The Camp on Wreckshore Beach
Seaton’s Cove and Wreckshore Beach, Duchy of Salinmoor — 4 Coldeven, 576 CY
Session 4 — July 26, 2025
Adventurers: Xahlen Thistlewacker, Cyr Baggins, Haldir Sorenson, Hugo Baudelaire, Galborn Valgwyn, Darrak Goldenforge, Brother Merrick
Level: 2nd
Adventure: RX02 — The Camp on Wreckshore Beach
Weather: Mild and breezy; broken clouds, a sharp coastal wind, and temperatures near 68°F
The weeks following the death of Blixteem gave Seaton’s Cove time to breathe. The adventurers recovered from their wounds, trained, and settled into the unfamiliar position of being recognized wherever they went. Their victory over the green dragon had spread quickly through town, growing a little larger with every retelling.
By early Coldeven, winter’s chill had begun to loosen its grip on the southern coast. The mornings remained cool, but the afternoons were milder, and the sea wind carried the first hint that spring was approaching. It was during one of those evenings that Tamily Tanderveil offered the party something none of them expected: a place of their own.
A Gift at the Salty Net
The celebration at the Salty Net & Fishery Hall was loud, warm, and well underway by the time the adventurers settled around their table. Lanternlight danced across the salt-worn beams, the hearth glowed beneath a roasting boar, and the room smelled of spiced rum, smoke, and the sea. Sailors, hunters, dockworkers, and even members of the garrison had gathered to drink to the party’s victory over the green dragon beneath Seaton’s Cove.
As the evening wore on, the stories became less accurate and considerably more entertaining. Cyr Baggins found himself challenged to a drinking contest by an overconfident halfling and promptly demonstrated why confidence and capacity were not the same thing. Darrak Goldenforge was persuaded to recount the dragon fight yet again, while Haldir Sorenson somehow acquired another bowl of stew without remembering ordering the first.
Only after the crowd thinned and the music softened did Tamily Tanderveil approach the party’s table. She carried a small bundle wrapped in parchment and tied with twine. Inside were a deed, a rusted iron key, and a hand-drawn map bearing a simple warning: Beware the rocks. Tide comes fast.
The property lay about three miles west of Seaton’s Cove, just off the Seaguard Road. It had once belonged to Tamily’s uncle, Tamren Tanderveil, and had served as a small fishing camp overlooking the Wreckshore coast. Tamily explained that the place had been abandoned for years. The storms had not been kind to it, and neither had time, but the main building, smokehouse, sheds, and pier had once made it a useful working camp.
She was offering it to the adventurers free and clear.
There was, however, a reason no one had reclaimed it. Tamren had left the camp after becoming increasingly frightened by what he claimed was happening there. He spoke of plants that moved when no wind blew, whispers inside the walls, and a feeling that the land itself had turned against him. After fleeing Wreckshore, he vanished before Tamily ever learned what had truly happened.
The gift therefore came with one request. Tamily wanted the party to discover what had driven her uncle away and, if possible, put an end to it. If the stories proved to be nothing more than fear and old grief, the party would still have a roof, a dock, and a place along the coast to call its own.
The offer was too useful—and the mystery too compelling—to ignore.
West Along the Seaguard Road
The following morning, Xahlen Thistlewacker, Cyr Baggins, Haldir Sorenson, Hugo Baudelaire, Galborn Valgwyn, Darrak Goldenforge, and Brother Merrick left Seaton’s Cove and followed the Seaguard Road west along the coast. The road had once been maintained to military standards, but years of weather and uneven repair had left it a rough coastal track of gravel, hard-packed earth, and exposed stone.
The Azure Sea glittered beyond the cliffs as gulls wheeled overhead, and hardy pines leaned inland under the steady pressure of the wind. For much of the journey the road seemed almost pleasant, but the farther they traveled from town, the less frequently they passed carts or fishermen making their way along the coast.
The first warning came not as a sound, but as its absence. The gulls stopped calling. The wind still moved through the pines, but the ordinary noise of the coast seemed to fall away. A moment later, shale rattled somewhere above the road.
Three daggerbeaks attacked from two directions.
The flightless coastal predators were nearly five feet tall, with powerful legs, hooked beaks, and claws built for tearing. More disturbing were their eyes, which carried a faint green sheen, and the sickly fungal growth visible around their mouths and beneath patches of their plumage. One charged along the road while another came down from higher ground, trying to trap the party on the narrow cliffside track.
The fight was brief but vicious. Steel, arrows, and spellcraft brought the creatures down before they could force anyone over the edge, and when the road grew quiet again the party searched the nearby ridge.
Their search turned up more than the remains of a predator’s nest. Among the debris lay an old Suel dagger, its blade bearing the inscription IX CHAOL ZHUL—“Eyes Never Shut”—along with a clay talisman marked with a warding glyph. The fungal growth on the daggerbeaks was also unusual. Haldir recognized it as the sort of mold associated with disturbed magical ground, another hint that whatever had happened at Wreckshore might extend beyond one frightened man’s stories.
