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It Was the Wind

Wednesday, 26 August 2026

Session recap — 2026-08-26 (session 78)

Transcribed with whisper.cpp + pyannote diarisation. Speaker labels left anonymous (Ben DMs; this session was Gwrtheryn and “Mourning” Star on the ground, with Leaf Ear watching quietly through Mr. Sparrow). Proper nouns standardised to the campaign’s canonical list (Gwrtheryn, “Mourning” Star, Leaf Ear, Lleuad; Aetherium; Ketî). Names absent from that list are marked [unclear].

Where we left off

Gwrtheryn and Star had crept out to case a gated warehouse compound in Ellswater, one of several sites where the Aetherium powder might be stored — warehouses the party believe are owned by [unclear: “Braughan”] — while the rest of the party (and Lleuad) held back at the alley.

What happened

1. Casing the compound

• The street was dead quiet: double gates leading into a canopied courtyard, a tall warehouse to the right, candlelight flickering in three windows. Gwrtheryn wove the shadows close around them both (+10 to stealth) and they moved up.
• Star scrambled onto a ten-foot rooftop and reached down to haul Gwrtheryn up — and the drainpipe tore away from the wall, left hanging by a single bracket. Star spent a full minute quietly reseating it. “We are breaking and entering, not just breaking!”
• Two burly “dockworkers” came out to investigate — leather armour, shortswords at the hip, a dagger in each hand. They grumbled about the pipe making them more work, milled about for a few minutes, and went back in to report.

2. What’s in the office

• Star crept to a raised office window (21 stealth) and looked in on a tiefling woman in a long black leather coat, mid-card-game with one of the thugs. The guard reported in — “Nothing going on out there, miss” — and she rolled her eyes and sent him off. The table immediately clocked her as very much the Stevie type (“the one that shot me with a shotgun”).
• Star then clawed his way 40–50 feet up the main warehouse roof: three chimneys, none more than six inches across, no smoke, no way in from above.
• Round the back street they found a row of unlit windows 12–15 feet up, top-pivot type and untrapped. Gwrtheryn dropped his shadow-weave to cast Detect Magic — the windows were clean, but something magical sat right at the very edge of the spell’s range, deep inside the building.
• Star tried to hoist Gwrtheryn up on his hands to reach the window. Star overbalanced. Gwrtheryn hit the floor — no damage, considerable damage to his pride.

3. The big ol’ break method

• Star checked his Aetherium compass and it went berserk — not the usual excited twitch but the whole thing rattling in his hand hard enough to shake his arm. Nothing he’d ever felt from Aetherium before.
• So he picked up a broken anchor chain link and put it straight through the window. Shouts, a shrill call to alarm, and — in the DM’s words — Gwrtheryn watching Star “abandon all sense of tact and resort to the big ol’ break method.” Roll initiative.

4. The fight in the street

• Two thugs came sprinting out of the gate. Star, explicitly trying to hamstring rather than kill, put two arrows into the first — 33 damage with Hunter’s Mark — and killed him outright. “I really don’t want to kill you… anyway, I didn’t want to kill him.” It clearly bothered him for the rest of the session.
• Gwrtheryn, unseen, simply walked around the second thug as he ran past hunting for the cat, then jimmied the office window open with a dagger and slipped inside, pulling it shut behind him. The tiefling and her card partner were already gone, office door ajar.
• More opposition arrived: a third thug still fumbling his weapon belt on as he ran, then the tiefling herself, holding a flintlock pistol. Three in the street, one over the back fence.
• Gwrtheryn used Thaumaturgy to dim every candle in the office to nothing, then rolled a natural 20 on perception — “like Batman, Arkham Asylum, where he pings and you can see everything” — and heard, from somewhere inside the warehouse, a rasping, panicked yelp in the Ketian tongue. A tabaxi. Not [unclear: “Erky”].
• Star raided the desk, shoving every scrap of paper into his bag of holding (he can’t read a word of it), then used Blessing of the Raven Queen to teleport inside. The remaining guards lost the trail and fell back to guard the warehouse rather than chase.

