Session 1 - The Road Less Travelled
The Road to Loudwater
Waterdeep was a city where strange people crossed paths every day. Adventurers came and went through its gates, merchants crowded its streets, and behind the walls of its libraries and museums, scholars devoted their lives to mysteries most people would never know existed.
On this particular morning, five adventurers found themselves gathered inside the Library of Antiquities at the request of its young curator, Geraldine Wayreth.
Four of the adventurers already knew one another. Balduin Baldaar, Dora Clements, Perrin Hightree, and Lyris Astraea had travelled and worked together before, apparently for long enough to have accumulated their fair share of stories, questionable decisions, and at least one unfortunate incident involving a previous delivery. Their fifth companion, however, was a complete stranger.
Known simply as A, they had positioned themselves apart from the others and seemed perfectly content to remain there while Geraldine attempted to establish whether everyone had at least made each other's acquaintance. When it became apparent that A was unlikely to volunteer an introduction themselves, Dora eventually took it upon herself to introduce the group, although Perrin appeared considerably less concerned with proper social etiquette. He had already made himself comfortable sitting atop one of Geraldine's tables, muddy boots and all, and soon turned his attention towards the mysterious newcomer standing across the room.
There was, after all, one particularly obvious question that demanded an answer: what exactly did the "A" stand for?
A regarded him with their usual composure before offering the wonderfully unhelpful explanation that "it just is." Perrin considered this for a moment and ultimately decided that, if nothing else, at least they had established that the A did not stand for "asshole."
Geraldine endured the exchange with the sort of impeccable politeness that somehow made her considerably more threatening than if she had simply lost her temper. Still wearing the same pleasant smile, she asked Perrin to remove himself from her table and clean the muddy footprints he had left behind. When Perrin declined, Geraldine's expression barely changed as she informed him that she would, in that case, be equally happy not to hire them.
Dora intervened before her companion could successfully negotiate the entire party out of employment. After apologizing for the idiot who was sitting on Geraldine's furniture, she used Prestidigitation to clean the muddy footprints from the table and, for good measure, Perrin's filthy boots as well. With the crisis diplomatically resolved and Perrin hopefully discouraged from further antagonizing the woman responsible for paying them, Geraldine was finally able to explain why she had summoned them.
The Library of Antiquities had acquired a magical artifact that needed to be transported safely from Waterdeep to Hillsfar, far to the east. Whatever the artifact might be, it had been secured inside a sealed box, larger than the palm of one's hand but small enough to be carried comfortably without the need for a wagon. Geraldine admitted that even she did not yet know precisely what lay within, and until it reached its destination, the box was to remain firmly closed.
This immediately presented a problem, because the moment Lyris learned that she was not supposed to know what was inside the box, she desperately wanted to know what was inside the box. Unable to simply open it, she settled for the next most reasonable method of investigation and shook it. Dora reacted with the speed of someone who had apparently witnessed this particular brand of curiosity before, snatching the box out of Lyris's hands and declaring, "I'm not letting you break that one just like you did the last one." Neither of them elaborated on what, exactly, had happened to the last one, but the exchange made it abundantly clear that this was not the first time the two had been entrusted with delivering something that would have benefited from being kept safely away from Lyris.
The meeting also gave the four companions their first real opportunity to acquaint themselves with A, although their quiet new colleague remained something of an enigma. Their distinctly androgynous appearance eventually proved too much for Lyris's curiosity, and with all the tact one might expect from a nineteen-year-old fairy who had just shaken an unidentified magical artifact to see what noise it made, she finally looked towards A and asked the question that had apparently been occupying her thoughts.
"So... what are you? A guy or a girl?"
A responded by very deliberately pretending not to hear her.
Unfortunately for A, Lyris was not so easily discouraged. She asked again, and when Dora attempted to intervene by pointing out that perhaps this was not the sort of question one asked someone they had only just met, Lyris protested that she only wanted to know what pronouns she was supposed to use. What followed was an increasingly unsubtle discussion taking place well within A's earshot while A continued doing their best to remain outside of it, until the group eventually arrived at the wonderfully practical conclusion that everyone could simply use whatever pronouns they wanted for A.
