Arwen:
The rack actually doesn't have anything that resembles a weapon in the slightest. In fact, they seem to just be weights with handles. Arwen's first thought is that they might be for some sort of strength training.
Johanna:
The woman doesn't seem to have any magical equipment on her after Johanna performs a thorough pat down. She does have a small pouch of spell components, which Johanna confiscates to add to her own collection.
Mirella:
The woman clumsily picks the padded bench back up and sits on it, glaring at the cleric.
General looting:
There are two trunks by a bed in an alcove. One contains since nicely tailored tunics, pantaloons, and dresses, cut for a human woman, almost all in some shade of purple. The other, a beautiful oaken chest is mostly empty, except for a helmet, an incense burner and associated blocks of incense, and an amulet.
Spread open on one of the tables is a simple map of the Greenfields area showing the villages the cult attacked and looted. An arrow is sketched in from the Greenfields to towards the west and the town of Beregost, on the Trade Way, where the arrow turns north. A separate sheet of paper that is covered with numerals in columns contains the note, "Everything must be freighted north to Naerytar. Rezmir allowed us to keep a few pieces from her collection to finish off the saboteurs." Other papers are of less interest; most of them have bad poetry about dragons. There is also a thick but otherwise small, hidebound book in the far corner of the table.
Someone also grabs the boots that the woman tossed into the corner, and puts it with the rest of the loot.
((AND SINCE EVERYONE IS GOING TO ROLL KNOWLEDGE CHECKS ON THE LOOT I'M JUST GOING TO TAKE THE BEST MOD AND GIVE THEM ADVANTAGE INSTEAD OF ROLLING A DOZEN DIFFERENT CHECKS and then if you want to also roll you can, but only once per group.))
Identifying:
The helmet is a rough piece of grey stone, with streaks of rust running through it; it looks like it was carved out of the vein it was pulled from instead of having been forged. It's in the shape of a barbute.
(Adrik's Stonecunning, with Advantage: 20+5 10) The material is an extraplanar mineral called malcocite, closely related to malachite. Adrik recognizes it from the time he spent in the mines; it expands when hit, thus making it very useful in reinforcing tunnels against seismic activity. Adrik's almost-natural talent served him well in the mines and serves him just as well now. This helmet was forged in the Elemental Plane of Earth and brought here for purposes long forgotten, it protects the wearer, but knows not the limitations of creatures on this plane. With each heavy strike, the stone thickens and grows a bit more–eventually covering the whole of the neck, shoulders, chest, legs, in a spreading mass of hardened otherwordly stone. The wearer gets slower and slower while being more greatly protected.
The censer is an intricately carved porcelain vessel on a short hempen rope. On its eggshell like surface is engraved images of white dragons sleeping over dragon eggs. The pouch of incense that accompanied it smells like a crisp arctic breeze.
(Mirella's Religion, with Advantage: 11 18+4) There's actually nothing inherently magical about the censer; the incense, made from a plant found in the Moonshae Isles can grant connections to the divine, lowering the barriers between mortals and the gods. When burnt, the truly faithful fall to their knees in supplication, prayers and holy words spill forth from them quietly as the will overtakes them. In this state, they can tap into the godly power to manipulate the subtle forces of life, transferring deep reserves from one person to another, healing wounds in an instant. However, this is not some door that can be opened and closed at will; the unskilled and weak-willed can become stuck in this state, unable to eat, sleep, or move until they pass out of exhaustion.
The amulet is a polished circle, like a smooth riverstone, of stone the color of charcoal that hangs on a steel chain. It is warm to the touch, and makes one flinch back involuntarily, as if they had been burnt.
(Brother Cian's Religion, with Advantage: 1 7+4) This is a priceless Beyzgotian artifact, or at least very similar to one Brother Cian saw once at the monastery. It hung around the neck of a young man who was one of the uppermost echelons of the monastery. Rumors abounded among the acolytes about him; that he was over at thousand years old (older than Old Celeaias, who was in his 700s), that he was deathless, that he had met Beyzgot, that he really liked rabbit stew.
The book is embossed with the image of five dragon heads roaring forth from a crack in the earth, and the first half is packed with a mix of dense, but beautiful illuminated and printed text. From a glance, it is in archaic prose and focuses on the virtues of dragons, parables about dragons, dragon psalms and the stories of dragons and prominent dragon prophets. The second half is handwritten in an indecipherable language, full of diagrams and illustrations of rituals that grow progressively darker and sinister as the book reaches its conclusion. There are still a number of empty pages still remaining.
(Johanna's Religion, with Advantage: 2 20+4) This is old religious text that chronicles the history of the Cult of the Dragon. Since the beginning of time, mortals have worshipped what they feared, and in the primordial past, they feared dragons more than anything. Dragons have never gotten over that initial high and perpetually search for a way to rekindle it. The Cult of the Dragon has undergone an uncountable number of reformations over its lifespan. The latest major splinter group from the (mis?)placement of a period in an ancient prophetic text that (mistakenly?) predicted that the world would eventually become to be ruled by dead dragons, so the cult set off to raise as many dracoliches as possible. Luckily, they were successfully shut down. Clearly, some of their teachings survived.
The language, at least at the very beginning of the second half, is just a ciphered draconic. It will take a bit of time to crack, but a sharp mind like Johanna's should be able to break it without much trouble.
The boots are a simple black leather careful steel stitches. Their soles are worn nearly through, but still as strong as the day they were cobbled.
(Arwen's History: 16+4) The power of sorcery is not the power of wizardry. The simple think them the same, spells and pinches of powder and rattles of trinkets and great flames and winds and creations abound. But the scholars and sages draw from their science, and the true sorcerers draw from the universe. The power is everywhere, in everything, in the air and the flesh and the trees and the unseen things. The cleric valHorphian Smoot, the last priest of the fabled Golden Scales, who took his pilgrimages to the eight corners of the world to have the great Wyrms bless him and his quest, died nearly a thousand years ago. The cults and religious orders, over the centuries, that worshipped and revered him as the greatest prophet of the Draconic lines, held his staff and stone and clothes and boots as relics to be honored with great ceremony. His boots are the least of those treasures nearly lost to time.
Author
Topic: D&D 5e: The Tyranny of Dragons. IC Thread: A Much Delayed End. (Read 119931 times)