The Bone House and Its Wagers

Session Summary: 07/09/2023

Ahhhh, the BONE HOUSE! Oh, what a delightful den of corruption and desperation! Hidden behind a perfectly ordinary door in a perfectly ordinary building in a perfectly well-heeled district of Lepidstadt, the casino revealed itself as exactly the sort of establishment that the wealthy and the foolish visit when ordinary sins have ceased to be stimulating enough. The décor involved a great deal of bone, as the name suggested, and the air carried the particular quality of a place where far too much had been wagered by people who understood far too little about what they were losing.

Mortimer Totenspieler, the proprietor, was an elegant figure of ambiguous age who greeted new guests with the professional warmth of someone who has learned that every customer is a future acquisition. His dice were BLACK, and when Charles and Kiren touched them the shock was identical to the shock of touching black sand. Mortimer watched their reactions with the mild interest of a scientist confirming a hypothesis.

The real prizes were the other players. Rylar'op of Leng, a being who existed at uncomfortable angles to normal space, proved forthcoming about the Dreamlands in the way that only beings who have lived too long in them can be. And then there was Moria Dawnwhisper: the Whisperer of Dreams, Countess of the Court of Twilight's Embrace. When her name was spoken, Geist in his skull on Kiren's pack went utterly silent in a way that communicated volumes without words. There was HISTORY there.

They gambled. They lost some, gained some, and extracted from Mortimer the intelligence that Morpheus' Tears were the common name among the city's elite for black sand products, and that the Night Hexen was trying to take over the trade from the Veiled Hand, who had previously held a near-monopoly on it. The wealthy and connected used Morpheus' Tears items for everything from enhanced dreams to wish-fulfillment artifacts that fed on gossamer. The demand was enormous. The supply was tied to something no one at the table was fully explaining.

Outside afterward, they chose to follow Rylar'op rather than Moria, and watched helplessly as Night Gaunts, faceless bat-like creatures from the Dreamlands, swept down from the dark sky and abducted him before the heroes could intervene. The Dreamlands had long arms!