A Catastrophe in the Making

A Catastrophe in the Making
Date	05/9/24
Storyteller	Slayzo
Tier	Expert
Player Characters	Pomba, Amber May, Terog, Sheeri, Chrys, Holly Crown
Rewards	250 exp, 1600 gp
Result	Success
Author	Pomba
Downtime	28+

Log

Pomba's going on vacation! There's a village and apparently they're all about cats and they're having problems, so John Batective also wanted us to help us with those problems. It was a long walk away, but we eventually got there and Amber May immediately ran to the bar. But to be fair, so did Pomba, and also Terog and Holly. We talk a bit to the bartender while day drinking, and there's been murders and disappearances. Something keeps tearing people apart, so we as a group go to one of the crime scenes. We look around but we don't really find a whole lot in the house, except that there wasn't really signs of entry other than the guards. Terog finds a basement filled with alcohol, and everyone is talking but Pomba couldn't understand it.

Apparently there's a cat in town doing murder named Mister Lucky (like Lucky the Clown?) and so we go to a fancy statue after meeting up with the guard again. They misunderstand us about precautions to take and they think that we want to kill all the cats in town! Pomba thinks there's a shapeshifting cat, but we need to find it. There was a friendly white cat hanging around the statue

After night falls we do some patrols, Pomba patrols the Wet District but doesn't really find anything. After a while Pomba sees a big ball of light rising, but it clearly wasn't the sun, it was Chrys! Chrys speaks into Pomba's brain and so Pomba goes to meet up with everyone. Terog got hurt, apparently by the killer. The white cat from before showed up and turned out to be a monster, but it seemed like it was weak. Pomba manages to pretty easily hold it down and we all manage to beat it without anyone really getting hurt. Pomba got scraped up a bit, but Chrys helped. After we killed it, Pomba got a little too excited in the combat and threw it at the nearby fountain, and it turned black. Pomba cleaned up his mess and drank all the black water, and it was kinda gross but Pomba drank too much and threw up :(

We found and killed the killer! Pomba was right about it being a shapeshifting cat! Now we can enjoy the festival! We'll still be here a few more days.

No Dog in This Fight
Date	05/16/24
Storyteller	Slayzo
Tier	Expert
Player Characters	Pomba, Amber May, Terog, Sheeri, Chrys, Holly Crown
Rewards	325 exp + 1600 gp + Beastmaster's Sigil (Greater) + Instructions for Concealment's Curtains + Cunning + Glass Cutter
Result	Success
Author	Pomba
Downtime	+1

Log

Last night was fun but Pomba's ready for the party, but we still have to wait a bit. Batective already went home so now we get to just enjoy ourselves. Pomba went hunting but didn't get much, Amber May and Terog went gambling, Sheeri was checking out the river, Chrys was a plant and Pomba thinks Holly Crown went to find the families of the missing people.

We heard that there were some weird green dogs, and for some reason the others thought it was Pomba, but Pomba's not a dog. Apparently they were at the mayor's house, so there we went and we saw some guys and some big green dogs! We got up to talk to them but they got hostile. Suddenly some bushes came to life and attacked us also! The bushes also looked like dogs, which was weird. Pomba thinks it's weird that there were dogs attacking the mayor of Cat Village.

The guys with bows and their dogs all start attacking us and it's really bad right from the beginning. Chrys makes sure we're all connected to them to share our pain. We get surrounded by the dogs and Pomba tries to keep them off of us by throwing them around, but there was too many of them. Amber May and Terog break away and manage to take away some of the pressure, but Amber May has a hard time because of the wolf howling and took some hard hits. Pomba goes down too, but Chrys gets him back up. Sheeri is doing good by hitting multiple wolves at once, but we had to keep trying to keep each other healthy. Sheeri's ice and Terog's grease helps us keep wolves on the ground sometimes, and the ice storm swirling around Sheeri helps us hit the dogs better.

The beasts' masters taunt us and Sheeri and Pomba throw their taunts back in their face, and right when it was looking bad, our luck turns and we finally start taking down the wolves, Amber May and Terog take care of one and Sheeri keeps obscuring the archers while Holly Crown and I deal with the nearby wolves and Chrys hits the enemies with the unmatched power of the sun. Amber May shakes off her sluggishness and Pomba finally catches his breath and starts raging again, but its kind of a waste as the last wolves die and Holly Crown knocks out their leader and the other surrenders. We now have hostages who were terrorizing the mayor of the town, we're definitely heroes of the town now!

Just One More Thing
Date	05/30/24
Storyteller	Slayzo
Tier	Expert
Player Characters	Pomba, Amber May, Terog, Sheeri, Chrys, Holly Crown
Rewards	350 exp + 2100 gp + Water Purifier x 6 + Decanter of Endless Water + Waterproof Firearm Carrying Case (sold) + Eyes of the Cat + Bag of Cats + Waterproofing wax x 4 + feather token (tree) x 2 + beckoning Cat Amulet + cat eye elixir + impossible cake (cat) (note: includes rewards from The Esteemed Cat Festival)
Result	Success
Author	Pomba
Downtime	+3

Log

After we enjoy the festival, we decided to spend some time going to Dogberg without agreeing to necessarily help the Naiads. We head up to the city without much issue and Amber May goes straight for the bar again. Pomba thinks she has a problem.

