Belial's Children

Scribe Notes

Were kicking the game off on the week of the 20th. Add your name below if you're interested

Summary

Adventure: Belial's Children

GM: Jim Arona
Season: Winter 826 WK
Night: Wednesday, 22/07/26, 7:30 pm Auckland time.
Online: Discord
Level: Low/Medium

Party

• Slaydar loyal orc-servant of Artephious- played by Terry Spencer
• Artephious - A non-Frog prince and E&E - played by Ed Douglas[[
• Renae - Earth mage halfling
• TBA - TBA - played by Paul
• TBA - TBA - played by TBA

Time on adventure

1 Frost 826 WK to ??? 826 WK

Employer

Just this guy

Mission

"the children of Belial, are gone out from among you, and have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city"

In theory, a short engagement, featuring the passage of a moon, wickedness and Astrologick certainty.

This will be a short game of, perhaps, as few as four sessions, and will be played over Discord, etc..

Go ye unto the realm of Nualis and the land of Nabatea, and take ye the measure of they who abide in the wilderness. Those that are wise in the ways of sandy wastes, those that know the paths of river and sea, and those who have understanding of high courts and can drink of a cup of tea without breaking wind in sulphurous eructation, will receive a weekly stipend of fifty silver pence per Rank per week.Those proficient in the unnamed skill double the emolument.

Pay

The lettera di cambio is in the mail.

Scribe Notes

Party (in alphabetical order)

Artephious

Renae

Slaydar

Artephius, Greater Noble of Alusia — in service to the Seagate Adventurers' Guild — writes.

Chapter 1: The Anonymous Patron and the Long Road to Nabatieh

The guild hall had been all but empty for a month, the rest of our fellows long since scattered to their own ventures, and only three of us remained when the work came to find us. I will set us down as we stood that day. I present myself as I am: a man of perhaps seven-and-twenty, handsome enough by my own reckoning, though I will concede I am slight of build and no one's idea of a bodyguard, with my small companion Furze — a manticore-like creature scarcely larger than a cat, still very young and content to ride in my pack. Slaydar I need hardly describe to myself, having kept his company long enough; he introduces himself, with his customary theatre, as my manservant, the fellow who carries things for so important a person as myself, which is precisely the fiction he enjoys maintaining and which I have long since stopped correcting. He stands a little over five feet, an orc in scrupulously clean holy robes, wreathed as ever in an odour that no cleanliness of cloth can touch, his right hand a prosthetic of orange crystal.

The third of us was the newest to me: Renae, a halfling earth-mage whom the others had already taken to calling Terra, sporting a white beard so magnificently false that only a very charitable observer would credit it. He is still finding the shape of his own abilities, but he contributes ideas readily, and I have learned to value that more than polish. Three of us, then, remained to hold the hall when the work walked in.

And walk in it did, in the person of a man who sauntered. I use the word deliberately: he arrived with the studied casualness of someone who wished very much to be taken for no one in particular, and who was therefore certainly someone. He wanted, he said, a matter investigated, and he wanted above all to be able to deny ever having been present to ask for it. That sort of preamble tells you a great deal before a single detail of the work is spoken.

I asked the man his name, as one does. He declined it, and reasonably so, since to name himself would undo the entire purpose of his visit; he would leave us a place to meet rather than any means of being contacted. I knew him regardless. I have chosen to keep that knowledge to myself, and I see no reason to commit it to these pages either. There are advantages in being the only member of a party who understands precisely whom he is dealing with.

The task, once he came to it, was this: somewhere within a great desert, something was stirring, forcing out of the land an unusual quantity of fantastical activity, spiritual disturbance welling up where it had no business to. He wished to know the cause. He would carry us to a city called Nabatieh and leave us there to find it. He warned us, too, of the road: a narrow shore giving onto a far vaster desert, cold at this season, particularly by night. It snows in the desert, he told us, which I noted as the sort of fact that sounds like poetry until you are the one shivering in it.

He produced a scroll for Slaydar with the air of a man offering a gift, and Slaydar, never one to wait upon ceremony, simply grabbed for it. There followed a brief and undignified tussle from which Slaydar emerged the clear victor, being a great deal stronger than our anonymous friend, and muscled the thing free. It proved a blueprint for the construction of a house of bone, an intricate working well beyond the reach of most, though I have no doubt Slaydar will find a use for it, morbid and grand as all his ambitions tend to be.

