Chasing Barendur Sessions 1-5
Adventurers of the Crossroads
Aldric is a scholar-mage who walks the razor’s edge between brilliance and madness. A man who mistrusts both himself and the world around him, he drowns his insecurities in study, translating every fear into knowledge and every danger into a footnote. Anxiety hums in his bones, and yet—when the moment demands it—he summons a ferocious, almost grim resolve. He views magic as a series of puzzles, each solution a bulwark against chaos. Yet in the dark watches of the night, even he wonders if knowledge alone can save him, or if he is simply building a taller tower to fall from.
In the party, Aldric is the reluctant visionary, the one who sees the vast, terrifying machinery of fate turning—and feels both awe and dread in equal measure.
Aldric
Blueberry
Blueberry is a halfling who greets apocalypse with the sunny stubbornness of someone who simply refuses to believe bad things could really happen to her unless she allows it. She blends small-town hustle with eldritch chaos in a way that somehow feels wholesome, like a thunderstorm politely knocking before it floods your house. Underneath her bubbling charm lies a razor-sharp pragmatism; she can swindle merchants, trick fiends, and weave illusions with the same casual grace as haggling over a pie.
In the party, she is the glue, the wildcard, and the occasional chaos engine—bolstering morale by refusing to acknowledge despair, and navigating disaster with nimble wit and unstoppable will.
Ipid is a bastion of stoicism in a world that seems determined to tear itself apart at every seam. He is not loud, nor quick to anger, but his presence hums with the certainty of a sword driven into stone. Every choice he makes is weighed, measured, and chosen not for glory but for necessity. His honor is not the boastful kind; it is quiet, a muscle flexed only when needed. Yet beneath the scale-hard patience, there is a furnace: a righteous fury at betrayal, injustice, and cruelty.
In the party, Ipid serves as the immovable center—the unbreakable shield against horror, the enduring reminder that some oaths, once sworn, are carved deeper than bone.
Ipid
Pappy
Pappy is a force of nature wearing a gnome’s battered boots. Once a monk in search of serenity, he cast off enlightenment like an ill-fitting robe and found himself reborn in the raw ecstasy of conflict. He lives in the moment with terrifying purity—laughing, cursing, fighting, and eating with the abandon of someone who knows tomorrow might never come, and frankly doesn’t care. Yet there’s a sharpness beneath his joyful savagery: an instinct for survival honed in mud, blood, and loss.
In the party, Pappy is the storm they unleash when diplomacy fails—the shock trooper, the living testament to the idea that sometimes, the fastest path through a problem is straight through its face.
Scorn is a walking contradiction: a bard who seduces crowds with one hand and sharpens betrayal with the other. He wears cynicism like a velvet cloak, yet a fire burns beneath his bitterness—a desperate hunger to matter, to carve his name into the bones of history whether it likes it or not. Every smile hides a calculation, every jest a blade. He doesn’t just survive the world’s cruelty—he dances with it, dares it to strike him harder.
In the party, Scorn is the whisper in the dark, the song that twists hearts and minds. He pushes them forward not out of loyalty, but because he believes in the power of the story they are becoming—and knows he must be its leading man, no matter the cost.
Scorn
Adventures in the Crossroads
The refugees fled first—their battered carts spilling heirlooms, their hollowed eyes staring back at the storm they could not outrun. Behind them, across shattered farmlands and burned copse, something old and many-legged stirred, threading impossible spaces with whispered hunger.
Into this calamity rode five souls not yet broken by the world’s malice.
Aldric, the scholar who mistook terror for curiosity;
Blueberry, the halfling who smiled at chaos as if it were a distant relative;
Ipid, the paladin who bore the world’s sins as if they were his own;
Pappy, who had wrestled inner peace into submission and chosen violence instead;
And Scorn, the bard who would rather sing the world’s end than stop it.
They came to the Temple of Baren-Durr, once a beacon of learning, now a sepulcher for broken faiths and blinking spiders that slid between worlds.
Steel met fang in the shadowed halls. Ipid stood a living bulwark, Aldric’s spells flared desperate and bright, and Pappy’s joyous savagery turned prayer-beads into cudgels.
