Recap - 2026-09-10

The morning after the attack on Chirper’s, the party woke sore and bruised. Angelus was snoozing on in his “water bed”(the staff having officially redesignated the old bathing room as his quarters and set up a new bath in what used to be Kor’s room). Rumors of the attack had spread, and patrons peppered the group with questions over breakfast.

Tag & the Brooch

Rolling out of bed, Tag spotted the old elf woman’s broken hexagonal brooch glinting on the table where it had tumbled from his pack during the night. His closer examination revealed tool marks around the crack. It looked like someone had intentionally been damaging the jewel but, more disturbingly, the crack appeared smaller than when he first saw it.
Using his jeweler’s kit, Tag confirmed a thin new layer of gemstone had grown over the gouges overnight. The brooch seemed to be healing itself.
Close inspection revealed engraved writing in infernal along the inner corners. Josiah’s Arcana check determined the brooch has no active magical aspect but carries a lingering aura of divination magic.
The inscription is mirrored along the back. One side reads “Penumbra Cadre”, the other is an older, archaic dialect of Infernal that best translates as “the Lower Cadre” or “the Under Cadre.”
Tag visited Allesha’s Pantry, where she was distributing food to a line of the destitute (including a water-like elemental). Tag was able to expertly mime his request, and he was led inside.
The pantry’s back dormitory held three residents: a scruffy, soot-faced elf coughing into his blanket, a figure of indetermine age and gender who stared silently at Tag the entire visit without moving, and Idris, the ancient elf woman, muttering to herself.
When shown the brooch, Idris became agitated and mistook Tag for someone named “Leoquin.”
- “It knocks and knocks and knocks. It never opens. But they know. We talk. He whispers.”
- She speaks of a whisperer who contacted her through a conduit: “He whispered me, and I whisper back, and we whisper, and we share. We shouldn’t have done what we did.”
- I gouged out the eye, but his face is still there." (When Tag pointed out there’s no face on the brooch, she cupped his hand and turned the brooch toward him: “This is the face. This is the eye.”)
- She stopped the whispering “for us and for you and for them,” but “it never stops. It grows and grows and will come back. It’s bound to me. I hear it talking. Still now.”
Hearing the name “Penumbra Cadra” and “Leoquin,” she reeled, pleading with Tag not to leave her again. Allesha notes Idris is very old and her mind mostly gone, she has perhaps a year or two left, at most.
Tag, wanting to connect the brooch to himself, weighed whether or not he would kill the woman to do it. The session ended before he made his decision.

Chibro’s Deliveries

At breakfast, Thom delivered two items left for Chibro:

A scroll (unsealed, wrapped in a torn strip of fabric, arrived late the prior night) containing a list of places Thorin IronStar was known to frequent, mostly in the Hive Ward and Lower Wards, courtesy of Maud of the Hands of Havoc.
A seamless golden box (arrived that morning), roughly toolbox-sized, a single contiguous piece of metal with shifting weights inside.

Back in his room with smith’s tools, Chibro found the hidden seam and solved the puzzle box. Inside was perfectly cubic food: meat, a mystery vegetable, and a gloop that held itself into a rough square shape despite quivering with each bump of the table. It was hot, fresh, and surprisingly tasty, reminding Chibro of the food the Quadratum produced for him. As he finished eating, he found a carved eye etching at the bottom, identical to the one that slides across Quadratum’s face. The box then folded itself into a small quadrupedal walker and skittered out the door.

Departures & Errands

Angelus announced he was off to visit the house he won from “the fox lady at Fortune’s Wheel” in the gate town of Rigus. Dreri sent him a note calling its condition “abominable.” He did not return by evening, which isn’t unusual for him.
Hankin confirmed his goal of building a temple to Tyr. Freestanding single-deity temples are frowned upon in Sigil, so the gang settled on building in the Outlands near Faunel, near to the party’s demiplane portal. The site has been scouted and looks promising. Chibro put forward 1000 gold, as did Josiah, and Hankin committed the rest of his savings to it, fulfilling the 8000 GP investment.

