Senior Subadjunct Eric Vollman filed Castle Wittgenstein under extraordinary incidents, the category reserved for ruined fortresses once routine quarantine could no longer contain them. His agents found an abandoned outer bailey, bloodstains, and a spent burn pit packed with cremated remains. Villagers spoke of green fire, Morrslieb, beastmen, and a storm that dispersed shortly after the castle fell into the Reik. The office declared the cause undetermined. It presumed the von Wittgensteins dead without identifying a body, allowed that the villagers might have turned upon them, and requested a magistrate with soldiers and corrected Imperial maps.

The Dandy Fräulein, meanwhile, was still trying to sink.

At Wittgendorf, the party nailed boards over the worst rents and smeared pitch into the seams while water threaded through lesser gaps. Starving beggars ate provisions on the dock. Two had been sent toward the castle with a promise of silver for news. Qavitrae judged the patch waterproof for the moment, and no one proposed testing it at night against submerged timber or whatever else the Reik concealed.

An hour into the work, villagers brought down a man who could scarcely stand. Willebald Krantz introduced himself in a croak as an Imperial Exactor and asked for passage toward Altdorf. Rescuing a tax collector, he suggested, might earn them a reward. Thindruk brought him aboard, invoked his acquaintance with Count Otto von Boorman, and offered food from his private stores. Krantz attempted a polite refusal before cramming the cheese into his mouth.

Two earlier collectors had vanished in the quarantined barony, and Krantz had followed with guards. A Lady von Wittgenstein welcomed them to dinner, where he believed he had been drugged. He awoke to a four-armed member of the family and several taxidermied creatures that were, in his judgment, not entirely dead. Lady Marguerite later confined him in the dungeon, where Slagdorg tormented him. He thought he had been there one or two months.

Krantz remembered five travelers freeing the prisoners and taking them away by boat. He had not seen the fighting and did not believe five people could pull down a castle.

“Powerful beastmen had taken control of it,” Thindruk told him. “We worked with local resources to remedy the matter.”

They had destroyed nearly all the creatures, he explained, before beastman magic brought down the spire. Krantz accepted this readily. He had heard hooves and braying in the corridors. Once a man had met animated taxidermy, his standards for corroboration became forgiving.

Wanda rigged him a hammock away from the sealed Warpstone container. Thindruk warned him not to examine the sensitive items in the hold. Krantz agreed and closed his eyes.

As Qavitrae finished the patch, the beggar messengers returned with Leopold and survivors from the camp’s fighting force. Thindruk paid each messenger the promised two silver before hearing their account. A functioning lie, like a hull patch, benefited from meeting its smaller obligations.

The fighters had stormed the outer bailey and killed its remaining defenders. Trapped near the bridge and gates, they had watched the cliffs fail beneath the inner castle and assumed the party dead. They dragged the rotting guards into a pit, then killed the altered villagers and castle staff wherever they could reach them. One or two guards might still have remained in the central bridge tower, which stood without much bridge to justify it.

Adja Voit listened as Thindruk explained what Imperial authorities traditionally did to peasants who attacked their betters. Most evidence of the castle’s corruption now lay burned or drowned. The Empire might therefore notice the uprising more clearly than its cause.

They settled on the account already given to Krantz: the von Wittgensteins had harbored beastmen; the beasts had killed the family; the party and local fighters had destroyed the beasts. Voit promised to teach that story to her people and to anyone arriving in the village.

By four in the morning they had only a few hours left to sleep, and most managed little. Wanda slept soundly beside the wicked-looking Zweihänder she had carried from the castle. Nora could not sleep her crushed larynx into mending. It required treatment, so they chose Kemperbad rather than turning upriver toward Diesdorf.

At sunrise they left the damaged second barge beached and took the Dandy Fräulein downriver. Qavitrae’s boards held. Whenever Krantz and Aubrey Hennig were out of hearing, the others discussed the Warpstone. None wanted to carry it into Middenheim. They considered hiding it in empty country for Grey Wizards to retrieve, but Qavitrae knew no faction she trusted to contain it.

Around midday, Thindruk found Krantz dead in his hammock. Slaps and shouted encouragement did nothing, and there was no evident cause. Krantz carried no proof of office and looked like any other ruined beggar. They waited until no vessels were in sight, tied weights to his feet, offered a prayer, and dropped him into the deep middle of the Reik. The dark green water took him without administrative ceremony.

At five they reached Kemperbad. Before the gangplank was down, Matthias Blücher approached in polished shoes and measured haste. The wealthy young merchant needed one hundred units of Cathayan porcelain carried to the Golden Heron at Marienburg within roughly ten days. From there, it would sail to Bordeleaux for a noble wedding.