We came then to the matter of money, which I confess interests me rather more than desert mysteries. It was Slaydar who named the figure — fifty thousand silver for the party, twelve and a half thousand apiece across four of us, though only three had presented ourselves that day — and the patron who accepted it without a murmur. He spoke throughout of our four, as though the missing member were merely elsewhere and expected, which as it happens he was. The whole sum was to be paid after the work, for roughly a month's labour, with any equipment bought from him charged separately. I said fifty thousand was fine. There is no sense talking a party down from a figure a companion has already set and the patron has already swallowed.

The equipment proved worth the separate reckoning. We each took a Circle of Protection, which Terra delightedly insisted on calling a green hula hoop and which I confess the description does not entirely misrepresent, at seven and a half thousand apiece. I bought myrrh besides, the medium I require for the greater enchantments, apportioned across three of us. And I indulged in a small collection of amulets from his stock, paying from my own purse: one of Luck, a Hypericum, a Carbuncle, and one of Elder Flowers. Slaydar armed himself similarly with a Hypericum, an Aquilegius, a Betony, and his own Elder Flowers. One equips oneself well when the road ahead is described in terms of snow, spirits, and things best not investigated.

Then the man opened a purse and tipped out what appeared to be a dozen mice bound onto a leather pad. They were not mice, or not originally: cattle, he explained, transformed down to that convenient size and held under a sleep meant to last a century. We took six as provisions, which is the sort of practical marvel that reminds me why I keep company with people who deal in such things at all. We laid in the rest of what a desert demands, too, cold gear and hot, water skins and barrels of it, mundane food against the day the transformed cattle proved unappetising. Terra offered his Bag of Holding, some eight cubic feet of it, for water storage, and Slaydar his stout backpack for the skins. Our patron, unexpectedly, gave us a small lecture on desert survival that had the ring of genuine experience: how much water a body needs in a day, the use of salt, the reading of one's own condition by the colour of one's water. I wrote it down. Sound advice does not care where it comes from.

Two smaller matters settled the arrangement. Terra asked whether he might repay me after the adventure for what I had covered on his behalf, and I agreed readily. A companion who owes you money is a companion you have every reason to see kept alive, at least until the debt is settled, and in a party as thin as ours that is no trivial consideration. And when the question of a leader arose, I declined it at once. Slaydar was nominated in my stead and accepted with evident pleasure. Let him carry the burden of command along with everything else; it suits the fiction, and it suits me better still to be led than blamed.

The man opened a rune-portal, and we stepped through. Such crossings exact their toll on all but the one who works them, and we came out the far side wrung utterly dry, every reserve of strength stripped from us in the passage, to find ourselves at Novodom in the early afternoon. We stopped to eat, and Terra brewed a tea from his herbalist's stores that put a measure of that lost vigour back into all of us. We passed the night at an inn our patron knew, while he went off about his own business until well after dark. Before I slept I set a warding upon myself, the old habit against ill dreams and worse intrusions, and it took cleanly. We all woke alive, which Slaydar pronounced another successful night, and which I have come to regard as no small achievement given the company I keep.

In the morning our host offered fresh warnings: fell beasts trouble the country near Novodom, and worse than beasts abroad in it — the hooded riders who serve the Dark Lord, whose true name I will not set down on any page of mine. He would not name them, and he was right not to. I know what they are. I did not say the name either, for naming such things can be an act with consequences of its own, and I would sooner be thought ignorant than be proven reckless. He studied the three of us then with a long, deliberate attention that may have been more than ordinary looking; I could not be certain. Slaydar returned the scrutiny through his third eye, that developing sense of his for what lies beneath a surface, and the two regarded one another for a moment like duellists deciding whether to draw.

We left through the west postern gate and stepped out into a ravine that had no right to exist. There had been no mountains there before, and yet here was rock rising sheer on either hand, and our guide walking into it as though he had done so a hundred times. Slaydar paused to summon Min from within his cloak. She and our patron fell into a long and evidently productive conversation, and I came away with the distinct impression, not for the first time, that Min is considerably cleverer than Slaydar credits.

A steady breeze blew into our faces the length of the defile. Terra crouched over a set of tracks left by some dainty-footed creature that had passed the same way, though he could tell us little of what had made them. And then we came to the thing I had half-expected from the moment the mountains appeared where no mountains should be. Slaydar saw it first, but I knew it on sight: a Pattern, worked into the ground, of the very kind I have walked once before. I recognised the danger and the shortcut in the same instant. We could go the long way around, or we could walk it. We chose to walk.