When Scorn drank the cult’s silver promise—the so-called potion of vitality—he collapsed into visions deeper than madness. It was Blueberry, fearless as only the absurdly hopeful can be, who clawed his soul back from the brink.
Yet the deeper they pressed, the more the past rose to meet them.
Lucas—Scorn’s old nemesis, all greasy charm and cheaper wit—stumbled into their path, dragging behind him the wreckage of Kentworth, a soldier whose dishonor stank louder than his wounds.
The deeper tombs hissed with vengeful dead, and cowardice ran quicker than valor.
Pappy, grinning through bloodied teeth, left traitors broken in his wake, while Aldric deciphered grim truths: the potion’s price was not merely life—it demanded the blood of a corrupted angel.
Beneath grand, rotting doors they found relics of the cult’s ambition: MorningDew, a scholar who mistook rambling for wisdom, awoke with shrieks and accusations.
The party ignored her prattle, for worse horrors waited above.
In the storm’s heart, a thing of terror rose—a celestial whose wings were wrong, whose fangs glittered with stolen light.
It ascended, leaving only dread in its wake.
The road back to the Crooked Crossroads was no gentler.
Cambions, disguised in friendly smiles, bartered for forbidden relics, their contracts stitched in honeyed words.
Giants roamed the hills like half-forgotten gods.
Invisible trolls lurked under sleet-choked bridges.
And death rode the air like perfume, clinging to the crossroads where fortune and betrayal braided tighter with every deal.
At the Stolen Stocking, Scorn took the stage, weaving truth into lies and lies into gold.
Blueberry, armed with a single mug of milk and an iron will, conquered the market like a storm in miniature, building a merchant’s empire from loose change and quicker words.
Behind it all, the Chalice—source of miracles or madness—passed quietly into Scorn’s possession, its fate stitched invisibly into the city’s festering veins.
But fate, once stirred, demands payment.
Sulph, the shapeshifter of smiling threats, spoke of Drowning Wallace, the sunken city of bone and rot where another key to immortality waited.
And so the battered company rode again, banners snapping in wounded skies, their path marked by storms and unquiet dead.
Plague and poison struck the company. Blueberry and Pappy groaned through nights of sickness while Ipid carried their burdens without complaint, his armor stained by more than rain.
Still they pressed on.
The haunted bridge proved no obstacle that blood and fire could not solve. Aldric’s spells tore the unseen troll from hiding, Ipid’s sword found the marrow beneath invisibility, and the map to forgotten treasures fell into their calloused hands.
Yet not all omens could be slain.
Aldric alone read the sky’s secret—the Red Omen, the Great Boon, the Total Death—and tucked the terrible knowledge into the folds of his heart, saying nothing.
When the stampede came—a hundred panicked horses thundering from unseen terror—it was Pappy, mud-soaked and laughing, who rode the storm.
His reward was mud, bruises, and a stable haunted by something fouler still.
At night, under a gibbous, watching moon, they faced it: a monstrous white horse whose hooves birthed dead men in the shape of beasts.
Steel sang. Magic howled. Blood soaked the churned road.
In the end, it was Aldric who, with solemn certainty, took up the Hammer of Fate and ended the abomination’s reign.
And from ashes, hope flickered anew.
Ipid, with patient words, pulled a broken man back from despair.
Thallin Giggis, priest of a silent, judging sun, built a pyre—and Aldric, seeking absolution or understanding or perhaps both, walked into the flames.
The fire bowed away.
A miracle was witnessed.
Yet there was no time to savor it.
Deeper still, past graveyards restless with old anger, the dead rose in protest.
Ipid stood unmoved, Blueberry turned their own illusions against them, Scorn’s music sharpened blades and unstrung bones.
And Pappy—laughing, cursing, glorious—became a whirling storm of gore and mirth.
But the last of the grave-spirits fell not with a scream, but a whisper.
Something worse stirred in the deep places.
The temple’s broken stones sighed in sorrow and invitation.
The game was no longer survival.
The game was transformation.
And somewhere far beyond mortal sight, ancient eyes blinked open—and smiled.