He offered three hundred crowns, seventy-five in advance, hull repairs, and loading in time for a Festag departure. Thindruk judged him a skilled negotiator who sincerely wanted their acceptance. Qavitrae concluded only that expensive human weddings were ordinary short-lived foolishness.

While negotiations continued, Wanda took the voiceless Nora to the Temple of Shallya. They waited among fevered patients and stevedores with bones through their skin rather than push ahead. Wanda donated a crown and explained how often Nora had been struck in the throat.

A priestess’s blessing eased Nora’s pain and exhaustion. The healers treated her larynx within the crucial first day, avoiding a permanent complication and reducing her recuperation to sixteen days. Poultices and honeyed medicine left her lightly wounded. When Nora tried to speak, fresh blood ran from her mouth, and the healers ordered silence for several days. Wanda also spent eight crowns from ship funds on the temple’s two available vials of laudanum.

Marienburg offered routes toward the sea and Athel Loren. “We can always take it to my people,” Qavitrae said of the stone. “They at least will be alive long enough to protect it from the next set of idiots.”

They accepted the job. Aubrey thanked them for her employment and declined to endure anything similar again. Thindruk still carried a lightly wounded injury in his back, though binding and rest should suffice for it.

Felrick guarded the boat while Thindruk and Qavitrae reviewed the contract with Max Wagner. Its legal flourishes concealed a clause making them responsible for every chip, loss, decay, or depreciation suffered by the porcelain unless they could demonstrate that Blücher personnel had caused it while the vessel or cargo remained in Blücher custody.

“I propose we rewrite this section as a best effort,” Thindruk said.

Wagner resisted until Thindruk pointed out that Blücher workers controlled the packing and Blücher deadlines controlled the speed. With Qavitrae supporting him, Wagner attached a rider replacing the clause. They signed, initialed, and received orders to move the Dandy Fräulein to Wharf Seven for repairs and loading.

The seventy-five-crown advance became seventy-five units of knives, pots, pans, and other worked metal goods for resale in Marienburg. Wanda and Thindruk failed to secure a favorable price and bought them anyway. They planned to spend the evening at the Swan’s Neck, where Wanda intended to ask discreet questions about Matthias Blücher, his family, and the contract.

Once loaded, the hold would contain one hundred units of porcelain and seventy-five of metal, leaving one hundred twenty-five free. The sealed Warpstone container occupied little of that space. By a considerable margin, it remained the most dangerous thing aboard.

Session Notes

The Office Closes the File

  • Senior Subadjunct Eric Vollman filed a Reikland Quarantine Office report on Castle Wittgenstein’s destruction.
  • The office declared the collapse’s immediate cause undetermined and found the surviving outer bailey abandoned, with signs of bloodshed and a spent burn pit full of cremated remains.
  • Villagers reported an unnatural storm, green fire, Morrslieb looming overhead, and beastmen inside the walls as the central rock spire and much of the inner bailey fell into the Reik; the storm dispersed shortly afterward.
  • The report presumed the von Wittgenstein family dead despite the absence of identified remains, while allowing that the villagers might have turned upon them.
  • The office recommended an Imperial Magistrate with a military escort and requested revisions to Imperial maps that still showed the castle intact.

Patching by Moonlight

  • In Wittgendorf, the damaged Dandy Fräulein continued taking on water while the party worked through the night, nailing boards over the worst damage and sealing them with pitch.
  • The makeshift repair appeared waterproof, but the party could not determine how long it would remain secure.
  • The party had set out provisions to keep the town’s starving beggars occupied and had sent two of them to investigate Castle Wittgenstein in return for promised payment.
  • Wanda retained the wicked-looking Zweihänder she had temporarily dropped during the escape from the castle.
  • The party chose not to sail at night because unseen river hazards made the journey more dangerous; they intended to wait for the messengers, rest, and leave at sunrise.
  • The threatening circumstances prevented restful recovery of Peril for most of the party, but Wanda’s ability to sleep in dangerous places allowed her to recover normally.

