The tavern opened tonight with the debut of our new Pub Quiz, a semi-regular comedy panel game hosted by the gaffer himself. Ruby Red and Aron Schur will be weekly team captains.
After the quiz, attention shifted back to the more pressing matter: the rescue of Gideon Moss. The wizard Ebbo the Boar, with help from the Mayor of Shady Pines, planned on using dark magic to change Gideon’s mind somehow.
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-Passage from the dark scripts, do not recite.
When the cage proved unbreakable, Garrick suggested they look under the floorboards. Cutting down they found an old and abandoned club of some kind – polished wood, covered booths, giant spiders, the works. Boxes stacked directly beneath Gideon’s cage made the plan precarious, but the crew pressed on.
Before a full rescue could be prepared, the Mayor and Ebbo arrived. Gideon in chains was with them. Little Maggs immediately confronted the Mayor, invoking the terrifying political might of the Village Green Preservation Society. With her threat to “make elections difficult for him,” the Mayor abandoned the procedure and stormed out. Ebbo, however, did not.
Instead, the old wizard stepped inside the cage with Gideon.
There he revealed his true plan: not to “fix” Gideon at all, but to remake everyone else in Gideon’s image. That is, lonely, unbound, answerable to no one. All so that Ebbo could finally be left to his own devices. His bitterness toward wizarding academies and government oversight gave rise to a scheme to reshape all of Shady Pines in his own twisted vision of freedom.
This was enough for the tavern.
As Ebbo began chanting from his deep magic, Moonmoth and Karakis launched into a frantic sawing operation beneath the cage while Zat counter-chanted whatever fragments he could remember. The floor finally gave way, and Gideon dropped through, breaking the ritual.
What followed was a chaotic rescue through the lower tavern corridors. Ebbo gave chase, transforming into a monstrous boar, goring Inés and hurling Moonmoth about like a rag doll. They battled him room by room as he shifted between man and beast.
When Ebbo realized he had lost, he dissolved once more into a cloud of sand and tried to escape through the tavern door. But Moonmoth caught him in a bucket, slammed a coat over it, sat down, and asked for crochet supplies.
With Ebbo contained, Inés patched up, and Gideon freed from his chains, the tavern finally breathed again. A round was poured for all.
The secrets of the tavern below are for another night.
Another evening at the Werewolf of Shady Pines Tavern started with gossip. Gideon, who just last week beheaded a man and fled, has been captured by the guard and is being held in the town gaol.
Werewolf tried a new way to collect coin from the patrons, a magic machine that gives everyone a price it deems fair. The regulars did not deem it fair and demanded it be destroyed. Anything that can raise prices on a whim but only benefits the owner didn’t seem fair.
The tavern was having a problem with escaped rabbits after introducing rabbit stew. The regulars made makeshift rabbit catching tools and traps. Unhelpfully one of the rabbits bounded into the magic POS as it was being destroyed, flooding the tavern with rabbits.
This was solved when someone opened the doors and Sharik the dog came running, scattering the rabbits.
Through Zat we learned the mayor plans to use his wizard and alter Gideons brain – the one thing he seems to fear most. The tavern plans to stop it by destroying the cage he is being held in and somehow fighting the wizard. Could this be the last straw for the mayor of Shady Pines? Can they overcome such a powerful wizard? You’ll have to come by next week for another episode of The Werewolf of Shady Pines.
In an upper-crust tavern far from The Werewolf of Shady Pines, the illustrious Moss family gathers for a lavish reunion. Amid the bustle of the tavern staff, young Gideon Moss is left perched at the bar, his Moss Mother too harried and important to have time for him.
There, Gideon becomes captivated by a brooding young wizard named Ebbo, who tells him about “higher freedoms” he wants to achieve through magic To a boy whose future feels predetermined by duty, Ebbo’s words awaken something in him.
Then in strides Uncle Bigod Moss – the famed adventurer known across these lands as The Thorn in the Moss. He and Ebbo greet each other as old friends, with a shared suspicion of family expectations and a fierce love of their own visions of freedom. Gideon is spellbound between these two giants of defiance.
But the milk between them quicly curdles. Bigod learns that Ebbo has abandoned his wizard training and intends to strike at the Moss gathering by transforming the entire family into wild boars. The two square off. Ebbo unleashes his newly learned spell but Bigod’s shining armor reflects the magic back upon the wizard. Ebbo is knocked unconscious and a gathered crowd cheers.
Moss Mother swoops in to retrieve Gideon, insisting that Bigod is nothing but a drunkard and that the family’s praise is misplaced. Gideon isn’t so sure.
Later, Ebbo awakens in shame and simmering hatred. A single boar’s tusk has sprouted from his cheek, a permanent reminder of his folly, and the beginning of the bitterness that will shape the wizard he becomes.