By: Owen "Kalashai" Lacey
On Saturday we were all invited to Hedda’s home in Blackwood: the underwater swamps of Hartlepool. Upon arriving we were enchanted to be able to breathe underwater (which, at least in my case, resulted in manifesting a pair of gills for the day), and told to watch out for the muddy swamp nearby that seemed to be spitting out undead. She also mentioned that she had lost a few small boxes in the swamp that we should look for throughout the day. Throughout the day Blackwood was distributing food made in the Hartlepool kitchen. While there wasn’t a massive amount of it, what we did get was very good. The butternut squash soup in particular provided a much needed boost during the tournaments, and the chocolate and oat snacks were a nice sugary treat during the day.
Shortly after we arrived, some Kenku birds showed up, asking for help with a map to their missing eggs. Their vocabulary was limited to “Help, map” and “Eggs” (though some people taught them other words, including swears), which led us to hunt for map pieces in the swamp. It turned out the undead had pieces of the map stuck in the muck on them, which the small early group slowly collected. After we had all the pieces of the map, which was a cube made up entirely of L shaped pieces, we retreated out of the swamp to figure out the map and participate in some light tournaments. As it turned out, the tournament prize was a second piece of the map, but it had been broken, so we each got a piece for participating in the early tournaments. We had little luck figuring out either map piece, but more people were arriving, and Ypnn, Cimone, and Rekees managed to solve both puzzles rather quickly once they sat down to work on them.
At that point, we needed to wait for the Kenku birds to finish deciphering the map, so Blackwood set up some more tournaments for us to participate in. Throughout the day we fought in limited-style tournaments with single short, hand-and-a-half, magic missile, “Mumblypeg” (an archery tournament where you scored points by shooting through an opponent's legs), and more. These tournaments were incredibly fun—not too competitive, but also not too silly to take seriously and get some good fighting in.
As the sun was starting to go behind the underwater trees, the Kenku birds returned, indicating that they had deciphered the map and could lead us to their missing eggs. With a full party, entering the swamp and fighting through the muddy undead proved much easier than before. We quickly found our way to a blocked door, with a friendly water snake named Linguine swimming around nearby. A team of puzzle solvers up front worked on the door, while myself, Makhta, Orion, and Ypnn held the back line against the swamp’s undead infestation.
Once through the door we encountered incredibly angry cats lunging at us with claws, teeth, and a massive hammer that broke through armor and bones much quicker than a standard weapon. We chased them back to a lair where they had stashed the stolen eggs, and fought them down until the King Cat stopped regenerating. However, we still couldn’t return the eggs to the Kenku. They seemed to be magically bound to the King Cat’s corpse, and neither disenchant nor resist magic allowed us to take the eggs very far. Even destroying the cat’s body down to bones and goop didn’t help, and left us with cat goop sloshing towards the eggs constantly. It turned out that the eggs had been corrupted with cat magic. Eventually Swift and Ypnn worked together to do a ritual to Aurora to call the cat souls out of the eggs and return them to their natural state, finally boiling away the cat goop we had been carrying around.