Where: Vallaki, near the town square.
Status: 🏠 Home base. A six-bed room, 2 gp a night, ours as of the evening we arrived.
First entered: Session 7, at the end of the long day through the gate.
The house
Kept by Urwin Martikov and his wife Danika, with their boys Brom and Bray permanently underfoot and reportedly under tables. Warm light, real food, honest prices, and the first room in Barovia where nobody watched us eat. After the village, the windmill, and the road, walking in here felt like being handed something we’d forgotten we were owed.
The menu, priced for the road-weary: hot beet soup, potato pottage, potato bread — coppers. Wolf steak, properly done — silver. Wine flows and is not yet a problem. Six beds, two gold, a door that locks.
The regulars
- A musician in the corner dressed in colors so bright they can only be a very deliberate statement — an outfit assembled, seemingly on purpose, to be as opposite from a Vistani as cloth allows. We have not yet asked him why.
- Two happy drunks, professionally happy.
- And at a corner table: Roger — a very old man who went white as a sheet at the sight of the five of us. Urwin’s quiet explanation: he is what remains of the previous set of Mistwalkers, from the bad times, when Urwin was a wee lad. There were others once. There is only Roger now.
Standing business
Sirius has bought two glasses of wine. One is for Roger. That conversation is where Session 8 begins.
Open questions
- What do the Martikovs know about the bad times — and about us?
- Why does a man dress that hard against being mistaken for a Vistani?