Failure to Communicate

A stranger walks out of the ruins of Berez: Ghast, a soft-spoken apprentice exorcist whose family was paid, by someone, to send him to this party. He has a book's worth of local history and no combat experience, and his first fight ends with him standing in his own bonfire.

Berez is a drowned village on cursed ground, and every living thing in it is afraid of the same old woman. The bullywugs across the river flee at the sound of Baba Lysaga's name and warn the party that the ones who go into her territory never come back. The ruined church at the heart of town is worse still: a dead priest stands at a broken pulpit and calls his flock up out of the mud. If you hear the bell ring once, turn around.

Then the party tries to walk through a myconid ceremony, and a peace talk collapses on a natural one. Fifteen mushroom people, one of them enormous, and they don't kill you. They eat you. Cassius goes down and they start feeding on him. Gesch hauls him up, and Cassius answers with a critical hit and a burst of divine light that blows the giant sovereign apart.

By morning the swamp has gone to war across the river, magical fire has scorched the shore, and the dead are missing from where they fell. The trail ends at a tree that moves, ravens caged in its branches, and a woman's laughter inside it: "You should have seen those adventurers."