GM Notes
Once Karland is satisfied that the party understands what he actually knows—and, more importantly, what he does not—he formally offers the job.
Travel to Reiver's Right. Determine why the logging camp has gone silent. Find out what happened to its workforce. Look for any evidence connecting the site to the strange corruption appearing in Palakar timber. Return to Karland with what you discover.
Karland does not ask the party to cure the Palakar Forest.
He does not ask them to identify the ultimate source of the blight.
He does not know that anyone at Reiver's Right is involved in a conspiracy.
At this stage, Reiver's Right is simply the strongest unanswered lead he has.
Karland's Sawmill establishes the question. It should not provide the answer.
The characters can establish two important facts here:
First: the strange black sap was present while the affected trees were still alive.
Second: the affected timber comes from multiple cutting areas rather than one isolated grove or crew.
Karland then gives the party a concrete frontier assignment: investigate the newly silent logging camp at Reiver's Right.
The Old Macridi locations deepen that investigation without solving it. Morwenna can examine the physical sample. Fanciful Inquiries provides maps and route knowledge. The Veridical Scriptorium reveals the important history of Reiver's Right's ownership and contracts. The Gilded Ledger provides the most direct route toward Captain Sella and transport downriver.
Those discoveries belong later.
The intended progression is:
Karland sees enough to know that someone needs to investigate.
He does not know what they are going to find.
That is why he hires adventurers.
The problem did not begin as a crisis.
First there was one strange log: healthy-looking darkwood with thick, oily black sap buried inside the living grain.
Then another appeared.
Then several more arrived over the following deliveries.
The numbers are still small compared with the enormous volume of timber passing through Karland's mill, but the affected logs are appearing often enough that he can no longer dismiss them as an isolated curiosity.
Worse, his records indicate that they do not all come from the same cutting site.
Karland does not know whether the number of affected trees will continue increasing. He strongly suspects it will.
That uncertainty worries him more than certainty would.
Karland does not believe he has proven that Reiver's Right caused the blighted timber.
Most of the affected logs currently reaching his mill originated from other cutting areas in the Palakar.
Reiver's Right matters because it presents a second unexplained problem at exactly the wrong time.
The logging camp was reopened roughly a decade ago after a long period of inactivity and has since operated as a substantial commercial cutting site downriver from Macridi.
Now its shipments have stopped.
Messages have stopped.
Its workforce has stopped appearing in town.
Karland does not know whether the silent camp and the black sap are connected. He wants someone competent to go there and find out rather than allowing Macridi's merchants to assume that two strange events must be unrelated simply because that explanation is convenient.