Before heading to bed the crew decided to meet up at the local market early the next morning to see what supplies we could scrounge up, we hoped to find a wagon or at least a cart to carry all the loot that we would surely find.
The day started badly and only got worse, it was a cold grey morning with frequent rain, we spent a couple of hours at the market but alas there were no carts or wagons to be bought. We settled for horses and a good supply of rations, as the journey to the spine of the world would surely take several weeks. But what we mainly got was wet.
One old fellow manning a rather tatty looking stall kept harassing us to buy some of his miserable-looking offerings, we weren’t all that interested but he kept on and on and then we noticed that miraculously it wasn’t raining around his stall… Magic at work !! So we wandered over and looked through his wares, most of it was rubbish but there were a few items that caught our attention. What a mistake that turned out to be.
The ‘Wetland Boots’ that I bought turned out to make an annoying splashing sound everywhere I walked. Gandoillin ended up with a wand that supposedly detects magic, but it seems that as it is magic it just constantly detects itself. Theodore tried on a cloak that seemed harmless enough but turned out to be a Cloak of Tongues that licks everything he walks past, gross. Karn got what was supposed to be a rod of disintegration which true to its name promptly disintegrated the moment it was used. <Aidan> found an old dusty looking book that looked interesting, but whenever it is opened a cat magically appears and sits on it so nothing can be read and Shra ended up with a ring, which seems to alert him with an ungodly screech if any supposed enemy is within his sight. Not an auspicious start! When we returned to the old fools stall he had of course disappeared and now we are stuck with these items as they seem impossible to take off / remove.
We also heard some gossip about a supposed Chronomancer named Karl who lived nearby, apparently, he had had an encounter with the Orb so it seemed a good idea to seek him out and see what info he could give us.
We headed back to the Inn, paid the bills changed into dry clothes and then went off in search of Karl. It was mid-afternoon by the time we reached the forest and the weather had begun to clear at least, maybe our luck would change with the improving weather.
At Karls house we found Nick the Teifling Weapon Smith and got a supply of weapons, Gondillin picked up a few smithing tips which could come in really handy for keeping our equipment in tip-top condition, and improving it with gems of power should we find some. Definitely an improvement over the events of the morning. And we found Karl, he turned out to be a young lad who was a ‘Chronomancer in Training’ and he wasn’t able to tell us much about the orb other than being close to it made him nauseous and panicky which I suppose is understandable. When he tried to approach the Orb he was instantly teleported back to his home many hundreds of miles from the Spine of The World, very powerful magic indeed. He was however able to supply us with a fairly detailed map that can detect magic or time anomalies and glows blue and purple when such an anomaly appears anywhere on the Sword Coast.
The Motley Crew 