Virgil joins the party at the Penance Chapel. In catacombs underneath Ulm's Monument, they fight workers collecting meteoric iron, fatal to fairies, and discover encoded letters and spells. Annie at the Quaternion Society helps decode the letters and spells, and they learn that "Ishild" has been experimenting on fairies to make a Fey Extinction Event spell, and that "Astrid" will power "the spell" using the Penance Stone at the Cathedral of Gradska.
Ajer couldn't make this game, but Dan joined this game as the rogue Virgil. We decided that to join the party, Virgil would go to the Penance Chapel for a confession, arrive as the party finished Game 1 there, and join them then.
The other characters got free healing potions from Chambers the Apothecary at the beginning of Game 1, and we also gave Virgil one. I believe that Kiltak also gave Virgil the Dagger of Sorcerous Rebuke, which they'd taken from Ash's killer in Game 1.
In other party news, Mike remade his fighter Kiltak as a barbarian after Game 1.
I also owed the players a few things from Game 1:
The information that Kiltak received by interrogating their attacker at the Penance Chapel: She told Kiltak that when people come into the Penance Chapel and touch the Penance Stone to do a silent confession, the Stone stores their guilt.
The reward from Yorvick and Leona Volstead for saving Violet: The Volsteads gave them 1,000 gold pieces, which they split. Yorvick also took Elgis aside, and told him that Volstead House had long sold opium, but now they’d distilled a new medicine from coca leaves. He handed Elgis a small corked bottle of white powder and said that it would stimulate Elgis's mind and heighten his powers of deduction.
Coca Powder
And finally the items that they found looting Ash Turner's house in Game 1:
Ash Turner's tabard
A tabard (tunic) emblazoned with a symbol of Gradska, and a symbol of Ajana, and two symbols you don't immediately recognize.
Once per day: Cast Shield as normal (as a reaction) without using a spell slot.
Brand Hill's family tree
A partial family tree showing the descendants of "Brand Hill." The tree starts with Brand's birth in 3412, 513 years ago. It traces some of Brand's descendants, almost to the present day, and seems to stop about 30 years ago.
However, we didn't choose a character to take these two.
At the end of Game 1, the party decided to go to Ulm's Monument next, based on Ash Turner's urging ("Laurel...they'll kill Laurel…Ulm's Monument") and because they tracked their Penance Chapel attacker there after the fight. They headed there now, and Merrick the Penance Chapel sexton joined them as a healer. They found the monument on the square around Foundling Gate, between Braddock and the City of the Dead. It looked like a gothic cathedral, but smaller, and seemed abandoned.
Ulm's Monument, catacombs
They asked about UIm and Elgis rolled History, but rolled a 12 and only knew:
Ulm started the trading house that introduced both whaling and opium to Hollin.
The front door was inside an entrance house ("H"), and Virgil went into the entrance house and picked the front door lock.
Inside ("G"), they found high piles of dirt and skulls everywhere. There was a hole in the floor with a ladder in it, going down. Looking down the hole they saw corridors with salt floors, lined with skulls and femurs. However, they decided to investigate the first floor first.
I believe they looked in the casket in the center of the first floor, and just found a large skeleton that might have been a manly whaler. The casket didn't contain any treasure or weapons.
At the rear of the monument, they found chapel alcoves dedicated to Ajana and Gradska, and a chapel remembering Ulm ("D", "E", and "F"). Elgis, Virgil, and Kiltak investigated / prayed at the three chapels. Fayne surprised me by asking what Elgis got by praying at the chapel to Gradska, and I said Elgis was Bless'ed for the next hour.
Virgil prayed at the chapel to Ajana. Since everyone in Hollin has their own picture of Ajana, I asked Dan how Virgil saw Ajana. Dan said (my notes):
Omniscient, omnipresent, all knowing. Being androgynous he's a mystery and the cosmos personified...can bestow any blessing or curse. Inside Virgil doesn't really believe, but probably not a bad idea - same reasoning for going to do a silent confession at the Penance Chapel. So a skeptic, but Elgis was blessed, so fool the god but inwardly rolling his eyes. Virgil does respect the mythos of Ajana - respects but doesn't believe.
Virgil received Shield and Sanctuary for praying.
