Session 3 - Thievery and Pursuit

This session begins with a bit of a time warp...

Ivan wakes up a bit late having overslept after meeting with the rest of the adventurers and missing their departure for the Neverwinter Natural and Arcane History Museum. He has a conversation with Dr. Naznarth and learns where the party was headed set off to. With a bit of work, he is able to fairly easily follow our path into and through the Deadwood, and finds the ruins, sees the wizard's tower and the zombies.

He kills one, and then finds a way around the town to the back of the tower instead of trying to go through all the zombies. While working to break into the back of the tower, he hears a thunderous sound, and all the zombies drop lifeless, at which point he enters the tower and meets the rest of the party.

The party fills in Ivan about what happened and that they're about to take a rest.

Ivan reveals a bit of his own history - that under the influence of Yeenoghu, he created a terrible chimera made of gnolls, but doesn't know quite where that town is relative to our current location. Dae is fairly appalled, and the others are somewhat relieved that their own dark secrets no longer seem so dark.

-- Party takes long rest --

During the watch, as Dae comes out of her meditation to take watch, she finds Jakob unconscious -- which as an elf is extremely disturbing, since generally, elves don't sleep and can't be magically forced to sleep.

She and Jakob have some nervous discussion regarding this, but don't tell the rest of the party outright. However, they're both so shaken by this that they act awkward enough for the party to question them and ultimately they reveal that Jakob was somehow rendered unconscious on his watch, and when he came to, the bag of holding seems to have been opened.

On Teddy's prompting, Topknot checks the contents of the bag, and finds the Arcane Hourglass missing.

The party ultimately searches for tracks and finds a group of tracks of an unknown number of humanoids heading west out of the Deadwood, and then south along the edge of the woods.

They follow the tracks through the night and end up finding a camp of about 12 black-cloaked humanoids with sentries patrolling, and a 4-man watch set up. Topknot does some sneaking around and looks into the camp a bit, but can't really see the hourglass, or an obvious place it would be, as his use of detect magic shows A LOT of magic all over these people as well as on or in all of their bags.

[not sure how this information was revealed... someone with a good history/arcana check? info came from Bob?]

It is revealed that this may be a group from the Tarin Kowt - an old organization of magical assassins.

Bob comes back into the skull and reports that while there's a lot of magic in the museum, most of it seems to be just broken artifacts and stuff like that, nothing shady to report. (maybe he's where the info about the Tarin Kowt came from)

After much deliberation and planning, the party tries to sneak up and grab a few of the bags and see what they can see, but the sneaking fails quite miserably and two of the sentries notice Topknot and Teddy approaching. One fires a firebolt at Teddy but misses, another completely roasts Topknot in dog form, knocking him unconscious. Teddy backs away, and the group packs up and moves on, at which point the party is able to revive Topknot and gather back together.

Without much in the way of options, the party travels back to Neverwinter and the museum, where they notice some huge new crates being delivered. Topknot does some poking around and discovers that the crates are full of dragon bones, but there's no skull!

Sara, a half-orc found at the reception desk mentions that Dae's sister She'Lian hasn't been in for a few days.

Topknot sneaks in to Phineas' office and rearranges some of the items on his desk.

Finally the party heads to talk to Dr. Naznarth again, they reveal to him the events of the last few days, are awarded 1500gp for their troubles. The party mentioned the wizard's journal and the mention of the Barrier Mountains, and suggest that Dr. Naznarth set up an expedition for them to explore there. He says that this can be done, but that in the meantime, they could take a job to Fetch the Dragon Skull from Waterdeep.

The party agrees.