Burnt Offerings

The PCs attend the Swallowtail Festival (a ritual to consecrate Sandpoint's new cathedral) and end up defending the town from a goblin raid. In the days to follow, the PCs come to terms with their growing local fame, making friends and contacts among Sandpoint's citizens. As rumors of massing goblin armies build, the disappearance of a local tavern owner leads the PCs to uncover treachery within The Sandpoint Glassworks and the existence of an ancient catacomb below the town.

An investigation of these discoveries reveals two things: that monsters dwell below the city and that the goblin raid on the town was but the first the monsters have planned. In order to save Sandpoint, the PCs must travel to Thistletop, the lair of the most powerful goblin tribe in the region, where they can confront the woman whose madness and wrath presents such a menace, yet who is herself the tip of a much larger conspiracy that will soon threaten all of Varisia.

———

Five years ago and hundreds of miles from the Varisian coast, a wicked and ambitious stone giant named Mokmurian awakened a slumbering tyrant-Runelord Karzoug. In his time thousands of years ago, at the height of Thassilon's rule, Karzoug drew his magic from traditions closely tied to the seven primal sins. After many centuries of magical slumber, Karzoug wasted no time in beginning his triumphant return by activating an ancient Thassilonian artifact called a runewell, a device capable of extracting magical essence from the souls of certain creatures who, in life, exemplified specific spiritual traits-in this case, greed.

Only these souls were useful to Karzoug in completing his return to life, and so he sent Mokmurian, now his puppet, back into the world to make ready the harvest. Karzoug uses a potent scrying device called a soul lens to focus on sacrifices prepared with the proper rituals and marked with the Sihedron Rune (the ancient symbol of all seven schools of Thassilonian magic). As the sacrifice dies, the soul lens draws his soul across any intervening distance to empower the runewell.

Karzoug's growing need for greedy souls has spurred Mokmurian and his stone giant kin to further and further violence, and in time, the PCs must stand before these giants. Yet for now, the activation of the ancient runewell has had another, unanticipated, effect. Other runelords kept similar receptacles of magical sin as well, and when Karzoug activated his runewell, these others also flared to dangerous life.

In most cases, the other runewells were hidden deep underwater, buried far underground, or lost in remote regions, and this sudden flare of ancient magic had little noticeable effect. Yet in the Catacombs of Wrath below the sleepy town of Sandpoint, where Runelord Alaznist kept a minor runewell keyed to the sin of wrath, these effects were not so isolated.

Although possessing but a shadow of the power of a true runewell, it sent a shockwave of magical energy up through the town above, manifesting in the form of violent nightmares from which many folk woke in a terrible rage that vanished in the span of a heartbeat. In a few unfortunate cases, however, the wrath found fertile soil.

Lonjiku Kaijitsu, a bitter noble who still seethed with rage at being cuckolded years before, woke in the middle of the night, called his wife to the back porch of their cliffside manor, and threw her over the edge to die on the jagged rocks below.

Jervas Stoot, an eccentric artist who channelled his rage from years of paternal abuse into the creation of hauntingly beautiful woodcarvings of birds, began to lay his plans for the murder of nearly two dozen folk whom he felt had wronged him over the years.

Nualia Tobyn, left pregnant and abandoned by a local cur and shamed in her foster father's eyes, finally succumbed to her anger and forsook the goddess of dreams and stars for the goddess of monsters and madness, promising herself that she would burn her father and his church to the ground.

These three unfortunates became consumed by their wrath, and their actions over the course of the next several months came to be known as the Late Unpleasantness. Those days are over now, fresh in memory still, but thankfully past. The people of Sandpoint now prepare to consecrate a new cathedral to replace the old one that recently burnt to the ground, and are eager to put all reminders of the Late Unpleasantness behind them for good.

Lonjiku's murderous act has gone all but unnoticed, and Stoot is long dead, yet Nualia has not been idle over the past several years. She is ready to finish what she started with that first fire. This time, all of Sandpoint shall become burnt offerings to her insane goddess.