The Pantheon War Campaign/Session 7

*We did it! We crossed into the valley of Amaranthia.
*We then immediately get distracted by discussing who has horses
**Elesett is too big and Screecher can fly - so they canonically lack mounts
*Screecher goes scouting: 
**black smoke rising from cities
**some small hamlets (<20 houses each) in shadows of mountains
**Guard towers protecting communities, toll roads
**Some walled towns; sizable but probably too big
**Mining camps up high
**Larger logging camps
**Something along rivers?
*Warn the mercenaries? Screecher goes to check out what's going on
*We agree to meet at a big, abandoned farmhouse
**It turns out everyone left in a hurry and all the horses have been killed
***No one took any horses before the rest were slain (all stalls are full.)
***These were not quick kills; it took effort, but wasn't sadistic; intent to be as merciful as possible. Final horses were killed by crossbow bolt
***No human remains around
***Free-range chickens keeled over and died 
**Pigs? Yep, 6 dead, 6 alive who ate them. They're in a stall that doesn't give view of sunrise or sunset.
***Elesett finds some grain and feeds them. They eat, but most of them are likely to die anyway. Elesett moves the one Haruspex thinks could survive into another stall configured to protect from sunshock, and gives it several days' worth of grain. 
**Tome investigates the farmhouse: it has been stripped of most valuables, but not books. 
***The books are few and short: business ledgers, looks like they sold lumber and bred horses. Lots of horse sales, mostly to the king's guards, right up until the end
***Down the roads, tenant worker housing, fields, etc. 
**Tome also scouts out the woods: abundant forage growth (berries, etc.)
***Fields are full of grain; no one's harvesting.
***Haruspex does some threshing (extremely well). He feels very fulfilled by the activity. 
***Tome shoots a bunch of birds (all sunshocked)
***We test them on one of the dying pigs, then bake the rest into a pie. It's an all-day activity but will feed us for a few days.
*Screecher and the mercenaries:
**Keeping watch, playing music, six men inside a wicker cage (two Hootenannies and four sailors) who had been infected. Some others who looked up immediately threw themselves into the sea. A couple other Hootenannies saw it and took off to find Screecher.
**Survivors: 50 mercenaries, 20 sailors. 
**Koko has kept control of the rest.
**Screecher sings to encourage everyone to stick to the mission, and not follow him. They are very empowered, just not to follow him. 
**He tells them about the mines and the lumber camp. 
**Koko is not very inspiring, and the mercenaries set out to go looting. Sunrose convinces them to at least steal useful things.
*Shocked birds:
**Several lost limbs. Many others can't fly because feathers have grown improperly
**Elesett collects several and sings a new song to them, and they repeat it. The evening-out of their souls is not perfect, has not fully erased original topography. 
**She tries to rebuild one based on the topography she still senses. She accidentally catches it on fire instead. We've definitely all learned something here today.
*The party heads out towards the city Tome's men were going to loot. 
**Lots of animal and human corpses; many of the human deaths were suicide, or painless killing of children
***Human bodies don't indicate sun-shock
***No insect life around these corpses
**Tumorous growths on trees, but it's the trees themselves, all growing towards a particular point in the sky. 
**There are more wagons, loot, food than explained by the number of bodies we see. There are also more dead children. 
**Tome rides ahead and makes it to the center of the town. In the center of the town are gallows with three corpses. Someone costumes a corpse and then an angry preacher type comes out and starts preaching to the people of the city. At the peak of his preaching, the man drives a dagger into the heart of a corpse using the hands of the other corpse to hold the dagger
Category:Session Summaries