With everyone now properly dressed and equipped we set out towards
Altdorf to follow the army of cultists. The journey was pleasant and
uneventful right up until we approached the village of Pfeifeldorf and
were stopped by a road warden. Much to his confusion we conversed
relatively civilly with him, given that he was accusing us of being
criminals. He had a drawing that he claimed was a picture of Mormacar.
While it was definitely a picture of an elf, Mormacar felt it didn't in
any way do him justice, and Frida agreed that the hair didn't look
nearly good enough.
We asked him for his credentials, and he
revealed a signet ring that Frida identified as belonging to the Speier
family. ("Who would have thought that skill would come in useful?")
His rather generic pictures of another elf, two dwarves and a halfling
didn't convince us that anything was on the up and up here, and we
weren't particularly keen on the idea of being arrested, but agreed to
accompany him to the village once we learned it had a pub.
We
were assured that the whole matter could be easily cleared up if we
dealt with a small village matter of a missing chicken. He reckoned it
had been eaten by the passing crusade, but its owner, Gertrude, insisted
that it hadn't.
Gertrude, a very tall woman, paused her current
activity of cleaning graffiti off her house and showed them the hen
coop, where they found signs of forced entry and some purple fibres.
Gertrude's neighbour, an insane old man whose farm had been destroyed by
the crusade, was found using a purple handkerchief, which on closer
inspection had been torn from a larger piece of cloth like a cloak or
tabard. It even had some heraldry on it, which Frida was unable to
identify.
Missing animals seemed to be an issue in Pfeifeldorf, with a young boy missing a rat and someone else missing a goat.
We paid a visit to the town scribe, a person of proper height (dwarf
edition). Alas, without a name he was unable to determine much about
the heraldry on the purple fabric. We promptly went to the pub.
Unsurprisingly, the landlord was missing a dog. (Was someone stealing
animals to stack them into a nice statue?) We also encountered the
bailiff and a female friend, and engaged in a nice game of cards that
Mormacar won. The bailiff was drinking water, something perceived as an
act of great bravery by all present.
Finally, we paid a visit to
the baker's wife, along with a bottle of brandy as a gift so she would
be allowed to accept visitors, and Frida turning on her best halfling
charm. The baker had recently committed suicide, which we all found
highly suspicious, and said suspicions looked confirmed when Gildiril
noticed that the splinters on the beam from which he supposedly hanged
himself were pointing the wrong way, as if he'd been hoisted up there by
someone else.
After assuring Frau Schimdt that she was in no way
responsible for her husband's death, we learned that Schimdt the baker
had been doing some research into heraldry himself, shortly before his
death, and managed to get a name to go with the purple crest. Schmidt
had also joined the crusade very briefly, but she had not wanted to go
with them.
We left the house. Clearly we needed to visit the
library again to learn more about the name and the crest. It would also
be worth digging up Schmidt to see if we could work out how he died.
(Burlok was very excited at the prospect of digging.) And now we had
four missing animals on the list and still no idea of what that was all
about.
Still, at least there was a pub.
No comments:
Post a Comment