Lights, Camera, Action!

Things Are Seldom What They Seem

Lights: A young local lord hires the party to kill a monster that is attacking his men. The beast is said to be a large bear with blood red eyes, who rends people and horses limb from limb.

Camera: The party will hear many stories about the beast and will find tracks near supposed attack spots — it is indeed a large creature with huge claws. However, they will notice peculiar differences in the versions of stories about the beast. The lord is indifferent and just wants the nuisance dealt with. In the version of the story his soldiers tell, the beast seems to get and more horrific, but they lack the evidence of any terrible battle wounds. The villagers are tight lipped, hostile and don't want to talk to the party, because they are seen as being the "lord's men". If the party can somehow gain the villagers' trust, they can find out the lord is cruel: he imposes heavy taxes even when crops have been poor, he takes local children as servants and treats them unkindly and his soldiers are little more than thugs — and the villagers can display bruises and broken limbs to prove their stories. There is also a local legend the village wise woman can tell them, about a spirit that used to protect the village in times of need many years ago.

Action: The monster is Paul Lippenstock, one of the villagers who recently moved back to the village with his mother. He is a were-bear, and gained this hereditary type of lycanthropy from his father. His mother used to live in the town but moved away when she met his father. He has good control over his changes and, being a bear, he mainly subsists on a vegetarian diet. He returned to the village with his mother after hearing his grandfather had died; they were horrified to see what the new lord was doing to the people, so they are arranging ambushes of the lord's men to try and stop their brutality. Paul tries not to deliberately kill and maim, he just tries to scare the men and horses away. The lord's men are really a cowardly lot, which is why they exaggerate the details of the battles to make them seem much worse than they were. Hopefully the characters can solve the mystery without killing the bear and may even want to join sides with him.

by Tonia Walden

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