Episode 50: Noble Blood

The Heroes of Bingle have finally found Cho’Ran’s family inside the Castle Rum. But nothing could have prepared them for the shocking revelation of who they really are! Will their escape prove even more dangerous than their journey inside? And why are the demons of Castle Rum obsessed with noble blood?

#### **DM/GM Intro**

*It started as a simple dungeon run…*

*But quickly became something more.  A fateful quest to find the missing Wardens - Ain’s ancient protectors. Lost - captured - held in impossible locations, by powerful enemies. A gnomish inventor named Ertinfert, controlling a tower in the sky.  A dragonborn warrior named Yan Mo, leading an amphibious army in the deepest part of the ocean.*

*Each time, an epic battle.  And each time, these 5 intrepid adventurers fought back against incredible odds, and freed the Wardens.  In the process, they became the Heroes of Bingle, liberating Lily’s island home and saving her family from undersea terrors.*

*On the trail of a third Warden, their adventure took an unexpected turn, as they were magically transported back through time, into the lives of 5 sellswords.  5 sellswords in the employ of an infamous pirate.  Whitebeard.  A man they knew to be cruel and vicious.  A man they defeated on their quest to the bottom of the ocean.  But now, 22 years in the past, a man they need.*

*For Whitebeard captured a Triton by the name of Cho’Ran.  A fugitive of the Shaxen Gao empire - the dragonborn dynasty in the north.  But Cho’Ran promised to reveal the location of a valuable treasure - the dynasty’s treasure - if the Heroes of Bingle helped him find and rescue his family. A wife and son who fled the port town of Boster into the Castle Rum, a frightening haunted manor only accessible by boat. But even with a fast ship, brash captain, and hearty crew, the trip was fraught with terror.  Ghostly apparitions assaulted the team as they sailed, bombarding their sanity with devastating psychic attacks.*

*Luckily, the team had procured the only defense against such attacks: the Liquor of the Dead, a foul concoction distilled inside rotting corpses.  To get it, Lily and James visited a strange man at the top of the lighthouse on Ocean’s Gull Point.  A man calling himself the Viscount Winger-Sticks Envoy, who allowed them to take a jug in exchange for promising that they give him their own corpses, should they meet an untimely end.*

*The Liquor proved useful not only in the journey to the Castle, but inside the haunted mansion itself.  The Castle was a bewildering and dangerous place, with ghosts and poltergeists and creepy porcelain dolls lurking in its many rooms and corridors.  But in each room, drinking a sip of the Liquor provided the team a vision - a piece of the puzzle said to make up the fragments of a shattered mind.  The mind of The Lady of the House - a woman the team glimpsed in vision after vision, fearful and desperate.*

*Each vision also manifested an item that, when brought together inside the study, revealed the final piece of the puzzle.  A glimpse into the past. The Lady of the House, attempting to calm 2 of her three children, read them a story called the Heroes and the Dragon - a story evidently hand written by a servant named Jaspin.  As she read, noises and eruptions echoing through the halls made her more and more fearful.  Finally, she ushered her sons inside a hidden room behind the bookcase in the study.  When her husband arrived, looking for her, he was joined by Jaspin, who Lily and James immediately recognized as the Viscount from the Lighthouse.*

*But the vision was not over.  Jaspin, grabbing a knife from the desk, brutally stabbed the man in the back, locked the entrance to the secret room, and began setting fire to the Castle.  The team heard pounding and screams from behind the wall, as the flames engulfed the room.*

*When the vision faded, Lily unlocked the bookcase wall and slid it aside.  Standing there, inside the hidden room, were Cho’Ran’s wife and son.  The team had found them.  But in finding them, a new revelation.  Cho’Ran-the-Triton’s wife was dragonborn.  Their son, a half-dragonborn half-Triton boy, no more than 5 years old.  Cho’Ran called out to them.  Baozhai!  Cho’Mel!  But it was undeniable.  The boy he called Cho’Mel was Yan Mo.  The warrior who fought them at the bottom of the Deep Reef. The captor who held the Inferno Warden with a mighty Kraken. The leader who commanded an undersea army to attack Bingle, who held Lily’s mother and sisters captive and forced them to serve him.  Yan Mo.  But here, in the past, only five years old, clutching tightly to something in his hand, standing wrapped in his mother’s arms.*

*But no sooner did this realization hit them, than the situation changed again.  As Cho’Ran called out to his family, a new spector passed through the walls and into the room.  A ghostly woman, wild and angry - disembodied -  hovering in the space between them, haunted eyes searing and furious, like dark coal.*

*As we ended last time, the team stood transfixed by this phantasm, but the voice of young Yan Mo, broke through the confusion, saying - pleading... “Father?”*