The Bleating Lamb
SocialArea T1 — The Bleating Lamb
The common room is dark and smells heavily of stale ale and damp wood. Chairs and tables have been dragged across the floor into rough, defensive barricades. The moment you step across the threshold, a crossbow bolt snaps through the dim air overhead and buries itself deep into the doorframe.
The innkeeper, Grist Mallow (CN male human innkeeper 3), is frightened nearly beyond reason. He has not slept properly in weeks due to the psychic feedback echoing from the Threshold Seed beneath the village church. Every night, just before midnight, a phantom echo of his late wife crosses the kitchen floor exactly as she did on the evening she died. It never speaks, nor does it acknowledge him, driving him to hide in the cellar until the manifestation passes.
Unless the party moves quickly to reassure him, Grist assumes they are another manifestation born of his exhaustion and terror.
- Diplomacy (DC 20): Convince Grist the party can put an end to the haunting. Reduce the DC to 16 if the heroes mention Sister Mirela by name, as her presence in Thornwick remains a primary source of comfort for the villagers.
- Religion (DC 18): Recognize the spectral manifestation as an unquiet echo tethered by planar corruption, and promise to conduct proper Pharasmin funeral rites once the village is secured.
- Intimidation (DC 22): Grist cooperates purely out of fear, but he will remain untrusting and seek refuge in his cellar at the first sign of real danger.
If the heroes earn his trust, Grist opens the cellar to them, shares what he has seen of the unnatural occurrences spilling from the church, and parts with a pouch of Graveward Dust alongside a lesser potion of healing he has been hoarding for "when the threshold fully breaks."
Grist Mallow, Innkeeper
Appearance: Unshaven, bloodshot eyes, smells of stale beer and fear.
What he knows:
- The haunting started three weeks ago, right as the psychic feedback began leaking from beneath the village.
- The church bells ring every night on their own, timed precisely with the midnight planar shifts.
- Sister Mirela hasn't left the church in ten days, consumed by maintaining the sanctuary against the encroaching corruption.
- Old Varla has been suffering from severe sleep deprivation, muttering that "something's eating the boundary."
- Three villagers walked into the cemetery (Area T2) and never came back—their bodies were found at dawn, smiling unnaturally.
What he wants: His wife's echo to stop walking through his kitchen. He doesn't care how.