An Exactor in the Hold

  • About an hour into the repairs, villagers brought the severely weakened tax collector rescued from Castle Wittgenstein to the dock.
  • The tax collector introduced himself as Willebald Krantz and asked for passage toward Altdorf, claiming that rescuing an Imperial tax collector might earn the party a reward.
  • Thindruk invited Exactor Krantz aboard, gave him food from his personal stores, and questioned him privately while presenting himself as an influential noble acquainted with Count Otto von Boorman.
  • Krantz had been sent with guards after two previous tax collectors failed to return from the quarantined barony. The townspeople directed his party to the castle, where a Lady von Wittgenstein welcomed them and apparently drugged him at dinner.
  • Krantz awoke to a four-armed member of the family who introduced him to taxidermied creatures that Krantz believed were not entirely dead.
  • Lady Marguerite von Wittgenstein subsequently confined Krantz in the dungeon, where Slagdorg tormented him. Krantz believed he had been imprisoned for one or two months.
  • Krantz remembered the party freeing the prisoners and taking them away by boat, but he had not witnessed the castle fighting and did not believe five travelers could have caused the collapse.
  • Thindruk told Krantz that powerful beastmen had seized the castle, that the party and local forces destroyed nearly all of them, and that the beastmen’s dark magic brought the castle down. Krantz accepted the account and added that he had heard hooves and braying within the castle.
  • Krantz lacked proof of his office and feared that reaching Altdorf alone would be difficult. The party promised to carry him at least to Kemperbad and possibly farther.
  • Wanda prepared Krantz a hammock away from the Warpstone. Thindruk warned him that the hold contained sensitive items that he was not to examine, and Krantz agreed.

The Camp Returns

  • Qavitrae completed the temporary hull patch and judged the Dandy Fräulein fit for the roughly one-day voyage to Kemperbad, provided the crew watched for renewed leaks or displaced boards.
  • The two beggar messengers returned with survivors from the camp in the woods, including Leopold and the camp’s fighting force.
  • Thindruk paid each messenger the promised two silver.
  • Leopold reported that the camp fighters had stormed the outer bailey in a bloody battle, killing the remaining defenders after the party had already reduced their numbers.
  • The fighters became trapped near the bridge and gates while trying to reach the party. They saw the cliffs fail and the inner castle fall into the river and had assumed the party was dead.
  • The fighters dragged the plague-ridden, rotting guards into a pit and killed the altered villagers and remaining castle staff, leaving everyone they could reach in the outer bailey dead.
  • The central bridge tower was still standing when the fighters departed; one or two unreachable guards might have remained inside.
  • Camp strike leader Adja Voit met privately with Thindruk. He warned that Imperial authorities historically treated peasant uprisings harshly and that investigators or witch hunters might eventually identify the fighters despite the destruction of much of the evidence.
  • Voit agreed to spread the account that beastmen harbored by the von Wittgensteins killed the family, after which the party and local fighters destroyed the beastmen. She promised to tell her people and anyone arriving in the village the same story.
  • By approximately four in the morning, the party had time for only a couple of hours of sleep. Nora’s damaged larynx remained untreated, so her nineteen-day recuperation period had not yet begun.
  • The party decided to seek healing in Kemperbad rather than return upriver to the healer near Diesdorf.

Downriver with the Dead

  • At sunrise, the party left the other damaged and unmaintained barge beached at Wittgendorf and departed for Kemperbad aboard the Dandy Fräulein.
  • The temporary hull patch held throughout the day’s downriver journey.
  • In private conversations beyond Krantz’s and Aubrey Hennig’s hearing, the party debated how to dispose of the Wittgenstein Warpstone without carrying it into Middenheim.
  • The party considered hiding the Warpstone somewhere sparsely populated and directing a Grey Wizard or the Colleges of Magic to retrieve it. Qavitrae knew of no faction she could confidently trust to destroy or contain it.
  • Around midday, Thindruk checked on Krantz and found him no longer breathing. Attempts to wake him failed, and the cause of his death was not established.
  • Because Krantz resembled a sickly beggar and carried no proof of station, the party waited until no other vessels were in sight, tied weights to his feet, offered a prayer, and dropped his body into the deep middle of the Reik.
  • The Dandy Fräulein reached Kemperbad around five in the afternoon and tied up at a dock for smaller vessels.