We arrange to meet with the mayor to see if there's anything to do around the area, and she tells us that there's a job picking berries or something. We learn she already sent out a party to deal with some kind of big cats, and we decide to go for that. We find their trail and they already killed these cats, but we greet them and convince them to help us by sending word to the Dryads with their weird wolves. The Dryads approach us as we wait and takes us to their grove and we get to have an audience with their queen. They seem to have a bad opinion of the Naiads and doesn't really care what the Dogberg villagers do with the wolves they are gifted, so we head back. They also tell us that they have a big water worm or something, Holly Crown knew a little about it and Pomba had the deep desire to wrestle it.

We go back to Dogberg and convince the mayor to tell us what they know thanks to having the note about the concealment's curtain ritual, and we meet with MS or Mistress Seloura, who tells us that she's been sending people to Cat Village because she thinks the cats are being sent by the village, but Pomba knows that those guys are chumps who wouldn't be able to do that. She became convinced that the festival was some kind of ritual, but thanks to us keeping an eye out and letting her know, she knows now that the festival was just that, a fun party.

So we decide to head back towards Cat Village, and approach the river to seek an audience with the Naiads. None of these nymphs seem to know anything about the disappearances, and while some people do get eaten by their worm, it's mostly fed by fish that the Naiads farm, explaining the lack of fish downstream. Most people only die to the worm if they fall in the river, or are thrown. The Naiads and Dryads are having their own issues and Pomba doesn't think that involves the towns at all, so someone else must be playing both sides of the party.

We finally return to Cat Village and hunt down the cats. There's a lot of talking in a language Pomba can't understand, but Pomba understands later that we were trying to talk to 'their' boss but between no suitable offering and Chrys being bright meant that was a no go, so our last option is the Cat Village Mayor. Holly Crown has a good idea of who the cats worship and so we give the idea of brightening up the area to drive them away. The cats were the ones responsible for the disappearing people, tricking them and sending them into the river to be eaten by the Naiad's worm. The big cats just kinda live in that area and Dogberg had the wrong idea, and the cats seemed to nudge them along that line of thinking to attack Cat Village. Cat Village does dump prisoners to be executed by the Naiad's worm, so we convince them to not do that, to at least execute them in another way.

So with that, we decide to just leave. We don't want to start a war with these tribes of nymphs or the two villages, and hopefully now the villages might stop being so mean to each other. On our first night out of the city, we got a big pile of stuff and a note, seemingly from the cats. The rest of our trip was uneventful and we had a nice vacation. :) Pomba got some gifts for his brothers, a book for Boophis, a statue for around the house, and some cat ears for whoever wants to wear it.

Supplemental log

Just One More Thing
Date	05/30/24
Storyteller	Slayzo
Tier	Expert
Player Characters	Pomba, Amber May, Terog, Sheeri, Chrys, Holly Crown
Rewards	350 exp + 2100 gp + Water Purifier x 6 + Decanter of Endless Water + Waterproof Firearm Carrying Case (sold) + Eyes of the Cat + Bag of Cats + Waterproofing wax x 4 + feather token (tree) x 2 + beckoning Cat Amulet + cat eye elixir + impossible cake (cat) (note: includes rewards from The Esteemed Cat Festival)
Result	Success
Author	Terog Shalesmiter
Downtime	+3

Log

From the desk of Terog Shalesmiter, Counselor of Desperate Hope:

What a truly absurd sequence of events I have taken part in. At first, we had come to Cat Village--a town seemingly infested with what Amber May called "cat shee"--to help the bat-like detective fellow determine the rash of disappearances that had hit that town recently, which were due to a disgusting beast disguised as town mascot/protector "Mister Lucky". Said creature nearly murdered me during the investigation, but we put it down with prejudice.

Had that been all, it would not have been such an ordeal, but the next day, we discovered some men from nearby Dogberg and their plant-wolves preparing to shake down the mayor. Yours truly took many critical wounds from them before we stopped them, and the mayor told us that a rivalry between the two towns was to blame for the would-be attack. After this came the village's annual Cat Festival, which provided some sorely-needed leisure time; however, we learned that Cat Village, in addition to its feline fey residents, was under the protection of a group of naiads inhabiting the river and that there were dryads watching Dogberg, as well as "cu shee".

With this information, we visited Dogberg, which was not nearly as ready for visitors as Cat Village (they didn't even have an inn, so we had to talk an old man into letting us sleep in his home), and met with the mayor, who told us that saber-toothed cats often appear in the area but another party had been dispatched to handle them so they had no work for us beyond picking berries. We went to meet this other party, who had already killed the cats, and they let the dryads know we wanted to talk to them; we didn't have long to wait and the dryads brought us to their queen. It turns out that the naiads and dryads have a long-standing territorial squabble over the riverbank due to the occasional flooding and both groups wanted us to eliminate the other. By this point, I was exhausted by all of this fey nonsense and absolutely did not want to fight any of these groups.

After meetings with a Mistress Seloura in Dogberg and the naiads upriver, we returned to Cat Village and spoke to the cat shee's representative, and it dawned on me that much of this mess was from their equivalent of pushing items from a table. After learning that the cat shee's leader was a creature that hated bright lights, we went to the mayor and advised her to erect more lamps around town to keep them safer, and to be less hostile towards Dogberg. Having done this, we left Cat Village (hopefully permanently) and set back out for home. I for one am thoroughly tired of cats (no disrespect towards fellow associate Amber May), dogs and fey and plan to take a break from associate work for a short time.

Respectfully, Terog Shalesmiter

(underneath is written, in Dwarven, "Cats and fey can both go to hell as far as I'm concerned")