With that particular mystery somehow both resolved and not resolved at all, Geraldine finally managed to steer everyone's attention back towards the actual job.
There were two possible routes to Hillsfar. The Trade Way offered better roads, more frequent settlements and a considerably safer journey, although taking it would add several months to their travels. The alternative was the Black Road, a much more direct route that would eventually carry them across the vast and dangerous wilderness of Anauroch, where settlements were scarce and the road offered considerably fewer assurances that everyone travelling upon it would actually reach the other side.
Presented with these options, the party demonstrated an entirely reasonable sense of self-preservation and initially chose the Trade Way. Geraldine was willing to accept their decision, although she admitted that she would much prefer the artifact to reach Hillsfar sooner. The sooner it arrived, after all, the sooner she might finally learn what was inside the mysterious box herself, and taking the Black Road would shorten their journey considerably.
Geraldine's preference for the Black Road did, however, give Dora something to work with. If reaching Hillsfar sooner mattered enough for Geraldine to ask them to trade the relative safety of the Trade Way for a journey across Anauroch, then Dora saw no reason why they should take on that additional danger for free.
If Geraldine wanted them to take the dangerous route, then she could pay them hazard pay.
Dora put the proposition to her with remarkable confidence, arguing that a faster delivery through considerably more dangerous territory deserved considerably better compensation. Geraldine, perhaps recognizing the fairness of the request, agreed, and after a little negotiation, the promise of additional gold was added to the reward awaiting each of them in Hillsfar.
That changed things.
The Trade Way was still safer, and Anauroch had certainly not become any less dangerous in the few minutes since they had first discussed it, but the prospect of being paid handsomely for taking the risk made those dangers considerably easier to overlook. One by one, the party's objections to the Black Road began to soften until the sensible route they had chosen only moments earlier was quietly abandoned in favour of the faster, considerably more profitable alternative.
With the decision made, Dora took responsibility for the mysterious box, Geraldine entrusted the artifact to their care, and the five adventurers prepared to leave Waterdeep by a route none of them had originally intended to take.
The Black Road it was.
Tallowmere's
Before leaving Waterdeep, Geraldine recommended that the party make one final stop for supplies at Tallowmere's, a local shop catering to travellers and adventurers.
Its proprietor, Mara Tallowmere, proved rather different from the elegant curator they had just left behind. Young, fashionable, and considerably more talkative, Mara welcomed them into a shop filled with travelling equipment, adventuring supplies, and the occasional magical curiosity tucked amongst the more mundane wares.
The party wasted little time finding things to spend their money on.
Perrin purchased a Book of Instant Copying, an otherwise useful magical item burdened with a collection of deeply unfortunate command phrases. Lyris acquired a Dress of Many Pockets and a Djinn and Tonic, while Dora chose a Stylist's Circlet and a drink of her own. Balduin purchased the third Djinn and Tonic, and A, perhaps demonstrating more foresight than everyone else combined, selected a Headband of the Sweatless shortly before embarking on a journey that would eventually take them into a desert.
As they browsed, conversation eventually turned to the road ahead. The moment Mara heard that the group intended to travel along the Black Road, her cheerful rambling took a more personal turn.
Her brother, Bram, had travelled that same road nearly ten years ago, but never come home.
Mara delivered this information with an optimism that did not quite match the circumstances. As far as she was concerned, Bram was surely still alive somewhere. Perhaps he had found a new life. Perhaps he simply did not want to come home. Whatever the explanation, Mara appeared determined to believe that her brother was out there somewhere, even after a decade without a word from him.
Before the party left, A quietly approached Mara and offered to say a prayer for her missing brother.
Mara hesitated. The offer was kind, certainly, but there was one small problem. A prayer sounded suspiciously like something one might offer for a dead person, and she believes with all her heart that Bram was not dead. He was alive somewhere. Probably. Hopefully.
With Mara suddenly more concerned about defending her brother's continued existence than receiving spiritual comfort, the prayer was ultimately abandoned.