Our guide went first, and the preparation he made before setting foot on it told me a good deal about what we were in for. He drank a potion, wove several spells, brought out his own Circle of Protection, and pressed something to his forehead before stepping into the first great curve and through the first veil. Then he saw to us. He gave each of us a potion that lent a formidable steadiness of will for some hours, and Slaydar, drawing on his training as a military scientist, rallied us with a few inspiring words that firmed our resolve further still. I have learned not to sneer at his encouragements; whatever one thinks of the man, the effect is real.

The first veil was the worst of them. I passed it with room to spare, my will being one of the few things about me that has never been called feeble. Slaydar very nearly did not. I watched him falter at the threshold and then find some deep reserve within himself, muttering that he could not fail his lord, and push through by main force of stubbornness. It was at the second veil that matters turned genuinely alarming. Slaydar lost himself entirely, his composure and something more besides breaking apart, the stench about him worsening until even our unflappable guide asked, not unreasonably, whether he was Chaos-touched. I offered that he was merely lubricating himself to move faster, which satisfied no one and amused me privately. There was nothing for it but to haul him the rest of the way. I have not the strength to lift so much as a full pack, let alone an orc, so I dragged him bodily along the ground through the remaining veils, at no small cost to my own concentration, which is precisely the sort of indignity I entered this profession specifically to avoid.

Terra, meanwhile, was very nearly lost. Something in the Logros reached for him at the second veil and all but drew him in, and for a moment I thought we would lose our newest companion before I had properly learned his measure. He gathered himself, resisted, and pulled free. Somehow all three of us reached the centre of the Pattern, Slaydar unconscious and reeking, Terra shaken, and myself considerably the worse for having spent the crossing as a beast of burden.

At the centre our guide concentrated, and the world dissolved into colour. The Pattern whirled about us and tendrils rose from the ground, and then we were elsewhere: a gloomy place of very dark grey stone beneath a sky that gave almost no light, a road climbing away from us toward what might have been sun. Slaydar, recovering himself, promptly lost the contents of his stomach across the stone. Our guide told us to fix the place in memory, for we might have need of it again, and offered the observation that we had likely passed through the underworld to reach it. I fixed it in memory. One does not decline that kind of advice twice in as many days.

We spent the remainder of the day climbing the road, and came out toward five in the afternoon into a broad rift valley on Nualis: bright, dry, the ground a vivid orange clay, and not a drop of water within reach. Clouds came racing in far faster than clouds have any business moving. Our guide walked uphill, and one of them descended to meet him; he stepped onto it as onto a floor, and we clambered aboard after him. The flight to Nabatieh, he then admitted with the sheepishness of a man confessing a small dishonesty, would take four days rather than the shorter span he had implied. He had got the date wrong. Slaydar discovered that anything dropped upon the cloud fell straight through it, and was so delighted by the possibilities this suggested for the relief of his own person that I shall record no more of that particular conversation than necessary.

Four days aloft is a great deal of idleness, and idleness is the enemy of a mind like mine, but the others found employments. Terra spent three of those days training at a healing spell until he had it well in hand, which struck me as an eminently sensible use of the time given where we were bound. Slaydar, on the second day, took it into his head to ask our guide to halt his aging, and displayed his hands as evidence of some worthiness, those twisted, deformed things he is so oddly proud of. Our guide pronounced them a genuine work of art, marvelled that anyone could reduce a hand to such a state, and declined absolutely to touch them. Slaydar assured him it was a family trait; his father, apparently, had hands just the same. I have decided not to inquire further into the Slaydar lineage.

On the third day we passed a great port city in the distance and then crossed a narrow sea, some thirty miles across but running seven hundred long, bearing north and east. To the north the marshland rose into farmland of an extraordinary sophistication, worked with techniques far beyond anything a realm like Nualis should be able to produce. I examined it as closely as the distance and my own knowledge of husbandry allowed, and could find no ordinary explanation. Terra suggested witches, and I am not inclined to dismiss him. Our guide, notably, ordered us all to the cloud's left side, whereupon it tipped, gathered speed, and pulled sharply away over open water. If ever we had cause to flee this place, he warned, we must not flee toward that farmland. I underline the instruction here for whoever reads this after me. He also pointed out where, the following day, we would make our own entry into the desert, and bid us take careful notes.

