Shadows That Bleed: The First Return to Lepidstadt

Session Summary: 06/04/2023

Ahhhh, the city of LEPIDSTADT! That grand northern metropolis with its university towers and its gas-lit streets and its EXCELLENT density of things going terribly wrong beneath the polished surface! The heroes arrived to report their findings to Dr. Ritalsin and received a shock in return: other children of the Five Great Families had fallen into mysterious comas while the heroes were working in Poiana. The corruption had not been contained to a single village and a damaged gate. It had reached deep into the city, and it wore the face of gifts.

Dr. Ritalsin tasked them with investigating young Dietrich von Bethlen, the latest victim, youngest son of the Bethlen family. They relocated to the Golden Stag Inn, a considerably finer establishment than the Lup Rosu, and proceeded to Bethlen Manor with all appropriate speed. Viktor and Amelia von Bethlen received them with the hollow-eyed exhaustion of parents who have watched their child sleep without waking for three days and who have run out of ways to explain it.

Dietrich lay pale and motionless in his bed. On the nightstand beside him sat a teddy bear, soft and round-eared and utterly innocuous to every sense except the ones trained by recent experience. When Kiren leaned toward it to examine it more closely, it ATTACKED. The same tick-tock rhyme. The same black sandstone heart visible through a tear in the plush. The same malevolent precision as the doll at Schloss Wulfen, albeit in a different shape. They destroyed the teddy bear and extracted the heart, and Lavinia von Bethlen confessed through tears that she had given the toy to Dietrich herself. She had won it at the Bone House, a clandestine gambling establishment, during a card game with Andreii von Dragffy.

The Bone House. Lavinia described it haltingly: an exclusive casino for the privileged and the connected, where the wagers were sometimes more unusual than mere coin. She explained how to obtain entry tokens and promised her cooperation. The heroes left Bethlen Manor with a new lead, a black sandstone heart wrapped in cloth, and the growing certainty that whatever was creating these monstrous toys had EXCELLENT access to the city's elite social circles!