1. And a pox and a curse on the people round here

The Rats of Waterdeep Incident Report

Encounters

Level: 1

Summary

Incident report written by detective-in-training a filed with Swordcaptain Arvene Morrow regarding the ‘Rat Pox’ incident in the Dock Ward:

It was a grey and grim day when I was asked to look into the Rat Pox troubling the Dock Ward. Grey like the faces of the poor souls stuck behind the quarantine barricades. As grim as them too. They called it the Rat Pox, the Docks Disease, the Pest Plague. I was worried of catching it myself, but I knew someone had to stop it before it started to spread to the rest of the city. Trouble was, the Swordcaptain wouldn’t let me go in alone. That’s where they came in, like some bright-eyed town hero walking into a tavern, armor gleaming like it was fresh off the rack. I didn’t know these strangers, but they looked like trouble. The Swordcaptain assigned these new recruits to assist me in my investigation. I didn’t like it, but I knew I didn’t stand much of a chance going it alone.

Our first task, once past the barricades was to check in on one Jerald Brisby, a retired sea captain. He’d contacted the Swordcaptain a few days earlier saying he had some kind of information that could help stop the plague, but when he didn’t show to their rendezvous, we suspected foul play. And foul is just what we got. On arrival, we found the Captain dead - scratched and bitten to death by tiny claws and mouths, lying in a dark puddle of his own blood. He smelled almost as rotten as the cheese left to mold in his icebox, almost as foul as this case.

We discovered a clue in the form of a piece of paper hidden in his sock. On it was written the letters ‘HH’ and the numbers ‘908’. We scratched our heads on that one until one of my companions discovered a newspaper crumpled up beneath his bed. An ad for a local apothecary was circled, but what drew our notice was the ad for ‘Harbor Holdings’ - was this our mysterious ‘HH’?

We headed out to check it out - but ran into some miscreants on the street. A group of thugs, led by a beholder. Was this eye tyrant the one and only Xanathar? At this point I thought we were toast with a side of fried horns, but he told us a few bad jokes and traveled on - leaving us to his thugs. They proved to be harder than they looked, beating us to within an inch of our lives, but we eventually overcame them and headed out to the bank.

Luckily, the gnomes running the bank didn’t seem to remember Captain Brisby all that well and allowed us to view the contents of his box. This is where things started to get really strange. Inside we found letters between the Captain and his estranged daughter Catarina - she was King of Rats! It seems she’d become involve with a woman named Maladie who she believed to be behind the plague, but her father seemed to think otherwise. Also in the box was a small doll of a rat, Mr. Squeaks the Captain called him.

After the bank, we decided to track down the only other lead we had - the apothecary circled in the newspaper. We weren’t sure what connection it might have to things yet, but beggars can’t be choosers. We were met there by a surly secretary surrounded by salves and spirits. Luckily, one of my assistants was also a doctor and was able to bluff his way past her to find a secret basement hiding under the surgery. We pushed our way passed the secretary and into the basement, only to find crazed cultists working on cryptic contagions as well as cages of plague-ridden rats riled from their roosts by our rumble with the rough ruffians.

It seems we’d found the secret lair of this mysterious Maladie, the Lady of Plagues. Amongst her papers we found a secret cipher that led us to conclude that her and the Rat King had been sending coded messages to one another via the Dock’s newspapers. It seems they had a brief affair that had now gone as sour as strange concoctions on her workbench. Things were getting messier, and some of my companions were starting to show signs of the plague. We needed to do something, and fast.