Characters#
- Sephire — Oath of Vengeance Paladin / The Fiend Warlock
- Minerva — Circle of Stars Druid / Life Domain Cleric
- Froggo — Gloom Stalker Ranger / Rogue
- Verdian Suyanti — College of Glamour Bard
- Kairos — Soulknife Rogue
- Asep — Battle Smith Artificer / Bladesinging Wizard
Session Overview#
Froggo, Kairos & Asep’s Perspective — T=76.00 Hours to Festival#
Asep, still disguised as a Vallaki Guard through Disguise Self, opened the door to the second floor room of The Loudest Inn.
Inside — three Githyanki, armored to the teeth, and none of them pleased to see a guard standing in their doorway.
The Githyanki commander demanded to know what Asep wanted. Asep leaned into the disguise and told them plainly: they had overstayed their welcome. The commander wasn’t impressed. He warned that testing Vlaakith’s wrath was a decision people rarely made twice.
Asep pivoted — dropping the intimidation, offering help instead. What are you looking for? Maybe we can assist. The commander, tired and road-worn from hopping across planes, answered: they were searching for an elf from another plane who traveled by ship and carried a mark that granted control over fire — a mark originating from his destroyed homeworld.
Down the corridor, Kairos and Froggo were holding ambush positions. Kairos heard every word.
He already knew.
Through telepathy, Kairos reached out to Froggo and Asep:
“He might be looking for me. I think that you should bring them to me.”
Asep attempted to buy time, visibly thinking. The commander noticed the hesitation and ordered one of his warriors to cast detect-thoughts|Detect Thoughts. Asep identified the spell before it landed.
The stalemate was heating up. Asep made a decision — he brought the Githyanki to Kairos, who was waiting in the corridor in what could generously be called a disguise: his normal clothes, hastily colored to match Vallaki Guard colors.
The commander looked at Kairos.
“Is it you we are looking for?”
“Am I?” Kairos answered.
The commander confirmed it. Then he delivered the message they had crossed planes to bring:
There was a bounty on Kairos’s head. 100,000 gold. Payable in Sigil. His presence there was expected.
Kairos responded by throwing his Psychic Blades.
The confrontation erupted — all of them, in the narrow corridor of The Loudest Inn, with the guard sweep still audible from the streets below. Froggo, Kairos, and Asep fought until the two Githyanki warriors went down. The commander, seeing the tide turn, activated plane-shift|Plane Shift. Asep threw a counterspell|Counterspell — and missed the window by a breath.
The commander was gone.
Two dead Githyanki on the floor of The Loudest Inn. The party searched the room and found what the Githyanki had been carrying: a message addressed to Kairos, bearing the name of the sender.
Trevor Lohefather.
The message said only that Kairos’s arrival in Sigil was awaited.
Kairos read it. He stared at the ceiling.
“Oh… why?”
Venty’s Perspective — T=74.00 Hours to Festival#
After parting ways with Minerva near the Upper City, Verdian Suyanti|Venty made his way back to The Silent Inn alone.
HAWA’s safehouse in the basement was empty. No one there. He tidied the place — because someone had to — then heard the creak of the entrance door upstairs.
He couldn’t speak sign language. He grabbed a paper and pencil from the desk and went up.
At the bar, a pale man with red eyes was engaged in a heated exchange with the bartender. The conversation was entirely in sign language, but the pace and tension of their hands said enough. Whatever the pale man wanted, the bartender wasn’t giving it to him. Eventually the bartender simply walked away.
The pale man turned his attention to Verdian Suyanti|Venty.
His clothes were dark and finely made — modest in cut but expensive in detail, with thin golden lining along the collar and cuffs. He looked at Venty with the particular patience of someone who has been looking for something for a long time and has learned not to show urgency.
“I’m looking for a particular Elf Woman. Light blonde hair. Purple eyes. Moon-patterned robes.”
A pause.
“Name any price for information about this woman’s whereabouts.”
Verdian Suyanti|Venty recognized the description immediately. That was HAWA — down to the detail of the robes.
He kept his face neutral. He nodded toward the door.
The pale man studied him for a moment, then left without another word.
Verdian Suyanti|Venty stood at the bar alone, holding his paper and pencil.
Someone was hunting HAWA. The question was — who sent them?
Minerva’s Perspective — T=70.00 Hours to Festival#
The changing room behind Mademoiselle’s stage was loud, crowded, and smelled of greasepaint and nervous sweat. Performers moved around each other with practiced efficiency — sword swallowers, fire dancers, ballet dancers pulling on slippers — all preparing for the night’s performance.
Minerva was shown to the rack of available costumes. She set aside her plate armor and her traveling clothes and found a dress scattered with small sewn stars. It fit as if it had been made for her. Perhaps it had.
While she dressed, she looked for Adrianna the Ballet — the dancer who had caught her eye at the previous rehearsal. She wasn’t there. Minerva asked one of the other ballet performers, who told her simply that Adrianna’s family needed her in Barovia City. She had gone home.
The stages director found Minerva before she could think further about it. He was brisk and entirely uninterested in pleasantries — he had a show to run and he didn’t care about anything else. He told her: after the sword swallower, she was up.
The upper class of Vallaki filled the theatre.
When Minerva walked to the center of the stage the crowd fell quiet.
