Ponterford

A town beyond the Palisade in Rivalon, roughly ~45 miles past the wall and north of the Keep Grow Inn — long the subject of a child/youth-abduction job Silithane took from the spymaster Dominus back in Session 12. Children disappear and then return waterlogged and dead, "as if they were drug down beneath the water," with the deaths centering on the first of the month. Per the inn's trapper, only those with a son or daughter are at risk ("then you're safe to travel"); a visitor is told to "go there for the first of the month and you shall see and understand — but I wouldn't recommend it." It is close enough to Cathalon to scout the enemy capital "without getting too close."

(Spelling long unsettled — "Ponterford," "Ponterford," "Ponterford," "Pontifort," "Ponterford," and even "Ponterhood". Canonical spelling is "Ponterford" per the DM's term list; this note's filename is kept as "Ponterford" to avoid breaking older session links, with "Ponterford" as an alias.)

Session 22

• Picked as the party's tentative next destination after the bridge and the inn — both to finally chase the missing-children job and to glimpse Cathalon.
• The inn trapper deepened the horror (the drowned dead, the first-of-the-month timing, the son/daughter rule); Laewendas is apparently doing nothing about it.
• One of the four roads weighed at session's end (with Marmoth, Giffield, and the Gray Veil Cave); the GM will prep it.

Session 31

• A concrete lead surfaces. Caressa's own outgoing mail (carried out by courier Thalia) is addressed to the Aberforth Speakeasy in Ponterford — a place, not a person — telling the party there is a speakeasy to find there, and giving them a contact when they arrive.
• Confirmed as the party's stated next destination: the missing/drowning children, now approached with both the speakeasy lead and Silithane's knowledge that the Coalition already dispatched replacement knights to the town.

Session 32

• The town, explored in full. A dying sawmill village of saplings and stumps — the lumber mill has felled every grown tree (a giant trunk stands before the church). Key sites: the town square to the north (marketplace, a pyre, residences), an abandoned wizard's tower overlooking the centre, the witches' church, the orc hunting lodge (north end), and the Northern Trading Company branch where most of the session played out. The party enters by a back (northeast) way.
• The economy is the war. The sawmill is everything here: wood floated upstream to the capital Cathalon to be built into Laewendas's war machines, and downstream to the settlements. The GM names shutting down or turning the wood factory as the real strategic objective — constrained by Coalition treaties forbidding the party from simply burning it. Best lumber market is Marmoth (where a giant flattens the buildings).
• The pyre. The town-square pyre (plaque: "The Pyre") burns "prostitutes, heretics, Reclamationites, and post people" about once a month; its bones are calcinated from repeated use, and it's heavily guarded (also covering the main thoroughfare, ~10 guards within reach). The old postmaster, church-lady, librarian, schoolteacher, and the hated Terry were all burned here.
• The Snatcher, by rumour. Townsfolk hold that The Snatcher rides in on horseback, takes anything "underage," and sends the bodies down the river (which also carries the lumber) — but asking openly is a sore, suspicion-raising topic. Thalia's Insight reads the stories as distorted hearsay.
• The witch's bargain. The witch-priestess will only share what she knows about the snatcher once the party earns the town's trust through good deeds — first test: a frog-folk family near the lumber mill has lost something.
• The Speak Loudly — the village tavern (a deliberate joke on the still-unfound Aberforth Speakeasy), where Eldrich the Elder's caravan is gathered. Its owner steers hard questions toward the church.

Session 33

• The sermon turns the town. In the witches' church, the Covenite preaches on the witch Rhiannon ("the Night Witch") and the doctrine that the witches vote the island's ruler — leaving unsaid that Laewendas was not chosen. Weeks of this have commoners and guards asking openly treasonous questions; Ponterford is markedly anti-crown, having been punished for resistance before.
• No children left? Magra hears no gossip or condolences about the missing children, and the party sees not a single child in town — perhaps the snatching has paused because the town has run out of kids. But Renforth muddies it with a cryptic correction: the children aren't missing, they've "all been returned in slightly less good condition" (see The Snatcher).
• The wizard's tower is a magic shop. The "abandoned" hilltop tower is run by Renforth the Wysand, an owl Mage's Society member; the party spends ~2,000 gold on armour gear there (+1 town reputation) and Silithane learns to conjure a tower.
• Local geography. The Speakeasy (bounty board; the Aberforth Speakeasy contact) sits across the road from the Speak Loudly; the dead Speak Moderately is now the home of the rude wizard Malgamar. A Baelheim-style sunken-triangle house (the trading clerk's) is the only non-Rivalonian building in town.
• Dillinger's tomatoes. Platypus farmer Doug "Duck" Dillinger's prize crop, magically over-grown into sentient monsters, infests a field by the tower; the party exterminates them. The witch's first good-deed test — the frog-folk family at the lumber-mill docks, amid human bones in the water — is begun but unresolved on the recording.

