(GLÅUGUST) St. Octavia's Vigil
GLÅUGUST challenge 2, prompt 5: books as treasure.
A not-terribly-serious character-based micro-module, set somewhere in a wooded region within a day's travel of a decent-sized settlement. It has not been edited, and probably needs to be.
Background
Three weeks ago, some novice adventurers stole a rare book called The Song of the Heights from the estate of a local noble. It was a dicey, poorly planned heist, and they were lucky to escape with their lives. The plan was to lay low in the woods for a couple of days before returning to their employer, a black market figure calling himself "Mr. Knife" who offered an outrageous bounty of one thousand gold pieces for the book.
Unfortunately, the ruined chapel they picked as their temporary hideout turned out to be the lair of an ogre named Ruggs. After shaking the party down and realising how much they treasured The Song of the Heights, Ruggs decided to use it as leverage. He's forced the adventurers into being his goons, robbing travellers to keep him supplied with food and alcohol. He promises to give the book back when he's done with it, and threatens to destroy it if they act out.
If you need a hook, there are rumours of eccentrically dressed bandits who apologise profusely to their victims before disappearing. Reports suggest there are at least a dozen of them, but that's actually Moonie's auditory illusions giving the impression of more bandits just out of sight.
Characters
Ruggs
An ogre, naturally. Morale 8. Armed with a giant hunting spear.
Ruggs distinguishes himself from other ogres by his extreme laziness. He finds his new minions' exhaustion and horror at their situation hilarious, and loves making them sweat and struggle while he sits back and gorges himself.
He's generally pretty stupid, but has an excellent nose for direct lies.
Treasure: Ruggs keeps The Song of the Heights on him at all times. Worth at least 100gp. More on this at the end of the post.
The Adventurers
Grimy, shabby, and sleep-deprived. They've only been together for about six months. They really should just abandon the job and run off into the woods, but three things keep them here.
- Mr. Knife's bounty for The Song of the Heights is more money than any of them have ever seen.
- Sunk cost fallacy.
- They're idiots.
When they're not out stealing or buying supplies, they spend their time halfheartedly standing watch, eating horrible stew, and arguing over how to get The Song of the Heights back. They all have their own plans, none of which will work if attempted.
Ruggs has ordered them to attack and drive off strangers, but they'll crack at any serious threat. Mr. Knife has ordered them not to tell anyone about their mission, but they'll crack under even light interrogation. (Ruggs doesn't care and hasn't asked.)
Denise
1st-level fighter. Chain armour, glaive.
An uncouth, thick-limbed boar of a woman. The nominal leader. Cantankerous beyond her years. Grunts and snorts as much as she speaks.
Current plan: Wait until Ruggs is particularly drunk, then rush him. He can't take all four of us! (Even utterly wasted, he very much can take all four of them.)
Moonie
1st-level illusionist wizard. Unarmoured, dagger. Only spell of note is ghost chorus (like ghost sound, but from multiple target points at once).
Shaved head tattooed with "arcane glyphs". Barely 5' tall. Voice and demeanour of a frightened mouse. Freezes up under any sort of interpersonal stress.
Current plan: Wait until Ruggs gets bored of the book. (He won't.)
Cadmus
1st-level monk. Unarmoured, mace.
Weathered and spindly. Godawful posture. "Well, in fact..." Feigns understanding of everything. He's the only adventurer who's actually looked inside The Song of the Heights, and was (and still is) planning to run off with it in the night and make his fortune.
Current plan: Poison Ruggs. (They've already tried this once, but it just gave him a stomach ache. Cadmus has been collecting herbs for another try, but will inevitably screw it up again.)
Fernand
1st-level bravo. Leather armour, rapier.
Ethereally handsome if not for all the mud and bloodstains. Foul-mouthed. Paper tiger.
Current plan: Damn it all, let's run away and start again! Who's with me? (Nobody's willing to join him, and he's too scared to do it alone.)
The Vigil
Graphic design is my passion.
The ground surrounding the Vigil is strewn with broken bottles and jars, some of them visibly fancy and expensive. The smell, especially on hot days, is atrocious.
1. Hitching Post
A broken chunk of church pew driven into the ground. A weary-looking mule is tethered to it and an empty cart sits nearby.
Occupant: A randomly chosen adventurer stands guard here, under orders to alert Ruggs of any intruders. They have a 2-in-6 chance to be asleep, day or night.
2. Midden Pit
A 10' wide, 10' deep pit full of food waste and excrement. Smells exactly as you'd expect. Rat-sized woodlice feast eagerly on the refuse.
Treasure: There's a partially clothed human skeleton buried beneath the general sludge. This is Niall, the party's former fifth member, whom Ruggs killed as a show of force when he first encountered them. (That was actually the least traumatic part. Nobody liked Niall.) His satchel has already been looted, but there's a gold ring in a secret pocket in his hat, worth 25gp.
3. Chapel
The chapel itself looks ruined, and it is, but it was also never actually finished. The windows are unglazed, just holes in the walls. The roof only covers the eastern half. Sacks of bread and cheese and a half-eaten pig carcass hang from makeshift hooks on the north wall.
Where the altar would normally go, at the east end, there's a 15' wide pile of reeking rags which Ruggs uses as a bed. Most of them are worthlessly stained and rotten, but there are glimpses of bright colour in there. A staircase in the southeast corner leads to 4. Chapel Cellar.
Occupant: Ruggs spends almost all of his time in here, sleeping (wearing the screaming torc, see below) by day, leafing through The Song of the Heights by night. He leaves to check in on his minions at dusk and dawn, and spends about half an hour taunting and haranguing them before stomping back to his nest.
Treasure: Ruggs leaves the screaming torc here when he's not sleeping. It's a heavy bronze torc (he wears it as an armlet), stained blue with verdigris. While worn, it emits a piercing scream when a living creature larger than a cat comes within 30'. Worth 50gp as a curiosity.
A rummage through the nest finds 20gp worth of fine clothes. They need a wash, but they'll sell.
4. Chapel Cellar
20' square. The walls and floor are bare, damp earth. You could get drunk just on the smell.
Treasure: 1d6 x 10gp worth of fine wines and huge quantities of worthless rotgut.
5. Tents
Three leaky single-person tents clustered around a large fire pit.
Occupants: The three adventurers not on guard at 1. Hitching Post are gathered here. They are (1d6) -
- Sleeping.
- Cooking a hunk of meat for Ruggs.
- Cooking stew for themselves.
- Arguing about how to get the book back.
- Arguing about whose fault the situation is.
- Arguing about leadership.
The Song of the Heights
A foot-square slab of a book, bound in black leather with copper-plated corners. 500 thick, handwritten pages. Attributed to "Philemon the Traveller", supposedly a new translation of a lost, centuries-old original.
The text is presented as a travelogue, documenting the geography and peoples of a distant, legendary mountain range. Even assessed as the fiction it obviously is, it's a poor effort. The prose is lurid and stream-of-consciousness. It contradicts itself constantly. Whole chapters are plagiarised.
But nobody's reading it for the story.
The Song of the Heights is densely and lavishly illustrated with some of the finest works of pornography in the known world. Whoever drew them was a genius, albeit a rather scattered one - several pieces are unfinished, and they're often completely unrelated to the text. A cursory skim could introduce even the most jaded sybarite to half a dozen new hobbies.
The original is worth 100gp to any rich pervert. Anyone with the means to copy and distribute it, even just the images, could make a lot more than that. The pseudomedieval world is no stranger to smut, but nobody's making anything quite like this.
Be careful, though. Plenty of people are threatened by This Sort of Thing, and some of them have swords.