In the chapel remembering Ulm, Kiltak learned, beyond what Elgis already knew:
The young Ulm was a golden god of a harpooner, and he landed his harpoon Hosingen in the primordial bull whale Huhner. But Ulm couldn't finish Huhner off, and Hosingen is still in Huhner's side, waiting to be recovered by an even greater harpooner who can bring the immortal whale down.
They went down the ladder, and found an old, industrial-scale salt mine repurposed as an ossuary, with neatly organized skulls and femurs lining wide corridors dug through the salt. On a History check, they knew that before the City of the Dead, Hollin's cemeteries had filled up, that the bones had been moved to an abandoned salt mine under the city, and that was probably where they were now. Dan said that this was like the Paris catacombs, which were indeed the inspiration.
Just off the salt mine / ossuary, to the east, they found an underground chamber ("I") excavated around an ancient meteorite strike, which had been buried by sediment. In the chamber, there was an overseer and three workers clearing the dirt around the meteorite fragments; I suggested or metagamed that the four were "sinister." Eglis poured oil into the 5-foot-wide chamber entrance, Kiltak shot the overseer to lure the four up to the entrance, and Virgil lit the oil when they arrived at the entrance, burning them.
They fought the four as they came out of the tunnel bottleneck, killing the three workers but keeping the overseer alive to interrogate. However, they failed their good-cop-bad-cop Intimation-plus-Persuasion role, even using Heroic Inspiration, and didn't get any information from him, and Kiltak killed him. However, Elgis and Kiltake took some meteoric iron to craft a halberd and great sword, respectively.
They reminded themselves that they were at the Monument to look for "Laurel," and they suspected she was a fairy. They went to the other end of the salt mine, to the west. They found a forge ("A"), an office ("B"), and a spell lab ("C") in rooms dug out of the salt.
They failed a Nature check at the forge and didn't determine anything there.
In the office they found two letters, which seemed to be gibberish or encoded.
In the spell lab, they found three spell scrolls:
Detect Fey
1st-level divination
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 30 feet
Components: V, S
Duration: 1 hour
At higher levels. When you cast the spell using a spell slot of 2nd level or higher, the range increases to 100 feet at 2nd level, then 300, 1,000, 3,000, 10,000, 30,000, and up to 100,000 at 8th level. At 9th level, the range is infinite.
Black Lung
1st-level necromancy
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 60 feet
Components: V, S
Duration: 1 minute
The target must make a Constitution saving throw. On a failed save, the target can’t breath and is incapacitated. The target can use its action each turn to make a Constitution saving throw to end the spell.
Death Spiral
1st-level necromancy
Casting Time: 1 bonus action
Range: 60 feet
Components: V, S
Duration: 1 minute
Targets you choose in range fail death saving throws for the duration.
Ajer wasn't at the game, but the party gave Hamza the three spells.
They also found some gibberish or encoded spells, with a strange disk near them:
Cipher disk
The cipher disk is a circular device with a large outer disk and a smaller inner disk that rotate relative to each other, with the alphabet around the circumferences of both disks.
For any relative rotation, you can encode text by replacing letters on the outer disk with the corresponding letter on the inner disk. Or in reverse, you can decode text by replacing letters on the inner desk with the corresponding letter on the outer desk.
It appears that each relative rotation of the outer and inner disks is itself specified by a letter. So, you would need the correct rotation letter to decode text.
It also seems that if you had a cipher word of say five letters, those five letters would give five rotations that you could loop over to create a more complex encoding - one that could only be decoded with the cipher word.
The spell lab also had some material spell components including a circlet worth 1,500 gp, which they took.
Virgil rolled INT to figure out how to use the cipher disk, but rolled 1 on the die and received a red "REJECTED" sticker. He re-rolled using Inspiration, and learned that if they had matching encoded and plaintext texts, they could compare them to find the cipher disk passphrase. That same passphrase might then decode the other documents.
The players asked if they as players needed to do that, or if the characters could roll to do it, and I said the characters could roll. Kiltak rolled a 12 though, short of finding the passphrase. I suggested someone in the city might be able to help them.
They left the monument. Back on the streets, Virgil went to the thief Rowan at the Halfpenny tavern to fence the circlet. Rowan agreed, and said she'd give them the 1,500 gp the next day. They had a long rest and Virgil went back to Rowan the next day to collect the gold. However, being a rogue, Virgil gave Elgis and Kiltak just 200 gp each, and kept 1,100 for himself.
