Bern
We made our first few inquiries at the market. The prices inside the walls are no better than those outside the walls and if anything, possibly worse. Asking about sources of ale, the cheapest available was a barrel of old schweissner’s at 20gp each, and we would need two barrels to “paint the walls” of the abbey, but carts are sold for 5x the normal prices. When we asked about renting a cart, they laughed at us. We chose to look for liquor elsewhere. Tough was able to find most of the ingredients requested by the hag. But had to make the payments herself. The Unicorn meat, she was offered. Seemed somewhat sketchy. Apparently it does not come from a real unicorn, but a particular variety of local deer that is believed to taste and feel like Unicorn meat. Whether this will satisfy the hag, I have no idea. I’m still much happier giving a fake unicorn delicacy to a hag, then killing a real Unicorn for the same purpose.
We made our next stop at the chapel of St Dougan, on the way to Fort Vulgar itself to meet Lord Osric. The priest there had not heard of the Pillar of Ambule, but he offered to look it up in his archives. For a small fee of 20 gold, of course. I paid the fee, having a hunch that this pillar might be more significant than was obvious at first glance. I did let him know that we might be traveling over the next few days, so we would return for the information later on. He did mention that his church has a modest collection of illustrated manuscripts and he is always looking to add to that collection. So if we run across any such things, he would be an excellent buyer.
While at the church, we met a number of. Local Fisher folk and boatsman. Who wore elaborate tattoos of tentacles up and down their arms. They claimed fairly aggressively that these tattoos protected them from the sea monster in the lake. I suspect it’s much easier to simply avoid boats entirely. There was certainly no discussion of what obligations having tattoos of a tentacled monstrosity might incur to the person being tattooed.
We continued on to the Fort proper where Lord Osric told us about crookhorns who raid travelers near Qog’s Creek bridge, led by Captain Gib Snarkscorn. He would like Snarkscorn’s head, preferably separated from its body, and offers a reward of a substantial amount of gold. Osric would like us to accompany a barge to defend it from the captain, which would be a place to start looking. He also offers a bounty on crookhorns in general. We declined for the moment; Pelf is a bit spooked by her hag bag and wants to fulfill the terms promptly. We expressed interest in returning when time allowed. We will need to return to collect our research on the pillar in any case.
With all of our errands taken care of, we returned to our camp to find that Morin had disappeared and Ignas had joined us. She did at least bring my three dogs. We explained the situation and satisfied ourselves Morin would not be returning and did not need rescuing, at least in the short term, and set off to return to the inn.
Ignas does seem to be disturbingly attracted to the sea monster.
