Our story opens at the Baby Roc, tavern and occasional meeting place of the resistance, where Thugeel asks Thorongil to look into the recent disappearance of Bofor, his dishwasher. During the last month, thirteen potential resistance recruits have vanished; apparently, someone has been posing as a resistance member and luring these youngsters off to be either kidnapped or murdered. The most recent batch to vanish, a group of the better not-quite-first-level students at the Fighters' Guild, were told that they'd be meeting the resistance leader in the wells (where the real resistance isn't stupid enough to hold meetings, but raw recruits wouldn't necessarily know that); they disappeared three days ago (1725 PK). The fake resistance people are thought to be shapechangers (causing the name Kareelmola to cross at least two players' minds).
Thugeel arranged a meeting between the party and "Free Leader 1", who gives his name as Freedom Bringer and appears to be a half-elf in plate mail who walks around with a drawn katana. The meeting took place in the cellar of the Baby Roc, where FL1 was flanked by an unarmored man in merchant-style clothes and a somewhat shifty-looking woman in studded leather; about a dozen human bodyguards with drawn weapons were also in attendance. After some idle chitchat (which Silvana suspects may have covered some mental scanning attempts), most of the resistance folks departed, and the party was briefed by two of the bodyguards, Zanbar and Gark.
According to Zanbar and Gark, all new recruits are required to pass some sort of initiation; two typical missions are smuggling boxes into certain locations in the Fighters' Guild hall (a simulated sabotage/demolitions mission) and going into the hobgoblin quarter, posing as an Imperialist, pissing off the hobs (making them annoyed with the Empire, at least in principle), and getting back out alive. These tests are done in pairs to encourage teamwork. FL1 normally sets the tasks, though other resistance members sometimes have some input; FL1 was also responsible for the change from passive to active recruiting.
The disappearances all took place during what turned out to be fake initiation tests (though all except the well incident closely paralleled real initiation tasks). In addition to the two who vanished down the well, one recruit disappeared in a cellar, two more vanished from a dark alley, and another four were lost inside the Fighters' Guild one night; Zanbar and Gark don't remember what happened to the other four. The only pre-first-level recruit not to disappear during the month was the partner of the cellar victim; during the same month, about a dozen more experienced people joined the resistance (mostly on a part-time basis) without incident.
After meeting with the resistance, Silvana and Ganeth went to the Moon Temple, where they were introduced to a kenku called Jenx, who's been tracking Spider Monk activity in the area. (When Jenx entered the room, he addressed Ganeth as "Red Dude"; later in the conversation, he mused, "I knew what you looked like. I wonder who stuck that in my mind.") The monks have been kidnapping young people and brainwashing them, trying to increase their numbers. Jenx says that potential monks need to be both fairly strong and reasonably wise; these may be the same qualities that FL1's "active recuitment" program seeks, and this may not be coincidental. Since Elbleem seems to be making a lot of money from this operation, Jenx hypothesizes that Elbleem is handling the actual kidnapping and then selling the victims to the spiders.
The actual brainwashing is being handled by a devil named Spinx; Jenx knows only that Spinx has no long-term disguise abilities (though he can appear to be a quiet thirtyish human for short periods) and goes to great lengths to avoid combat (including running away from a lone hobgoblin thug). Jenx also believes that the proto-monks are in an underground meditation chamber (also referred to as a cave) that he saw in in a dream. Oddly, the dream seemed to be from the perspective of a rat, and he was accompanied by a were-rat, so while he knows how to get to the cave though rat-tunnels, he doesn't know how to get there by more conventional means (probably through the well system). The Temple of the Moon people are putting together a meeting between the party and the Mayor of the Ratmen, who can hopefully tell them about the place Jenx saw in the dream.
Of course, there are spiders down in the well system; since Silvana and Horon saw a largish spider with a pentagram on its back (a Gate Spider, according to Jenx) in the wells about four years ago, there could be a lot of them down there by now (though Jenx thinks they're laying low for the time being).Can the party prevent the kidnapped recruits from becoming the next generation of Spider Monks (and will they get some cool dice in the process)? Can they find the traitor(s) in the C-Ra resistance organization (and is it their old pal Kareelmola, posing as FL1)? Will they gain contacts that could be of assistance in Banzeel? If the Red Mage is somehow involved with this tangled tale, will Elbret put in an appearance (and whose side are they on this time around)? If the East-West and Chaos-Rakni conflicts start to converge, do we dare wonder how life could get even more complicated? Stay tuned...