Blood's Awakening recap: part 1

♣ Blood's Awakening: the party
♣ Recap: part 2 - part 3
♣ SESSIONS RECAPS START HERE

Alice: *chanting* MAP REVEAL MAP REVEAL
Here's the first part of our D&D campaign's summary, with some maps to help you visualize the party's journey! Originally I wanted to summarize everything in a single post, but the more I wrote the more realized how many things happened during more than a year of campaign... I decided to opt for a 3 part recap - I'd rather have 3 smaller posts than a huge wall of text telling everything.
But now, let's get on with the plot!!

Trigger warning: kidnapping, mentions of slavery

New beginnings

• The party meets in august in Letis, a small town in the Mitreum province. As they join forces to help a young taverner find her missing friend, Vittorio (who used to be a fencing teacher) hires the party to help him with his quest: his favorite former student, Aurelia, was kidnapped, and he’ll need all the help he can get to bring her back home.
• The taverner’s missing friend was killed by some gnolls. In the following days, the party takes care of a small gnoll band that’s threatening the nearby villages.
• In Aurelia’s ransom letter, the kidnappers urged her family to bring money to Dumetum, a city in the Mitreum province. While traveling there, the party gets to know each other, not always in a good way: despite his attraction to Celio, Caliban doesn’t completely trust his mysterious but charming demeanor, since it reminds him of Angelo, his ex “best friend”, while Vittorio gets on most people’s nerves for his apprehensive fatherly act.
• Celio dreams of a fight against a powerful undead. The creature breaks Celio’s weapon, and Celio flees until he finds a lake. Diving deep in, at the bottom of the lake lies a sword seemingly waiting for him, and Celio emerges from the water, slaying the foe with his new weapon.
  When he wakes up, he’s drenched and the sword from his dream is at his side. He doesn’t explain his vision to the others.
• Serpico receives a vision from Aurevia, their goddess, during their sleep: they see an abandoned temple in the mountains. When they wake up, they tell no one about it.
• Edna confesses to Vittorio that she had an affair with a noblewoman a few years ago. The relationship ended badly: the two women couldn’t marry, since Edna doesn’t come from a noble family. Vittorio comforts her.
• In Dumetum, the party gets together and plans how to save Aurelia. With everyone’s ideas and abilities, they’re able to deceive the ransomers and talk to them: they’re deserters who need money to flee from the kingdom. They mean no harm to Aurelia herself: to them, she’s just a tool to get to her family’s riches.
  The party disapproves of the kidnapping and ransoming, but at the same time is mostly understanding of their situation: some of them went to war and touched its horrors firsthand. The only exceptions to this are Caliban, Polvere and Serpico, who would want to bring the criminals to justice, but they end up biting the bullet.
• Caliban and Celio start having a sex and get closer and closer to each other.
• Polvere confesses to Serpico that his birth name is Sifulo Stellatina, and that he ran away from his home, the very secluded island of Cardeli, a year ago.
• The party travels to the deserters’ hideout. They reach a peaceful agreement: Vittorio promises to fund the deserters’ escape (which costs him basically all his life savings) and Aurelia is free and unharmed.
  The deserters reveal that they were paid by a mysterious figure to kidnap young women and bring them to a meeting point near an abandoned Aurevia temple, in the mountains: when they discovered that Aurelia was noble, they decided to use her to gain more money, breaking the deal.
• Serpico asks the party to go to that temple, since they had a vision about it, and the party (with Aurelia) accepts.
• During the night, Caliban tells his story to Celio: Angelo, the man Caliban considered his best friend, lied to him and to the Alfieri family about his identity for years, hoping to marry Caliban’s sister Livia and get his hands on their family fortune. Caliban stopped him, breaking the engagement, but his family still blamed him for what happened. Celio consoles him.
• Once they get to the temple, they find out that it’s being occupied by a group of cultists of Shar, an evil goddess of darkness and loss that’s a direct rival to Aurevia. They kill the cultists and free the women that were kidnapped by the cult.
  Winter seems especially distressed by the whole situation, but doesn’t really open up. Vittorio still tries to help with its anxiety.
• The party travels back to Dumetum to bring the women home, and then goes back to Letis, where it all began. There, Caliban reports back to a centurion, who tells him the army won’t allow him to join the next battle, since his injury is too serious. The centurion orders him to report back right before spring.
• The party travels towards Lexiapolis, Vittorio’s and Aurelia’s hometown, capital of the Lexian province. During their journey they decide to stop for a couple of days in Casarino, a small village, to take part in the Autumn Festivities.
• Despite the festive atmosphere Vittorio is lost in his thoughts: Casarino is Aidan’s hometown. Aidan Emporiello was his lover during the war 30 years ago, and they traveled together as adventurers until they both were 35, when a huge fight broke out between them, with Aidan falsely accusing Vittorio of stealing money from their mercenary band and the band itself siding with Aidan.
  Aidan never talked about his family and kept many secrets to himself. Curious about what was hidden to him, Vittorio goes to his family’s shop and meets Aidan’s sister, Katerina.
• Vittorio finds out that the Emporiello had to enslave themselves (with Aidan's exception) to the Valentius family, the nobles governing Casarino, to repay their huge debt (around 10k gold pieces) they owe to them. Katerina also tells him that Aidan joined the Red Hand, a huge criminal organization, to raise money for his family. Vittorio, who never suspected anything, is shocked.
• During a procession, followed by a ritual in honor of Aurevia (goddess of the sun) and Onatar (god of wine and youth), Polvere is extremely distressed and completely shuts down for the rest of the day.
• That night, Katerina asks for the party’s help: her son, Martin, went missing. The party looks for him and finds him in a forest, where he was kidnapped by two trolls, and they save him.
  Martin tried to escape from Casarino: he wanted to reach a place where he could live as a free man. The party decides to bring him back home, where they cover Martin’s tracks and his medical expenses: they don’t want Florius Valentius, his owner, to find out he tried to run away.
• Katerina explains the debt situation to the whole party and Vittorio promises to settle their debt in his name.
  Caliban and Celio leave the room: Caliban is very distressed, since his family owns slaves. He begins to question his whole life.
  Serpico is concerned about Vittorio, because they don’t want him to hurt himself to try to help this family. Vittorio still wants to try, and most of the party agrees to help him, except Polvere, who’s not sure about committing to something as big as potentially facing a criminal organization.
• Serpico tells Polvere that their name in Rivaterra was Jacinthe. They started using the name Serpico when they came to Altia.
• The party leaves and after another week of travel they finally reach Lexiapolis.