The Hall of Information

Josiah returned to the Hall of Information to research sustainable architecture, and was intercepted: Kesto BrightEyes, a deep gnome with gray skin, blonde hair, and unsettlingly long fingers, performing illusion puppet shows mocking the Harmonium.
Kesto seemingly sincerely claimed he’s a former employee of the Guvners who left on amicable terms. He offered to get Josiah’s books if he stopped by his shop on Forgotten Lane, for a price: Josiah must find himself a fitting surname first. Kesto reads names and faces. Working titles floated and rejected included “Lawbringer,” “The Unknown,” and “DawnSeeker.” Josiah left without deciding on a name.
Navigating the actively hostile shifting maze of shelves, Josiah stumbled on Kesto stuffing scrolls into a bag and fleeing across the tops of the shelves.
Josiah reported the potential theft to a pair of Harmonium officers eating outside the Gastrognome. They recognized Kesto’s name, promised to look into Forgotten Lane “later,” and cheerfully assigned the case to Melthalrian. Josiah recognized this as the silver dragonborn officer with the lisp and fangs from his first days in Sigil. The Harmonium officers decide to assign him to the case specifically because he hates Forgotten Lane.
Josiah headed home to prepare instead of following up immediately, unable to decide if he wanted to participate in the raid. On the way, he ran into Chibro.

The House of the Griffin

Armed with Maud’s list, Chibro spent the morning working Thorin’s haunts: the Smoldering Corpse Bar (nasty as ever, no sign of him), the Fiend’s Salute (a goth-glam “Hot Topic for fiends”, fake devil wings, devil horns), the Fallen Angel, and finally the House of the Griffin, wedged between the Mortuary and the Gatehouse beside the Ditch.
The Griffin is made up of several Hive Ward buildings mashed together, leading to a lean-to style 3-story building that leans slightly but stretches up alongside the tallest buildings in the constantly shifting Hive Ward. Each story is only seven feet tall, and the floors jut out over the open center, with no guardrails to prevent a drunken patron from plummeting three stories to the ground below. Each floor is a circle of curtained booths, with a single table and a handful of chairs inside. In the center of the bottom floor is a pile of magical mugs that fill with booze a commensurate quality to the coin tossed inside. The coin dissolves as the drink is consumed.
On the third floor, one curtain concealed a dark booth that reeked of fear-sweat and old ale. Inside, a hooded figure huddled under the table, surrounded by scrawled words and phrases, some in blood, surrounded by dozens of spilled steins, and muttered looping phrases: “Thorn, Thorin is not Thorn. Thorn’s not here. Thorin is Thorn is me. Thorin is we.”
Chibro flipped the hood with his trunk, seeing a dwarf with fresh poorly-shaven scars, a spit-soaked scraggly beard, and eyes stretched painfully wide. Thorin IronStar, the member who brought Chibro’s Hands of Havoc contract idea. Key fragments:
- “Her talks to me. Her promised things. Her showed me things of death and fire, collapse. Her promised to save us…save us from the great things beyond that come.”
- “Her is them. We can’t see. She mustn’t see. Her, her, her…who am I, who?”
A Medicine check found no physical parasite or infection. Chibro scooped him up in one of his fits of catatonia and began carrying him back to Chirper’s Inn. On the way, he kept sharing things that he had seen, trying to provoke a reaction. Showing him the dodecahedron (found under Wintu’s bed) provoked pure terror: “Her watches. Her eyes. Her watch never ends” and he jumped out of Chibro’s arms and ran into the street.
In view of Josiah (walking back from the Hall), Thorin threw himself under the wheel of a massive cart drawn by some enormous creature. The wheel went over him. He was dying in the road.
Chibro pumped a max-roll Healing Word into him, buying one last moment of lucidity. Clutching Chibro by the ears, Thorin delivered:

“They’re coming! The ones from outside…they’re coming. I have seen them. They hate us. They despise the fact that we’re alive. They’ve already started. And every plane will fall from the sky. Her has spoken it.”
Then he died. Revivify was out of range (Hankin was at the Outlands site scouting out his temple location). The body now rests behind Chirper’s in the stables, per Thom, who declined to examine it too closely and asked only that they deal with it before it starts to smell.
The party regrouped at Chirper’s (Angelus still absent). Chibro laid out the stakes: something outside reality is meddling through agents like Her, corrupting forces that should maintain balance, things like the crawling city, the Blood War, the Hands of Havoc, maybe even Sigil itself. He argued Sigil itself is in danger and the party should rally allies.
Josiah promptly shut down Chibro’s instinct to involve the Lady of Pain. Their combined history checks established: she keeps Sigil spinning and repels those who’d control it (see: Aoskar, the dead portal-god of the Shattered Temple, whom she “straight-up murdered”), she doesn’t police the city’s affairs, and most tellingly, her silence means the threat hasn’t yet reached her threshold. When Chibro spoke the Lady’s name too loudly, Thom gave a quiet headshake at the table, prompting the conversation to drag to a halt.
Candidate allies floated: the Doomguard (Chibro has inroads via Saren Grav), the Bleak Cabal, the Harmonium/Guvners, or factions beyond the halfwit de facto leader of the remaining Hands of Havoc.

Song of the Session

Somebody’s Watching Me by Sam Rockwell

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