Overview

After a brief encounter with a mysterious package and a construct made from bits of paper and ink, the Party made their way to The Bent Nail Inn to investigate the dead man in room six. They arrived at the inn and were met with a raucous room full of live music, singing, and drunken shouts. The common area was filled with people clapping and shouting and cheering as a female bard, a woman with big fiery red curls and a cittern, led the patrons in a rowdy drinking song.

The party went upstairs to investigate the dead man in room six only to discover that there was no room six. The doors went from 5 to 7 with very little space in between. After some looking and poking around, the party decided to go downstairs to investigate and question some patrons. They found a few oddities, including multiple people who saw Orren and someone who looked exactly like Seren going upstairs and having an argument. As the mysterious bard played a melancholic song, the party each had visions of their past and lost items reappearing at a place called Ashwater. As the song came to a close, all 3 visions started overlapping and, as the bard plucked the final note, the sounds of scratching and moving could be heard upstairs.

Upstairs, the party discovered that room six was present exacly where it should be. They investigated the room a bit to find Orren Vale dead with no obvious signs of injury or illness and no clear cause of death. As Orren's body was touched, the party saw echoes of what seemed to be Seren knocking on the door, entering the room and conversing with a living Orren. The party seemed to be watching Orren's final moments. As the echo approached its end, the False Seren in the echo turned to look at the party and stepped out of the echo and into the present.

Roll for initiative.

Key Moments

• Arrival at the Bent Nail Inn to find a rowdy crowd stomping and clapping along to a live musician
• Introduction of a mysterious female bard with fiery red hair
• Despite Nessa remembering that she cleaned it, Room Six seems to have disappeared after she left to get Seren
• Several odd clues while investigating the wall between rooms five and seven
• Cold feeling on the wall; knock from the other side; multiple magical signatures; impossibly long hallway
• Downstairs investigation revealed a server brought up one drink and retrieved two glasses
• Ledger revelaed Orren checked in; ink changed to Seren and back
• Bard plays deeply melancholic song, triggering a personal memory/vision for each party member depicting people and places they lost, hinting at a place where lost things show up called Ashwater
• As the final note plays, there is movement and dragging sounds from upstairs; Room Six returns
• No obvious cause of death for Orren, though several odd items including a map of Ashwater and a delivery receipt for a package signd by Seren dated several days from now
• Party triggered an echo of Orren's last moments; False Seren knocks on door from inside the room
• "You're not the one I delivered it to" - Orren to False Seren
• False Seren looks at the party, says "Well thats clever," then steps out of the echo into the present day

NPCs Involved

• Seren Vell
• Nessa Quill
• Orren Vale
• Mysterious Female Bard

Notes

The session started with the party leaving Seren Vell’s workshop after investigating the mysterious package and finding signs that the workshop had been messed with, along with evidence that Seren had been researching strange locations that did not seem to follow normal rules as well as a crooked smile/crescent symbol.

Arrival at The Bent Nail Inn

Following Nessa and Seren, the party made their way to the Bent Nail Inn to investigate the dead man in room six. The inn was loud, crowded, and full of people drinking and singing along to a song about a place called Ashwater. Led by a mysterious female bard with a cittern and fiery red hair, the raucous drinking song did not make it seem like a man had died.

Initial Investigation

The party talked to Nessa, who told them that Room Six had vanished despite the fact that she had a key and ledger indicating otherwise. The ledger indicated that a man, Orren Vale, had checked in to Room Six the previous evening. While looking at the ledger, the ink, which was still wet somehow, changed from ORREN VALE to ORREN VELL to SEREN VELL before eventually returning to ORREN VALE. Nessa explained what she rememberd:

1. The man arrived alone the previous evening and gave his name as Orren Vale
2. He paid for one night and specifically requested room six
3. He asked whether Seren Vell had recetly received a package
4. Nessa later found him dead at the writing desk in room six
5. The door was locked from the inside
6. She left the body untouched and came directly to find Seren

Following Nessa and Seren, the party headed upstairs to investigate. Counting the room numbers, Room Six did indeed seem to be absent. The hallway went directly from room five to room seven, and the two rooms appeared to share a wall. There was no door, no gap, and no obvious space where another room could fit.

Shiny cast detect magic, which revealed:

• Magic clinging to the space between the wall inside the absense where the room should be
• A narrow vertical band of pale light where the door ought to be, flickering in and out of focus
• Looking through the knife edge light showed an impossibly long hallway
• Aura did not reveal a clean spell woven by a single caster, but severl kinds of overlapping magic: Conjuration, Illusion, and Divination
• For one heartbeat, the door became visible, a tarnished brass number 6 hanging at the center
• A silhouette of a man sitting at a desk behind the door. The figure slowly raised its head and looked directly at shiny before the aura collapsed entirely

Nigh decided to press their hand against the wall and found the wall much colder than it should be. Not the ordinary chill of plaster, but a deep, damp cold that seemed to press back against their palm. For a moment they felt nothing, followed by a Tap. Tap. Tap. The sound was coming from directly beneath their hand. The wallpaper shifted slightly, rising and falling like something breathing before a thin seam appeared in the plaster, just for an instant. From beyond the wall there was the sounds of the scratch of a pen moving rapidly across paper, followed by a man's voice.

"S...Seren...?" said the voice, hesitant.

After a brief pause, another voice answered. "Open the door, Orren." It was clearly Seren's voice. The real Seren said nothing. The cold vanished and the wall was solid again. When Nigh's hand pulled away, there was a small black ink stain in the center of their palm.

