Tyrant of Tacot

The Adventure:

Rumors have begun to float into Newood that the nearby town of Tacot has been suffering. While the rumors aren't consistent, there appears to be a man named Monder who has begun taking control of the town. At first it seemed to just be some grumpy townsfolk who couldn't deal with a strong new mayor, but recently news indicates that it may be a lot more. While the more experienced heroes are currently too busy to deal with this, some of the local folk have offered to follow up and see what the issue is.

Karisa:

After hearing some rumors about a small farm town, Tacot, being abused by a new mayor we decided to go down and check it out. We're a pretty tough group, and maybe a tad intimidating.. Tarul being a Aasimar, Krom a Minotaur, and Karisa a tiefling, we were pretty confident that we could help this little town.

We decided to travel through the Forest, following the river to take the most direct route. When night fell we made camp and had a slight encounter with a wild boar-like creature which Karisa and Tarul took quick work of. The rest of the night stayed quiet, Krom cooked some boar meat for our breakfast and we took off towards Tacot.

First impressions coming into town told us that it's a pretty quiet town. Just a handful of buildings, nothing really noteworthy. We decide to go to the temple and talked to a man worshipping named Jarin. He obviously didn't really want to talk to us. We asked a bit about the town, about the mayor. Jarin answered politely but quickly and left us with no answers.

Getting nothing from the temple, we moved towards the blacksmiths. As we walk in, the oddly tall dwarf man doesn't seem to notice us. Karisa kind of clears her throat multiple times to get his attention. Like Jarin, he didn't seem to want to talk to us. We got his name, Clifton. He confirmed for us that Tacot is mostly a farming community and the majority of his work is horseshoes and household maintenance. Again, he was polite but rushed in his answers. We got the feeling that these people were hiding something from us.

Krom mentions how a tavern is usually a good place to get information so we headed towards the inn. Going inside, there is 2 people sitting in the small common room. They noticed us and quickly turned away, trying to avoid connection with us. Karisa tries to find a desk, someone to talk to. Walking towards the back and around the corner she finds a small elfen girl reading a book. Again she kind of clears her throat and says hello. The girl startled slightly and goes on how unusual it is to have travellers coming through, same thing we learned from Jarin and Clifton. She quickly tells us to have a seat and she'll arrange some food and ale for us. While we wait for our food we go and talk to the people sitting in the room. The young man is a tanner in town and chatted a bit with us but gave up nothing more than we asked. We mentioned we would come for a visit and he dismissed it by referring us to his master. Without knowing what else to say we returned to our table.

The innkeeper, Gwendoline as we found out, brings out our food. Tarul asks where we could find the mayor and she points towards a building where we can talk to his secretary. She takes care to set our table and tells us some pleasantries before retreating to the back. Completely baffled by this town we enjoy our lunch. As Tarul goes for his napkin he notices something inside of it. He finds a piece of parchment with words scribbled on it. “Do not stay the night, leave now” he slides the parchment to Krom and Karisa and they agree to leave the inn to go to the mayor's house.

After leaving the inn they agree that they are not going to head the warning of who they can only assume is Gwendoline. They will stay at least the night and try to figure out what's going on in this town. When they reached the mayor's house Tarul knocks on the door. A old elfen woman opens the door. She asks if we have an appointment, Tarul tries to say that we do when obviously the woman knows we don't. She precedes to tell us about how busy the mayor is and what important business we could possibly have with him. Tarul again makes up a lie and the woman schedules us in for 4 days from now. With nothing else to say, we head back to the inn.

We go straight into the office where Gwendoline is reading, Tarul asks right out if she wrote this note. Gwendoline sits stunned and baffled, starts babbling about different possibilities of who could've written the note. Karisa asks why is everyone so scared. Gwendoline points out how frightening we look, points out our horns, where Karisa scoffs but then looks at Krom and understands. Realizing they are getting nowhere they just ask for a room for the night.

