Only Bards

The band's second gig — the White Lady Inn in East Haven — started with the roadie dosing his own lead guitarist. Roadie slipped Rico Lunae a packet of Mystican 'gorilla panic' and Rico immediately stripped naked in the snow to fight an imaginary spider-gorilla, catching himself in the blast radius of his own thunderwave. Dick flopping in a snowdrift and guitar warping in the cold, he was still expected to take the stage on time.

The rest of the band salvaged the show. Kaldur Gravelgut strutted ZZ-Top-style with a magecraft-boosted bass fill, Dreadie Mercurie nailed a nat-20 Freddie-Mercury entrance, Enjee brought the drums, and Roadie headbanged 'help action' at Rico from the wings. Rico played the whole set with one exposed testicle and no rhythm, but the band still walked out with twenty gold each — and Kaldur earned a permanent per-performance Magecraft dice bump for the pyrotechnic bass fill.

At the bar afterward, Roadie recognized Ambassador Therindrel of Waterdeep of the Waterdeep Blackstaff — a self-hating half-elf who had just trashed the band to Rico's face — and served him gorilla-panic tea disguised as a fan gift. Therindrel of Waterdeep knocked over a table, stripped his clothes off, and ran into the snow, screaming. Not the last the party would hear of him.

Rinaldo, the halfling medium in the White Lady Inn's green room, ran their post-gig seance and channeled the White Lady — the moon-tied Queen of the Lake, contacted through frost forming on windows and candles guttering plumes of smoke. Roadie asked about missing halfling Bot Withers ('eastern shore, north') then bricked the follow-up with 'how you doing?' — the White Lady punished the impertinence by freezing Rico's exposed cock into a camel toe out of pure spite. Kaldur got a Dumathoin secret ('Termalane'), Enjee got two shops for a drum-kit-sized bag of holding (Triglio in Targos, Ewan's Trinkets in Bremen), and Dreadie got a place where the spirits yearn to rock ('Kerr Koenig, the corpse').

Before they could rest, the town speakership's crescent-moon-sashed assistant Prudence burst in: white-robed strangers with spiral tattoos had ridden axe-beaks into the Town Hall and were attacking Speaker Danneth over 'the shears.' The party crashed through a secret entrance and wiped the raiding cell — five dead, two slept, one grappled and interrogated. Kaldur ran the interrogation dwarven-style, knocking teeth out until real answers arrived. Mid-fight, Therindrel of Waterdeep turned up hunting revenge and tried to Polymorph Rico as payback for the roofie. The spell failed to stick.

The raiders were the Church of Inexorable Ruin — the Cult of Ragnarok, serving Thrynne the Black — who intended to shear the mythic Chaos Wolf awake so it would devour the sun. But the shears were already gone, stolen that morning by a one-armed man whose fancy left-hand prosthetic bore the unmistakable craftsmanship of Paxton. And a shardalyn statue in Speaker Danneth's office whispered 'the awakened one lies below,' suggesting Danneth is himself compromised. Rico spent most of the interrogation across the room flirting badly with Prudence — 'so you heard the good news about William Moon?' — and won only a small insight that she is much more than a scribe.

Commandeering the cult's rocket-powered geyser sleds, the band screamed eight miles east to a moon-marked barrow — the tomb of William Moon, Rico's Odin analogue. They picked their way through a zero-gravity Ginnungagap void chamber, an Odin's-eye stone tree yielding a 300 gp black-opal dagger, a giant-slayer skald riddle that collapsed a titan statue on Rico's head, and a Norn's-loom room threading Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld's colored fates through live spinning stone spindles.

In the sarcophagus chamber they found the one-armed thief himself — Finulf One-Hand, a self-declared Fang of Vanagander, a mercenary company sworn against the Cult of Ragnarok. He'd teleported past every trap with a Cape of the Mont Blanc to keep the shears out of Thrynne's hands, and explained Uror's Shears cut anything but return to the Norns after a single use. A Gleipnir-and-Fenris-mouth trap in the room mimicked the Tyr myth and cost Rico a hand's worth of psychic damage.

Cult reinforcements — sixteen of them, per Kaldur's tremorsense — closed in outside. The session paused mid-fight, shears still hidden, the party debating whether to trigger them on a rope so they'd vanish back to the Norns, and 'poor Scar' — another Fang — still somewhere out in the tunnels.