With our most recent Carrion Crown campaign session, the group reached a major milestone, and finally concluded the trial of the Beast of Lepidstadt. The first few days had been a bit hit and miss, and the trial was not going well. However, on the last night, the group started to follow up on many of the original clues, and eventually traced the true villains to a pair of body snatchers hiding in the city. Vorkstag and Grines, upstanding businessmen in Lepidstadt, were actually a Fey and a Dark Creeper, using their abilities and talents to become rich and distract any investigations into the mythology of the beast.
Vorkstag, a Fey creature called a Skin Walker, used the skins of his victims – most notably an oversized mongrelman – to impersonate the Beast and steal from gravesites, murder victims, and ultimately burn down the Sanctuary Hospital. It was he who had been bitten by the swamp caiman, as shown by his scarred shoulder, when being chased by the villagers of Morast. And it was Vorkstag whom the administrator’s assistance had seen during the fire at Sanctuary.
Grines was a bit more involved in city politics, passing himself off as a post-Bleaching gnome. Secretly, he was managing a large network of necromantic supply and trade, dealing with many dark arts, including grave robbing, body parts, and murder. Grines was the one managing the arrangement with Doctor Brada, both for a steady supply of cheap workers for the factory, and for fresh victims for his knife. And he was acting as a broken for external forces, with unique and sinister demands.
With this information in hand, on the final day of the trial, the tide turned rapidly. The group was able to quickly connect the dots, and with some magical compulsion, the two villains filled in the rest of the blanks. Although the pair was not involved in the tragedy of Hergstag, the group had already established that the Beast was not at fault as well. And with the true culprits in hand, the court had to of course rule the Beast as innocent of these particular crimes.
The next morning, when the group gathered to release the Beast back into the wild, he had one more surprise for them – despite his prior appearance and the groups assumption, he was actually fully intelligent and capable of speech. The Beast invited the group to visit him at his father’s home, north in the mountains at Schloss Caromarc, where he was heading now. With his thanks and eternal gratitude, the Beast then bid the group farewell, and jogged back into the swamps and mists.
Over the next few days, the group had some welcome rest and recovery, and spent their recent rewards. All was not well in the town however, since much of the village was still upset by the Beast’s existence. Now that it was clear the court would not destroy the threat, a growing number of citizens felt it was their duty to destroy the Beast once and for all. And fortunately, word has already spread of the likely location of the Beast, in the mountains at Schloss Caromarc.