Making a plan to go search the office a little more thoroughly after everyone's gone, they hunker in for the afternoon. Once the sun goes down, Tarul and Karisa make their way downstairs. Not as quietly as they would hope but they don't hear or see much activity. Tarul goes to the office door to find that it's locked and decides to check out the kitchen. Approaching the door he hears voices, nothing of interest but good to know they aren't the only ones here. He decides to check the window from outside, it doesn't open. Not seeing another option, Karisa takes Tarul’s crowbar and pops open the door, maybe a tad too forcefully. After a very loud snap and a very broken door they go inside the office a start searching. Not finding much except the sign in ledger which states that they are the first guests in a month. Hearing voices come towards the door they try to find anything else but just stand there while someone opens the door and catches them. Being yelled at quite loudly by this woman, Tarul comes up with a lie about losing a very important parchment this afternoon. Without knowing what to do the woman just sends us up to our room. Shortly later we hear a knock at the door.

The Sheriff has come to talk to the intruders who broke the door to the office. He was the most normal person we talked to all day. He was satisfied enough with our apologies and money to fix the door. Threatened to throw us in the cell is he found anything missing from the room and advised us to stay in our room and keep to ourselves during the rest of our stay.

As morning came we went back downstairs to the common room, Tarul needed to return the ledger so she walks into the office where Clifton is working on fixing the door. She has a quick conversation with Gwendoline and leaves the book behind.

Karisa decides she wants to try the mayor's house again and just be honest about why they are here. The old elfen woman opens the door and starts on again about how busy the mayor is.. Karisa starts arguing a bit about how he can be so busy, and surprisingly the woman argues back! Karisa even mentions the problems they've been hearing and the woman scoffed at that too. Finally Karisa just pushes the door in. After they got into the room the woman's character changed completely, she suddenly became very frightened and told us to leave, do not go talk to the mayor, she begged us. And suddenly she just turned white and motionless. Karisa closed the door and tried to talk to the woman, no response. They proceeded to look for the mayor.

They open the door to a man sitting at a desk. He looks up and says how busy he is and who are we exactly. Karisa says a few words and the mayor asks where Millicent is, oh she told you to leave didn't she, she told you to not come up here and leave immediately. Barely waiting for our response he reaches for his staff and calls for a black shadow and tells him to remove us. We see this demon appear behind the mayor and 3 imps come up behind us.

Tarul attacks one of the imps with having very little effect. Karisa tries to throw a javelin at the demon but he evades it easily. An imp stings Tarul while the other two bring Karisa to unconsciousness as the demon says someone in his demonic language. Krum tries to grab Karisa and runs out but can't get past the imps who bring him down as well. Tarul, being the last one standing tries again to take down the imp he attacked before and gets a better blow in. After being stung again he places his hands on Karisa to bring her back to consciousness. Karisa rises and calls out to the demon in its language, what do you want? Without a response she throws a javelin at the mayor and sees it hit before she gets hit again by an imp and goes down. Shortly after Tarul manages to get a blow on the imp he wounded and kills it before he gets stung again and goes down with his comrades.

Tarul wakes up to Gwendoline dabbing his forehead with a cloth. She has cuts all over her face and chest that definitely weren't there the last time he saw her. Gwendoline practically weeps “I tried, I'm so sorry, so sorry.”

Karisa:

After waking Gwendolyn tells us that she can answer our questions now that it isn't forbidden. Immediately we notice an imp in the doorway of the room sitting perched above the door. We find out that there are rules to this town. Do not tell people to leave. Do not try to leave the town. Do not talk about things the mayor would not like. If you break the rules you will be punished. Apparently the staff that the mayor used to summon the demon is what started all this. Also is why we didn't see her scratches before.

After Gwendolyn left us, we ate breakfast and headed towards the blacksmiths. Outside the inn there are imps flying around all over the town. As we walk into the blacksmiths we notice that there are no imps here. Clifton looks up from his work and greets us, giving his condolences for our rough night. Karisa asks him why he's not being watched. He tells us that they stay away from him for some unknown reason. With that, Karisa asks if he'd be willing to coat her axe in silver. He looks at her like she's mental. After explaining in little detail she gets her point across that the imps are weaker to silver weapons. Suddenly he takes off his shirt, showing a giant scar across his chest. He explains that he had an accident where he got coated with silver. So that explains why the imps tend to leave him alone.

Clifton agrees to helping us with our weapons if we watch over his family. Even though they won't go after him they will definitely hurt his family in his stead. We head over to his house to introduce ourselves to his wife. She seemed very confused and unsure of us. After Karisa carefully tries to tell her what's happening without outwardly telling her (due to imps being around) she seems to understand and allows us to leave Kali behind to help around the house.

Wondering the town we find out that the imps do not enter into the temple, so that's a safe place to talk. We stopped by the mayor's office to check on Millicent. She got pretty hurt for what she said to us but seemed to be ok with it.

