Smokey and the Badger

9Sessions • 24Known Persons • 18Locations • 13Open Threads

Session 09 Tense undertone beneath a largely comedic and character-driven session

Session 9 opened with Ledger's cold-open narration reviewing the crew's precarious position after a triumphant day: paid by the Kingsguard, fed the town, and earned a spot on the crown's shopping manifest — but also delivered a bloodied threat note and surrounded by professional hunters, Vance spies, and an ominous river. Sanji and Skrit spent the session completing Maurice's crown shopping errand, managing to reopen reluctant market stalls, haggle on a tight budget (aided by Sanji's 17 insight), and haul their goods back to the East Gate in a hand cart — with Skrit riding in the back — just barely in time. Maurice met them with visible relief and presented Sanji with a purveyor's chit naming her and her compatriots as approved vendors to the crown's provisioning circuit. He warned them that the king does not take kindly to anyone trying to locate his whereabouts, and begged them not to mention his name if they ever found the king. On the way back the two attempted to find the animal-speaker they had noted during their shopping, but the stall was already closed.

Cliffhangers

Three unlit rafts were spotted heading downriver toward Thornwall Fords by Callum and Petra — Callum warned the party they might not see morning.
The Greasy Spoon wagon, the evidence strongbox by the water, the plesiosaur alone in her dark pool, and Ledger himself are all in separate exposed locations overnight — as Ledger's narration explicitly catalogued.
The river has gone quiet again — Ledger's narration mirrored his earlier observation before the plesiosaur appeared.
Captain Stout's forces are spread thin across three locations with only eight spears total.
The stall where a person claimed to be able to speak to animals was closed when Sanji and Skrit returned — thread unresolved.
Gorlog has not shared the truffle oil's poison-resistance properties with the rest of the crew.
Skrit's anonymous Draconic note directing him to a kobold warren near the next town east received no development this session.

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The Story So Far

through Session 09

The crew of the Greasy Spoon did not set out to become enemies of the most powerful family in Cormyr. It began smaller than that: a kobold being harassed in a market square, a satyr's impulsive sense of justice, a badger and his wagon caught in the wrong street at the wrong moment. When Constable Barnaby Plum of Splinter's Bend found himself publicly humiliated — fish-birthed in front of his own townspeople — the crew fled before he could recover his dignity, leaving green flames burning on the cobblestones behind them. They did not yet know that Barnaby's uncle ran the town, that Barnaby's cousin ran the logging settlement up the road, and that behind both of them stood Elder Vance of Splinter's Bend, a man whose reach, it would turn out, extended far beyond any single town.

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