Session 11 - The Full Moon, the Wormy Refugees & Through the Gate

Players: Reyna, Lyasra, Cassandra, Theren, Gaille (Ireena present as NPC)

Summary:

  • Picked up at about 8 p.m. at Luvash’s Vistani camp, the same night as Session 10. Luvash and Arrigal served a stew dinner; it was some of the best food the party has had in Barovia.
  • The Vistani children ate at a table in the middle of the tent, each tied by a rope around the waist to the tent’s center. Luvash explained that tonight is a full moon: on such nights the Vistani hold “sleepovers,” tie the children down and have the able-bodied keep watch.
  • Kasimir advised against going into Vallaki tonight: things that go bump in the night are stronger under a full moon, and the Vallakians are especially prepared on such nights (they held a festival last full moon). He offered the party his hovel, one of about eight around the tent.
  • After dinner, Ireena announced she would spend the night with the Barovian refugees: they are her people, and as the late Burgomaster’s daughter it is her duty to care for them. Theren objected that she is the party’s charge and they’d heard refugees were being abused and burned; Ireena insisted. The whole party went with her. Kasimir asked to come too, to finish his “study appointment” with Gaille, and brought papers and several books. Reyna carried whoever needed carrying.
  • The refugee camp (about 15 minutes’ walk, right outside Vallaki’s iron gates): a palisaded town wrapped in fog, two guards behind the gates, half a dozen pikes topped with wolves’ heads, and roughly 50 gaunt, hollow-eyed Barovians around campfires. Few children are left.
  • Emeric (a melancholy grey-haired older man Reyna had met in Session 10) and Magda (a young woman with dark circles under her eyes) greeted Ireena. Magda asked what had happened to her hair (“the new style,” said Ireena) and whether the party had been sent by the Vallakian Burgomaster to finally take them in.
  • The infestation (Lyasra, natural 20 Perception):
    • The Barovians eat and drink constantly — mostly water, some wine — and many were eating Morgantha’s pies.
    • Lyasra smelled something sharp and spicy, then saw a refugee lying stripped on the ground, shivering, with long white lines across their arms and body.
    • Magda rolled up her sleeves to show the same veins spreading across her own body. The children have it worse: their lines are darker and move beneath the skin. It began a few weeks ago when they arrived; it comes and goes, darkening, moving, or fading for days.
    • When Reyna (immune to disease) touched the shivering refugee, flakes of skin came away, and where the white lines ran she jerked her hand back.
    • Reyna’s Divine Sense found no undead nearby.
  • The pies: Theren (Medicine) recognized a heavy dose of the sedative herb he’d studied near Tser Falls; the pie smells pungent. The vegetable pie’s filling was slimy and viscous, and its “cheese” was globules that pop like boba. Cutting one open showed only a strange liquid, nothing alive.
  • Lyasra cast purify food and drink through her feather on a pie. She felt a crushing resistance, like pushing a boulder over a ledge, and was left winded and sweating; the pie looked the same afterward. She then grew drowsy, strangely at ease and at peace, and resisted falling asleep (natural 20). She told the party something had tried to stop her spell.
  • Water: the refugees bucket their water from Lake Zarovich. Ireena added that the lake has streams and rivers running outward. Asked above the table, the GMs checked the map: Tser Falls, where the party saw the strange owlbear and vultures, does not connect to Lake Zarovich by water.
  • Emeric on the pies: the refugees have eaten them for weeks, ever since arriving after undead attacked their home. They make worries go away and bring the most pleasant dreams, and some just want to go back to the dream. But not everyone has eaten them — Emeric showed his own veins, white-blue with something wriggling beneath, though he said he hadn’t had a pie.
  • Cures: Reyna used Lay on Hands on Emeric and Magda (Ireena’s two chosen friends): the movement stopped, but the marks remained. Theren cast lesser restoration on Jen, a child whose lower right leg was riddled with lines (“my leg hurts”); the wriggling stopped. Jen’s father was nearby, eating pies; her mother isn’t in the camp. Reyna won Jen over with candy and now carries her in a baby-carrier sling; Theren has declared her “his child.”
  • The autopsy: Theren wanted a specimen. Magda and Emeric instead brought two recently deceased refugees. Theren (Nature, with Lyasra’s help) found large pustular boils incubating worm creatures — larva-like in the skin, pupa-like inside the corpses. The boils were hard and icy to the touch. Each creature was encased in a slushy, not-quite-ice gel like a freezer gel pack, in a membrane that popped to reveal a cool, jelly-like interior. The party concluded the dead are incubators.
  • Kasimir wasn’t surprised the Barovians are unwell, but was surprised how bad it is: in his hundreds of years here he has never seen this, and he gagged. A pie maker has been coming to Vallaki regularly for about three months (three lunar cycles); her wares were an attraction at Vargas’s festivals this last month. The Barovians only arrived this last month.
  • Gaille’s Void Child was fascinated, even mesmerized, by the creatures, and sent her images of a ghostly angelfish and swirling liquid. Gaille couldn’t tell whether this is something new or something old now being put to use.
  • The gate: Reyna used her background feature on the guards (Persuasion with advantage, 18). One guard stammered that he couldn’t let her in past curfew because “Strassney” wouldn’t let him; the other pulled him aside and said they could help her in the morning. Ireena still wouldn’t leave her people, but agreed to go into town because something is clearly wrong and must be dealt with now. Reyna then intimidated the guards (with advantage), and they opened the gate as the refugees tensed. The guards told the party to head quickly to the Blue Water Inn without being seen, and split Reyna’s 10 gp bribe.
  • Into Vallaki went the party, Ireena, Emeric, Magda and Jen. As they left the gate behind, they heard someone shouting at the guards, a scream, a burst of fire at the gate, then a lullaby played on a grass whistle. Theren assumed the guards had just been killed.
  • Belinda: Gaille took out the doll to comfort Jen. Before Theren could take it away, she felt a longing, as if they were in the right place — feelings that were neither hers nor the Void Child’s. She did not give the doll to Jen.
  • The session ended at night inside Vallaki, with no long rest yet. Reyna plans to take off her armor, put on commoner clothes and gather information overnight so that in the morning the party can “stab the right people.” Other night activities are to be handled over Discord.

