Journal Entry One
It appears that I was horribly injured. I do not remember much from the past couple of days, only that my last conscious action is that I ran into a building to attempt to rescue some of its’ residents from a fire. I think a support strut fell on me. I no longer feel as I once did. I am weaker, less dexterous, and less hardy than I was but four days prior. Sitting in this sick bed is starting to drive me up the wall, but no matter. I recently received mail from some unknown man, telling me where I can get my vengeance for a prior event. Ah, how foolish of me! I haven’t told you, whomever has gotten a hold of this journal, anything about me!
I am Bjorn Jortunbründ, recently discharged soldier. I would rather not speak about why I was discharged, but I think it will suffice to say that there were some… less than acceptable acts done on my behalf. Good god, it seems like everything has just gone wrong recently… Well, now that I think about it, I believe that you should know why I was discharged. Two weeks ago, a young lad by the name of Thomp Thompson, was taken, and I believe I know by who. That damned Gaedren. Well, I searched restlessly for a week or so, asking many people if they knew the whereabouts of a child, I would say, “Have you seen a child, no older than ten years of age, with long, dark brown hair recently? He also has green eyes, brighter than the most expensive of emeralds. You would know who he is by seeing him.” Well, one man did say that he “might know where he is, with a bit of ‘persuasion’.” I gave him my last eight gold pieces, and he tried to run off. Enraged, I threw my Elven Curve Blade at him, and killed him on the spot with it. I retrieved the gold and blade, and than found my superior and told him of the event. He was angrier than I expected, and I was discharged.
Two days later, I see a burning building, and rush in to try and get anyone inside to safety. I got out an elderly woman and what appeared to be her two grandchildren, and heard another scream from inside. I rushed in again just in time to see a young woman, no older than 18 years of age, jump from the second story of this building. I ran to try and get out of the building, but it appears that I was too late. Something heavy fell on top of my, and I could not remove it. Miraculously, I have survived to tell the tale, but my muscles do not appear as strong as they were, nor does my body feel as hardy. For the past couple of days, I have been within this hospital resting and having my burns treated. Thank god they still think I’m in the city guard here, or else I would have a pretty hefty bill to pay at the end of my stay here.
I plan to leave this city when I find Thomp. I want there to be great stories written about me. That’s why I originally joined the city guard, but it quickly became apparent that there wasn’t really going to be any opportunity for fame, so I was bored. I constantly dreampt of going out and adventuring with a group of likeminded fellows, but have never got the chance. But I believe that this hunt for Gaedren may open some doors to me that were previously closed. But I must not forget the main purpose for me going on this mission; I must find Thomp and bring him back to his home safely.
Journal Entry Two
Earlier today, I woke up in the hospital and was told that I was being released.
I was thrilled to be out of this place, I never have really liked being under the care of someone else.
Whilst I was taking off my bandages, I found something odd.
There was a card in them, saying “I know what Gaedren has done to you.
He has wronged me as well.
I know where he dwells, yet cannot strike at him.
Come to my home at
3 Lancet Street at sunset.
Others like you will be there.
Gaedren must face his fate, and justice must be done.”
Rather odd to find this message, but I decided that I should go, if only to have something to do.
I arrived there a little early, and discovered a note on the table.
It read, “Thank you for coming.
I had to step out for a bit, but shall return shortly.
Please, have a seat while you wait.
The basket under the table contains bread and drink for you.”
Well, I ate some bread, and accidentally ended up drinking all the wine.
Ah well, things happen.
About fifteen minutes later, the others arrive. There is a kobold, that I cannot remember the name of at this moment, followed by some horrid looking serpent beast. All he mentioned about his past was that Gaedren had kept him in a cage for the beginning of his life. Maybe his serpent is an imaginary friend come real through some sorcery? I shall further ponder on this. There was a gnome, who called herself Ackippy, or something along those lines. He was one of those forest people, and was followed by a bear by the name of “Sergeant Grumbles”. I quite like the bear actually. She told me that she has lost a child to Gaedren, and would like him back. Poor woman. Next came a half-elf mage, who has said nothing since the beginning of this whole thing. Odd, I must get him to speak and learn more about him. Last, comes Curtis Kassic Prime. Quite a nice man, though a little barbaric for my choice of company. He told me a touching story, about how he has had an awful childhood, and was forced to work for Gaedren, and was beaten near death when failing at stealing. He than apprenticed under an armor smith for a while, and, later, got in many fights. He went to jail, built an orphanage, which later burnt down, and generally had a life I don’t really comprehend.