At last, with supplies packed, the mysterious artifact safely tucked away in Dora's backpack, and their pockets considerably lighter than when they entered, the five adventurers left Waterdeep behind.
The Road East
For a little over two weeks, the party travelled east.
The walls and towers of Waterdeep gradually disappeared behind them, replaced by open roads, rolling countryside, and long stretches of wilderness. Settlements grew fewer as the days passed, and the journey settled into a familiar rhythm of walking, resting, and waking the next morning to do it all over again.
Eventually, the landscape began to rise around them. The Delimbiyr River appeared below, winding through a lush green valley before rushing through stretches of whitewater and spilling over a spectacular waterfall farther downstream. Mist rose from the falls and caught the afternoon sunlight, painting a faint rainbow across the valley.
Beyond it, sitting upon the rising land ahead, was Loudwater.
After nearly three weeks on the road, civilization was finally within reach.
Unfortunately, it was at the top of a rather steep hill.
The five adventurers began the final climb alongside a handful of other travellers. Among them was a family leading two horses that pulled a wagon piled high with trunks, crates, and seemingly everything they owned. Sitting amongst the belongings at the back was a small child, who spotted the adventurers approaching below and cheerfully waved.
Almost everyone waved back. And as the party is enthusiastically waving back at the child, they heard a loud noise. Snapping. Cracking. And then the unmistakable sound that something broke.
The horses neighed and lurched forward, the wagon came loose behind them, and before anyone could react, it began rolling backwards down the steep road. The family's belongings went with it, and so did their child.
The Runaway Wagon
Lyris reacted first, planting the end of her quarterstaff firmly against the road as she murmured a rapid string of Druidic incantations beneath her breath. Almost at once, the earth answered her call. Greenery burst from the ground in the wagon's path, spreading across the road with impossible speed as wild grasses unfurled between the stones and brilliant flowers blossomed in a sudden riot of colour. For a fleeting moment, it looked almost as though Lyris had conjured an entire meadow beneath the afternoon sun, beautiful enough that one might have forgotten the wagon currently hurtling through the middle of it.
Then the vines emerged. Thick, grasping tendrils twisted upwards amongst the flowers, reaching for the wagon as it thundered towards them. They wound themselves around the spinning wheels, tangled through the spokes, and curled around the undercarriage, pulling taut as though the earth itself were attempting to drag the runaway vehicle to a halt.
The wagon, unfortunately, had several hundred pounds of wood, luggage, and momentum on its side. The first vines snapped almost immediately. More followed as the wagon tore through the magical undergrowth, ripping stems from the earth and scattering flowers across the road in its wake. Lyris's beautiful field was being thoroughly demolished almost as quickly as she had created it.
But the spell was doing its job.
The vines might not have been strong enough to stop the wagon outright, but every tendril wrapped around a wheel and every root dragging beneath its undercarriage stole a little more of its momentum. By the time the wagon finally ripped itself free of the last stubborn vines, it was still careening downhill towards the party, but it had failed to gather any more speed.
Lyris had not stopped it, but she had bought everyone else something far more valuable: time.
A attempted a more direct solution. They raised a hand and fired a Guiding Bolt at one of the wagon's wheels, only to discover an unfortunate limitation of the spell. Guiding Bolt could only target a creature. The wagon, despite currently behaving with what could reasonably be interpreted as murderous intent, did not qualify.
Dora reacted by running directly towards the oncoming wagon, closing the distance as quickly as she could. Her plan, apparently, was to deal with several hundred pounds of runaway wood and luggage when she got there.
Perrin also ran towards the wagon, although his approach was considerably less concerned with conventional rescue techniques. Drawing upon his Focus, the young monk exploded into motion, sprinting straight towards the runaway vehicle with astonishing speed. The distance between them vanished rapidly as the wagon thundered downhill and Perrin charged directly towards it, neither showing any particular intention of moving out of the other's way.
At what was presumably the last possible moment, Perrin launched himself into the air.
