## The Contract ##### [[Campaign 3]] A loose collective of professionals is pulled together in the city of [[Taembria]] by a monster hunter named [[Burrim]], hired by guild master Athena Thalazar on behalf of the prominent devil family known as the Crassians to bring in a Death Tyrant. Before the job even begins, threads begin to unspool in every direction. [[Stepjan Antona]], a middle-aged wizard, is chasing down a mysterious vial given to him by a sickly half-elf named [[Rowyn Witherleaf]] — the same vial Rowyn himself bought from a man hiding in the sewers who warned him to be careful and then vanished. [[Veszzar Hlalth]], a drow warlock, is being squeezed by his superior Xalyth into retrieving a book called [[the Obscurus]] or risk losing his pact to the ooze god. [[Beautiful Carl]], for his part, is auditioning his charms for Vassago Crassian, who wants him to seduce a noble family head to prove his worth before sponsoring him as an entertainer — the role coming down to him or his rival, Cody Divine. Preparations made and blessings gathered, the party descends into [[the Underdark]] through the Schism. On the way down, a tremor shudders through the city. They think little of it until they reach a tunnel in the deep — a quarter mile wide, carved through solid rock by something no living member of the party has ever heard of. They press on toward Skolash's lair anyway. ## Into the Lair The Death Tyrant's dungeon yields its horrors in layers. Mad duergar with crystalline blue eyes haunt the first chambers, cannibalized and barely coherent, lured by a statue that tries to walk the party into its own spike trap. Deeper in, a captain confirms what the party had begun to suspect — Skolash, now a Death Tyrant, has been trapped by his own anti-magic deterioration and hasn't left his inner chambers in ages, leaving his duergar guards to run feral in his absence. Veszzar executes the captain once he's said his piece. The trap corridor beyond is a gauntlet of spinning, fire-spewing ballistae and deadly discs — solved with teamwork, explosives, and rope. The gallery past it is stranger still: suits of dreadnought armor, a petrified dragon, a demonic carpet, a living tree that was once a druid, and a celestial named Ithuriel locked in a prison cell, sold out by an aged halfling named [[Pallas Zion]]. Ithuriel agrees to heal them after the fight, though his intentions toward the city above are opaque at best. Stepjan is drawn to the empty cells by a voice only he can hear — he finds a paper with his own signature on it. When Burrim takes it, the page is blank. The Death Tyrant falls. Veszzar is turned to stone and restored by Ithuriel. The treasure is claimed. On the way out, the party surfaces to find the quarter-mile tunnel now swarming with Ortanus Dreadnoughts. The officers spot them hauling a wounded beholder and demand surrender. Skolash, calculating his odds, offers several party members a ride — and they take it. ## Loose Ends and Longer Shadows Vassago Crassian is waiting at the top of the Schism with a wagon and performers. A well-timed illusion and a silver tongue get the beholder through the checkpoint without incident. Rewards collected, the party lands at the Loaded Die to celebrate. Rowyn catches the eye of a noble tiefling nursing an ale — Jessica Edaxinae, law clerk by day and aspiring thief by night, whose career was derailed when a pair of celestials blew out a temple wall at exactly the wrong moment. She asks him to put in a word with his adoptive father, Dulian Markoth, head of the Thieves' Guild. He agrees. Veszzar, meanwhile, tries to scry his mother and gets nothing — an outcome that should be impossible. When Xalyth is summoned she is agitated and sharp: under no circumstances is the Obscurus to go to Crobadon. She needs it first. Some of her sisters have gone missing. The following days bring a new contract for Burrim, a rendezvous with Stepjan's uncle at the School of Illusion that Veszzar spies on without learning quite enough, and a trip back down into the lair — now occupied by a grinning derro named Timruk who activated the yagnoloth skull and has to be defeated before being conscripted as a reluctant caretaker. Below, they find the druid Althea Halani and cleanse her curse. She begins to speak of dangerous new fungal growth spreading through the Underdark — and then her eyes go cloudy, her flesh begins to decay, and she shambles off into the dark without another word. ## The Gorefields The party follows Althea up through the Schism and into the farmlands above the city, where she traces strange patterns through the fields before walking through an illusory wall