A multi-table night: two parties working the same square, two DMs running them, and the standing rule that the tables could talk to each other, trade with each other and heal each other — just not fight each other.
This table: Princess Hobnip, goliath arcane archer; Zlatan, dwarf bard; Kiln, druid; Bugrump, goblin; Sira, paladin; and Amarin.
The job
A friend put each of them in touch with Sima, a Harper agent, who paid 25 gold pieces a head to go and look into a rumour: that the Red Wizards of Thay were planning something sinister in Rashemen.
That is how the party came to be standing in Immilmar — a place that anywhere else would be a large town, and here is the closest thing the country has to a cosmopolitan hub. Four plazas around a central square, wooden buildings and makeshift market stalls, and at the centre of each plaza a pegasus carved from rare wood, newly raised and newly dedicated. A woman stood where all four plazas could see her:
The spirits of Rashemen and the souls of its people are represented by these beasts, full of power, both natural and magical. Let these statues remind us of who we are and what we must always be. May the spirits guide us.
The crowd bowed its head. Outsiders clapped politely.
Four plazas, four statues
Red-robed figures stepped forward, one into each plaza, and screamed in unison for the crowd to prepare to serve Thay and its masters. The pegasi came off their plinths as winged monstrosities with light moving inside their bones — and where each red-robed figure had been standing there were now four hovering blades, spinning and slashing at whoever was nearest.
The square was full of people, ankle-deep in water, and every square of it was difficult terrain. The party went for the big one first and left the swords for later, which cost civilians their lives: the blades cut down bystanders two and three at a time while the winged beast was being brought down.
Notable work in that fight:
- The beast was commanded prone and held there, poisoned by an Enfeebling Shot, slowed by the longbow's mastery, and finished inside a cloud of daggers.
- Princess Hobnip gave up on shooting one of the swords, jumped, and caught it out of the air by the hilt — then carried it across the plaza and threw it into another sword, on the theory that anyone who has seen a robot cage fight knows how this goes.
- A firebolt was spoiled when a fleeing civilian shoved the caster aside mid-cast.
With the plaza clear, the party started across the square toward the other table, which was still fighting.
The spirits have a greater plan for you
The woman who had addressed the square stepped forward afterwards. Some of them were outsiders, she said, and they had shown courage and decency; the spirits had a greater plan for them. Then she paused, listening to something only she could hear.
The attack had been one part of a larger plot. Thayan intruders were trying to capture the magic-making brethren of Rashemen — the Vremyonni — who had fled into the Ashenwood to escape them. The forest is sacred and normally closed to outsiders, but the spirits had told her that only outsiders could defeat those who had breached it.
She whistled, and an owl came down with a rod in its talons: intertwined plant stems covered in buds about to bloom, blessed by the spirits and crafted by one of the Vremyonni. That, three potions of greater healing, and a blessing — twice, any one of them could spend a reaction to let a creature within 60 feet reroll a failed ability check; after the second use the blessing would leave the whole group.
They took a short rest. There was a food stall, a tavern, and a shop selling scrolls, weapons and armour at 25 gold for a first-level scroll. Someone cast augury on the road ahead and got back: it was going to be rough.
The Ashenwood
No roads. The party tracked the Thayans by nature and survival, and worked out where they were probably headed by what they wanted — the old standing stones in the forest are magical, and the Red Wizards care about magic.
Then the bard tripped over their own feet while playing, the whole party went down after them like dominoes, and everyone took poison damage from magical poison ivy. Somebody took a faceful of it to save the lute.
The fog thickened. The trees started moving, and faces came out of the bark:
Why do you disturb our pine children? Why are each of you worthy of being allowed to continue? Tell us of a time you honoured the spirits of the natural world.
Kiln answered first, in Primordial, as a druid of the wildfire circle — the forest burns and is reborn, and that is what they honour. One answer landed badly enough to bring branches down on everyone. What finally worked was a cleric stabilising a dying plant with spare the dying, an honest argument that the people they were chasing burn and steal and do not replant, and the rod held up as proof of who had sent them. The faces sank back into the bark, and the party was permitted to pass.
Past that: a ravine twenty feet across, with a single fallen tree laid over it. They shot a rope across on an arrow, rigged three lines, and started over one at a time. An earthquake hit mid-crossing; the druid's fire spirit teleported the group to the far side. They noticed afterwards that there had been a second log ten feet away the whole time.
The standing stones
The forest opened into a clearing holding four sets of standing stones, each sealed inside a shimmering dome of green energy. Inside each dome a single Vremyonni held the barrier up while Thayan mercenaries pushed slowly through it from outside. High above the clearing, two wizards were duelling: one dressed like the Vremyonni, one in red robes.
Before anyone could get a closer look, the ground erupted and a zorn — three arms, three legs, a hide of rock — swallowed a boulder whole and came for the party. An attempt to talk it out of the fight in Primordial went nowhere; something had been done to it, and it fought as if it had no choice. It went down to a spiritual weapon, a cloud of daggers set on fire, arrows, booming blade and a vicious mockery about being dumber than a bag of rocks.
The barrier failed as the zorn died. The Vremyonni holding it dropped out of the sky onto the stones, and every Thayan in the clearing — mage, scouts, a berserker — turned on the party, with a flying red-robed enemy overhead throwing fear and necrotic magic.
What turned it:
- Plant growth cast over the clearing, seeded from the poison thistle the party had carried out of the forest on an arrow, turning the whole field into a crawl and poisoning everything standing in it.
- The party's second blessing, spent to reroll a saving throw that would otherwise have dropped someone.
- Princess Hobnip stepping to point-blank range, planting the bow against one foot the way he had as a small goliath, and putting an instant-crit Enfeebling Shot into the enemy for 29 damage.
- The Vremyonni, recovered enough to sit up, casting a mass heal that put 30 hit points back into every one of them.
The flying enemy came down. The last scout ran.
What they were told afterwards
The spirits were glad. But the Thayans have taken four of the Vremyonni — each of them well versed in crafting magical items and steeped in the power of the spirits — and this is feared to be part of something larger.
For the work in the clearing the party was given bone carvings worth 250 gold, a potion of lightning resistance, and bracers of archery.
The adventure continues in four further sessions, and everyone who came through it levels up.
Source · Reconstructed from the automatic transcript of the session recording (archive/transcripts/2026-09-09). Names heard once and never spelled are left unnamed rather than guessed.