The Talisman of Pure Good: Part 1

While crossing from the Greywood through Balduren and back into Treft, the party comes across a speechless priest. It seems a prophecy was foretold that a party of that composition would be seen on the road, and when it was, it was to be conducted to the Prefect at Laketon.

Laketon, City of Wizards, and not know for its faith, boasts a huge but empty church. In it the Prefect of Laketon is a lonely man with few congregants. The only other members of his church are his acolytes and the Mad Knight who lives in a cell in the basement.

The Prefect informs the party that the Patriarch of all Westrun is on a walk about of the Eight Kingdoms, but he left word that a party such as this should be pressed into service to recover the Talisman of Pure Good, so that it might be used by the forces of good to defeat the rising evil.

According to the Prefect, the Talisman was last kept in a reliquary in the Church of Recusa. Recusa was a town abandoned when the Kingdoms of Saklan and Rath made peace and agreed to leave a thirty mile wide border unoccupied as a sort of neutral zone. The Church was left abandoned until it was reclaimed by a priestess espousing a new doctrine.

She led her cult into the neutral zone and disappeared from public notice. Except reports of her strange powers and growing congregation worried the church. They sent a priest who never returned. Over the years, an entire peerage of Paladins were joined into service and only one ever returned. He is a shell of man, level-drained and diminished and plagued by night terrors. He tells the party that his sword and shield were abandoned in a crypt beneath the church. He admits that he was seduced by a fairy the night before entering the Church and this made him vulnerable to the attacks of the undead which infest it.

Intrigued, the party set forth for the neutral zone and the abandoned Town of Recusa to find the Talisman.