Poisonous Past

Arrived at the Hornwood estate, the party was surprised to see a trade caravan seemingly installed in a semipermanent fashion. But the surprises didn’t stop there.

Meicoril’s cousin Martin Bridestar had redecorated the place in a rather gaudy and decadent fashion, and was involved with an eastern trader ****. After some awkward introductions the group got to know that the Listra’ds basement had been overrun with a poisonous gas.

Going downward they noticed two things:

First the poison that knocked out everyone entering the basement was a sort of nerve gas, that brought people in a sort of mindscape associated with the snake people and their god. Luckily Alruna had an idea as to how to get rid of the gas by shooting sticky glue at the tubes that served as the poisons, which allowed the gas to slowly fade away, though it would take until the next morning before it would fade away sufficiently to allow safe crossing. The poison, they realised after some erroneous hypothesizes, was connected to the cobra, the assassin hired by Galahad Valyrian to assassinate Meicorils parents.

The second problem was the antimagic field, which forced them to deal with their troubles in a mundane fashion.

During the night, Tara noticed that the magic items on display all came from her fathers shop, and the amount and quality of the magic items put on lavish displays (amongst which a +3 crossbow, an elven chain and the Robes Tara wore once as a child) vastly out-valued whatever a noble of his stature could afford. Combine this with the rather sarcastic attitude of the man when hearing the name Alzis, this made Tare quite worried about her father. Even so, the time constraints on them was of such pressing nature that she could do little against that now.

The day afterwards they managed to push on through, and after finding a key and opening the gate within the room to go on further the AMF was disabled and they found a room similar in construction and present equipment to the divination cave. Several things were of note. First: there were multiple entrances, even one probably leading to the underdark and the cave itself fell just outside of Listrid territory.

Further, instead of the primal magic crystals that clad the divination cave there was a tank containing a vile poison whose effect was described in great detail in the Listrids research notes, and visible in the different animal corpses and skeletons.

But most importantly, the research notes contained the reason why the Listrids undertook this research: it was to have a weapon that could be deployed against the Giants. So the Listrids were aware of the coming invasion.

With that bombshell revealed unto the party, they had to consider their next move.

And they had to figure out what this meant for Arthurs father. And whether the Listrids actions or Galahads were justified, or perhaps neither or both.