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Winter 1245

Cieran is planning a new adventure to hunt down the vampires.

Rumours gathered

• Cieran’s Plan
  1. Check with the Italian and with our trade partner in Limerick if there are news.
     • generally reveals that prices have slowly normalized and no new river camps have been established.
  2. Check with the villagers of An Scairb if they have picked up news from further South.
  3. Collect gossip in some of the trade posts; this is delegated to grogs and companions; if someone can draw street maps, they are volunteered. We can always dispatch a peddlar with some goods to sell as a cover story.
  4. Cieran scouts out the trade posts, and prepares a breakin into the keep.
  5. Break into a keep to search for clues.
  • … assuming of course that we are not derailed by good clues 🙂
• The DeBurca and to a lesser extent Draytons both confirm this.
  • There is still a dosturbing trend of attacks at night on roads, so such travel is more actively discouraged than before… but the attacks are less bloody. Sometimes robberies, sometimes a travelling party just dissapears. There were reports of more bloody attacks like before but they were last know to be in the neigh orhood of Dublin and your sources lost track of those.
• Lord DeBurca reports that the local Faeries he treats with have calmed down a bit, saying things lile the “Blood crazed warrior has moved on, but there is still a stench of foreign rats about.”
• #2 The villagers are quite happy with your version of the river camp (this was the village you all invrsted in?)… they are also quite pleased that the other camps have slowly raised their prices and those people don’t throw money around like its water anymore. This has helped grow their new trade a bit.
• #3 There are a number of rumors.
  • A sickness that comes from imported wine will give you nightmares and impotence for months.
  • Many people are looking for or lamenting after missing loved ones at the camps and in general in the water/boat related trades. Grown men sometimes seem to be quietly cryong thenselves to sleep. It isn’t something talked about openly but the covenant, the two families, and the villagers have all run into this rather quiet rumor.
  • A spirit of the rivers has been seizing greedy people when they are alone. Sometimes this is told as an angel doing it.
• You dispatch the peddler, he gets those three rumors among more mundane ones… but mid season he does not check in.
  • mid-Winter? Oops. We send a team of grogs to investigate, while Cieran completes the arrow spells …
• #3 The grog party does discover the site of where the peddler is ambsuhed. The peddlers wares were taken but strangely, his clothes and boots were mostly burned in a hastily dug fire pit. A small, hardened leather purse, a recogizable wedding gift, is recognized by his wife despite being pretty charred. The fire was seemingly left to burn out unattended, as simple tending would have easily ensured everything burned to ash completely.
  • South of Limerick - Along the roads that run in the area of the river camps
  • The grog scouts can take you there
  • They burried the fire pit in a little mound, sort of a funeral without a body. One of the Grogs was a close friend.

Spring 1245

Vampire Hunt

Session 1. 20 September

Cast Cieran, Una, Dermot, Blair, Greta, and four non-descript hunters led by Dermot

Pieter the Peddlar, one of the covenant grogs, disappeared in Winter during his mission to collect news, Other grogs find the place where he was ambushed. Some burnt clothing is left behind, but the peddlar and his wares have vanished. Cieran organises the party to track him down.

Stopping at a tradepost, they learn that there are rather few free townsmen there. They do not recognise a lord, but the tradepost owner.

Before they get to the ambush site, they have the idea to use Pieter’s clothing and the Inexorable Search. Una locates him a little North of Gorth in Connacht. Cieran makes a reckless Leap of Homecoming, not home but, to whereever Pieter is, using the same arcan connection. He ends up in a dark basement where Pieter is chained to the wall weakened by torture. After some debriefing, Pieter is sent home to the covenant with a cookie, and Cieran explores the castle.

Cieran blows the doors open with dart making the wood rot. Apart from the prison cell, the basement serves as storeroom for tradegoods. Exiting upstairs, he finds himself in the courtyard of a ruined castle. One tower has been restored. The courtyard is full of villages toiling. There seem to be guards on the encircling wall.

He talks to the villagers, who appear more like mindless thralls, One of them, called Janine, is a little bit forthcoming, and Cieran takes her home with cookies.

Pieter’s Story Many of the tradeposts are run by a single man. There are men speaking Norwegian and English as well as Irish. Travelling between them, Pieter was surrounded by men-at-arms. He ran but was caught. Everything became very big and he could not move. He gathers he was made small and put in a purse. Next he knew, he woke up in shackles.

Bridget can tell a legend from Stonehenge, about pretend romanes who make such stone statues.

Janine’s story There are guards on the walls of the castle. They bring food. If they misbehave, they are brought to a room in the basement. They get everything they need, and delicious wine. There are about sixty villager; some English and one Frenchman, but he left.

There are six so-called night-men plus a short one. They never show their faces, The leader is tall with a long nose.

Between Sessions

Just after most of the party returned to Elk’s Run a Redcap comes to deliver a letter. It reads:

To the Magi of Elk’s Run,

By the time this reaches you I will have left the Isle of Hibernia. You may know me as one of the Turb Captains of the Bronze Portal Expedition. I was the Quartermaster and Master of Secrets for the Tremere Covenant of Sol Majorus all those years ago. It was not my choice to rise as I have, but I find myself quite alive - at least in the way that the Faerie are. Like all of my kind, I am driven by the desire for family, for kin. Thus I have taken great pains to travel far away so I might live in peace.

The recent ambitions of Vincenzo, who you know as owner of the many river camps, has seen him draw on three of the five treasury shares to fuel his Roman revival ambitions. Vincenzo is intelligent, a skilled leader, he was the Ship Master for our covenant and expedition. He is also obsessed with his Roman heritage. Over the centuries of our confinement, our hunger, he busied himself with dreams of empire.

I have no interest in the little empire Vincenzo is trying to forge. I do not have anything against the Merinita Shade who you know as the Italian Doctor. I care not for the Beast who has lost himself in bloodlust. I do not know where our Scout Master is, though I would say he is an honorable sort. Not that I could find him, or want to find him in the wilderness that is his element. Most importantly I have no quarrel with you, the other Magi of Hibernia, or the Order.

To that effect, I offer you my personal pledge of peace between us, gesture of leaving the Tribunal, and the caution that Vincenzo is quite insane. I am aware of what I have become, more deeply than the others, and this allows me to see that the little emperor has become unhinged and a danger to the folk of Hibernia. I would also remind you that by the Code of Hermes ye shall not molest the Faerie when they entreat you well, as I have done. This expedition has been a fool’s errand of more than three centuries and I give you my wholehearted promise that I shall not seek to trouble you again.

Fare thee well Magi,

One of the four, one you need hunt no further.

Magister in Medicina, Connell DeBurca, has COM +2, Teaching 5 (Single Student), and an Animal Ken of 5 … He is happy to teach you for the season. As stated before, it is a gesture of goodwill on behalf of his family and himself… though if you consider payment his request is that you never strike such fear into him as you did with that gaze (he can laugh about it now though).

Magister DeBurca also extends the offer of instruction, for reasonable trade, to anyone at Elk’s Run. Magi get their first season free - a gift from his brother Lord Fergus DeBurca.

Session 2. 27 September

Session 3. 4 October

Rewards

• Confidence Points 4
• Source Quality 15xp

Search and Rescue for Derghie

Session 1.

Grogs harvest rumours and learn that

• drowned men haunt the shore towards Connacht since the disappearance of Derghie. Archimedes can also convey this.
• fishermen in Sheepsbay clainm to have seen two wyrms.
• the lake is full of faeries, but they are harmless. Annoying pranksters, but harmless.

The party establishes a camp on the opposite shore from Sheepsbay.

Other events

• Yves completes the copy of the Folio of 1186