The fourth morning found us perhaps a hundred miles from a defile in the mountain range that walls the desert's western edge, a gap some hundred metres wide through which a feeble, shallow, stagnant watercourse still leaked toward the sea down what had plainly once been a river. A mile or so inland stood a black castle upon a hill, dead in the centre of the two ranges that frame the desert's mouth. Slaydar asked who lived there. Our guide answered only that it was for our four, which I take to mean it is our destination whether we like the sound of it or not. I set myself to mapping the approach: three miles of sea, three of marsh, a mile of rocky defile, and then the hill. Terra tried to help, though he owns freely that his hand for charts and navigation is poor; I am the surer of us at fixing a position by the stars, and so I took that duty upon myself and produced at least a serviceable sketch of the ground.

We came down under cover of darkness about a mile and a half outside Nabatieh, and there our anonymous patron took his leave. He is not summonable, he told us plainly, so there would be no calling him back. Should we need him, we were to make for Axiom, a heavily populated trading city on the west bank well to the south, a station on the silk route, unexpectedly rich in alluvial gold, where luxuries and novelties fetch good prices. Then he was gone, and we were three foreigners on the edge of a desert with a month's work ahead of us and no way to say his name aloud.

We turned at once to the question of cover. Traders, we decided; it is the one disguise that explains a stranger going anywhere and asking after anything. I proposed we manufacture and sell crystals of vision as novelties, little scenes sealed in glass after the fashion of snow-globes, houses and storms and perhaps the likeness of whatever local lord holds sway, since flattery sells as readily as glass. Nabatieh, we learned, trades in frankincense and myrrh, gum arabic, perfumes, purple cloth and glassware out of Tyre and Sidon, white sandalwood, even the tails of camels. We settled at last on two thousand silver's worth of empty glass perfume bottles and a single ounce of white sandalwood at a considerable price. Slaydar and I paid for the cargo out of our own pockets, on the understanding that the party will repay us from the proceeds before any profit is divided; I have found it wise to keep such arrangements explicit before the money starts moving.

Maps, we discovered, are hard to come by here, the sort of people who keep them being rare. No matter. The castle stands upon a hill in the centre of the plain, and as our guide observed, one could hardly miss it. Our route, then, is down the coast, past or around the swamp, and on to the black castle. We discussed hiring on as caravan guards for the safety of numbers, which appeals to my instincts far more than crossing a haunted desert as three lone eccentrics with a bag of bottles. Terra explained the way of desert travel, that caravans move by night and rest by day, on camels rather than horses, and that the trick of surviving the heat is a covered trench dug below the surface of the sand with a spire raised above it to draw air through like a chimney. He proposed, more simply, that we strip away the top foot of sand and pitch our tent in the hollow, where the ground beneath runs cooler. It is a good notion, and I have marked it as our first line of defence against the sun.

We ended the day taking stock of Slaydar's own peculiar inventory, a survey I undertake with a mixture of professional interest and settled unease: his few remaining mummies, the great Antediluvian Tortoise, and a supply of flesh-devouring beetles capable of stripping a body to clean bone within the hour. Reassuring, in its way, to know precisely what my manservant carries. Less reassuring to contemplate the circumstances under which he expects to need it. Our fourth companion has yet to join us; the man is expected shortly, and our guide's persistent talk of our four suggests he, at least, considers the roster already complete. For now we are three at the desert's edge, a feeble noble, a malodorous necromancer, and a bearded halfling of uncertain whiskers, and I find I would not presently trade the arrangement for a warmer one.

