Session 1 - The One Where They Met
A disparate group of 'heroes' arrive almost independently in a small town in Faerun - a logging town called Oakhurst. A human paladin, Thomas Covenant, has been here a few days, celebrating the Midsummer festival with the locals and the tourists, and generally boring many with tales of past heroics, that most do not believe. A female dragonborn, a rare sight in these parts, sits on the table next to him - Máhtis is her name, quiet but imposing with gleaming white scales. Two male wood elves arrive, Ramikhand, or Kandi for short, seemingly the subservient companion of the more regal Carro, though it turns out they only met a day or two previously.
Forced to sit at the same table, conversation is stilted, but polite. Máhtis admits she is searching for her sister, who was part of an adventuring group last known to be in Oakhurst. Thomas shares little information, though later drops in conversation the fact that he "is familiar with people in a coma" and knows about pears, apparently. No one questions him further on these two apparently unrelated facts. Kandi seems to be here to earn a bit of coin, and proceeds to prove this by managing to sell his barrel of very fine Oak Dew spirit to the tavern owner, Garon, for a tidy sum, leading to a conversation about fine drinks and ales, and Garon revealing that he buys a very palatable ale named "Goblin Brew" from a local band of goblins who infrequently trade in the town - he is always running out, however, and would pay handsomely for the recipe as he has never managed to make ale as good as that.
Carro talks little, and seems to try his best not to be condescending towards the others, and to the locals. Something which Thomas could perhaps learn from, since on their visit to Dem "Corkie" Nackle, the priest at the local shrine, he failed completely to hide his contempt for gnomes, or maybe priests. Luckily Corkie is busy trying to tend to a patient - a wood elf in a coma - who was brought in a couple of weeks earlier - part of an adventuring party who were heading to a 'Fallen Fortress' that is nearby. Nothing Corkie has been able to do seems to have helped and indeed one of the other members of that party was also brought in at the same time with a similar condition, but could not be saved and passed away a couple of days after being received.
Carro and Kandi don't seem to recognise the sick elf, though they do think he is from their homeland - the High Forest only a couple of days journey from here. They vow to try to find out what happened to him, and maybe who he is, and to maybe inform his family back home if possible.
Máhtis, meanwhile, thinks that he may be part of the adventuring party that her sister was a member of, and is keen to find out more. The party visit Felosial, the half-elf leader of the town Watch, who explains that they discovered the elf, and the human paladin who sadly passed away whilst in their care, along with an already dead female halfling at a camp in a wood a few hours out of town. Some enquiries about this adventuring party led to the revelation that when they had previously passed through town, there had been four of them - the fourth being a male dragonborn of a religious persuasion. The Watch found no sign of the fourth member at the camp, but there was also no signs of a struggle, and Felosial had no idea what had happened there. She offered to show the party whereabouts the camp was, if they wanted to do their own investigation.
Keen to progress, the party set out straight away, without even bothering to see the Crafting Museum, or pay a visit to the Woodworker's Hall, let alone buy any provisions at the local store.
A couple of hours later, with the benefit of Carro's tracking skills, they find the abandoned camp. Thomas and Kandi glance in the weathered tent that is standing there and declare nothing of interest, while Máhtis and Carro investigate the strange body of a wolf that is poking out from under a bush.
A bush that, in fact, was in some way alive! As were a few other bushes nearby, and, taken by surprise, Carro is hit by a swinging arm of twigs, as Máhtis struggles to fight off the strange creatures.
The other two wade in, and Thomas, with a swing of his longsword, chops down one of the blighted bushes, whilst the two on Máhtis both get good hits in and the dragonborn gets severely injured. Kandi, from a distance, tries insulting the trees, a 'Vicious Mockery' not managing to cause any damage. Meanwhile Carro has his last remaining bush pinned to the floor, stopping it from getting a clear attack on him. Thomas, in a blaze of heroism, takes out one of the bushes attacking Máhtis, and Máhtis herself takes down the other one.
The final bush is proving difficult to take down, despite it being on the floor. Eventually the party manage to knock it unconscious and tie it up for questioning later on, despite it showing no signs of being able to communicate.
A little exhausted from their brief one-minute of action, the party decide they want to rest. Suspicious of the bushes around the camp, they move away from the camp to rest amongst similar bushes a few hundred yards away. On their way out, Kandi spots a book lying half-under the tent and grabs it to read later.
An uneventful short rest later, they are now familiar with Gwen's Journal, describing the final actions of the adventuring party. They work out that Gwen is the deceased halfling, Woderick the deceased human paladin and Erdan the comatose wood elf. Karakas must be the missing dragonborn - the tracks of whom Carro and Kandi between them spotted leading away from the camp, in a hurry. Máhtis admitted that Rúhin, mentioned at the end of the journal, was her sister, but it appears that she left the group in Neverwinter. The party is unsure whether the albino pear that the group apparently bought from a group of kobolds on their last evening had anything to do with their demise.
Rested up, they decide to interrogate the blighted bush, which now seems to be conscious - well, it's moving at least. It seems to understand them, but not be able to communicate, though they improvise a basic interrogation of the captive with eye blinks to give rudimentary yes-no answers, and Máhtis threatening death by sword, or by campfire proving an effective incentive to the twig.
They learn, or at least, the twig tells them - the validity of the information is not yet decided - that the rogue bushes were not responsible for the deaths of the previous party, nor did they witness what was responsible. Feeling that they won't get much more information from a mini-tree, they decide (reluctantly, in the case of Máhtis) to let it go and it duly scurries off away from them before blending perfectly in with the other bushes in the area.
The group decide to follow the dragonborn tracks to see what may have become of Karakas. A short way along the tracks they come upon three bodies of kobolds - two with arrows in their backs, the third killed with a blow to the head, though, Kandi suspects, not before some amount of torture was imparted to it. No sign of a dragonborn, and the only tracks that Carro is able to discern leading away is a set of kobold tracks, heading east.
We leave our 'heroes' as they plan to follow these kobold tracks to try to discover more about what happened to the previous adventuring party.....