The Road to Harrow Keep

This is before the recordings, and is set down from the notes.

The company that left for Harrow Keep was bigger than the one that came back from the Pools. Wynn brought a friend — Thalia, a halfling who used to investigate for the City Watch, until she asked one question too many and they helped her find the door. And the Temple of Bahamut sent Drakov, a red dragonborn cleric, to keep the Duke's daughter alive; his high priest had heard where Lady Sera was going and did not care for it.

The forest, the ogre, and the ambush

They travelled the way you travel the Thornwood: Kaelen hunting, Wynn cooking a deer into stew, everyone taking a watch. It bought them one quiet night. In the morning an ogre came into the camp, put Sera on the ground unconscious, and opened Drakov up before anyone was properly awake. Quill turned it — a Shattering Barrage that staggered the thing — and Wynn finished it. In its leavings: forty-two gold, a Potion of Diminution, and a Potion of Resistance against poison, which the party would be very glad of within the week.

They did not get far before Thalia spotted the next one coming: kobolds, lying in wait. Quill dropped three of them with a Sleep before they could move, Kaelen pinned the rest in Entangle, and the ambush turned into a rout — though not before the kobolds answered with poison darts, magic missiles and a lungful of poison gas. The last one alive threw down its weapons to Drakov. The party did not kill it. They kept it, and the ones asleep in the grass, and now they had prisoners.

Turning kobolds into guides

The largest of them was Torque, and Lyrique got further with a cup-and-ball game than anyone got with a threat. Over the game the party learned how the Poison Scale think: they worship the dragon Verdanthis as a god, they believe she lairs at Harrow Keep, and they are forever at war with the gnolls — "dog men" — over hunting ground in the deep forest.

That last part was a lever. The party rested inside a magical Haven and came out with a plan: trade the kobolds a solution to their gnoll problem for the thing in the keep. Torque led them in.

Harrow Keep

Harrow Keep is a ruin now: broken walls, a rusted portcullis, a well gone dry, and one great tree filling the courtyard. Chief Scris "The Claw" met them, and Sera and Lyrique talked while the rest of the party counted exits. Mid-bargain, the chief let one sentence slip that was worth the whole trip: "the great one left the bowl in our charge." Verdanthis was not at the keep. She had handed the relic to the kobolds and gone to lair somewhere else. The Tess-Kydra was here. The dragon was not.

Then Scris decided he liked his odds and called the attack, and the courtyard came apart.

Quill held the middle of it — Freeze and Sleep — while Thalia put sneak-attack arrows into the field from cover. It was not clean. Kobolds breathing green poison ichor cut Wynn and Kaelen badly; Sera was dropped to nothing by a longsword and dragged back by Drakov's magic; and Quill was knocked out of the air by a volley of magic missiles, failed a death save on the way down, and was saved by a second Healing Word with no margin left. What ended it was Drakov and his mace: a critical hit that killed Chief Scris outright. Lyrique froze the kobolds' spellcaster mid-word with Hold Person, and Wynn hogtied him.

What the keep was hiding

There was more keep to clear — a kobold priest that Quill killed instantly with a Guiding Bolt, warriors, and a drake that Kaelen took the head off with a critical Hunter's Mark strike. And then, at last, the Tess-Kydra itself: the vessel the city needed, a battery for the broken stone under the Warrens.

Thalia picked the lock on a chest, and the chest held more than money. Three hundred eighty-five gold — fifty-five a share, seven ways. Two amulets, neither of them identified. A ranger's heraldry that had no business being in a kobold hoard. And, folded away and hidden, a letter.

It was written in the year 934 by Commander Edric Harrow, who held this keep during the Green War, and it said the thing no history book says. The keep's forces never beat the forest. They were losing, and to survive they were forced into a secret treaty — the Greenwood Pact — and then Harrow buried the truth so the crown would go on believing the war had been won.

Kaelen took the ranger's heraldry, and started wondering aloud how many senior rangers had walked into this forest over the years and not walked out. The party did not wait around to find out. A kobold had escaped, and might come back with worse. They took the relic, the gold, the unidentified amulets and the letter, and ran for the tree line.