The Master of Revels was a one-shot adventure in the city of Hollin. Thanks to the players, Glen, James, Mo, and Tracy!
Beale the Goldenpiper, Marina Gale, Samara, and Vincent Alleret meet their friend Burgess for dinner at the Mooncalf, but Burgess is attacked there. Investigating, the party discovers that Cankerblossom's tontine has turned Hollin's rich against each other in a winner-take-all fight. Cankerblossom suggests that Phyla House attacked Burgess, and they find the Moonwell vampire lair under Phyla House's manor, where they kill Lolani Phyla. They take the tontine subscriber list from her, which includes Hollin's Master of Revels Helmholtz, and they find Helmholtz dead with a poison dagger in his heart.
The players and characters were:
I said that Beale, Marina, and Samara had a mutual friend, Burgess Banks. Burgess was a patriarch in Lorentz House, an Admiralty supplier, but he retired from day-to-day operations two years ago. Burgess stayed active in retirement by volunteering with the Braddock watch, based at the Mooncalf tavern, and he invited them to dinner there at 8:00. They agreed.
As Beale was preparing at home, Hollin's secret police chief Durer knocked. Durer asked if Beale would come to the Great Council Hall to talk with Helmholtz, Hollin's Master of Revels. Helmholtz told Beale that several previous Masters of Revels seemed to have died unnaturally, and that his immediate predecessor Ella hadn't been seen for a few days. He asked Beale to keep his ear to the ground, and gave Beale his notes on the previous Masters of Revels and his Brief History of the Anhault Charter Company.
A Brief History of the Anhault Charter Company
Beale, Marina, and Samara assembled at the Mooncalf for dinner with Burgess. They decided to eat in the Mooncalf's quiet South Room, domain of the Mooncalf's Pipe Warden Owen, and Owen offered them pipes.
James, Mo, and Tracy introduced their characters. My rough notes:
James: Beale the Goldenpiper, a bard, entertainer, preferred instrument is pipes, comes from the City of the Dead. Catalogs songs and stories that he finds. One of them that he uncovered had to do with a mythic whale that had been killed with a spear, that's his latest project. Kind of an icon for the downtrodden. (Glen: whale meat is so delicious.) Kind of robust, blond, 6 feet tall. Carries pipes, boisterous, gregarious.
Mo: Character is Samara. Samara is in his late forties, very thin, short at 5'2", 100 pounds. Samara is from the Caliphate, and moved to Hollin seeking enlightenment. Shortly after moving to Hollin he became friends with the Master of Revels.
Tracy: Marina Gale, ranger. Companion wolf Boom. Grew up on the coast, in and out of a druidic circle, because her parents traveled. Not a practicing druid, she's a ranger. Done a little sailing. A little navigation, not a career sailor. People are an endless curiosity to her, she understands animals more.
Glen introduced Vincent Alleret, their Mooncalf waiter.
Glen: Vincent looks like a distinguished gentleman, but if you're perceptive, he has chemical stains on his fingers, his fingers are chewed up, burn scars. Looks like a smart dude, sharp eyes, average height (5'8"). If anyone has knowledge of the underworld, he's an agent of Miss Miller, a notorious boss.
Glen's daughter sketched Vincent too.
Thus assembled, they began to order dinner, but Burgess was immediately pulled away.
You're just sitting down with Burgess when a gray-haired man, maybe a businessman, comes into the room. He looks around the room for a few seconds until he spots Burgess, then quickly walks over and asks Burgess if he's the watch captain.
The man says he's Giles Ulm. Giles says when he got home from work just now, he found his wife Selma dead. Would Burgess come right away? When Burgess hears this, he becomes alarmed and says, "My lord, a death at Ulm House? You know Tamir Rabi was found dead just yesterday at House Hanan."
And then:
As Burgess and Giles are talking, you notice a young woman come into the room. She has a sword in her hand and a second sword in her belt. She scans the room for a few seconds, then approaches Burgess.
She asks, "Burgess Banks, of Lorentz House?" Burgess replies, "Yes, ma'am, I'm Burgess, the watch captain."
The woman asks again, "Burgess Banks, of Lorentz House?" and Burgess replies, "Yes ma'am, Lorentz House."
As Burgess says this, the woman suddenly and cruelly drives her sword through Burgess's chest. He slumps on the sword.
The woman then threw Burgess and her sword into the pipe racks on the wall, sending splintered pipes everywhere. She turned to leave but Vincent acted, attacking with his waiter's knife. We rolled initiative, and Glen rolled highest, so Vincent immediately struck again. In the meantime, Beale went to Burgess, and finding him still alive, stabilized him with Cure Wounds.
The woman summoned five swarms of ineffective bats, and she repeatedly failed to grapple the characters. She did score a cruel sword hit on Samara, but Samara paid her back with Hellish Rebuke. The party fought her for three rounds, with Marina ultimately bringing her down. The party declared a few of their attacks nonlethal, hoping to interrogate the woman, but when she reached 0 hits, she dissipated into a mist, leaving her sword clattering on the ground.
The party gathered around Burgess and asked him about his attacker, but Burgess didn't know anything about her. They asked Burgess what he, Selma Ulm, and Tamir Rabi might have in common, and Burgess told them that all three were prominent in some of Hollin's biggest trading houses.
While the others talked with Burgess, Vincent examined the woman's sword, looking for e.g. a maker's mark. He found:
Bat's Head Sword
Vincent claimed the sword, but we changed it to a rapier, which suited Vincent better.
The party decided to investigate Selma Ulm's death at Ulm House, and look at Tamir Rabi's body, which had been taken to Meade Hospital Morgue.