Session 34

• The frog-folk's crocolion, slain. At the lumber-mill docks, the party kills the intelligent crocolion menacing King Ringo's frog-folk, completing the witch's first good-deed test. Carving it open reveals no recent child remains — it is not The Snatcher, only a scavenger of the drowned.
• The Aberforth Speakeasy, found. The long-hunted Speakeasy (across from the Speak Loudly) is entered at last — a hushed, food-only, no-alcohol eatery run by Abely, son of founder Aberoth, and the town's bounty-board hub. Caressa's letter is delivered to him; it was a keepsake from his father.
• The sheriff and the next job. Sheriff Jeremiah Falconer pays the 100-gold crocolion bounty and points the party at a south-side undead — a head-and-neck-only drake skeleton that wakes nightly to bite and blocks new construction.
• The fire pit, in action. Fenric's sarcastic "do you want to be hit?" to a lumber worker earns him a roll through the criminal-burning fire pit — a threat is a threat here regardless of tone.
• The mill, turned off the frog-folk grove. Lash cons a worker that the southern (poison-sapped) trees carry a spreadable pox, steering the lumber "CC" away from cutting them. The town's whole economy still runs on floating war-wood upstream to Cathalon; locals parrot Laewendas's anti-postal isolation propaganda (no village should talk to another). Still no children in town.

Session 35

• A quiet downtime night. The party rents the old Falconer family home (the sheriff's childhood house, on the southern hill beside the screaming drake skeleton) from the sheriff's house-letting friend Abernathy Bogner, and splits up for an evening of dinners and "dates" — no combat all session.
• The screaming wyrm, silenced. The limbless, never-named drake skeleton that grinds its jaw on stone each night (robbing the town of sleep) is put to rest when Valmora Dispels the miscast Animate Objects animating it. She means to confirm it stays dead over several nights.
• The snatcher, confirmed dead. A passing trio of out-of-town adventurers killed the horseman-shaped child-snatcher and buried it in the woods weeks ago; the drake's bones were animated by their caster mid-fight. The town's childlessness is Laewendas's standing decree (any child born here is drowned), not the snatcher — the town waits on the Reclamation.
• Town texture. Guard captain Facey warns Thalia in a back alley that a "child" risks Laewendas's reprisal; a pacifist druid neighbor (likely the Horibus the sheriff named in Session 34) pledges his service if the party stops the lumber mill. Named services: Edgar Wiley the will-writer, the potter's, the carpenter's, the orc lodge.

Session 38

• More of the southern district crossed at 9 AM: the druid Horibus's vine-and-garden house (cures, antivenoms, an anteater), the Northern Trading Company longhouse-barracks across a river of stepping-stones (guarded by Warmaiden Yngraf), and Renforth's tower.
• The road north. Eight miles up a war-decayed road lies a collapsed-bridge crossroads that once linked Ponterford to northern Rivalon (Saltwater, Ornston Keep, Port Porro), now severed by a meandered river — beside a ~140-ft eroded stone tower (a dead worm-skeleton at its peak) and a forest-mushroom-folk warren. The hunting ground of the Guardian of the Woods, and the front of the brewing lumberjacks-vs-nature conflict.

Session 39

• Past midnight, into the 29th. The day rolls over from the 28th to the 29th of Spring's End. The cured party celebrates an afternoon in the orc lodge, then keeps a midnight meeting at the witch church.
• The cave revealed. A murdered kobold boy's ghost and the Varian spy Timothy Leisten disclose Laewendas's cave ~10 miles upstream — a mercenary holding base and a child-sacrifice tomb — confirming where the town's drowned children were truly taken, and what for.
• The old postmaster's lodge. A 20×70-ft storage house by the lumber mill, broken into by Thalia: full of junk, a hidden cache of 40–50 undelivered parcels, and a floor-hatch to the underground river (an escape route hinting the postmaster survived).
• The lumber mill, still standing. Lash's plan to burn it down is talked out — it would bring Laewendas's reprisal on the commoners; the town's war-wood economy remains the unsolved strategic problem.

Session 40

• A day of errands (the 29th of Spring's End). Before the cave raid the party works the town: the ritual-lore man Victus the Mute (warning of the Candleman and the northern shrine), Renforth's tower (scroll/ring trades), and the town blacksmith's shop (a claw-weapon pattern for Lash). A bounty-board "piss thief" goes unsolved for want of a latrine.
• The south-side worm, contextualised. The blacksmith reveals the screaming drake skeleton the party silenced in Session 35 is the same venom-wyrm as the tower beast — and that a child died playing in it years ago. It's a dead end for harvesting (ground-down teeth, dried venom).
• A hard choice. The party decides not to tell the town its snatched children are still alive in the upstream cave — false hope being crueler than silence.

Session 44

• The arc winds down. The party returns from the cleared cave at ~2 PM on the last day of Spring's End (the 30th — summer begins the next morning) and spends a 2.5-week (16-day) downtime tying off the town: the Miller's daughter's bones returned to old Gordon Miller, the witch told the cave is cleared (but no children survived), the dragon-skeleton bounty settled, and a cave's worth of loot sold through the Northern Trading Company and Renforth.
• Harvests doubled. At session's end Thalia casts Enrichment on the town — the GM writes into canon that Ponterford's harvests are doubled and its felled trees will partly regrow, a lasting parting gift to the recovering sawmill village.
• Departure looms. The party will leave with Eldrich the Elder's caravan next session, up the River Pontar road toward the woods and the Menaggles.