Amber Ablaze – blogpost 7

The party goes back to the cabin in the woods with the ritual-basement. What I wanted to do previously – taking the sword from the stone – is now being done by Mivyre. I do not want it, because it is a simple longsword I already possess. The moment Mivyre pulls the sword from the stone, a little imp appears with a lot of trembling! We attack it and beat it, but we don’t see a large phantom coming out of the skeleton. Lurlille is very frightened by it, but luckily, together we defeat the phantom.

We leave the house together with the body of the imp and the longsword. We make way for Red Larch again, and along the way, we again see a goblin. This one is really drunk. We decide to follow him to see if he leads us to Mivyres’ lost shield (the one as big as a barn door). The goblin leads us to a goblin camp: around eight goblins are sleeping, drinking, and snacking around a few campfires. Celeste wants to negotiate with the goblins, but we think that is too dangerous. Lurlille disguises herself and scouts the camp instead. She returns and tells us about what she has seen: in a cave is a big temple with a coffin. We don’t know what it is, but we have too little info to scout further and proceed to Red Larch.

We enter the village and take a short rest. Our rest is interrupted by a loud noise. In the middle of the village, a sinkhole appears and a couple of people have fallen inside! I’ve never seen anything like this! We run towards it to help people. A couple of town elders keep everyone away from this spot. I get that, but it seems that they are hiding something. Solarion tried to follow a town elder but lost him because of the chaos. We descend into the sinkhole and find a tunnel and a door. What’s up with this…?

Solarion and Lurlille go and scout ahead. The rest of us stay behind. In a flash, we are all surprised by cages falling from the ceiling. A couple of us get trapped, but Celeste luckily climbs over the cages and disarms them. While we get to safety, Grunt (the market-man) stands at the other side of the tunnel and yells: ‘Go away! Go away! You guys shouldn’t be here!’ We agree to leave if he helps us to remove the cages, and he does. Celeste tries to grapple him when the cages are gone. This works out, and Lurlille helps by charming him.

I catch up to Celeste and Grunt. Grunt asks why we did not say the password. We tell him we forgot it, and he says: ‘We are the True Believers’. Weird. What are the True Believers? Grunt thinks we already know everything but he still gives us a bit more information. The Believers is a cult that worships the Moving Stones below Red Larch. Nobody can access the Moving Stones that lie deeper in the cave. Grunt is not a member, but a couple of people in the village are:

• Marlandro Gaelkur (barber)
• Baragustas Harbuckler
• Ropharr Hatherhand
• Ilmelth Waelvur

We walk into another room and see a little boy trapped below a stone. We get angry and ask Grunt how long that boy is trapped. Apparently, the boy is being punished – he is lying here for a couple of days. We release the boy. His name is Bralen. On the stone, a gravestone, a sentence is printed: ‘Displease not the Believers’. How ominous. I don’t like this at all. Bralen wants to leave as soon as possible, but we are contemplating where to go next…