Elgis and Kiltak wanted to make weapons from the iron they'd taken, and they went to Kazola, the Cotton House smith. Elgis rolled a 19 History, so he knew that Hollinders were suspicious of blacksmiths, because working with fire, smoke, and metal suggested devilry. The party discussed whether they could afford Kazola, or whether they would need to steal back from her to afford her services. Re: stealing from Kazola, Dan confidently said, "I'm not going to fail," but we pointed out that he had already been "REJECTED" rolling 1 INT before.
They asked Kazola to craft weapons from the meteoric iron - a +1 halberd for Elgis and +1 great sword for Kiltak. (Virgil was already carrying the meteoric iron Dagger of Sorcerous Rebuke.) Kazola warned them that meteoric iron was poison to fairies, thus quite sinister, and they realized that they'd seen Ash killed with a "dimpled iron" dagger. Kazola asked them to give her a day to think about helping them.
They went to Gregor the Naturalist to ask about the encoded letters and spells. Gregor referred them to Annie, a mathematician at the Quaternion Society, in the Morningstar Observatory in the Shipyards. They also asked Gregor about the iron, and he said that meteoric iron could be cold-forged, unlike normal iron from ore.
They went to Annie. She tried a few combinations of encoded and plaintext documents and found that one of the encoded spells was "Detect Fey," which they also had as plaintext. From these she found that the cipher disk passphrase was "Ishild" and decoded the remaining letters and spells.
Fey Extinction Event
9th-level necromancy
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: ∞
Components: V, S
Duration: Instantaneous
Fairies identified by the caster (e.g., using Detect Fey) die instantly.
Beatrice,
Deliver Laurel to Ishild immediately, for his Detect Fey and Fey Extinction Event experiments.
Astrid.
Beatrice,
The Penance Stone will power the spell. Have the Duchesses steal it and bring it to the Cathedral.
Astrid.
I believe they gave the decoded letters and spells to Virgil.
The players discussed the situation. Mike thought aloud: someone was trying to kill fairies; fairies use humans to raise their changeling children; someone has stolen changeling babies to test using the Penance Stone to kill fairies, and if it works, they're going to wipe out all the fairies. He said that if they stopped all of that from happening, they'd have goodwill from the fairies and the fairies would be okay with them making the meteoric iron / cold-forged weapons.
Fayne wanted to roll Religion to learn about Gradska. He rolled a 20 and learned:
Hollin's sailors say that thousands of years ago, a harpy's siren song lured the ancient warship She-Wolf onto the rocks off Anhault, sinking her. Stranded, the captain Gradska and his crew established the town of Lofton, which is now Hollin's abandoned old town.
Sailors say that on quiet nights in Hollin, you can still hear harpies singing, high in the cliffs above Lofton.
Harpies' songs are powerful spells.
They went back to Kazola and asked her if humans raising fairy changelings knew they were fairy children, and Kazola said the human parents didn't know, it was a cuckoo situation. She suggested making them +1 weapons from normal iron or steel, instead, for the same price. We decided that the price for the +1 weapons would be 10 times whatever the standard price was in the Player's Handbook, divided by 2 if they provided the material.
They discussed again if harpies were trying to kill fairies, and someone suggested that Ishild was a fairy. They discussed what they were really vested in doing, asking if they really wanted to save fairies, or just save Laurel. Kiltak said though that killing children and wiping out an entire people was shady.
The party had three apparent leads at this point. In Game 1, it seemed that harpies had stolen the changelings Luna Whitman and Flora Shaw, and Elgis had just learned that Hollin might have harpies in the cliffs above the old town Lofton. In Game 1 also, Yorvick and Leona Volstead had told them that they'd seen their attacker a few days before at the Black Cabaret. And now from the decoded letter, they thought that "Astrid" would cast "the spell" at "the Cathedral." In Hollin "the Cathedral" would usually mean the abandoned Cathedral of Gradska in Lofton.
They were still looking for Laurel, which is why they'd come to the Ulm's Monument. But their latest information from the decoded letter was that Laurel had been given to Ishild. Since they didn't know who Ishild was or where Ishild would be though, that wasn't actionable.
They decided to investigate the Black Cabaret next, and then look for the harpies above Lofton.
The characters went to level 3 after this game.
My raw notes at the game are here.