no one seemed to see, was reportedly kept locked away somewhere in the house. She had followers, of a sort—people who looked to her rather than the Baron for leadership.

"I don't know that it would be much better under her leadership, if I'm completely honest," Urwin said. "But choose between a tyrant and a woman who openly admires Strahd—" He left the rest unfinished.

He watched them head back upstairs, and seemed to think of something. "If you find yourself in trouble this evening," he said, "I will help. From a distance."

It was, for Barovia, practically a warm offer.

Gowain still slept, pale and changed, in his room upstairs. The Tome sat in a backpack. Outside, the Wolf's Head Jamboree was taking shape in the square—fresh posters, new wood stacked for the bonfire, peasants going carefully about the business of mandatory joy.

The party dressed for dinner.

Session Notes

New Party Members:

Getafix's Fate:

Key Developments: