Wine Cellars: Mysteries of Moldenwood - part 1

Mysteries of Moldenwood is the first on-line session of the Wine Cellars due to the Pandemic.

Our party consisted of:
Nate - Grit Lightningstruck, goblin sneak**
Joe A. - Brother Corinth, Acolyte of Sinakad
Sal - Jack Quick, a jack**
Joe P. - Icirus the Great, Owlman Magic-User**

Here is the first part of the tale -

 `An Introduction, though it may not be necessary...'

Once upon a time there was a brave and heroic... 

Ummm…

 Errr…

 Well there’s no way around it, I suppose…

Hero. There was a heroic hero or something, I don’t know. I mean, am I a hero though? Most people I meet certainly seem to think so. It’s probably my silver tongue and dashingly good looks that creates that illusion, though I am pretty handy in a tight spot (also, with a tight spot if you know what I mean…).  So some call me a hero, and some call me a knave but all call me Jack Quick! And whether you dub me a hero or a scoundrel, I call myself an adventurer! I travel wherever the whispers of Fortuna send me in search of new and exciting trials and tribulations to overcome, discoveries to make, and treasures to add to my collection. 

And so it was that Fortuna’s silky breath seductively whispered a name into my ear and I found myself in the duchy of the Duke known as Marqest. I spent some weeks there, lurking in the tavern and making myself at home among the villainous ruffians that populate the area outside the Duke’s homestead proper. After several days spent loitering, I managed to join a party of adventurers to journey into the Duke’s home. The things I saw there, I am not quite ready to speak of. Needless to say that I returned to the small village with the chill of that foreboding and grim place still upon my shadow and soul. Try as I might, for days I had dreams of the places we saw there. Of a well and tiny red capped shrews, of a shadow with burning eyes that I saw, half glimpsed, in the bowels of that benighted manse. For days after leaving that place, I felt drawn back. A pull that grew more insistent each day I was away. So I did what any self-respecting Jack would do. I pulled up stakes and went looking elsewhere for adventure, I needed to clear my head and soul before heading back to confront the Duke and his mysteries. One should never give in to obsession, that ceaseless taunt that drives so many men to their deaths. Oftentimes, those deaths could be avoided if a man were to approach life a little differently...with both eyes open rather than cyclopean myopia. So I left the town huddled in the shadow of the Duke’s home and traveled. East? West? North? South? It did not matter. Not to a Jack at least, we go where we are eventually needed and so I wandered and I wondered and eventually I came to the place where I was needed.   

Hemlock Hamlet

What do you mean there is no gold at the end of the rainbow?

The hamlet of... Mildew? Mullgrew? Piddllefoot?...we’ll check later but I’m going Mildew for now. The hamlet was a bit stagnant and moldy. All priest-run and holy-like. It was a total bore and I was going to leave right off. I really did have every intention to do so but wouldn’t you know? I saw my oldest friend and fellow pleasure-mate aboard the brigand warfreighter, SS Darkstar, that we were both enslaved to for a time. The indignities visited upon me  during that horrid time would have been insufferable, unbearable even, and I am certain I would have devised a way to kill myself or throw myself over the rails to drown in the sea if it had not been for the steadfast support and friendship of Cornith and here he was now, striding through the town square regal in priestly garb and moving with the purpose of the indoctrinated. The dull lockstep of the robot drone, it was pathetic really and I needed to address it right away. First, his dignity had to go. “What ho, young lad? Remember the days adrift at sea? And me as well?” I floated the question and he froze mid-stride. He turned and verily threw himself at me in joyous greeting, full of the love and affection one might bestow upon a family member. And why not? After what we’d seen, after what we’d done….well I suppose we’d been family of a sort a long while now. 

One brief explanation(*1) later, I found myself headed down a wooded road on the look out for axe bearing bandits (and unfaithful women and children or was it faithless? I don’t really remember, I wasn’t listening to Corinth. Everything he was saying reeked of responsibility and everyone including him knows I am tragically allergic to responsibility…) in the company of not only a cleric of some god that did not seem particularly terrible, a goblin named Grit, and an Owlman who called himself Icarus but who I thought looked a lot more like an Archimedes. 

It was an interesting group, though not the chattiest.The lack of quality communication was just fine by me though as the nature around us was quite the spectacle, a riot of greens dappled with more shade than sunshine.   

  So lost was I in the scene that I failed to see the little man in the path until I nearly tripped over him. 

“Watch yer self, wanderer,” spoke a voice far below my line of sight. I managed to spot the little fellow as he wandered back over to a small gathering of...I was not sure.There are many species of fay and little folk who roam the world, and I was terrible at keeping track of who was who and what was what. I wracked my brain to figure out what they could be. Dwarves? No. Gnomes? Not likely. 

Leprechauns perhaps? My heart soared at the thought of capturing them and torturing them to find out where the end of the rainbow is.

I realized they were talking to us.

“And find our woodwives,” one of the adorable little fellows was saying. Wives? These little men could please a woman? I was intrigued as the gold in the  pot at the end of the rainbow morphed a little in my mind.

I glanced around, puzzled. I was about to ask what they wanted us to do with their wives, did they need us to please their wives for them? This day was looking up already. A delightful walk in the woods was about to get very interes…

“They were taken from us by a large man with a larger axe,” the tyke was saying. Dang, there went any hopes of this being a day of leisure and checking in on the neighbors but I did feel a thrill of excitement, a shiver and a sliver of interest, at the mention of the wives and the axeman. This was exactly what they’d sent Corinth out here to do, for here was mention of just what they’d tasked him with finding: faithless wives  of the woods and axemen with large axes! It was sounding very salacious and very promising. 

I stepped forward into the limelight.

“Gentlemen, we would be happy to be of service to you and your wooden wives,” I said, gracefully bowing to them. “I…”

“Woodwives.” came the interruption of my splendiferous and dulcet tones.

“What now?” I asked

“Woodwives,” came the response again. It seemed to come from all three of them and the distinction seemed important to them. So be it.

“Very well, we will return forthwith to you your woodwives and in exchange I ask that you share with us your finest spirits and food at the conclusion of this venture.” I spoke with great gravitas and presented my most sincere demeanor. 

They agreed to the terms, and I was pleased to find myself one quest and a night of debauchery away from discovering if there was in fact any gold at the end of the rainbow. 

Since it turned out that our new quest and our old one both led in the same direction (funny how that works out, innit?), we continued on, though now we sought the company of a person or creature named Meboyoh and the head of a wives-thieving bandit. We traveled on, ready for adventure.

Winding paths, lost in time and space

The path we were on seemed to wind forever to the left, and now it turned to the right, but seemingly never truly onward. 

“We are going in a giant circle,” I commented at one point. 

Corinth scowled. “This is the right way. It’s the way the path leads us.”

Grit froze. His ears moved and his pupils widened. He looked at us and motioned for us to be quiet.  He whispered, “I can hear someone just ahead of us, and also it sounds like we have a group of ne’er-do-wells attempting to sneak up on us as well!” 

I saw the owlman start making gestures...actually, before we get to what happened, I need to talk about this owlman. I’d never met a bird-person until recently and I have to say, the experience is odd. They don’t have wings like we think, but they do have feathers. They break through the skin of the birdman like the hair on the arms of a humanoid, but then these feathers also break through erratically in weird clumps. The flesh glimpsed between the feathers was a sickly grey-ish pink, and translucent at that. Their hands end not in falanges but in cruel talons.      

Icarus did not blink ever and his brow, such as it was, gave him a permanent disapproving look. All in all he was a disconcerting presence, despite having an excellent demeanor and sense of humor, and I found him to grow only more disconcerting when he suddenly lifted in the air and flew. Without wings. This birdman flew without wings and my grasp on reality shifted slightly to accommodate this new wrinkle. 

Yes, the birdman levitated right there in front of us. And before you ask, no it didn't occur to me that perhaps he used magic of some kind. He’s a giant walking and talking birdman, and I did not wonder if he was also a mage. As he floated above us, drifting lazily higher and higher. I raced forward and shouted at our pursuers in an attempt to throw them off our trail.

As a Jack, I am gifted with the gift of gab. This means that I am able to influence and intimidate folks at will with a word or a phrase if they are of the susceptible sort. I find that not many folks have the ability to fend off a well placed barb or jab. 

This time though the words I spoke not only had no effect, but the weight of the words seemed to come back on me. The words lifted me physically and emotionally and slammed down. They had a Jack in their party as well! I drew my dagger and struggled to my feet. The others looked at me, puzzled at my reaction. If they also had a Jack, we would have no choice but to fight to the bitter end. Two Jacks in opposing parties of adventurers have no choice, it’s in the pact we tacitly agree to upon accepting the title of Jack. I started forward even as Icarus said mildly, “ I see a clearing, off the path. There is something there. Path continues in a straight line on the far side of the clearing.”

It clicked in my head then, the words I shouted were the ones that came back to my ears and knocked me down. There was only one Jack in this equation. There was witchery afoot and  I knew the temporal nature of it now.

“Yes, let’s get off this path before we run into ourselves from a few minutes ago or before we catch ourselves a few minutes in the future,” I muttered. A devious plot, and one that Corinth fell for. We were trapped on that path, caught in the moment and that moment stretched out along the path with the beginning chasing the end. One would never have found the other and we would have perished on that path.  

Thank goodness for the ability of birdmen to fly without wings.

We left the path and entered the clearing.

There was a cask here, it was massive and towered above us at least 10 feet tall and was at least 15 long and an additional five feet wide. Cool air poured from it in waves, chill and ominous in the summer heat. There was a mark I could make out even from this great distance and it caused my very blood to curdle.

A cask, out of place

The cask was enormous and very out of place, especially since I knew from whence it had come without even needing to see the crest prominently displayed on the cask’s side, burned into the wood. As we entered the clearing and drew nearer to the cask, the owlman began acting in a manner most peculiar and I knew then that he too had seen the foul, stygian depths of the Wine Cellars. He hurried past the cask without so much as a second glance and stopping only when he reached the edge of the clearing where he appeared to simply disappear into underbrush. As I walked into the clearing myself, Grit the goblin pushed by scampering across the clearing, while giving the cask a once over. I moved cautiously towards it, and, even at this distance, I could feel what I was sure had so unnerved the other members of the party; the cask emanated a sense of foreboding and...evil. It was more than just the pure otherness of the cask being out here in the field—a development that, on any other day and with any other cask, I would normally and immediately throw a bacchanal to celebrate the discovery of—and far from its rightful resting place. It was the chill that came from the cask, cold that came in waves that felt as if they were a pulse or the beating of Wendigo’s heart. It was the way the shadows deepened as you drew nearer to the cask, and I did draw nearer. In trepidation I reached out to touch the wood, seeing Grit join Archimedes Icarus in the distance and the hand smoothed and hand hewn oak of the cask filling my immediate foreground. A hammer crashed into the wood above my hand as Corinth—full of righteous fury and divine indignation at the presence of such an abomination—smote the cask, and nearly smote me as well. I dropped and launched myself away, a move that both moved me away from the rampaging paladin but also put me in a prime position to catch the waterfall of divine fermentation, the Duke’s Cellars were world famous for a reason after all, that never came.

I casually used my momentum to roll into a backwards somersault and spring to my feet. I whirled and watched Corinth go to work, slowly backing up to the menagerie gathered behind me under a tree at the end of the clearing who, if I had glimpsed right, were even now sipping tea and nibbling on crumpets as they watched Cornith unleash holy rage. His blows revealed an empty cask, save for a unicorn’s carcass. Corinth ghoulishly reached inside the corpse and pulled out a smaller, more humanoid figure. It was the taxidermied corpse of an infant giant, which,when Corinth coldly split it open, revealed an elderly kobold, which was torn asunder to reveal a bird of some kind, and then finally, a key. Yes, after picking through a variety of death, Corinth had found some sort of key. He joined us and traded Grit a crumpet for a look at the key, instructing the Goblin to hold on to it for the time being. Grit examined it closely and then quickly made the key into a necklace. He turned to Corinth to speculate as to the meaning and nature of the key. Icarus leaned in as well, all were interested in whatever the goblin had to say. 

Grit opened his mouth to speak, to drop a revelation, and…

 I farted loudly and started off down the trail.. 

Can’t have moments be too serious or dramatic, can I?  

footnote *1

Corinth regaled me with stories of how he came to his god’s service. It was not a rousing tale. In fact it left me feeling as though there was no such thing as happiness in the world. I resolved then to not torment him, instead I vowed (inaudibly) to help as much as possible while providing as much levity to this jaunt as I could.

** the Goblin sneak and Jack Quick are both classes from James V. West and you should check out all his awesome stuff here: http://doomslakers.blogspot.com/search/label/character%20class?updated-max=2015-05-17T15:00:00-04:00&max-results=20&start=30&by-date=false

**the Owlman is also from James and his awesome RPG - Rabbits & Rangers, here: 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product_info.php?products_id=191133&

SO ENDS, Part 1....