Enter Zellara, the young woman who asked us here. She does some odd voodoo magic tricks; I don’t really pay much attention to them. Something about inner turmoil and we all have a personality change in the past. Big whoop, I could have told you that without a deck of cards. She tells us that she lost her son to Gaedren, and tells us we should go slay him. We all gladly accept, and set off. We reach the docks, and sneak into his warehouse through a side door. No one is in this first room, and, whilst exploring it, Curtis opens a door, and there are three children in there, and a pirate. He orders the children to attack, and they follow his orders, though I do wish they hadn’t. The pirate deftly dodges several attacks, and I run in and slice him in twine. The children all sprint off, except for the one that the bear grappled. After some convincing, we convince Ackippy to have Sergeant Grumbles release the child. We loot the room, due to a need for equipment and whatnot. We find some silver and copper, take the items that were on the pirate, and I come up with the idea to put it all in a closet that’s in this room, and lock it with a key from the pirate. We than move on to the next room.
This room contains a mangy looking dog, which I quickly sprint at and kill with a single stroke of my mighty sword. I thought fighting was supposed to be a challenge? Nothing of interest in this room, and we move onto the next one, which, whilst containing four chests and two beds, contains nothing of interest. Curtis and I move on to the hallway near by, whilst the smaller folk enter a room that neither of us think we can get into, due to a jammed door. There is a crazy looking man in there, who, according to the kobold, threw vials of acid at him. I quickly kick down the door on the other side of the room, and we all charge in and attack the man. I do not land a single blow on him, be we over whelm him with our numbers, and soon he is dead. We stow his equipment in the closet that we put all the other stuff in earlier, and continue on.
Now, this is where things start to get a little sticky. We enter what appears to be a production room of some sort, containing many children, and one large half-orc. Well, this is an odd man. He starts giggling and telling the children to attack us. I quickly charge at him, but miss my attack horribly. Cue the children mob. They seem to just mob around me, the serpent, and the unconscious Prime, who had earlier attempted the same maneuver I had tried on the man that I shall refer to as Giggles. He runs around whilst we all try to fend off children, who are attacking us with pitchforks and daggers. I attempt to hit them with the flat of my blade, but I feel so poorly about it, I seem to miss every time. The serpent kills one, but I can’t place blame on it, it is an animal. I think. Well, my other party members attack Giggles, and, upon his death, the children stand down. You think they would take this opportunity to overthrow this man but, whatever. I collect up their weapons, as well as the items from Giggles, and stow them in the closet. We stabilize Curtis, and continue on.
We go outside the building, and cross a dock. Curtis, the Serpent and I all get to the boat that I believe houses Gaedren, whilst the kobold escorts the children back to Zellara’s house. Well, Sergeant Grumbles and his master, Ackippy, make it about halfway to the boat, with the half-elf following a little behind, when suddenly, the dock under the half-elf collapses, and a shark comes swimming up. “Ggrreeaatt…” I think to myself. The shark takes a nice chunk out of the magic-man, and well all start running to the rescue. I throw a dart at the creature, and hit it in the gills, and it starts to bleed profusely. The snake also attacks the shark, and appears to wound it fairly well too. The half-elf swims a little ways away, but the shark follows. The serpent slithers across the wall above the dock, and sticks its’ tail in the water for the mage to grab. He grabs the tails, but is bitten again by the shark, and is now unconscious or dead from the looks of it. I see one last opportunity to save him, and, from a stand still, make an absolutely massive fifteen-foot leap across the gap, land, and throw a dart at the shark, killing it. I’m not ashamed to say that I felt absolutely amazing doing this. Well, the serpent grabs the mage, I stabilize him, and we head back to the boat.
I kick down the door to get into the lower part of the boat, and see cobwebs all over the inside. “Eugh… spiders” I think to myself. I do hate those things. Well, a cat sized one comes crawling around the corner. I swing at it several times, and fail to hit it. It bites me successfully twice. Ah well, just a light nip at the toes, really. Our druidic friend uses some sort of magic that creates acid above the creatures head, and it dies. This is where we are right now, and I have taken but a few minutes to write in my journal so that I might not forget the events of today.
