Year One: The Sewer-Rat Job

• Begins at Heroes’ Guild Tavern, catching up. Summoned to Válaris who has a new job for the Company: giant rats the size of dogs being an issue in the Old City (East and West Side).
• Kenrick & Dustan meet with the mayor who wishes this to be resolved before the King of Naboria arrives in one week, get info & list, while the rest wander around and scope the area. Once the team reunites, they now have a list and decide to begin canvassing witnesses the next day.
• The Company splits up: Kenrick & Getwelle are together with the brother acting as the talker, Dustan leads Leodan and Murdok. The former encounter John Thatcher at the docks who had an encounter with a ROUS when it broke into his house. Learn of link to apothecary (owner asked about them) and sewers (how the rats move around). Dustan’s group meets with a city watchman who was attacked by a big ass rat some nights ago.
• On the third day, Getwelle and Ser Kenrick meet with a merchant who has a servant who slew one; they investigate the week-old corpse and Getwelle does detect a very tiny spark of magic. The other team encounter some kids looking for their dog that chased something off the night before. They determine that the apothecary is the next destination.
• Go to apothecary, hear a scuffle so they break in to discover a big rat attacking “Eyan Vestôr”. Head into the sewer … for a couple of days. Enter the lab and thoroughly crush a small mob of dire rats. Discover a pair of corpses present as well as notes indicating this is an alchemical experiment under the auspices of someone called “the Magpie.”
• Summon the authorities to deal with the bodies. Later learn that “Eyan Vestôr” they met was probably the Magpie as the real one was one of the corpses.
• Mission successful! And with a single day to spare!

Player Notes:

• First time we’ve played this in several years. We’ve had some roster changes since last we played: three players are no longer active, so Dustan and Murdok are now played by different people and Rayna has “retired” from active play.
• Gigermann used a variation of the Zombie mob rules for the rat swarm to ensure it didn’t take forever and a day but, in retrospect, that surprise round may have been too much. Most of us kept forgetting the SM -3 for the swarm, but also forgot to use Telegraphed Attacks (since the swarm wasn’t dodging) so it ultimately worked out. GM thought it was anti-climatic, but the rest of us didn’t.
• We spent a lot of time in the sewer because he failed our skill challenge.
• There was a lot of background stuff that I didn’t cover in this, the most important of which being that the King’s Wedding is coming up.

See the Daniverse Blog for the GM’s post-game debrief.