A Merchant at the Gangplank

  • Thindruk recognized the well-dressed young merchant approaching the Dandy Fräulein as Matthias Blücher, a wealthy and successful younger son who controlled the Blücher family’s Kemperbad operations.
  • Matthias requested a private meeting and explained that the party’s favorable reputation in Kemperbad had led him to select their barge for an urgent shipment.
  • He needed fine Cathayan porcelain transported downriver to Marienburg, where the Golden Heron would carry it onward to Bordeleaux for an important noble wedding.
  • The river journey was expected to take ten days. The cargo needed to reach the Golden Heron by the first Montauk of Sommerzeit, roughly ten to twelve days away, though the ship might wait another day or two.
  • The porcelain would occupy one-third of the Dandy Fräulein’s three-hundred-unit hold, leaving room for other cargo.
  • Matthias offered three hundred gold crowns, with twenty-five percent paid in advance and the balance due after the party returned with sealed proof of delivery.
  • After learning that the crew and vessel needed care, Matthias offered to have Blücher shipwrights repair the hull, load the fragile cargo, and prepare the Dandy Fräulein to depart on Festag. He could recommend physicians but would not guarantee that one would travel.
  • The Marienburg route led the party to consider carrying the Warpstone onward to Qavitrae’s kin in Athel Loren or disposing of it at sea, although they did not choose a final method.
  • Thindruk and Qavitrae each spent a coin to reroll separate attempts to scrutinize Matthias.
  • Thindruk concluded that Matthias was a skilled negotiator despite his friendly manner and sincerely wanted the party to accept the job.
  • Qavitrae’s critical failure left her dismissing the wedding explanation as ordinary short-lived human frivolity rather than identifying any hidden motive.

Mercy in Shallya’s Hall

  • While the negotiations continued, Wanda accompanied the voiceless Nora to Kemperbad’s crowded Temple of Shallya.
  • They waited several hours among sick and badly injured laborers rather than pushing ahead of patients with more urgent conditions.
  • Wanda explained that Nora had repeatedly been struck in the throat and donated one gold crown to the temple.
  • A priestess invoked Shallya’s blessing successfully, moving Nora one positive step on both the Damage and Peril Condition Tracks and leaving her moderately wounded.
  • The healers successfully treated Nora’s larynx within twenty-four hours of the injury, preventing the untreated permanent complication and reducing her recuperation period from nineteen days to sixteen.
  • Further medical care reduced Nora from moderately wounded to lightly wounded. The healers supplied poultices and a honeyed medicine to be taken once daily.
  • Nora remained unable to speak safely; trying produced fresh blood, and the healers ordered her not to speak for several days.
  • With the larynx successfully treated, Nora could continue recuperating aboard the boat without a dedicated nurse unless she suffered another injury.

Fine Print at Wharf Seven

  • Qavitrae argued that reaching Marienburg would create an opportunity to take the Warpstone to her people, who could guard it longer than humans. The party consequently accepted Matthias Blücher’s job.
  • Aubrey Hennig ended her employment with the party after returning to Kemperbad. She thanked them but refused to repeat the experience she had endured aboard their vessel.
  • Thindruk and Qavitrae went to the Blücher offices to review the contract with the family’s older, heavyset contract manager, Max Wagner, while Felrick remained aboard.
  • The original contract made the party financially and legally responsible for any damage, loss, decay, or depreciation suffered by the porcelain from signing until delivery, unless the Blücher family demonstrably caused it while holding the vessel or cargo in its own custody.
  • Thindruk objected that the urgent schedule and packing controlled by Blücher employees created risks the party could not reasonably assume. With Qavitrae’s assistance, he achieved a critical success bargaining for a best-effort standard instead.
  • Wagner added a rider replacing the liability language with the agreed best-effort terms. The amended contract was signed and initialed.
  • A separate repair addendum directed the party to move the Dandy Fräulein to Blücher Wharf Seven. Blücher workers would begin repairs the next morning, start loading the porcelain around midday, finish by late evening, and prepare the vessel to depart on Festag.
  • Max Wagner arranged payment of the agreed seventy-five-gold-crown advance through the Blücher safe and purser.

Medicine and Metalwork

  • Wanda and Nora both resisted any illness to which they had been exposed while waiting in the crowded Temple of Shallya.
  • Wanda purchased the temple’s two available vials of laudanum for a total of eight gold crowns from the ship’s funds and returned with Nora in substantially improved condition.
  • The party planned to spend the evening at the Swan’s Neck, a reputable inn favored by prosperous river merchants, where Wanda intended to gather rumors about Matthias Blücher, his family, and the contract.
  • Using Wanda’s knowledge of Marienburg and bargaining ability, assisted by Thindruk, the party sought a compact secondary cargo that could be loaded quickly. They found worked metal goods but failed to secure a favorable price.
  • The party spent the entire seventy-five-crown advance on seventy-five units of knives, pots, pans, and other worked metal goods for resale in Marienburg.
  • Once the porcelain was loaded, the hold would contain one hundred units of porcelain and seventy-five units of worked metal goods, leaving one hundred twenty-five of its three hundred units free, aside from the space occupied by the sealed Warpstone container.
  • The party received fifty Reward Points for the session.