After discussing our plan in the temple a bit we decide to go share it with Clifton. We decide that were going to sneak through the house and try to get closer tough to the mayor to destroy his staff. Clifton finished a silver dagger which we would give to Kali to protect his family with.

After lunch we stroll across town, getting the feel of the layout. Tarsul decides to test the limits of the city. After we awoke we found there was a ring surrounding the town. After getting close to it he finds out quickly that it's extremely hot. Leaving that for another day we head back over to Clifton.

Krom offers his help to Clifton. While he works he recalls that the shadow creature does not like light, that even with our silver weapons it wouldn't have much effect on it.

With not much else to do we rest for the rest of the day and wait for the on coming battle.

Tarsul:

We finally had our silvered weapons from the smith and confidently went to mount an attack on the demon imps. They seemed to be weak to the silver.

We decided not to wait and walked right into the mayors house. No use in waiting until morning as we had the cover of night.

As soon as we went up the circular staircase, we entered into the battle. We killed some disgusting creatures with long fangs. Moving on into the upstairs corridors of the castle, we found some beasts who seemed to have tied up the mayor. I slayed 3 out of 4 of these creatures with my fists. Finally, we had our long awaited meeting with the mayor. We decided to untie him and he was so grateful he healed some of our wounds. Apparently a beast has stollen his staff and he seemed normal again. We decided to trust the mayor for now and follow him to the beast. We fought some bigger sacs of flesh which is the best way to describe them. They were disgusting. I did not appreciate them and felt absolutely disgusting being in their presence. Krom took the last hit to kill the beast and finally the staff is freed from his grasp. Karisa was the first to pick up the staff and she heard a voice, perhaps something to do with Ontar. Karisa destroyed the staff with her strong force.

When we left the mayors house, there were no imps anymore and no barrier around the town. It seemed destroying the staff had destroyed the curse on the town. Krom decided to jump for joy which I loved. I decided to stay back and watch the mayor as Krom and Karisa go alert the towns people that everything seems back to normal. The major told me he didn't mean for this to happen to the town. I told him it was best for him to tell the towns people this. He also resigned from the mayors position as he is unfit to govern. Karisa answered the towns people's questions and told them everything that happened. Moreover, Gwendolyn offered us to say at the inn which we enjoyed for a few more days. We helped to set the town back together and then started the journey back to Falonde.

In the back of my mind I seem to find it odd what there would be a staff in the river bend but I can't quite place it...oh well!

Krom:

Krom the amazing is enjoying his spending time at the temple with his kat, when he hears word of the some trouble in Takot. Looking to test his mettel and bring glory to Gildite he sets out on an adventure meeting up with some other adventurers in order to save the town. As they enter the town everything seems too normal with everyone hidding off the streets. We desided to make our way to the inn and though things seemed normal we resived a hidden message telling us not to stay the nite. We obisusly desided to stay the nite to see what would happen and the others desided to brake into the offise in order to look for clus. They ended up getting kot and wer made to pay for a door they broke. At this time we went to the mayors offise to try to get to the bottom of things. We forsed our way into the offise and fond the mayor with a demon behind him. A bunch of imps apeard and try as we mite we wer un able to take them down. As we wok from our sleep we discovered that the hole town was full of demons eyeing all the people and doing them harm if they stepped out of line and that the mayors staf was the kase of most of the problems. At this pont we wer told we culd not leve the town and we set out on our serch to un cover the mistery. Going to see the blaksmith we find out that the smith has silver in his chest from a smithing acsident and the demons stay away from him with some thot we figur out that they are weak to silver and ask the smith to put silver on our wepons so that we can save the town. He agrees to do so if we make sur his family is safe wile we do so and i use my larg musscles to ade him wile we makes our wepons silver. Wen he finishes we deside not to wate till morning and hed rite to the mayors howse to finish this. Esily we enter the howse and make our way up stares slaying demons on the way and we find the mayor tide up in a room full of demons. Not trusting the mayor we reluktantly un tie him and after he gives us some heeling Krom begins to feel more trusting. He then leeds us to the demon and Krom youses his grate strengt and crushs his hed like melon saving the town. Karisa snaps the staf lik a twig and we spend a few days helping out in the town in order to get things bak to normal. After leving the town Krom desides to send a message to his friend Zod at the temple leting him no that ther are many problems in the world and that he could use his help in further glory and adventer.