Journal Entry Three
Well, what an eventful and tragic day this has been. Wait, it hasn’t even been a day! Merely several hours now that I think about it… wow, quite a lot has happened in this short period of time. We entered the ship, and went down into the hull, where there appeared to be a slow leak, but that was no matter, we managed to fend off the small spiders that dwelled in this part of the ship. Simple. Next, we walked below the fishery, and reached a door. The kobold, Firk, and his snake went through first. This room was of quite an odd design. It was what I would approximate to be thirty feet wide by sixty or seventy feet long, and contained a long desk, with a horrible man sitting at it. This man was balding, with a big of white hair left on his head, and had a hunched back. He mocked us, obviously knowing of our past run-ins with him. Well, soon after he finished his taunting, while we all stood in shocked silence, I charged him through this foul smelling room. My first attack missed horribly, and he laughed at my feeble attempt to harm him. His pet alligator, short before this, had attempted to climb up onto the floor, there being a pool of water about ten by twenty feet by who knows how deep in the room, but had failed miserably. The kobold, and his snake, attacked the alligator. The kobold missed, plunging his spear into the water, but the snake struck true, dealing some damage to the beast. I couldn’t tell if Kurtis was doing anything or not, I think he may have been protecting the half-elf for the first part of this battle.
Well, my second attack on this horrid man struck true, and, with a strength I feel very rarely, I cut him clean open, and he died very soon after I struck him. We all turned our attention to the alligator, and soon, we had damaged it enough that it tried to escape. In my blind anger at Gaedren and this beast, Gobblegut, as it was named, I dove in after it, and hacked through its’ hide, killing it. I had a bit of trouble swimming back up, what with my armor and all, but soon got up. We promptly went about looting the room, and found the head of Zellara, who, through a Harrow Deck that her spirit possessed, she explained that she had actually been dead for weeks, and, contacted us through some magic, and gave us this quest that we have gone on. I then, disturbingly, discovered Thomp Thompson, the young man that I had been searching for, dead, hanging by his toes from the ceiling, missing his arms. Gaedren was truly a sick, sick man to do something like this. I got him down from the ceiling, and wrapped the body in some old clothes that we found in a room near the one we were in, and, for reasons unknown to me, the Firk decided to tunnel through the floor, and we climbed through to the surface.
We went to the cabinet to retrieve some of the stuff I had previously stored in there, but, alas, it had been broken into and the items within had been stolen. We walk outside to find that the city is in a state of panic; the king has died, looters are everywhere, and the marines and hell knights are doing their best to control the city. I put down Thomp deciding that, though my emotion attachment with him being very strong, having known him for five or six years now, there are bigger matters at hand. We sped off towards the market, needing to heal up our half-elf friend, and come to a group of houses, in a horseshoe shape, with six men with various improvised weapons attacking what appears to be a nobleman. I yell for them to stop, and do my best to talk them down, but that goes… less than great. I, in my nervousness, accidentally insulted their mothers’, and they became hostile towards me. I quickly applied some new-found oil that made my weapon more dangerous than ever, and prepared for the ensuing fight. It was mostly uneventful. No damage was dealt to me or any of my group-mates, though Kurtis did attempt to bribe the assaulters into attacking the nobleman, apparently to keep them from harming me. I guess it worked? I don’t think it was a great plan, but, hey, who am I to complain? I survived, the nobleman survived (though with a numerous amount of wounds), we got paid by the nobleman, and we continued on our way to the market. Lucky for us, the market was being safely guarded, so we handed over our weapons, and went about our shopping. We got some healing for our friend, we sold many of the items that we found, I bought some potions and healing of my own, and the others are still doing their shopping whilst I am writing this.
I feel that, while I am writing, I should explain who I got this odd weapon that I use now. It all goes back to my childhood, when I was learning to fight from mom and dad, both former adventurers. Mom was a dexterous woman, and loved to use daggers, rapiers, and whatever others weapons that let her use her nimbleness to great extent. Dad was a little more… forceful about the whole thing, and loved to use great swords, bastard swords, etc. Of course, both of them wanted me to use the type of weapon that they used, and so I was trained in both types of fighting. I could use either a dagger, or a great sword, to great affect. My training was superb, but, soon after I joined the city guard, my parents were called off to an adventure of great importance, and I have not seen them since. I have confidence that they are still alive; they were no weak individuals, even at their slightly older age. Well, one lazy night, me and a couple of the guards were sitting around, our shifts having just ended, and I look over at the elf. Now, normally I avoid associating with these weak types, but I was interested in something. He normally uses a bow, as one would expect, but I noticed a sword on his back. A two-handed sword, at that. I thought to myself, “why would he have that, he’s not very strong, right?” So, I ask him why he has the sword. He informs me that it’s called an “Elvin Curve Blade”, and that, unlike any other two-handed weapon of its kind, can be used much more precisely than, say, a great sword. Well, I try it out, and quickly fall in love with the weapon. I buy one of my own, and now it’s the only sword I am willing to use. Beautiful weapon it is. Ah, wouldn’t mom and dad be proud, having finally found a weapon that applies to both of their combat styles?