into a rotten expanse of flesh and golems. They go in after her. The battle with the corrupted druid is brutal. When Burrim kills her anyway, a Cambion named Morthoz arrives furious and joins the fight — mobile, dangerous, and targeting the weakened. Tariel Sunwatcher appears to tip the balance, healing Carl back from the edge of death and linking Veszzar's life to hers as a tactical gambit. She tells the party her contract with a devil involves Mechanus and that Morthoz cannot harm her without breaking it. Stepjan, mid-battle, finds new words written in his book — commanding him to read the pages that once drove him mad. Pallas Zion appears at his neck with a blade. Stepjan reads the pages and escapes into a ghostly reflection of Taembria, where a drow named Torreldryn Hlalth informs him that he has been a steward of the Realm of Memory for a year he thought was madness, and gives him a cryptic direction before sending him back. Veszzar, to incapacitate Morthoz through the life-link, throws himself into fire. A Marut tears through a portal and chases Morthoz into the hells. Carl revives Tariel. Pallas Zion slips away. The ground beneath the gorefields collapses into a sinkhole as the party runs. ## Broker's Day The Dreadnoughts pull the party to safety and recruit them for a covert operation at a gala in two days. In the meantime, threads tighten on every side. Rowyn finds tainted blood near one of his stashes and thinks little of it. The party learns that the creature haunting the lagoons — killing miners and terrorizing the underdark — is Fahshulzgarath the Hunger, a being from beyond time and space, with star spawn gathering in its wake. Tethren Ortanus, the Dreadnought commander's son, goes down to the lagoons and doesn't come back — a ransom note written in his blood arrives at headquarters, demanding the Obscurus be delivered at the gala. Crobadon the Rotting, visited in the Underdark, fills in the remaining gaps: the gorefields were his conception but Morthoz's doing — a lure to draw the Hunger through a portal to the Nine Hells as a weapon in the Blood War. He also reveals that Xalyth was the one who brought the star spawn to this realm in the first place, getting her sisters killed or worse, and likely wants the Obscurus to finish her pact and correct the catastrophe she caused. The Obscurus itself, he says, is an instrument of the god Feladrin — and paired with a ring called Stasis, it can make its bearer a Steward of the Realm of Memory. At the gala, everything converges. Stepjan maneuvers Carl's seduction of Amon Vateri into success by erasing the man's memory of his own infidelity. Veszzar and Rowyn, posing as kitchen staff, discover the Elderberry couple have been smuggling Gaze — and that something is stuffed inside one of their casks. Carl performs to a thunderous crowd. Then Franklin Elderberry tries to turn into a slug, fails to mind-control Veszzar, and detonates an explosion he had already set. Gaze pours into the street, drawing every addict in the district. The Worm appears and corners Stepjan, shows him Tethren's body in the cask, then leaves laughing — he never needed the Obscurus delivered. He only needed it in the building. Rowyn drinks a potion. The potion has been tainted — he saw the corrupted blood, and ignored it. He fails his save and bites Val Ortanus. She blasts him off with hellfire. The reaction triggers. An arcane explosion tears through the block. Fahshulzgarath rises from below and the street caves into its maw. Veszzar remembers his father's words. Salvation amid the teeth. He spots a dead Astral Dreadnought impaled on one of the creature's teeth — a glimmer within it leading somewhere else — and casts fly on himself, Val, and Rowyn. They dive in. ## The Plane of Memory The dreadnought's body is a demiplane — a passage straight into the Plane of Memory. The party fights through their own worst recollections and the enemies that live in them until they reach the prison of Vizier Terrorcry, the villain of the campaign before this one, held here since his defeat. Pallas Zion is already there, working to set him free. They stop her. The Obscurus is preserved. Feladrin, his gaze turned toward his own domain, expels Fahshulzgarath from the city. The prisons of the Plane of Memory hold. Taembria survives — scorched, sunk in places, and badly shaken, but alive. --- A Death Tyrant captured, a devil's gala detonated, a god's prison defended, and an eldritch hunger driven back into the void — though the Obscurus remains a prize others will come seeking, Xalyth's debts are far from settled, and whatever Pallas Zion serves has not yet shown its full hand.