She activated her druid-circle-of-stars-tce|Circle of Stars ability and the theatre ceiling vanished — replaced by deep night sky. Stars bloomed from nothing, shaped themselves into animals, and began to move through the darkness above the audience. Dragon Snakes coiled around the upper arches. Constellations rearranged themselves into impossible formations. The crowd watched in complete silence, heads tilted back.
Then the crowd erupted. They wanted more.
Minerva shaped the stars into a Dragon Snake that circled the entire theatre once, twice, then spewed cool starlight and silver radiance across the audience. The theatre went wild.
She bowed and stepped off the stage.
Mademoiselle was waiting for her in the wings. He told her that a carriage was waiting at the exit — the Crown Prince had requested a private performance at Vallaki Castle. Minerva agreed.
On her way to the exit she noticed a door marked Mademoiselle’s Room. One of the hooded figures she had spotted in the audience slipped through it. She followed — but the room was empty by the time she pushed the door open. The stages director appeared and directed her back toward the exit, businesslike and unhurried, as if nothing had happened.
Outside, a fine carriage waited. Inside were several of the evening’s performers, gathered like pieces being moved to a new board.
The Crown Prince wanted a private show.
The question Minerva couldn’t answer yet was — what kind?
Sephire’s Perspective — T=60.00 Hours to Festival#
“Master…..!!!!”
The creature’s voice cracked with something between fury and grief before it lunged.
It went for WARGA LOKAL — and WARGA LOKAL met it without hesitation. Both of them transformed into swarm-of-bats|Swarms of Bats in the same instant and tore through the door at the end of the corridor in a controlled collision. The door exploded inward.
Behind the door they had been standing in front of: two Ghouls and a Ghast, unleashed by the noise.
They came for Sephire.
He was alone, road-worn, and 60 hours from the Festival. He fought anyway — and won, with minor scratches to show for it. The hallway fell silent.
Sephire stepped into the room the creatures had come from. Most of the bookshelves were thick with a century of dust. But two books had been moved recently. Recently enough that the dust hadn’t settled back.
The first was titled ‘Selunite Praying Books.’
Sephire looked at the pristine spine. He thought about who they had been told was stationed in Barovia. He thought about the moon above the plane that nobody had been able to explain.
He knew who had been in this room.
HAWA had come to Castle Ravenloft.
WARGA LOKAL emerged from the other room with dust on his robes and said nothing about what had happened behind the door. He looked at Sephire and said:
“It’s not safe around here. We should leave quickly.”
“I agree,” Sephire answered. “But there’s one location I haven’t investigated yet.”
They found Strahd’s library deeper in the castle — massive, vaulted, and approximately one tenth the size of the Bureau of Time and Plane’s Grand Library. A century of abandonment had claimed most of it. But not all.
Sephire moved through shelf after shelf, running his fingers along spines, reading titles in the dim light. Hours passed. Then he found it.
‘Guide of Selune Bodies Manipulation.’
He pulled it from the shelf. The dust on its cover was thin — disturbed, recently replaced, as if someone had taken it out, read from it, and put it back. He held it and thought about what Asep had said aboard the Pequod: the Deep Purple Netherese Stone functioned like a commune|Commune spell. A direct line to a divine being.
To which divine being, nobody had answered yet.
Sephire put the book in his bag.
Exhausted down to his bones, he found a chamber near the library with a bed in it — one of Strahd’s many identical rooms, preserved by emptiness. He lay down.
WARGA LOKAL was still somewhere in the library, still reading, when Sephire closed his eyes.
Key Learnings#
- Someone is hunting HAWA. A pale, red-eyed man with golden-lined clothes offered any price for information about her location. Who sent him — and why now?
- ‘Selunite Praying Books’ and ‘Guide of Selune Bodies Manipulation’ were the only volumes in Castle Ravenloft’s library that showed signs of recent handling. Someone — almost certainly HAWA — visited the castle before the party arrived and accessed these specific texts.
- The Githyanki were sent to find Kairos. Their bounty order — 100,000 gold, payable in Sigil — came with a message from Trevor Lohefather, Kairos’s old mentor. The message said only that his arrival in Sigil is awaited.
- Minerva performed before the entire upper class of Vallaki and has been personally invited to Vallaki Castle for a private performance before the Crown Prince. The nature of that performance — and what the Crown Prince actually wants — remains unclear.
- Adrianna the Ballet is missing. The mysterious pale woman in Mademoiselle’s audience who resembled her has not been identified.
Who Did They Met?#
- Strahd von Zarovich’s Vampire Spawn — Castle Ravenloft. A century of waiting hollowed out into fury and grief. Its last coherent word was Master.
- 1 Githyanki Commander, 2 Githyanki Warriors — The Loudest Inn, Lower City. The Commander plane-shifted to escape. The Warriors did not.
- The Upper Class of Vallaki — Mademoiselle’s Cabaret Show. Audience to Minerva’s performance.
- A Mysterious Pale Woman — Veiled in black robes with golden tips, spotted in Mademoiselle’s audience and briefly in Mademoiselle’s private room. Bears a striking resemblance to Adrianna the Ballet, who is reportedly in Barovia City.
- Mademoiselle’s Stages Director — Brisk, professional, and entirely uninterested in anything that wasn’t the show.
Items of Importance#
- ‘Guide of Selune Bodies Manipulation’ — Recovered from Castle Ravenloft’s library by Sephire. Recently handled before his arrival. Contents unknown.
- Trevor Lohefather’s Message — Found in the Githyanki’s room. Addressed to Kairos. States that his arrival in Sigil is awaited.