What followed was less a rescue manoeuvre and more the sort of thing one might expect from the climactic sequence of an excessively expensive action movie. Perrin front flipped directly into the oncoming wagon, sailing over its edge before completing the rotation and somehow landing perfectly on his feet amongst the bouncing trunks and crates.
Directly beside the child.
The child stared up at him in stunned silence, seemingly unable to decide whether they had just been rescued or whether the runaway wagon had somehow acquired an additional problem. Then their expression shifted from confusion to absolute wonder, and they began to clap.
Perrin, naturally, interpreted the applause as confirmation that his entrance had gone exactly as intended.
He straightened, turned towards the child with all the confidence of a man who definitely had a plan and absolutely had not just improvised a front flip into several hundred pounds of runaway furniture, and delivered what he presumably imagined would become his defining heroic catchphrase.
"Buckle up, kid! I'm getting you outta here!"
There were no buckles anywhere in the wagon, but this seemed like a particularly unhelpful time to point that out.
While Perrin was busy living out whatever action movie was apparently playing inside his head, Balduin chose a considerably more practical approach. He raised his crossbow and tracked the wagon as it thundered downhill, waiting until one of its spinning front wheels came clearly into view before taking his shot.
From elsewhere on the road, A saw what he was doing.
Balduin pulled the trigger, sending the bolt racing towards its target just as a sudden shift in the wind threatened to carry it off course. It was the sort of tiny, unpredictable change that could turn a perfect shot into a near miss, but before that moment could arrive, A reacted.
Their divine magic reached Balduin in an instant.
For the briefest fraction of a second, the world seemed to move ahead of itself. Balduin caught a fleeting glimpse of the next moment before it happened: the change in the wind, the path of the bolt, and the precise point where the wheel would be when the shot reached it. It was hardly more than a flash of possibility, but for someone with his experience, it was enough. Balduin adjusted.
The crossbow bolt tore through the air and struck the wheel with a violent crack, splintering wood beneath the impact as the wagon continued its wild descent.
It was a remarkably seamless exchange between two adventurers who had only met that morning. Balduin had seen the opening, A had recognized his intention from across the road, and without a single word passing between them, the two had worked in perfect sync to turn an uncertain shot into a decisive one.
The wagon had lost its first wheel, but unfortunately, the wagon continued moving.
The wagon tore free from the last of Lyris's vines and continued its descent, leaving crushed flowers and snapped tendrils scattered across the road behind it. It had barely escaped the first patch of magical undergrowth, however, before Lyris raised her quarterstaff once more.
Another Druidic incantation left her lips, and farther down the hillside the earth answered her for a second time. Flowers and grasses burst through the road in a wave of green, followed almost immediately by thick vines that reached hungrily for the approaching wagon. Once again, they wrapped around its wheels and tangled beneath its undercarriage, and once again the sheer weight of the vehicle tore through them. The vines snapped one after another, but each held for just long enough to drag against the wagon and keep its speed from climbing.
Lyris could not stop it, but she was making absolutely certain it would not get any faster.
By then, Dora had reached the oncoming wagon. With one of its front wheels already destroyed by Balduin's crossbow bolt, she tightened her grip on her greatclub and waited until the other came within reach before swinging with all her strength. The blow connected with a tremendous crack, splintering the wheel and sending pieces of wood scattering across the road as the front of the wagon lurched violently towards the ground.
Dora barely had time to lower the greatclub before the wagon was upon her. She met it facing forward at first, throwing both hands against the front of the vehicle and bracing herself for the impact. The force drove her backwards almost immediately, her boots scraping through the dirt as several hundred pounds of wood, cargo and momentum threatened to carry her straight down the hillside with it.
Realizing she would never hold it back like this, Dora shifted her position. She twisted around until her back was pressed firmly against the front of the wagon, planted both feet against the road and leaned into the weight behind her, forcing her legs to bear as much of the burden as they could. The wagon continued to push her downhill, its ruined front end grinding against the earth behind her, but Dora dug her heels in and fought it every step of the way.
She could not stop something so heavy outright, especially while it was still loaded with trunks, crates and an entire family's belongings, but stopping it was no longer the immediate goal. Every second Dora remained on her feet was another second spent resisting its momentum, and every hard-won foot of road was distance the wagon was no longer free to tear through unchecked.
