Trouble in Fog Harbor | D&D Sessions 12-15

The Pirate Town of Fog Harbor

Sorry for the delay in posting. It has been a while, I know. With the holidays and everything else going on lately, I just have not been able to keep up.

That being said, there have been a few developments in our adventure log.

Fog Harbor Mishaps

The adventure in fog harbor was pretty much an epic fail. Whether of my own crafting as a DM or as the party struggled to catch the subtlety of a few hints, who knows. But here is how it went down:

• The party arrived. The small town is basically a giant harbor, with a small street built going up a gully into the mountains. There are no back alleys, at least apparently, and there is nowhere to hide. From the moment they arrived, they realized it was a dangerous place, as pirates were assassinating each other in the streets, hired thugs were bashing in the heads of patrons who couldn't pay for their beers, and overall the bodies continued to pile up.
• Snake, Nirn's associate in the area, had a price on his head, and apparently was attacked, but escaped north up to one of the five surrounding villages, much more peaceful than Fog Harbor proper.
• Guido and Oliver negotiated around town to collect on the price on Snake's head, under the ruse of being thugs themselves out to make a quick buck. In all actuality, they were pricing out who could pay the most, so they could attempt to find out which of the many "bosses" of the town carried the most authority. Eventually they settled on a halfling named Regis. They also found their way to a prostitute, an elven woman named Ronefel, who it turns out is an agent of Nirn's. Actually she was a powerful enchantress, and never actually prostituted a day in her life, she simply hypnotized her patrons into believing that she had provided them with the most thrilling evening in history.
• Horace and Necromancer Jim found out that there was a price on their heads as well, namely on the head of Phil, the Mürmaid who had been killed a few sessions back. Some logic told them that the price on their heads came from his attempt to mutilate the harbor master or Mies Osley, who was a connected man in a thieves guild there. They set a plan together to wreck the River Maven, now that they had a more sturdy vessel captured from a pirate raid in an earlier session, and leave one of the pirate captives they had aboard to look like it was actually Phil. They collected what bounty they could after claiming salvage on the vessel, and Horace received the rights to run a Rat-On-A-Stick Franchise (Regis, it turns out, is as handy a con-man as Oliver, and Horace was basically swindled out of this reward for finding "Phil.")
• After a short adventure up to one of the neighboring towns to look for Snake, the party discerned that they should just try to capture Regis, and get him in front of Ronefel, who would be able to enchant him into spilling the beans about who was in charge in this town. The end goal, again, was to overthrow the guild here so that Nirn would be able to take over as the guild-master of the area. The kidnapping was successful, though they raised the ire of a notable bounty hunter in the process.
• Instead of gathering the proper information, though, all they did was wake the next morning to find both Regis and Ronefel in the streets with their throats torn out.
• Faced with the only options of staying here and solving the issues they have found, or reporting back to Nirn that not only was their mission a failure but they had gotten one of his most profitable intelligence-gathering agents killed, The party put some thought and logic into solving yet another series of crimes.
• Their time in the village to the north of Fog Harbor had shown them that some kidnappings and remarkably brutal murders were happening in the village, and it most likely had to do with one of three men who had traveled through said village during that timeframe. Considering the brutality of Ronefel's murder, it was likely that whatever monster performed the crimes up north was also responsible in Fog Harbor.
• After a bit more questioning, they settled on a peddler who traveled the roads between the villages and Fog Harbor. As they launched a closer investigation against him<, it turned out that he was a were-rat, and also, they would later discern, the leader of the thieves in Fog Harbor. A chase continued, and eventually the rat was slain, and Snake, no longer with a price on his head, would be able to return.
• Finally, the Bounty Hunter (we had been calling him Boba Fett, but that will change once I find a more suitable name), took out his vengance from having been shot during the kidnapping. He figured out that these, were indeed the Mürmaids, and started setting Slavers' ships aflame in the harbor. "Oh, no, oh dear me, it's the Mürmaids," he said, putting torches to more sails. He explained that the Fog Harbor guild was small beans, but now that Theg Narlot, one of the leaders of the Slavers would be paying the bounty for the lot of them, Boba Fett would certainly chase them down and collect. He estimated that they had 6 months to escape before his chase began. With that, the Mürmaids left Fog Harbor, and retreated back inland to the relative safety in the Border Mountains surrounding Meis Osley.