Karisa:

Don't get me wrong, being able to relax and play some games with Tarsul is a nice change but I was so ready to get going when Krum came to tell us our weapons were ready. After a quick pow wow we decided to just get it over with and head right into the mayor's manor.

Walking up to the house we decided to just walk right in. It was a lot quieter than expected, and we weren't trying to be particularly quiet ourselves. Heading up stairs we run into a strange claylike creature. Krum basically ran into it and it disintegrated. After that we split up a bit, checking different rooms. Krum announces he found a room with a handful of imps, I found a room with a giant rat creature sitting on a throne. Rather than leave it we go in to kill the creature. Making quick work of other claylike creatures, my companions move towards the rat creature and it goes down in a couple hits as well. Not as exciting as I was hoping, I tell ya. Walking around the room we found a couple of toothy demons which I finally got to bloody my axe with, but that was it.

Moving further around the manor we check more doors, Tarsul got hit a couple times so he stayed back a bit more this time. I check a door and see the mayor tied up in a chair with 3 creatures guarding him. Stifling a laugh I close the door quietly to tell the others. Wanting to get the whole story I decide to barge in by kicking down the door… that door was tough ok! Totally nothing against my strength.. so after startling them we just walk in casually instead, no biggy. These guys proved to be a bit tougher than the previous foes but we managed with little injury.

With the room empty of enemies I go towards the mayor, asking how did this happen. Realizing he has a gag in his mouth I take it out. This is not the man we encountered on our first visit, much weaker in power and authority. He tells us that the large demon took the staff from him and was holding him prisoner until he felt he didn't need him anymore. Turns out this staff holds a contract which is still slightly intact but if he finds a way to break it he can do some terrible things. Listening to the mayor I felt he would have a hard time getting past the 3 of us so we decide to untie him. Upon release he actually healed us! I still don't trust him.

Following the mayor we travel back the way we came from. He figures the demon is still in the house, it doesn't take long to find him. I walked into the room slightly, and quite quietly but it noticed me immediately so my friends followed. Krum ran right into the demon so I decided to go take care of the other minions. I got one in a single hit and then the mayor released a spell that took out the other one and seemed to hurt the demon as well. Tarsul got a couple punches in but the silvered weapons definitely proved to be more effective. This guy was a little stubborn but on one of Krum’s swipes he sliced through it like butter.

Seeing the staff clatter to the ground I grabbed it before anyone else could. Immediately I hear a voice speak to me.. it tells me that it can give me anything I want. Under that voice though I hear a chant in my native language, infernal. Nothing articulate but definitely a spell of some kind. I could feel the pull of the compelling words but my will was stronger than it and I slam it over my knee. Immediately the voice and chanting are gone. I look at the mayor and he's in shock. He rambles on about how he couldn't help but listen to the voices and blah blah.. I sluff him off, tell him I have a strong will. I recommend that we go check outside, make sure those creatures are gone.

Once outside, it seems peaceful. We go check the borders and Krum does some weird dance.. “now I'm in, now I'm out” jumping the border that's now gone. I start yelling to the town that they can come out, it's safe. Holding the broken pieces of the staff for people to see. Clifton and Gwyndolyn come out first. Gwyndolyn gives us all great big hugs thanking us. Clifton gives his thanks and awe to our accomplishments. I state that without his silversmithing this wouldn't have been possible, he's a very humble man. Other people start coming out of their houses seeing that the creatures are gone. Everyone is still weary but I think it's going to be ok.

Seeing the mayor standing back I decide to make a little speech. I tell the townspeople about the compelling spell that was associated with this staff. I was able to resist it but not everyone would have such an easy time so even though he made some terrible decisions he shouldn't be held completely responsible for his actions. And I walk away, talking was never my strong suit. The crowd seems to have listen to me and listens as the mayor walks forward. He states that that manor is no longer his, he does not want the job in the slightest and is going to move back into his previous home.

The town seems to be relaxing now, Gwyndolyn offers us some food and a nights rest. I offer to stay and help get the town back to normal, Tarsul and Krom nod their agreeance.

On a side note, the mayor states to Tarsul while Karisa was dealing with the crowd, that he pulled that staff out of a river. He said that he would kill whoever threw that staff out in the open like. Not sure if that has meaning to anyone.