- Temple Ruin
- Graveside Tavern
- The Stone Barkeep
The Grim Gargoyle
The bar is a plank laid across two barrels, and behind it stands Kharnos, the temple's old stone guardian, who has kept it for longer than anyone has kept count. The drink is dark and bitter, the benches are old pews, and the regulars are mourners, gravediggers, night watchmen and the occasional scholar of the dead. No one is loud here. No one needs to be told not to be.
Travelers come for the quiet, and for the barkeep, who knows more about Emberfall than its priests and its records together. Getting it out of him is another matter.
On the Rattle Run the townsfolk put on masks, rattle tin cups and race from door to door through the harbor town after dark. Somewhere behind one of those doors is the sweetest candy in the land, made once a year by a baker nobody names, and whoever finds it carries good luck until the thaw. The clues are written on a list handed out at dusk.
The doors, though, are where the fun lives. Behind each one is a household that has prepared either a sweet or a game: a honey drop at one door, a flour bomb at the next, a riddle, a dare, a jar of something wriggling. Nobody knows which until the door opens.
The old herald trusted with the master clue list this year has mislaid half of it. You can help the herald find the missing clues across town, from the quayside to the old stone gargoyle, survive every door's game, and win the sweetest candy before somebody else does.
- The Rattle Run
- Half a Clue List
- Every Door Plays a Game
- A Price in Sorrow
- The Doors Below
- A Stranger Buying Answers
By night the ruin fills with mourners, gravediggers, the servants of grieving great houses and the kind of people who only drink where no one asks their names. The stone barkeep pours, listens and remembers every sorrow ever spoken across his bar. The player comes for information: a name, a debt, a rumor about the great house beyond the iron fence. The price is a confession. As the nights pass, it becomes clear that someone else is buying answers too, someone who wants the sealed doors open, and the barkeep has not decided whether to stop them, help them, or simply watch.