For the first time since the wagon had broken loose, the party's scattered efforts were beginning to come together. Lyris had repeatedly denied it the chance to accelerate, Balduin and A had taken out one of its wheels, and now Dora had quite literally put her body between the runaway vehicle and the rest of the hill. The wagon was still moving, but it was moving on the party's terms now, losing momentum piece by piece as five very different adventurers attacked the same problem from five very different directions.
There was only one rather important matter left to deal with: the child was still inside.
Perrin, having already made his spectacular entrance, now needed to deliver on his promise to get the kid out. Before he could attempt the second half of whatever action sequence was apparently unfolding inside his head, A turned their attention away from the wagon and towards its passengers. Perhaps they had already learned enough about Perrin to suspect that whatever he intended to do next would benefit from a little divine protection, because they called upon their magic and cast Aid, bolstering both the monk and the child against whatever impact might be coming.
It turned out to be a remarkably sensible precaution.
Perrin scooped the child into his arms and looked towards the front of the wagon, where Dora's unmistakable red hair was visible above the wreckage. She was still braced against the vehicle, muscles straining as she was steadily pushed down the hill, doing everything in her power to keep the wagon from reclaiming the speed Lyris had worked so hard to take from it.
Their eyes met.
Perrin smirked and offered his companion a wonderfully reassuring "See ya," before promptly hurling himself and the child out of the side of the moving wagon.
Whatever else could be said about Perrin's approach to rescue operations, the man was apparently very good at throwing himself at and out of moving vehicles. He twisted as they fell so that his own body took the impact, hitting the ground on his side with the child held securely against him. Dust billowed around them as they landed, but when it cleared, Perrin had somehow pulled off his second ludicrous feat of athleticism in as many rounds. The child remained completely unharmed.
In fact, thanks to A's Aid, the child had somehow gone from being an ordinary, perfectly healthy passenger at the beginning of the afternoon to emerging from a runaway-wagon accident healthier than they had been before the disaster started. Their parents might not have understood the mathematics involved, but there could hardly have been a better result.
Most importantly, Perrin had kept his promise. The child was safely out of the wagon and back on solid ground, which meant the party's most urgent objective had finally been accomplished.
Unfortunately, the runaway wagon was still moving.
With Perrin and the child safely out of the wagon, Balduin finally had a clear shot without the inconvenient possibility of putting a crossbow bolt through one of its passengers. He raised his crossbow once more, took careful aim at one of the remaining rear wheels, and fired.
The bolt struck true. Wood splintered beneath the impact, and the rear wheel broke apart as the wagon lurched violently to one side. Three of its four wheels were now gone, leaving the battered vehicle scraping and skidding across the road with only a single wheel still attempting to perform the job ordinarily entrusted to four.
Unsurprisingly, this did very little for its stability.
The wagon began to sway unpredictably as it continued downhill, its uneven weight threatening to wrench it sideways with every jolt in the road. Dora was still pressed against its front with her back to the wagon, digging her feet into the earth and fighting to keep herself from being driven farther down the slope. Beyond her, the hillside continued its descent towards the rushing waters of the Delimbiyr River below.
Lyris watched the increasingly unstable wagon stagger down the hill and desperately searched her memory for something that might help. She had already called upon the earth twice, filling the road with grasping vines and roots, but even those had only been able to slow something carrying so much weight and momentum. There had to be another answer. She tried to remember everything her mentor had taught her, mentally sorting through lessons and spells as she watched Dora being pushed closer and closer towards the river.
And then it came to her.
Perhaps she had been thinking about the problem the wrong way.
If the wagon was simply too heavy to stop, then she did not need stronger vines, or stronger arms, or some greater force capable of overpowering it. She just needed the wagon to be less heavy. Lyris immediately began another incantation, this time reaching for an entirely different kind of magic as she cast Reduce.