The road ahead suddenly seemed less ordinary.
Arrival at Wreckshore
A narrow trail left the Seaguard Road and wound inland through scrub and twisted salt-pines before opening into a broad clearing near the bluff. There, surrounded by dune grass, brambles, and years of neglect, stood the old fishing camp.
The main building leaned slightly toward the sea. Its shutters hung crooked, shingles littered the ground, and the porch sagged where rot had eaten deeply into the boards. A smokehouse and storage sheds stood nearby, weathered almost to the same gray as the surrounding driftwood. Beyond the clearing, a path curved toward the sound of waves.
The place was not silent in the ordinary sense. The sea could still be heard in the distance, and a loose shutter occasionally knocked against the wall, but there were no birds in the clearing and almost no insect noise. The air smelled of salt, mildew, and something faintly rotten.
The porch proved every bit as unreliable as it looked. One section of timber gave way underfoot, nearly pitching one of the party through the weakened boards and into the debris beneath. The near accident slowed their approach and made everyone more cautious about trusting anything that appeared solid.
At one of the doors, Cyr paused to listen. He heard whispers.
They were too faint to understand, little more than the shape of words somewhere beyond the wood, but they were unmistakably voices. When he listened again later, they seemed slightly clearer—and somehow more interested in him.
Corruption in the Camp
The interior of the camp showed the same mixture of abandonment and unnatural decay. Fishing equipment remained in the storage rooms, crates had collapsed where they had been left, and damp air had warped doors and floorboards throughout the building.
The first attack came from the storage area. Two huge corrupted centipedes emerged through a hole connecting the rooms, their black and red bodies swollen with pustules that leaked a sickly green ichor. They were far more aggressive than ordinary vermin, and their presence reinforced what the daggerbeaks had already suggested: something in the area was twisting living creatures.
After dealing with the centipedes, the party searched the old office. Damp charts, camp records, and business papers still lay scattered across a battered desk, enough to give them an idea of how the fishing operation had once been run. More useful was an old first-aid kit that had survived the years in a protected box, along with several pieces of equipment left behind when the camp was abandoned.
Yet the room held stranger things as well. Faded markings covered parts of the walls, and a draft carried the smell of fungus from somewhere below. The camp had not simply been left to rot; someone had spent time here trying to understand, record, or contain what was happening.
As the party moved through the hall, Cyr heard the whispers again. This time they did not merely seem to come from behind a door. They pulled at his attention, urging him farther into the building and toward the pantry.
Whatever was speaking wanted him below.
The Spider Beneath the Floor
Before the party could follow the whispers to their source, the living room revealed another danger.
The warped floorboards near the center of the room concealed a hidden burrow. Without warning, a huge corrupted spider burst upward from beneath the planks, scattering rotten wood as it attacked. Its body was swollen and diseased, marked by the same unnatural green corruption the party had seen in the daggerbeaks and centipedes.
The fight was fast and brutal. The creature struck from close range, using the floor itself as cover, but once the party recovered from the surprise it was quickly surrounded. When the spider finally collapsed, foul green ichor seeped from its body and disappeared into cracks between the boards.
The corruption was no longer confined to animals wandering near the camp. It was in the ground beneath them.
The Whispers Below
The whispers continued to draw Cyr toward the pantry. There, behind shelves and broken crockery, the party discovered a concealed trapdoor and the top of a ladder descending into darkness.
When the door opened, cold damp air rose from below carrying the heavy scent of fungus and wet earth. The ladder led into a low chamber where thin root-like veins glowed faintly green along the walls. They twitched almost imperceptibly as the adventurers passed, as though responding to movement.
The deeper they descended, the more clearly Haldir could feel something wrong in the earth. This was not simply rot or neglect. Magical energy moved through the ground in a distorted pattern, like a current forced through a channel that had been twisted out of shape.
The passage opened into a broad cavern choked with roots, vines, and fungal growth. At its center, a dense knot of vegetation pulsed with sickly light.
Then it began to move.
The Chikleek’s Den
The creature that emerged from the root mass was a Chikleek, a small corrupted fey horror with bark-like flesh, clawed limbs, and luminous eyes. Around it, three Stinkweed Shamblers tore themselves free of the surrounding growth, dragging tangles of roots and vines as they moved.
The attack came from more than one direction. The shamblers pressed forward through the cavern while the Chikleek fought from the roots, filling the chamber with maddening whispers and toxic spores. The confined space, uneven ground, and choking fungal growth made it difficult for the party to keep a clean battle line.
