Tser Pool Encampment

Where

A cart-rutted side track off The Road West, a day's walk west of the Village of Barovia. Marked POOL on Ismark's Map.

Visited

The end of Session 5 into Session 6: one evening, one night, one breakfast.

Status

Behind us, and still the safest night we have had in Barovia. Madam Eva says we will see her again.

The camp

Ismark called it a semi-permanent camp of Vistani travellers, "at least a bit safer than camping on your own." He said some people claim the Vistani are in league with the devil, because they can pass through the mists, though they can't take anyone with them. In his experience they had never done him wrong.

After the village, the merriment was almost a shock. A big bonfire, brightly dressed people, music, laughter, and a shout of "Oh, guests. Come on, come join the campfire." The price of a place at the fire was plain: "The trade of a story."

Sirius paid it with the truth. Born to a family with vineyards in Waterdeep, a heroic grandfather and a wastrel father; found drunk on the family's good vintage in the street at two in the morning at thirteen; a morning of sunlight and a terrible headache that made him want to change; and at fifteen his grandfather pressed a raven's feather into his hand and packed him off to a boarding school for priests, where they taught him to love the sun. "Good story. Good trade." Food and wine went round.

Then a large man strode out of the great tent at the back of the camp and called us all by name: "What took you, Drusila, Fëanor, Lilli-grai, Osric, Sirius? You are expected."

The great tent

Dim, candlelit, black velvet on every surface, a crystal ball on a gold stand and two decks of cards. Madam Eva greeted us with "It took you all long enough," told us "You are here for a reason," and read our fates. She called Sirius an imbecile twice. The whole reading, card by card, is on its own page: The Reading.

The next morning Fëanor cast his detect-magic ritual over the camp. The tent lit up like nothing we'd seen: kaleidoscopic, "like looking at a cuttlefish trying to disguise itself."

What we learned by the fire

• They come and go as they please. There is an old agreement between the devil and the Vistani, "an accident of ancient history": he grants them passage, they leave, trade and come back, and he and his creatures leave them alone. They are not his allies, simply exempt, and not much bothered about anyone who isn't. Barovians, as they see it, are the devil's property. We argued. They shrugged. One of us checked, and the man believed every word he was saying.
• "Mist walkers" is their word for people like us: outsiders who come in "with powers and ambition and wanting to change the status quo."
• Don't try to leave in a wagon. They tried smuggling a passenger out once. The wagon came out the other side without the person in the back. Then a wolf brought them a note in its mouth: "Naughty, naughty. Don't try that again."
• There are other lands like this one, which the Vistani call the Domains of Dread ("a pretty dour name"), and they can also pop out on the Coast of Faerûn. Waterdeep is very nice at certain times of year, apparently.
• The devil has been exactly the same for about seven hundred years. Whom he envied, none of them knows. They are an oral people. If the answer exists, it's written down somewhere.
• The seasons still turn. "It gets warmer, but it doesn't get sunny." Asked the date, one of them named a month none of us had heard of. It is autumn and getting colder.

The morning after

Lily raided Osric's pack for pie at dawn and won the wrestling match for it. Fëanor's ritual showed a strong enchantment woven through the pies, and a fainter one hanging around Lily's head, both the same magenta. We did not throw the pies away. We should have.

Breakfast was bacon: real bacon, with spices, from outside Barovia. Sirius declared the Vistani by far his favourite people in this land. They told us, kindly, that we should probably keep moving: "You are not Vistani."

Somewhere on the road west that morning, we found we were stronger than we had been the night before. The fates had been woven round us, and "the land is noticing you."

Open questions

• How long, and how, did Madam Eva know we were coming?
• Whose passenger vanished in the mists, and where did they go?
• The Vistani's agreement is theirs alone. Could it ever be ours?