Giles took them to Ulm House, where Selma's body was still on the kitchen floor. They struggled with Perception checks and didn't find any signs of foul play, but a young businesswoman appeared, Mira. Mira said she worked for Mr. Burbage at Garlington, Helmin, and Gibb, and Selma was a policyholder with Mr. Burbage. She wanted to confirm that Selma had passed away.
They moved to Meade Hospital Morgue. We discussed how Meade Hospital Morgue was a waiting morgue - bodies were kept for a few days with bells on their wrists and ankles to ensure they were actually dead before burial - and Marina coldly observed that a stake to the head would also ensure that people weren't buried alive. Looking at Tamir's body, they again struggled with Perception checks, but noticed the body was pale and eventually found a bite mark on the neck. The businesswoman Mira also appeared here, looking to confirm that Tamir was dead.
The party went to Mr. Burbage's office at Garlington, Helmin, and Gibb, near Market and Meade Streets. There they found:
The office is trashed - there are papers strewn everywhere, filing cabinets have their drawers open and the files have been dumped on the floor nearby. The filing cabinets, a desk, and some chairs are overturned and laying on the floor.
They saw Mr. Burbage leaning back in a chair with his feet up on the overturned desk, contentedly smoking a cigar. Beale recognized that "Mr. Burbage" was in fact Cankerblossom, the mischievous MC of Hollin's Black Cabaret.
They asked about the mess. Cankerblossom explained that as "Mr. Burbage," he'd organized a tontine for Garlington, Helmin, and Gibb. In a tontine, handpicked subscribers invest and receive interest payments each month. When a subscriber passes away, their interest payments are split between the remaining survivors, and when only one subscriber remains, he or she receives back all of the tontine's capital. So, being the tontine's last survivor can be very lucrative.
Cankerblossom said that the tontine he organized has become extremely lucrative in the last few weeks, because the tontine bought Volstead House's coca powder business and started to promote it on the street with free samples. So suddenly, the "wolves" among the tontine subscribers all wanted to be the last survivor, and have started to take the situation into their own hands. One of them broke into Mr. Burbage's office and stole the tontine subscriber list.
He offered them coca powder, but I'm not sure if anyone accepted.
Coca Powder Sample
They asked about the attacks on Burgess, Selma Ulm, and Tamir Rabi, and Cankerblossom said that Garlington, Helmin, and Gibb's privacy polices prohibited him from discussing the tontine's subscribers. But he said the subscriber list was in the wild, and he couldn't prevent the party from taking it back from the thief.
Vincent showed Cankerblossom the bat's head rapier he'd taken from Burgess's attacker, and Cankerblossom said the bat could be a symbol of Phyla House, who import bat guano from Hilde for making the Admiralty's gunpowder.
The party went to Phyla House and let themselves in. They found the house empty, including all of the beds, even though it was night. Vincent helped himself to 100 gp worth of gold candlesticks.
The house's library had a desk with some business ledgers, and a bookshelf with books for the House's business, like accounting, business law, and navigation. One book caught their eye, Hemophilia and Other Diseases of the Blood, and Marina claimed it.
Hemophilia and Other Diseases of the Blood
When Marina took it from the shelf, the shelf swung back revealing a wide spiral staircase going down, lit by flickering silver light.
Going down a few steps, they found some arches on the right-hand side of the stair, and looking down through them, they saw the stair spiraled around a kind of inverted tower or dry well, the Moonwell.
There were about twelve turns to the spiral, and the staircase had three or four landings on each turn, with doors. There was a floor at the very bottom of the well, with a shallow relief of the moon's face carved in it, about ten feet across. Occasionally on a lower turn of the spiral, they could see people coming out of one door and going into another, going about their business.
The players asked if the place seemed actively used, e.g., if there were scratch marks on the floor from doors opening frequently; yes.
Marina cast Pass Without Trace on the party, giving them a massive Stealth bonus, and they chose a marching order: Vincent, Beale, Mo, Marina, and Boom. But as they were discussing further tactics, a man came out of a door near them. Vincent quickly stabbed him in the neck, killing him, and the party pulled him back into the door he'd come out of.
Inside the room, they found a ragged elderly man in a cage. The cage included a work table with some books and chemistry supplies, and a second larger desk outside the cage contained more supplies.
They discovered the man was Manfred Unger, a friend of Gregor the Naturalist. Manfred said Phyla House had kidnapped him seventeen years ago when a rabies epidemic hit Phyla House's Hilde branch, and they'd been forcing him to research rabies prevention and cures ever since. Manfred also told them a few things he'd overheard during his seventeen years as a captive.
The party let Manfred go and headed down to the landing with two doors. They chose the right-hand door first. Inside they found a 30' × 30' private chapel with three prayer alcoves:
A woman was on a kneeler in front of the sleeping figure alcove - Lolani Phyla. They fought, with Lolani using many of the same tactics that Burgess's attacker at the Mooncalf had used. Lolani summoned five bat swarms, and one scored a critical on Vincent for fifteen in Round 3, forming a tornado of bats around him. But Vincent struck back, finishing Lolani with his rapier between her ribs.
They searched Lolani and found Cankerblossom's tontine subscriber list.
They took a minute to look over and discuss the list. Since Helmholtz was on the list, they went the next day to check up on him, but found him already dead with a poison dagger to the heart.
I awarded an inspiration point for Glen roleplaying Vincent's "skeevy" personality, but Glen corrected this to "distinguished."
One or two mysteries are left unsaid in this writeup, but I'll add them if we don't play these characters again or when their stories are resolved.
