Vargen Information for New Players

Things to Know about Vargen

1. When the party arrived in Vargen, they met a guardsman in the Wall District who claimed to have been attacked by speedy sprites (he was found naked and unconscious in the gutter). Later, these so-called “Quicklings” robbed a moneychanger and burnt a watch house to the ground (killing the original guardsman and his commander). The party avenged the guards and killed the Quicklings and cleared their underground lair in the copse outside the city. Their friend on the watch, Elisondro, became commander of the Wall District watch.
2. On the way to Vargen, the party discovered that the free ford across the Vargwater was under threat from kobolds and the Bargemen Guild was using this to make more money with their ferry (an ancient dwarven contraption). A rival guild, the Mercers, loaned the party mercenaries and paid them to clear the kobold lair near the ford – making the party somewhat famous and hurting the Bargemen Guild’s bottom line in the run-up to the Council of Ten election.
3. While clearing the kobold caves, the party finds the lone survivor of a group of Bargemen agents and a small orb that has something to do with Dragons. That agent, Barnier Brockett, stole the orb from the party and brought it to his boss, Rotho Waterman. Waterman was second-in-command in the Bargemen Guild and planned to use the orb to rob the horde of some river dragons living under the Khelwater (and keeping the Devil Fish away). Waterman’s plan worked, but Barnier disappeared with the orb afterwards and Rotho was arrested and killed in jail.
4. The party broke up a slavery ring purportedly run by Rotho Waterman by capturing his lieutenant, Aardmann, and torturing information out of him. Rotho was moving slaves from Midmark, Grell’s Lambs (natives often falsely imprisoned by Judge Grell). The Guild Master, Peter Thorel claimed ignorance and had Rotho arrested (taking the dragon horde for the guild). However, this whole episode undermined Thorel’s plan to take over the Council of Ten during the end-of-year elections.
5. After breaking up the slavery ring in Vargen, the party traveled to the small town of Kaligan (south of the city) where pirates docked to deliver the slaves taken in Midmark. However, someone sent word ahead and those pirates were gone when the party arrived. There were slaves locked up in the old imperial fort – although the dungeon was booby-trapped with the phoenix egg that would eventually kill two of the Nagas in Xen’Khel. The party also found an old imperial agent base (post-occupation) underneath the fort that was full of undead being animated by a Devil Fish ancestor statue (Araqiel, who took over Kottar’s body) to punish the imperials for interfering in underwater politics.
6. Returning from their adventures in Xen’Khel, the party arrived just as agents of Alaine Grell were attacking the Midmark naval forces in the harbor; they used a captured flagship named The Leering Sheriff, filled with gunpowder and on fire, in attempt to destroy another large warship named The Bawdy Bachelor and create a distraction for an assassination attempt on Peter Thorel, Guild master of the Bargemen. The party saved the Bawdy Bachelor and rescued Admiral Bridgitta Dyconson from The Leering Sheriff before it exploded. They also employed a summoned water elemental to intercept an Imperial Dervish assassin just before he killed Thorel.
7. Thorel tried to hire the party to kill the leaders of a rival coalition of guilds, the Harbor Triad, who he blamed both for the assassination attempt and the death of his young wife. The party rejected his offer and left for Midmark, though, and Thorel was killed shortly afterward by a second Imperial Dervish assassin who eluded the party.
8. Following Thorel’s death, all-out war raged on the streets of Vargen between the remnants of the Bargemen’s Guild and the Harbor Triad. Meanwhile, the embargo on Vargen trade imposed by Chief Magistrate Thornton and the Council of Elders in Midmark has plunged the city into another crisis of violence, starvation, and apocalyptic religious fervor.