Prologue: In the Beginning

You and your friends may not have all been born in Sandpoint, but you all grew up together in town! In fact, you started your adventuring career when you were childhood friends.

Some kids in town believe that Valdemar Manor is haunted, while others insist that the Sandpoint Devil itself has moved into the abandoned mansion. There must be a reason why the Valdemars left the place after old Ethram Valdemar died a few years ago.

The manor is all boarded up now. Some of your friends swear they’ve seen weird lights shining between the slats after dark, while others are convinced they’ve heard weird noises coming from the ruin. No one has dared go into the house yet, much less attempt to spend the night—that is, until now! Your group was dared to sneak into Valdemar Manor, look around the old building, and spend the night. If you can make it through the night, you’ll surely become local legends!

After you sneak down to the old mansion and search the grounds, you find some loose boards over a window into the manor’s kitchen. You pry them loose, then spend an hour exploring the manor’s dusty, abandoned interior. You fight with some giant spiders that had moved into the ground floor and an entire swarm of them upstairs. In the manor attic you’re attacked by several unsettling leathery homunculi that appear to have been left behind by one of the Valdemars, and finally settle in for the night—a night increasingly filled with creepy sounds, strange lights, and an unexpected attack!

Overcome Checks
DC 13 Arcana to discover clues that a troublemaking villain is using sorcery to frighten people
DC 15 weapon or spell attack to fight your foes
DC 17 Stealth to bravely hide from the things that come out at night

It turns out that the source of the weird sounds and strange lights was an infestation of gremlins led by a jinkin sorcerer named Murzle that had invaded the Valdemar Manor cellar. The creatures crept up in the middle of the night to attack your group, but you were ready and handily defeated them in battle, then chased Murzle back into a previously hidden secret room in the basement. Therein, you discovered an old taxidermy of the Sandpoint Devil—cunningly stitched together from the parts of a dead horse, a giant bat, and a giant lizard. For a moment you were convinced that you’d met the real thing, but it was just an animated construct left behind as a guardian—one that ended up helping you defeat Murzle when the jinkin drew the construct’s attention! You managed to defeat the taxidermy Sandpoint Devil (in part thanks to Murzle’s desperate magic), and found a fair amount of treasures and trinkets scattered around the laboratory.

When the sun rose, you all snuck out of the manor with your pockets full of loot and returned home, perhaps to some unhappy parents who spent the night looking for you. Of course, you told no one about what you’d been up to all night, since you weren’t supposed to break into Valdemar Manor in the first place, but word of your bravery still spreads through your social circles in town over the next few years. By the time you all reach adulthood a few years later, the perception that you’re adventurers has already begun.

Reward
You discovered a fair amount of treasure in the hidden room in the Valdemar basement, trinkets you decided to keep for yourselves—surely, if the Valdemars still wanted it, they would have taken these things with them when they’d moved to Magnimar years ago!

Each PC selects one of the following items as a reward (either gained from pilfered loot, or as a reward given by townsfolk grateful for the truth about the manor):
• A 2nd-level common talisman of your choice
• A 2nd-level common elixir or a dose of silversheen
• Two scrolls containing any two common 1st-level arcane or occult spells of your choice
• Two minor healing potions

Each PC also gains 20 gp, representing a fair split of the coins and other valuables left behind by the Valdemars (or additional rewards from a thankful town).

The party’s reputation with Townsfolk increases by 1.

Some 17 years ago, a nest of ghouls infested an old manor further down the coast. While Sandpoint’s boneyard seems relatively free from the influence of undead, this isn’t for lack of trying, so when your group started to hear rumors of a necromancer’s plot to plunder an ancient ruin, you knew what you had to do!

Local priest of Desna Abstalar Zantus supplied your group with some extra healing potions and vials of holy water to arm you for the fight ahead. After some investigation, your group learned that the necromancer was a man named Grizmere who had taken up residence at an abandoned farm to the southeast of town on the edge of Whisperwood Moor.

When you reached the old farm, the partially collapsed barn and the ruined farmhouse were the least interesting points. More notable was the excavation in one of the fallow fields that had revealed a once-buried ancient stone shrine devoted to some sort of fiend god. The shrine had a trapdoor that led down to a secret dungeon below the moors, in which Grizmere had already begun the task of assembling his undead platoon!

Overcome Checks
DC 14 Religion to use your knowledge of how to fight undead
DC 16 weapon or spell attack to fight your foes
DC 18 Medicine to be able to treat the necromantic diseases and afflictions your group is exposed to

Defeat!
You underestimated the dangers that Grizmere and his undead minions posed, and all you managed to do when your group infiltrated the old temple of Abraxas was force his undead hand. After you fled, Grizmere led his skeletons and zombies on an attack against several local farms to gather up "fresh ingredients" to replace the minions you did manage to defeat before you ran home. Abstalar Zantus, along with an unlikely (and very temporary) coalition of defenders recruited from the town watch and the Bunyip Club, managed to confront Grizmere and defeat him before he murdered too many farmers, but word of how your group shook this metaphorical undead hornet’s nest did your reputation in town no favors.


Reward
Before you were forced to flee Grizmere’s overwhelming forces, you managed to gather up a few handfuls of treasure in the old temple. Each PC gains 25 gp. Fortunately, luck may soon turn your way; each PC gains 1 Hero Point.

The party advances to 3rd level!

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Not everyone in Sandpoint has the luxury of going to the town watch for help when things don’t go their way. For members of the Bunyip Club, they’re traditionally on their own when faced with threats to their livelihood. Sometimes, such threats menace others in Sandpoint too and become a problem for the whole town, but when a rival group of criminals begin to flex their influence over the region in a way that goes unseen by most of Sandpoint’s citizens, the Bunyip Club makes an unusual decision to recruit your party to their cause.

It’s said that the criminals of the Bunyip Club use a hidden complex in the smuggling tunnels below Sandpoint as their current hideout, but this wasn’t their original base of operations. They’ve moved around over the years, shifting from one site to another as their numbers have grown or as secret sites have been compromised. One older hideout the Club hasn’t had much use for lately is a smuggler’s den built into a sea cave to the east of town. The discovery by a lowranking member of the Club that a group of troublemaking squatters—men and women armed with machetes and clad in leather armor that looks like it’s been burned—have moved into the cave.

Gressel Tenniwar, proprietor of the notorious Feedbag, has contacted you with a request from the Bunyip Club. If you can make your way to the old smuggler’s den and "get rid" of the squatters without letting anyone else in Sandpoint know, the Club will reward them handsomely. The Bunyip Club wants to keep their old hideouts as options for potential regional safe houses, and they can’t do that if rival gangs move in. In addition, several old supplies and devices remain in storage at the old site—Gressel informs your group that you can make use of these supplies to set up traps to take out the intruders and, furthermore, lets you know that if you find anything worth anything in there, it’s yours to keep!

Overcome Checks
DC 16 Intimidation to confront the squatters and threaten them to cease operations in the region
DC 18 weapon or spell attack to fight your foes
DC 20 Crafting to take advantage of the supplies and create several traps to aid in defeating the squatters