Interviewing the Patrons

Since they could not find any way into the missing room, they went back downstairs to do some more investigating. They questioned Nessa, talked to the bard, observed the people in the inn, and tried to figure out what everyone remembered. The answers did not entirely line up. This is what they found:

1. A server remembered bringing Orren one drink, but also remembered collecting two empty glasses
2. A man dressed in worn traveling clothes saw someone who looked exactly like Seren leaving the upstais hallway. This was while Seren was at the workshop with the party.
3. A stable hand remembered a window above the kitch that no longer exists from the outside.
4. One patron insisted The Bent Nail Inn had never had a room six.

The bard, who had taken a break from playing, asked if they were talking about the dead man upstairs. She remembers Orren pacing above the common room, a brief argument, and Orren shouding "You aren't the one I delivered it to." She believed another voice answered, identifying the second voice as Seren's. She described Orren as “a Quiet man. Nervous hands. Kept checking the door as though he expected it to arrive before whoever was chasing him.”She alo said she spoke to him and he asked if Seren Vell came here often, to which she replied "Often enough to owe Nessa money." Nessa denied that Seren owed her money. She also asked whether anyone else had arrived looking like Seren, "because he had already met two of him."

“He seemed relieved when she handed him the key. As though the room existing meant he had reached the right version of the inn,” the bard said. When asked what she heard, she said "Pacing. A chair dragged across the floor. Then a knock." Nessa pointed out the room was locked and the bard responded, "Yes. That was the troubling part. The knock came from inside his room."

She said the other Seren asked "Where are the remaining routes." She paused, then said "Orren told him that Ashwater was not hers." After that, the room made no sound at all, no fire, no footsteps, no building settling. It was as if that part of the inn had stoppd participating in the world. After that she heard a pen scratching, saw Nessa go upstairs, then came back down "looking like someone had walked across her grave."

Once the party had exhausted their questions, the bard said "Perhaps we can remind the inn that it misses it. Orren came here carrying a map of things the world had lost. Now the world has lost him too." She looked at the brass key and said "Fortunately, buildings are sentimental creatures."

For a moment, Nigh has a strong memory of staying at The Bent Nail Inn despite the fact that they have never been here. The bard began playing her cittern, saying only "Rooms remember songs better than they remember walls." This time, the song she played was full of sorrow and a deep melancholy.

Visions of Ashwater

Every sound but the cittern faded away. Time slowed with each sorrowful chord that seemed to reverberate not only across the walls and windows of the tavern, but also through the hearts and minds of everyone present. Pints of ale froze in the air mid-pour, fabric from aprons and dresses and cloaks stopped mid-movement, almost as if it forgot how to be fabric. The bard started to sing, slow and sorrowful, a hint of nostalgia for a time that both did and did not happen. The party watched as the chairs grew upwards into great, impossibly ancient oak and pine trees that shot up into a night sky that occupied the space where the ceiling used to be. Tables elongated and stretched into stone roads and wine-dark rivers flowing rapidly towards a valley that began where the bar used to be and stretched as far as the eye could see. The walls peeled into charred wallpaper, ashes, forest brush and a black night sky punctuated by trillions of stars.

Each player experienced a vision from their past. As the bard stared deep into each player's eyes, visions of lost places and things swirled around them. It was as though the bard spoke directly to each, narrating a painful past through the words of an unfamiliar song. Feltein and the fire that destroyed his town, Nigh's familiar forest that vanished overnight, the large stone village that stood where Shiny's small encampment lay moments before....all ebbing and flowing with each haunting word that was spoken. As the visions progressed, the individual memories started to overlap - burning trees in Feltein's shop, a deep black lake pieced by mighty trees with the tops of tents and tent posts underneath, rangers patrolling the stone village sitting directly on top, mugs of ale frozen in mid air, bar patrons stopped mid order, ashes swirled through rivers and lakes and blackened water. Each vision hinted at or directly mentioned a place called Ashwater. Each vision hinted that the the things that were lost forever may have been misplaced.

Eventually, the individual visions began to overlap. The party started seeing parts of one another’s experiences, and the separate visions turned into one shared vision. They saw pieces of the same place from different perspectives, and it became clear that Ashwater is somehow connected to all of them. It did not feel like they are simply being shown a random location but like Ashwater already knows them, or like they are somehow already connected to it without realizing it.

Throughout all of this, the bard continued playing. It was not clear whether she was causing the visions, guiding the party through them, or simply playing the song that allows them to happen. Then she played the final note.

As the final chord reverberated, time snapped back to normal. At that exact moment, the party hears scratching, dragging, and shifting sounds coming from upstairs. The sound moves across the ceiling, almost like something is rearranging itself inside the walls.

"See, it remembered."

Room six

The visions end, and the party immediately rushed back upstairs. When they returned to the hallway, the door for room six was now right where it should have been between rooms five and seven. The party entered room six and began investigating. Inside, they found evidence connected to the dead man and the events Nessa had described. The room was much colder than it should have been and did not feel like a normal physical space but rather like it is trapped somewhere between the past and the present.

As they investigate, echoes of the past played out around them. They heard voices, saw movements, and watched Orren's last moments repeat themselves as if the room was replaying a memory. They saw Orren pacing, heard a knock on the door, then saw Seren enter the room. As the memory played out, the False Seren inside the echo stopped, turned to look at the party, and stepped out of the echo and into the present.

Songs