Previously on Reclaiming Orathos

The downtime's done. We roll out of Ponterford behind Eldrich's caravan on the 16th of New Summer — racing the map-wall, playing I Spy, teaching Jex to dance — until a rigged "coin" drops a zombie horse in the road, mid-meal over a dead camper. We butcher the nag, then the camper rises and we butcher him too, only for the horse to bloat and detonate in a thirty-foot cone of flaming, poisonous guts that nearly drops the front line. Identify names the dead man Michael: an ordinary soul rotted by a spreading necromantic curse that did not start here.

We cut off the road into the woods and find Old Halfwood — a village burned forty years ago for daring to petition against the false queen Laewendas, its eight hundred signatures answered by soldiers and fire. We clear its shambling dead, pyre them, and meet Clover, a Goodberry-eating pacifist druid who's lost her elder and keeps dodging a "scary militia." She leads us straight to it: New Halfwood, rising on the dead town's name.

And as we warn old Thanhold of the corpsewalkers in his woods, the question hangs — where is this blight crawling from?

SUMMARY: The party leaves Ponterford, destroys an exploding zombie-horse blight, uncovers Old Halfwood's massacre for defying Laewendas, and follows the druid Clover to the rebuilt New Halfwood.