The Ageless Promise

After spending the night at Jobb’s inn, the group found one of the flyers covering the city, advertising a luxury cruise that would call at several cities closer to the continent. But once at the harbour they ran into two things: the hard truth (the cruise was far too expensive and refined for people like them), and a man who stole the group’s money from Astrid. After a short chase the thief was stopped and the money returned, but it had all been a test to see how the group would react, so they were escorted to a district of the city where, in a villa, they met Kael Vire, head of the Knot.

After a short conversation Kael made them an offer: the group would recover a shipment and bring it to one of his men, and in exchange Kael would get them passage on a ship.

Kael also told them that the cruise would reach its destination in four or five months, maybe more, but that he could instead arrange passage on another ship, which would make only a short stop at Promise before reaching Vyre.

The Ulfar accepted and headed out of the city to a coaching inn, where another agent of the Knot gave them the details they needed to complete the mission:

Three days earlier the Knot had received an offer from a wandering group of adventurers, who offered to sell several magical and mysterious objects and brought a small sample. After analysing the sample, the Knot’s experts recommended that Kael go ahead, so the adventurers said they would come back with the shipment in a day or two, but they never arrived.

The group was pointed in the direction the adventurers had been seen leaving in, and after an hour’s walk they found themselves before the remains of crumbling structures, probably thousands of years old. There, among signs of a struggle and spent firearm casings, they found a corpse they concluded belonged to the group of adventurers, and a severed arm with an iron ring showing a dragon. After finding a way into the structure below, the group ventured inside. The ruins below pulsed with magic and held many remains of mechanical equipment, but their exploration was cut short when they were attacked almost at once by a group of damaged automatons. Astrid received a vision and her left arm became useless in battle, but after being hit hard and falling unconscious she received healing and could use the arm again. It was then that the vision of her aunt declared herself dissatisfied, and said that what she was trying to do was teach her a lesson.

Inside the ruins they found a crate with the shipment in question: two deactivated automatons like the ones that had attacked them. They decided to flee when they saw that in the next room there were more automatons, bigger ones, around a deactivated, gigantic one. So they took the shipment and, playing on a technical flaw of the automatons (they could not tilt their heads upward), managed to destroy two of the bigger ones thanks to Freya’s lightning. Back in Skarvik, having delivered the shipment to the coaching inn and completed the mission, they heard from Kael that he was very pleased with them; as they said goodbye he told them that the captain of the ship in question (the Daughter of Black) would meet them at the inn the next day. After that they went to buy 4 javelins, and Sigurd asked the smith to replace the symbol of Iomedae on his armour with that of the Wolfmother. Freya bought a cold iron nail.

NPCs

Kael Vire