Key revelations & consequences:

  • The refugees are infested with parasitic worms: white-blue lines under the skin, worse and darker in children, creatures that move, hunger, shivering. The dead act as incubators, with icy, gel-encased pupae in hard boils.
  • Lay on Hands and lesser restoration stop the worms moving but don’t remove the marks.
  • Morgantha’s pies contain the Tser Falls sedative herb and boba-like globules, and resisted purify food and drink. But Emeric is infected without having eaten a pie, so the pies may not be the source. The refugees drink Lake Zarovich water.
  • Ireena was recognized by her own people (Magda, Emeric) despite the dye.
  • The party is inside Vallaki at night after curfew, by bribery and intimidation. Something violent happened at the gate behind them.
  • The party now travels with three Barovians: Emeric, Magda and the child Jen.
  • Belinda reacted in Vallaki: a longing, “the right place.”
  • Kasimir’s private conversation with Gaille still hasn’t happened.

Key NPCs established/developed:

  • Emeric, Magda and Jen (new; see their entries)
  • Kasimir: came to the refugee camp; shared what he knows of the pie maker and the Barovians’ arrival
  • Luvash: the Vistani full-moon tradition
  • Ireena: chose her people over safety; agreed to enter Vallaki
  • Morgantha (by reputation): her pies are everywhere in the refugee camp and popular in Vallaki

Open threads:

  • Who or what is “Strassney”? (Possibly Izek Strazani; unconfirmed.)
  • What happened at the gate after the party went in: who shouted, who screamed, the fire, and the grass-whistle lullaby?
  • Where do the worms come from: the pies, the lake water, or both? Did purify food and drink work on the pie, and what pushed back?
  • Will the treated refugees stay cured? What happens to the rest of the camp, and to Jen’s father?
  • Why did Belinda feel she was “in the right place”?
  • Did Kasimir follow the party into Vallaki? His private conversation with Gaille is still pending.
  • Reyna’s night of information-gathering; the Blue Water Inn; finding Arabelle and Stella in the morning.
  • Lycius is still asleep from the pie.

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