It became one of the hardest fights the group had faced since Blixteem. Darrak, Merrick, and the others struggled to keep the shamblers from dividing the party while Hugo, Haldir, Galborn, Cyr, and Xahlen tried to bring enough force against the Chikleek to break its hold over the cavern. Vines lashed across the floor, spores clouded the air, and every movement through the central root mass became a fight against the terrain itself.
Eventually the balance shifted. One shambler fell, then another, and the party finally brought the Chikleek down. Its death cry echoed through the cavern, and for an instant the old runes embedded among the roots seemed to flicker in response.
The pulsing light faded. Vines that had moved with unnatural purpose slackened against the walls, and the roots surrounding the central mass slowly began to wither. Whatever had been feeding the corruption had not been completely explained, but its grip on Wreckshore had been broken.
At least for now.
Tamren’s Refuge
A narrow side tunnel led away from the Chikleek’s den into a cramped hollow carved from packed earth. The room was hardly more than a refuge, and everything about it suggested that someone had retreated there in terror.
Against one wall lay the remains of Tamren Tanderveil, wrapped in the remnants of a rotting blanket. Broken candles, small charms, and fragments of a binding circle surrounded him. The circle itself combined symbols of different origins—Suel forms mingled with markings that seemed connected to the fey—but whatever Tamren had attempted had failed.
His belongings confirmed his identity. Among them was a wooden medallion bearing the Tanderveil crest and a small leather journal. Folded within its pages was a child’s drawing of Tamily, holding a fish and standing beside her uncle.
The final journal entries told enough of the story to understand how Tamren had ended there. He wrote of dreams filled with green fire, roots that moved like fingers, and whispers so constant that he could no longer hear his own thoughts. He had tried to contain what was spreading beneath the camp, but his efforts drew him deeper into the corruption rather than freeing him from it.
One message had been scratched into the earthen wall behind his body:
“It’s inside the roots now. I can’t hear myself think over the whispering. I’ve sealed the door. If it finds this place, it means I failed.”
For years, Tamily had wondered what frightened her uncle enough to abandon Wreckshore. Now the party knew he had never truly escaped it.
The Hidden Cove
Another narrow passage sloped away from the den, growing colder and wetter as it descended. The smell of salt strengthened until the tunnel finally opened onto a small rocky cleft overlooking the sea.
From the ledge, the adventurers could see the Wreckshore coastline from an angle hidden from the camp above. Tidal pools stretched between black rocks below, and beyond them an offshore island or sea stack rose from the shallows. The remains of an old iron ladder clung uselessly to the cliff face, suggesting the hidden cove had once provided access to the water.
The view raised as many questions as it answered. The coast around Wreckshore held more than the abandoned camp, and the low tide exposed routes that were invisible when the sea was high.
For the moment, however, the party still had unfinished business beneath the cabin.
The Mold Pit
The last chamber they explored was a low, slime-slick hollow filled with heavy fungal growth. At its center lay a pit of churning green-black mold, ringed by pale mushrooms. Half-sunken in the muck was a weathered Suel idol, its original features eroded and distorted by years of corruption.
The air itself was dangerous. Galborn Valgwyn entered the chamber to search the pit and quickly began to feel the effects of the mold, becoming ill as the spores worked into his lungs and senses. Despite the risk, his search uncovered a silver bracelet tangled in the growth and a strange green soul crystal, an object once capable of holding magical energy.
The idol was more troubling than the treasure. It suggested that the corruption beneath Wreckshore was tied to something older than Tamren, older than the Chikleek, and perhaps older than the fishing camp itself.
The party had killed the creature at the center of the immediate blight, but they had not yet learned what had first poisoned the roots.
Back to Seaton’s Cove
With Tamren Tanderveil’s remains and personal effects recovered, the adventurers left Wreckshore and returned to Seaton’s Cove. The strange clearing, the ruined camp, and the hidden passages beneath it were quiet when they departed, but the sight of the tidal pools and the offshore rocks remained fresh in their minds.
They found Tamily Tanderveil and told her what they had discovered. She listened quietly as they described the corrupted creatures, the whispers beneath the cabin, and the Chikleek rooted beneath the earth. The hardest part came when they told her about the small refuge beyond the den and the remains they had found there.
Tamren had not simply disappeared. He had remained at Wreckshore, trying to contain something he did not fully understand until fear, isolation, and the corruption beneath the camp finally overwhelmed him. His journal and the personal items recovered beside him gave Tamily something she had been denied for years: an answer.
It was not a comforting one, but it was the truth.
The party had fulfilled the promise they made when Tamily placed the deed on their table. The immediate corruption beneath Wreckshore had been cut away, and the fate of Tamren Tanderveil was no longer a mystery. Yet the hidden cove, the Suel idol, and the tidal route toward the offshore rocks suggested that Wreckshore still had secrets left to uncover.
For now, the session ended with Tamily learning what had become of her uncle. The sea beyond Wreckshore would have to wait.
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