Landfall on Bellatune

We sailed around to the lizardman side of Raora and dropped anchor out of sight of lande. We rowed in closer and then the shaman cast a spell and dropped over the side. We followed after him and sure enough we were able to breathe as if it were air. We grabbed rocks to keep us down on the sea floor and walked in towards shore. At a certain point the shaman poked his head above the water to check and then we completed our trip. and came out on shore in safety.

He led us to a clearing which I can only assume by the bloody altar in the middle was the “place of sacrifice” he’d mentioned. He had a spell which transformed his appearance, and he warned us to stay put while he went to get the other shaman.

The altar concerned me. What was it they were used to sacrificing???

We stayed hidden in the trees and before long the shaman returned, apparently asking us to cast any spells we needed before he cast a silence over us (the better to stay hidden until the fighting began).

He slipped off again and before long he entered the clearing with three guards. Or was it him? He was disguised as the other shaman and hadn’t told us how we would tell them apart.

Then another shaman entered from the other side with two guards. I had no idea which was which and could only hope that “our” shaman had been correct when he said we’d know which one to attack when the time came.

They seemed to be arguing, but even if I hadn’t been hiding in a zone of silence I wouldn’t have understood the Draconic to know what they were fighting over. I’m not sure I would have cared—we made a deal and I don’t like to go back on my word.

One of the shamen stepped back and cast a spell and the three guards moved forward to engage. The two on the other side also moved in and all of a sudden the silence vanished so I guessed our boy was the one on the left. We started to move to join the fight and the bad shaman (by which I mean not ours) cast a spell and everything else seemed to be moving way too fast. Before I could do much he cast another spell (how did he do that?) and i was trapped in a mass of sticky webs. I’ve seen Valkor use this spell and it was not a pleasant experience being on the other end of it.

I couldn’t see much of what was happening but I tried to fight my way out, and Stimpy was doing the same but he was closer to the edge than I. Even so we weren’t getting very far so Stimpy pulled something out of belt pouch that sparked into flame and set fire to the webs around him. He seemed unconcerned about the damage he was causing to himself. Before leaving the webbed area he dropped the stick in the area next to me where the webs burned away eaving me a clear path out as soon as I could free myself from the goop immediately around me.

I was just pushing free when splat! The whole area was covered in a fresh mess of sticky webs and I was stuck all over again.

I managed to push free eventually to see that on the one side was, I presume, our shaman and on the other was the other shaman and one guard stuck in some webs cast by Valkor (or so I guessed). Kat was pinging away with arrows but seemed to be unable to find a spot she was comfortable with as she kept running around all over the place. The guard, for some reason, was swinging at the shaman trapped right next to him even though I’m sure they were on the same side originally.

The bad shaman went down soon and then we concentrated on the guard who didn’t last much longer.

Our shaman went off to get us an escort back to shore and we set to searching the corpses. Stimpy went to check out the altar and I followed. As I was looking at the blood it seemed to me that it hadn’t been used in several months. While I was looking I found an odd stick and threw it over to Valkor who was determining whether any of the items we’d found were magical.

The shaman returned, and somewhat surprisingly stuck to his word. We were escorted back to shore and even given a boat to keep for our troubles.

We sailed around to Able to reprovision, get our magical treasures identified and sell them. Some of it was quite impressive—apparently the stick I found was a wand to cast the spell Hold Person, and while the spell cast from the wand was somewhat ineffective it was worth over 1000 gold and would make us some money when we could sell it. Unfortunately there was nobody in Able that could afford to buy the more expensive items and we were going to have to return to Seawell.

There, we were able to cash in the items we didn’t care about. The others also wanted to pay someone to set our course to Bellatune for us, which we did. There was also talk about hiring someone to sail with us but I managed to talk them out of that.

Sure enough, in three days we could see an island on the horizon and we sailed towards it. I cast a spell to give me some idea of the general landscape and we headed for what seemed the main population centre.

It wasn’t terribly large and had no dock so we were forced to drop anchor off shore and row in. A small delegation of the locals came to meet us and they were friendly enough though apparently unaccustomed to visitors. We asked about Miranda but they didn’t know her by name or description. They said there was a woman that wandered around the forest a lot and they occasionally saw, but she didn’t mix with them much and they didn’t know her name.

They also told us about a man that lived on the top of the nearby mountain and for some reason Stimpy seemed to think that meant it was some sort of guru. So we spent a day traipsing to the mountain, and more time straining to climb our way to the top.

We found the man who said we could call him “Red”. If failing to answer questions makes a man a guru then this guy was definitely a guru. Stimpy asked him about Miranda and he told us to come back a week later and he’d share his wisdom with us.

I was kind of annoyed about being dragged up the mountain for nothing so I waited until we were down again before pointing out to Stimpy that he probably should have asked the guy about the ruins we knew were on the island as well. You should have seen the angry shade of red he turned! It was hard to keep a straight face as he berated me for not reminding him.

With a week to fill in we went for my original plan of searching in the forest aimlessly, as Stimpy had called it. We camped for the night and can’t have been asleep long when we woken by Stimpy’s screams (he had the first watch). We saw that there were two extremely large wolves attacking him and scrambled to join the fight just as Stimpy went down. Valkor cast another of his famous webs and I took on one of the wolves while Valkor pulled Stimpy away and the other wolf struggled loose and attacked Kat.

I was able to take the first wolf down and then went to help Kat with hers. We were beat up pretty bad before the second one was down as well but by then Valkor had Stimpy back on his feet and with a judicious application of the healing wand we were pretty much patched up.

We were getting ready to settle down again when we noticed a woman entering our camp from the trees. This was obviously the woman we’d been told about, but she didn’t match the description we’d been given of Miranda on Raora. She complimented us on our foolhardiness in camping in the forest, but also on our combat skills in fighting off the wolves.

And she would have to be the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.