The change swept across the wagon almost at once. Its wooden frame contracted, the crates and trunks packed inside shrinking with it as the entire vehicle diminished before their eyes. It did not become some absurd miniature that Dora could simply tuck beneath one arm and carry away, but it became considerably smaller and, far more importantly, dramatically lighter.
Dora felt the difference immediately. The enormous weight pressing against her back suddenly diminished, stripping much of the force from the wagon that had been relentlessly shoving her down the hillside. Her boots still fought for purchase against the road and the battered vehicle was still moving behind her, but for the first time since she had planted herself in its path, the contest between Dora and several hundred pounds of runaway luggage no longer seemed quite so unfair.
With three of its four wheels already destroyed, only one remained stubbornly attached to the wagon. A, apparently deciding that there was no reason to leave the job unfinished, drew their rapier and turned their attention towards it.
What followed was an unconventional application of swordsmanship.
A struck at the final wheel with their rapier and, against all reasonable expectations regarding the structural advantages of a thin thrusting blade against several inches of solid wood, somehow managed to break it. Exactly how this worked is a question perhaps best left to scholars with considerably more time on their hands. What mattered was that the last wheel finally gave way, leaving the wagon completely wheel-less as its magically lightened frame scraped onwards across the road.
By this point, the unfortunate vehicle had endured more punishment in the span of a few minutes than most wagons could reasonably expect across an entire lifetime. It had been dragged through two separate fields of magically conjured vegetation, repeatedly tangled in grasping vines, shot several times with a crossbow, beaten with a greatclub, stabbed with a rapier, systematically stripped of every wheel it possessed, and finally shrunk to a fraction of its original weight by Druidic magic.
The remarkable thing was that, after everything the party had done to save it, the object in question was still recognizably a wagon. Its undercarriage had certainly seen better days, its wheels were now scattered somewhere along the hillside, and its owners were going to have several questions when they eventually caught up, but the wagon itself had somehow survived the party's rescue efforts. Even more miraculously, so had its cargo. Despite the violent descent, the missing wheels, the sudden reduction in size and Perrin launching himself both into and out of it, the family's trunks, crates and worldly possessions were still inside.
At this point, all that remained was the relatively minor matter of actually stopping the thing.
With the final wheel gone and Lyris's magic having stripped away so much of the wagon's weight, Dora felt the force pressing against her back finally begin to weaken. For what felt like an eternity she had been driven down that hill one punishing step at a time, boots slipping against the road as she fought to keep several hundred pounds of wood, cargo and momentum from carrying them both towards the river.
Now, for the first time, she felt it give.
Dora planted her feet firmly against the earth and drew in a breath, gathering whatever strength remained in muscles already burning from the effort. She was not some towering barbarian built to wrestle monsters into submission, nor a heavily armoured warrior accustomed to planting herself between danger and everyone behind her. Dora Clements was a performer. A clown. A woman whose professional talents included juggling, playing the flute, breathing fire and entertaining crowds.
And yet, when a runaway wagon had come hurtling down a hill with a child trapped inside, she had put her own body in front of it.
With her back pressed hard against the battered wooden frame, Dora drove her feet into the road and pushed with everything she had left. The wagon resisted, scraping stubbornly onwards, but this time there was no overwhelming weight behind it and no spinning wheels carrying it relentlessly forward. Inch by inch, Dora forced its remaining momentum to surrender until, with one final grinding scrape across the earth, the wagon came to a complete stop.
For the first time since the axle had broken, the hillside fell still.
Dora remained there for a moment, standing in the road with the ruined wagon at her back and the Delimbiyr River safely ahead of her rather than rapidly approaching, while farther up the hill the child's family came racing towards them. They barely seemed to notice what had become of their vehicle, rushing instead towards Perrin and the child they had surely expected, only minutes earlier, to watch disappear helplessly down the hillside.
Against all odds, the party had managed something remarkably close to the best possible outcome. The child was safe and completely unharmed, the family's trunks and crates were still accounted for, and even the wagon itself had survived the ordeal, although it was temporarily much smaller than its owners remembered and now possessed exactly zero wheels. It would need repairs. Quite a lot of them, in fact. But it had stopped.