5. Saffron-in-the-Reeds

• Gwrtheryn found the source of the yelp: a thug with his arm around a female tabaxi — slender, long-limbed, short dappled fur of burnt gold with dark stripes, amber-green eyes. Drugged, exhausted, bruised, dried blood matted in her fur, barely clothed. She called out to him in his own tongue; the thug laughed and snarled.
• Gwrtheryn cast Sleep upcast to 3rd level (51 hit points’ worth) and dropped both of them. The pair collapsed and started snoring. He rolled her clear, disarmed the thug and tied him up.
• Star meanwhile shut and barred the courtyard door in the tiefling’s face as she came hammering on it, furious at being locked out of her own warehouse. “It was the wind!” He found the yard gates locked, the side door from the house open, and turned the key on it behind him.
• Gwrtheryn woke the tabaxi and put a 3rd-level Healing Word into her. “Who are you? Are you here to rescue me?” — “Let’s say yes.” She gave her name: Saffron-in-the-Reeds. She took his hand and didn’t let go, licking a paw to tidy the matted blood out of her fur as he led her into the warehouse.

6. The iron-banded crate

• Saffron knew exactly what the Aetherium was: the mineral wealth of her continent, taken and hoarded here for nefarious means — and the stuff they’ve been giving her for her sickness. She coughed into her hand and came away with a purplish residue. Gwrtheryn had no lesser restoration prepared.
• Following the compass past barrels of grain, bolts of cloth and a great deal of perfectly genuine shipping goods, he found the one crate that mattered: four or five feet square, reinforced with iron bands that would need force to pry off. Too big and too heavy to carry, and — the party being the party — the session ended on them trying to stuff it into a bag of holding anyway.

NPCs met

• Saffron-in-the-Reeds — female tabaxi, held captive and dosed with Aetherium “for her sickness”. Wounded, drugged, coughing purple. Now healed, awake, and clinging to Gwrtheryn’s hand. Firmly on the party’s side.
• The tiefling in the black leather coat — [unclear: unnamed] runs the site; long black leather coat, deck of cards, flintlock pistol. Sent guards out, kept her composure, and is now locked out of her own warehouse and extremely unhappy about it. Hostile, alive, and knows the site is compromised.
• The warehouse thugs — four or more, leather armour, shortswords and daggers, presenting as dockworkers. One dead by Star’s arrows, one tied up and asleep, the rest regrouping inside.

Decisions made

• Chose noise over stealth: the chain link through the window traded a covert entry for a live alarm and a body on the street.
• Killed a guard by accident while trying to subdue him — Star’s non-lethal intentions are now on record, and so is the corpse.
• Barred the tiefling out of her own compound rather than fighting her, leaving a hostile, armed NPC outside who has seen enough to describe them.
• Woke and healed Saffron mid-infiltration instead of leaving her hidden — the party now has a weakened non-combatant in tow.
• Committed to extracting the iron-banded crate rather than just confirming its contents.

Loot & rewards

• Every loose paper from the warehouse office desk, unread, in Star’s bag of holding.
• One disarmed, bound thug and his weapons.
• The iron-banded crate — located, not yet opened, not yet moved.

Open threads / hooks

• What’s actually in the crate? The compass has never reacted like that to ordinary Aetherium. Whatever’s in there registered as magical from the far side of the building, right at the edge of Detect Magic’s range.
• Saffron’s sickness and the purple cough — she’s being dosed with Aetherium as a treatment, and coughing up something purplish. Worth asking what the party already suspects about purple things from the Truran Mountains.
• [unclear: “Erky”] — Star specifically checked whether the yelp was Erky’s voice, and whether it sounded like his brother. It wasn’t either. So how many tabaxi are being held, and where are the rest?
• The tiefling is alive and outside with a loaded flintlock, and the guards who chased Star know a cat went over the fence.
• Whoever owns these warehouses — heard as [unclear: “Braughan”] — has an explanation to give.
• The papers Star pocketed are still unread, and nobody in the building can read them.

Memorable moments

• “Kill them, take their disguises! …I see no problem with this plan.” Immediately followed by: “This is gonna go so bad for me.”
• Star spending a full round of a stealth infiltration carefully reassembling a drainpipe he’d just ripped off a wall.
• The drainpipe’s revenge: Gwrtheryn dumped on the floor from Star’s shoulders, “not enough to take damage, but enough to hurt his pride.”
• A natural 1 triggering a full table debate on whether natural 1s auto-fail skill checks in this edition, resolved with “it’s up to the DM.”
• “It was the wind!” — shouted through a barred door at the woman whose warehouse it is.
• Gwrtheryn snuffing every candle in the room by hand-wave and then pinging the building like Batman.