Torches in Twilight Session 27, Meet the Palbucs!

We left off last session in King's Lake.     Since Bendek recently learned Overland Flight, Kormatin and Company have largely ditched using horses.     In no particular order, Kormatin got a lot of information. While Ragani studied up on alchemy and the Draconic language and Brigid crafted a new charged augmentation gauntlet. Kormatin and Bendek flew (literally) to Ivanna City to see if the shards of their Bag of Holding could be used for anything.   They learned it would be possible (albeit very difficult) to use the shards to recover the bag's former contents in the Astral Plane and/or the shards could be salvaged for 20% of the cost of a new Bag of Holding.       Inara par Gruffyl answered Kormatin's letter and said she would meet him in King's Lake in roughly 30 days. Seemingly receptive to working with Kormatin but diplomatically worded for some leeway.       Aleesia the Satyr and a party of satyrs was returning from Duchy of Frymar and hoping to get the king to back them up against Duke Nanda Frymar. The satyrs want to move many of their noncombatants from the Village of Satyrs up north where they will be safer, and Duke Frymar was making it difficult. Presumably because he didn't want more mouths to feed.   Aleesia asked Kormatin to pressure Duke Frymar to be more accommodating. Swynfaredia is not known for being especially accommodating to their own satyr population and civilian satyrs are more at risk than civilian humans. At least the way the satyrs see it. For background, Swynfaredia has three times the total population of Fumaya but Fumaya has slightly more satyrs.       Danuta of the Fumayan Masks invited Kormatin and company to share intelligence.   First she congratulated them on disrupting the Gorisonad spy and communication apparatus. They delayed their proposed retributory strike against the Barony of Blue Peaks and the Wooly Slopes Barony because of their logistics disruption but because of the communication disruptions a few of the outlying Gorisonad provinces didn't get the message about the change. They mobilized anyway, and while the Gorisonads were sorting out the confusion, spies connected via the Fumayan Mask's network were able to slip in and pick up more information. Who some of the more important leaders in the military effort, where they are using as a staging point and when their attempt to march on the Border Baronies is.   The Fumayan Masks learned that the ajawnok of the Uskalan camazotz has forbidden her subjects from taking mercenary gigs from Swynfaredians without her prior permission. Technically, they aren't forbidden from working for Swynfaredian through a middleman broken but camazotz are not big on legalistic technicalities.   Most interestingly, they learned that a powerful but somewhat dishonored Fang Warrior from House Selwyth promised to deliver the heads of Kormatin and his three companions to House Gorisonad.   Kormatin thanked Danuta and asked her to keep any eye out for noteworthy noble bastards in roughly his age range.     Kormatin asked his dwarven weaponsmithing roommates to make several "gnome sized" knives to arm a potential goblin slave revolt in Swynfaredia later.     Kormatin received an anonymous letter saying that based on acquisitions they were going after House Selwyth either recently made a lich or were trying to make a lich.     Kormatin was summoned to the King Henryk III Linijka the young king. He told Kormatin that the king was told that men were disappearing near the Swynfaredian border in Duchy of Palbuc and that Plant magic was likely involved in covering the tracks.   The party sent a messenger kalazotz to have Noggra the Tengku meet them near the demesne of Count Adrion Zielonkame. Kormatin invited Aleesia along (because she was right there in King's Lake).   Brigid finished up her charged gauntlet and the party used Overland flight to meet up with Noggra and then present themselves to Count Adrion Zielonkame.   Count Adrion married Kormatin's mother, Lady Alina, years ago. He went through the charade of pretending Kormatin was not his wife's bastard son but he did make himself scarce fairly often to give them time to talk.   Adrion greeted Kormatin's party formally than made up a flimsy excuse to turn them over to Alina. Kormatin used this opportunity to catch up with his mom and explain Brigid and by extension, about Count Rohdri and his many bastard children.   Then they had a fairly formal midday meal with a normal spread, not a luxurious spread. Adrion and his top advisors met with Kormatin and company in a big map room and explained who disappeared in approximately what stretches of forest at approximately what times. His ranger brief Noggra a little bit on the terrain but did not travel with his party. Adrion said that Duke Vern Palbuc was (ineffectively) patrolling the border with a large party of men largely out of his enthusiastic youthful zeal.   They had a low key evening meal. Kormatin chatted with his step brother Lord Bazyli and they had some polite small talk.   Roughly simulataneously met with a lady in waiting, Wanda who was a Palbuc bastard. The two young women connected the dots and pieced together that Rohdri was almost certainly her father. Brigid eventually relayed this to Kormatin and they agreed that they should try to help her somehow.       Kormatin set out with his semistandard six-man unit: Kormatin, Brigid, Bendek, Ragani, Aleesia, and Noggra.   They found the trail of Duke Palbuc and his men fairly easily. Kormatin tried to convince Duke Palbuc to go home because he was exposing himself to unnecessary risk and Kormatin was not very persuasive because the young Duke's sense of duty and machismo wouldn't allow him to take that level precaution. Ragani reframed the argument saying that the duke's force was intimidating would be attackers and he was essentially scaring their target away.     Side note, Brigid has a good poker face in general, but Kormatin and Ragani figured out that Brigid quickly developed a crush on Duke Vern Palbuc who happens to be a teen heartthrob as well as a duke.     Eventually, Noggra found a the general area where someone disappeared and Aleesia to talk to the trees to find out where the bodies were carefully hidden. The bodies were fairly well mauled and they were stripped of their most valuable possessions.   They were relatively near the castle of Count Anatol Palbuc V so they swung by and talked to Anatolian Palbucs. Count Palbuc and Kormatin compared notes on the disappearances. Count Palbuc surmised that since the Swynfaredian are not big on forest guerilla warfare, so they were probably using mercenaries. Count Anatol didn't got full feast mode but he did do a bit of a flex with some relatively spice heavy meals.   Count Palbuc and his chief warden were able to inform Kormatin and company where the most recent disappearance occured. Aleesia and Noggra once again used a combination of Plant Magic and general ranger know-how to figure how where six men were buried. Ragani was able to deduced that they looked like they were mauled by a bear (though their flesh had not been eaten). The party was able to determine there were two bears at least.   Armed with this knowledge, Kormatin tracked the residual magical residue of old spells with his Divination and Noggra looked for bear tracks with his ranger training. The two bears used Plant magic to hide their trail but they didn't have the mana to do this constantly, so Noggra and Kormatin had to hand off who was doing the tracking periodically. At some point their quarry turned into birds and flew off but they left enough of a magical trail and Kormatin was rolling really well so they tracked their quarry through the area through the night until they found a small encampment.   We ended the session here so we didn't have to end this session midaction.