And standing at the bottom of the hill, exhausted but victorious, was the clown who had stopped it.
The Harvest Moon Inn and Tavern
Once the hurried embraces and shaken voices began to settle, the child wriggled free from their family and hurried back towards Perrin.
Reaching beneath their clothes, they pulled a small necklace over their head. There was nothing outwardly valuable about it. A simple old cord held a little wooden pendant, its carved pattern worn smooth by age and countless years of handling. Whatever its history, it had clearly been treasured for a very long time.
The child held it out to Perrin with both hands.
"Here. You can have this. It’s for good luck."
Perrin looked down at the little pendant, and for all the bravado with which he had thrown himself into the rescue, he understood perfectly well what was being offered to him. The necklace was not valuable in any conventional sense, but that hardly mattered. To the child, it was something precious, given freely to the stranger who had leapt into a runaway wagon, promised to get them out, and somehow managed to keep that promise.
Perrin accepted the pendant, turning the worn piece of wood briefly between his fingers. The gesture was undeniably sweet, perhaps a little more so than he was prepared to openly acknowledge, and beneath the nonchalance he had carried through the entire ordeal, he was genuinely glad that the child was standing safely in front of him to give it.
He could, of course, have simply said that.
Instead, Perrin slipped comfortably back behind the easy confidence he seemed to prefer, a faint smirk returning to his face as he looked at the child.
"Heh. Guess it was worth saving you after all, kid."
It was not quite the sort of response one might expect from the gallant hero of a children's tale, but then Perrin had never seemed particularly interested in playing one. The little wooden pendant was his now, however, and something about the care with which he kept it suggested that his casual remark had not fooled anyone who mattered.
Fortunately, the child's family needed no convincing that the five adventurers had just saved far more than their wagon.
As it turned out, they were the proprietors of Loudwater's Harvest Moon Inn and Tavern, which meant the adventurers would not be paying for their accommodation that evening. After everything the party had done for them, the family offered them warm food, proper beds, and additional rations for the dangerous road still ahead.
By the time the party finally climbed the remaining distance to Loudwater, the sun was beginning to sink behind the hills. Golden evening light settled over the valley as they passed through the gates, and after nearly three weeks of travel, the promise of a warm tavern and an actual mattress had rarely seemed more inviting.
The Harvest Moon Inn and Tavern offered exactly what the party needed after the afternoon's excitement: hot food, cold drinks, comfortable beds and, for the first time since leaving Waterdeep, absolutely nowhere else they needed to be. Grateful for the safe return of both their child and their belongings, the family welcomed the adventurers inside and insisted that their rooms were theirs for the night, with extra provisions waiting for them in the morning.
Their journey could wait until then.
After everything that had happened on the hillside, most adventurers would have taken the opportunity to eat a warm dinner, enjoy a well-earned drink and retire to bed.
Dora Clements, however, discovered that there was gold to be made. Despite being thoroughly exhausted from the day's heroics, Dora decided that she still had one performance left in her and offered to entertain the patrons of the Harvest Moon.
She had, unfortunately, miscalculated.
Whatever circus performance Dora attempted that evening was so spectacularly unsuccessful that it seemed to transcend ordinary bad entertainment and enter the considerably more confusing realm of the incomprehensible. The patrons watched in uncertain silence as Dora valiantly continued, several exchanging hesitant glances across their tables before quickly looking away again.
Perhaps this was a Waterdhavian thing. Perhaps it was some unfamiliar foreign tradition they simply lacked the cultural sophistication to appreciate. Perhaps asking questions would result in Dora explaining what she was doing, which somehow felt worse.
Whatever conclusion they reached, the entire tavern seemed to arrive at the same unspoken agreement: the kindest possible response was to politely avoid eye contact until it was over.
Dora earned no gold.
Eventually, the performance ended, dinner was finished, drinks were emptied, and the five adventurers finally allowed themselves to rest. That night, they settled into proper beds with full stomachs, their mysterious cargo safely tucked away and fresh supplies waiting for them in the morning.
For tonight, there was nothing left to do. The road could wait.