TPS Report 7

The
Pathfinder
Society

Report



By: Tyack Verumpeto
Report: 7.0
The Seekers were contacted by Alandir from the Pathfinder Society. He needed us to go out and check out the Black Arrows, a group of rangers up at Fort Rennik. He had commissioned us a ride up a river on a barge run by Milfred Bordicos. Bordicos was a plump, gregarious man who talked a lot. He almost immediately got on our nerves.
We stopped first at the town of Wartle. It was a small trade town famous for its grit-ridden green drink known as bog-grog. While Bock and I drank the grog, Valdaire visited the town’s 3-brothels, but unfortunately his wand was out of charges, so he didn’t tarry long. Grok, who we later found was unnerved by boat travel sat around staring at one of Bordicos’s men who was back at the raft. Shalelu and Kyra remained strangely quiet for most of the trip.
The accommodations on the barge were sub-par, and when we heard that there might be frog-men somewhere up ahead on the river, I became nervous that we were in a too vulnerable position. We continued on upstream when one night Bock woke to notice us drifting back down river. Apparently several crocodiles were surrounding the barge and made Bordicos nervous. Bock used his bond with animals to gain the creatures’ trust and they went away and we continued on.
The next town we came to was Whistledown, a gnome town with white houses draped in moss. We did not stay there because the gnome-size dwellings seemed ill-suited for our size. So the boat continued forward. Bordicos then announced that there was some sort of log-jam up ahead and he wanted us to move it. Grok, still irritated by his life on the water, became irritated at Bordicos’s command. Many of us figured it might be a trap and decided we would take the rest of the trip by horse. Bordicos then upped the belligerence level by refusing. Finally, before things came to fisticuffs, we got Bordicos to relent, we then floated back to Whistledown and took off overland. Bordicos was quite irritated and by the end of the exchange, so were the most the rest of us. I promised we would tell the people in Ilsurian about the blockage to traffic, and we continued on.
We did indeed inform Ilsurian, but the residents of that town seemed sullen and unresponsive to outsiders. They weren’t unfriendly, but did not go out of their way to make strangers feel at home either. At this point Shalelu broke her unnatural silence by telling us that, like Grok, water travel makes her nervous and that she is seeking a Black Arrow ranger named Jakandros. He was sort of a quasi-stepfather to Shalelu, whom she did not particularly care for. When brigands attacked and killed her mother’s village, Jakandros disappeared. Shalelu had come to seek him out because she is not so sure of how to react to him.
After we left Ilsurian, we rode up towards Turtleback Ferry, so named because of the three giant turtle shells that they have built ferries into. The people here were much nicer although we discovered the town had recently suffered a tragedy when their erst-while “party-barge” sank, killing over 50 of the town’s citizens. Through interrogation we learned that the ferry was owned by a lady Lucretia whose description matches the description we had of Xanesha. We further learned that she had been responsible for the sehedron tattoos on many of the citizens who were her preferred “customers”. After inquiring with Blakely, one of the workers in the local bar, we realized that he wasn’t a particularly big spender and that there might be more to these tattoos then we had originally thought. Nevertheless, we moved around town, made our presence known, and evaluated the citizens. The mayor seemed competent and friendly.
We proceeded the following morning towards Fort Rennik. On our way there we encountered a bear that had broken free from a trap and stared at us quite piteously. In the distance we heard the baying of hounds. Shalelu and Bock both determined that this bear was no ordinary bear, but instead was some druid or ranger’s animal companion. Suddenly from the woods leaped several dogs to attack the wounded bear. We encircled the bear to keep the dogs from harming it. In the distance we heard some discordant singing and following the dogs emerged the bear-hunter and deformed half-ogre, or Hogre as we came to call them. We inflicted massive damage on the Hogre and it began to run away. We immediately felled it.
Using two Bull’s strength spells, Grok and Bock managed to get the trap off the bear’s foot. The bear then proceeded to lead us Lassie-like towards a farmhouse where apparently there was some sort of danger. Here the report ends as we begin our assault on the fortress.