---

OOC Details

Items Acquired (Session 1)
Artephius: Amulet of Luck Hypericum amulet Carbuncle amulet Elder Flowers amulet Circle of Protection Renae: Circle of Protection Slaydar: Bone Construction blueprint scroll Hypericum amulet Aquilegius amulet Betony amulet Elder Flowers amulet Circle of Protection Unassigned: Cattle transformed into sleeping mice Party (shared): White sandalwood Glass perfume bottles Party balance: 7,700 sp
Session Summary
Reduced to three while the rest of the Guild is away on other ventures and a fourth member has yet to arrive, the party is hired by an anonymous patron to investigate a spiritual disturbance welling out of a distant desert, for fifty thousand silver payable after roughly a month's work. After equipping themselves with Circles of Protection, amulets, and desert provisions, they travel by rune-portal to Novodom, walk a perilous Pattern that nearly claims Slaydar and Renae, and pass through what is likely the underworld to emerge on Nualis. A four-day flight aboard a summoned cloud carries them across a narrow sea to the desert's western edge, where a black castle on a hill is named as their eventual destination. They land near Nabatieh, part company with their patron, and adopt a trader's cover, laying in glass perfume bottles and white sandalwood before planning their route down the coast toward the castle.
Chronological Timeline
Date	Event
Day 1 (30 Harvest) — Guild	Anonymous patron hires the party; fifty thousand silver agreed, payable after a month's work
Day 1 — Guild	Equipment bought: Circles of Protection, amulets, myrrh, desert provisions, sleeping cattle-mice; Slaydar named party leader
Day 1, afternoon — Novodom	Rune-portal to Novodom; a meal and Renae's restorative tea
Day 1, evening — Novodom inn	Night at the inn; Artephius sets a warding against ill dreams
Day 2, morning — Novodom	Warnings of fell beasts and the unnamed "N" things; departure through the west postern into an impossible ravine
Day 2 — ravine and defile	Slaydar summons Min; Renae reads strange tracks; a Pattern found worked into the ground
Day 2 — the Pattern	The party walks the Pattern; Slaydar falters and is dragged through; Renae nearly lost to the Logros
Day 2 — underworld waypoint	Transport to a gloomy grey-stone place, likely the underworld; fixed in memory
Day 2, ~5pm — Nualis	Emergence into the Rift Valley; the party boards a summoned flying cloud
Cloud flight, days 1–4	Four-day flight to Nabatieh begins; Renae trains a healing spell over three days
Cloud flight, day 2	Slaydar asks the patron to halt his aging; his hands admired but declined
Cloud flight, day 3	A port city passed; a narrow sea crossed; anomalous farmland sighted and avoided
Cloud flight, day 4, morning	The black castle sighted on its hill, named the party's destination
Cloud flight, day 4, night	Landing near Nabatieh; the patron departs, naming Axiom as the rendezvous
Nabatieh	Trader cover adopted; perfume bottles and white sandalwood bought; route to the castle planned; Slaydar's stock reviewed

Buffs & Mil Sci

Buffs

Long Term (assumed always on)

Magic (caster)	Rk	Effects	Duration	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA
TBA)

Self Only

Magic (caster)	Rk	Effects	Duration	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA
TBA (TBA)
TBA (TBA)
TBA	Rk
TBA
TBA	Rk
TBA

Short Term (cast when needed)

Magic (caster)	Rk	Effects	Dur	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA
TBA (TBA)
TBA(TBA)
TBA (TBA)
TBA (TBA)

Cast by minions and retainers

Magic (caster)	Rk	Effects	Dur	Location	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA
TBA (TBA )
TBA (TBA )
TBA (TBA )
TBA (TBA )
TBA (TBA )

Senses and other stuff

TBA	Rk	Effects	Dur	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA
TBA (%)
Detect Ambush (%)		Ranger (-5/rank of opposition)
TBA
See Invis (Rk)		Effective rank for seeing invisible
Stealth (%)		Standard / Ranger Outdoors

Misc

Greater Enchantment

(TBA ) rank ??

Enhance Enchantment

(TBA ) rank ??:, ?? seconds

Remove Curse

(TBA ) MA ??

Herbalist Lunch/Broth

?? rk ?, Meal ? FT or Broth ? FT

Watch Order

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12
1		2		3		4		5		6

Marching Order

Skirmish Formations (Front)
Default	Double File	Single File ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ???

Calendar

Winter: Frost 826(7)
	Moonday		Duesday		W'ansday		Th'rsday		Frysday		Reapsday		Sunday
		Samhain	1	Guild Meeting Seagate	2		3		4		5		6
	7		8		9		10		11		12		13
	14		15		16		17		18		19		10
	21		22		23		24		25		26		27
	28		29		30		1		2		3		4
Winter: Snow 826 (8)
	5		6		7		8		9		10		11
	12		13		14		15	Solstice	16		17		18	Yuletide
	19	Days of Chaos	20	DoC2	21	DoC3	22	DoC4	23	DoC5	24	DoC6	25	DoC7
	26	DoC8	27	DoC9	28	DoC10	29	DoC11	30	Twelfth Night	1		2
Winter: Ice 826 (9)
	3		4		5		6	First Plough	7		8		9
	10		11		12		13		14		15		16
	17		18		19		20		21		22		23
	24		25		26		27		28		29		30