Arcade’s Journal: Dopplegangers in Winter – Crellar’s Inn Part 1 ...grateful to find an inn just before snowstorm hit. We encountered a party consisting of a cleric Rofan Fairfax, Lyons the mage, and others. Lyons was quite friendly, and asked to examine my unusual staff. I complied, wondering if he could tell me anything about it. Suddenly the mage’s eyes rolled upwards, and he fell unconscious to the floor. Most curious. We woke him up, but he could not explain what had happened to him. The inn belongs to Gardis Crellar, an ex-adventurer, and his wife Gertrude and their sons Kellog and Kelsey.... ...dark doings. During the night, Lyons was found murdered, but witnesses swore they had just seen him about the inn when he was already dead. We suspected doppelgangers. The investigation was going nowhere, when we got lucky. Two guardsmen wearing Thurrian family livery were mounting to leave on horseback, when their horses spooked and refused to carry them. This seemed unusual behavior for the horses of trained cavalry officers. A confrontation with the two revealed them as the doppelgangers, and we slew them. Who knew that animals don’t care for doppelgangers? Must remember that. ...before we left, I met the daughter of a Kindric merchant headed for Rampart and gave her a message for the Thurrians, warning them of a possible doppelganger plot. Rofan has attached himself to our group. He is a priest of holy Galanna of the animals, but I suspect that he is actually insane. He tends to preach and try to convert disciples, and apparently has been healing for money. Specifically he has been healing “pigs, and fat women,” he says. Refers to things he finds objectionable as “The Devil’s Fruitcake”. I suspect that it’s going to be difficult to get rid of him.

Annotations As with many P’Cat adventures, this one came back to haunt us in a big way. As did the PC Rofan. More later. The first time (described above), the adventure was taken froma wonderful Dungeon adventure called "Night of Fear" (or something like that.) It involved a classic plot: the PCs are trapped by a winter storm, and someone in the inn is a murderer. In this case it was three someones, doppelgangers. The PCs managed to kill two, thinking that the third was dead as well, since a doppelganger killed an elf and claimed that the elf was changing shape. The night was full of paranoia, suspicion, and nervousness! When all was said and done, one doppelganger remained alive and undetected when the PCs left the next day. Unfortunate, as it turns out. You'll see why. Rofan was a "visionary" of Galanna who saw the Goddess in the smallest things: a bird, a snowflake, a pig. He was erratic, though, and not necessarily stable. Rofan adventured on and off with the party for years, eventually leaving to found a bear cult and become a charismatic (if insane) leader. It was at this point that Grundo's player got bored with him, and switched to Alix Loial, noble rogue. KidCthulhu's description of him is right on the money. He had run away from a father who wanted him to become an accountant, hoping for a life with the circus or with adventurers instead. His luck was phenomenal; the incident referred to in Arcade's journal involved Alix tossing a juggling ball at Arcade to get his attention, and rolling a critical hit. __________________ - Piratecat, Rofan was a nutcase. He used to take sudden dislike to the most mudane items (boots, for example) and proclaim them to be instruments of the devil. More specifically, the devil's fruitcake. Why a fruitcake? Dunno. Rofan was nuts. And fruitcakes are pretty evil.--KidCthulhu

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