I’ve got terrible at keeping up with these. Let’s try to sort that out!

The players leave the surrounds of Illmire and get supplies, and more importantly recruits to reinforce Illmire. They travelled out on the King’s Highway, and got torrentially rained on. I like AiME and so a good excuse to make this journey a Journey with Exhaustion and suffering1 is one that’s been missing for me up until now. The party were very relieved to see a cabin just off the path and the bears prowling around outside it menacing the occupants were of no mind at all.

They dispatched them quickly, saving the Tortle (not that she needed saving, safe in her shell) and the scared family in the cabin itself. The rain stopped overnight and the party continued onwards, leaveing the bard Toni had been most impressed by their actions.

Once civilisation had been reached, some shopping on behalf of the beleagured Illmire occurred; finding medicine and troops. Once altruism had been addressed the shopping started in earnest for some +1 gear and a Ring of Protection.

The priests in the town were all speaking of extreme weather, and sure enough, on the return journey, the snow started. The party got to Illmire with little problem but the summer is over, and everyone agrees that the winter is going to be bad. Illmire will struggle through but the logging villages don’t have a hope without the adventurers helping out2.

Once spring was established, the party returned to Illmire. Or at least they started, but were very disturbed to see a dragon flying across the landscape. They hid when it passed over, and then watched it fly over Illmire several times, before leaving for the mountains to the North.

Returning to Illmire found the townsfolk alive, but debating the significance of the visitation. A female elf, Faral, is sure that the dragon is protecting Illmire, and should be workshipped. She is canvassing support for a search party to find the dragon and reward it for its “support”.

The party were quite strongly against this alternative fact, and imprisoned her before she could sway other impressionable minds. They didn’t unfortunately convince the guards of the seriousness of this, and so by the morning, she’d been let go, and is nowhere to be seen…

The party are a bit distracted though, as it turned out that when the mindphages under the church were being cleared out; the altar might have been a bit too tempting. Leithidir the Ranger had picked up a spade. Nothing wrong with that, everyone leaves spades around.

On altars.

Surrounded by skulls. 💀

Yeah it’s cursed3.

His eyes are turning white, and his strength is started to (very slowly) decline. Despite his best efforts, nobody wants to take it off him. The town agree their druid might be able to help him, but Yorivar fled shortly after the cult arrived. Exploring his hut just finds lots of notes about spiders. The party very reluctantly decide to go on a trip to the Webbed Hollows, south-west of Illmire.

Lessons

  • The Illmire campaign doesn’t leave much space for spending the loot that has been accumulated, so I added this in as a bit of a release valve
  • The town deliberately didn’t get a name, I wanted the focus to be the Illmire campaign

  1. Actually, I’m just here for the player-suffering. ↩︎

  2. As the link details, I ran a one-shot of Do Not Let Us Die In The Dark Night Of This Cold Winter for some variety. ↩︎

  3. The original curse as written is supposed to take about a week to kill the character. I’ve changed this to be much more theatrically convenient. ↩︎