11 Ches, 1502 D.R.

Once again, the Syndicate has been extended a courteous invitation to a party destined to go terribly, terribly wrong.

Thrax himself teleported us to Baldur's Gate for this one. There were carnival games and carnival foods and carnival rides and carnival people, but the main event was an apparently terribly important horse race, a derby as they call it. We were to participate in the race; Thrax apparently betted heavily upon it, and was relying upon us to win it at any cost.

Well, he must be disappointed. No sooner did the officious petty lord in charge of the affair stand up to begin speaking than we were all sucked into Hell.

Reader: I do not write these words lightly, nor do I jest. The four of us -- myself, Solia, Bri, and Sylthas -- were all dragged unwilling through a portal to Avernus, the first layer of the Nine Hells. It happened. If I make it sound abrupt, if it seems jarring and bewildering to the reader of these notes, then I have perhaps begun to do the experience justice.

When we regained our bearings, we were met by an especially odious rakshasa, who gave us an ultimatum: it was he who had called us to this place, and we could either do his bidding and be sent home with a substantial reward, or... find our own way home. His bidding was to recover a trove of soul coins (twenty-eight, to be specific) from a rival of his. We were given a hellish engine of war to help us accomplish this task. Needless to say, we accepted.

We were given a list of encampments controlled by the rakshasa's rival. Armed with our customized infernal machine, we rolled up and laid waste to the guardians of two of them before we found the coins required of us and more. We were then recalled, but before we could be given our reward and returned to our home, the aforementioned rival arrived with a small army of their own machines, and we were forced to hold them off while the portal was made.

We accomplished this task as well, and in the end, the wretched creature kept its unholy word. It sent us home with a small trove of valuable magic items, to find that the derby we'd come for was already entirely over.

Is it... is it wrong to say that I rather enjoyed the experience? Hell notwithstanding, the machine was mighty almost beyond measure, and I regret that the thing disintegrated upon crossing through the portal back to the Material.

Well, it is over, in any event, and I am certain we shan't be hearing from that creature or his infernal people again.

-- Yashir adh Rumahr

11 Ches, 1502 D.R.
Solia Faolanri
Location: Avernus

Well, I'm pretty sure this was supposed to start out as horse racing. But, that didn't happen quite the way we expected.

It was a lot less racing and a lot more portal-to-Avernus-and-Soul-Coin-recovery. Which we were all a little worried about, until we actually got started. We were told that our host's cache of soul coins had been stolen, and we needed to get them back. The best way to do that was to use an Infernal war machine.

We found an encampment of... things... that we observed and then ended up attacking. We found some soul coins on them, and knew we were at least on the right track. Then, we stole their war machine and went to find some more. We did and there was this snake-haired lady that was trying to turn us all to stone and we ended up just kind of driving by her a bunch of times and the swords on the side of the war machine did her in. I unlocked some new skills myself and figured out how to sneak aboard one and stole it, too. Then we were attacked by this giant flying horror monster.

We finally had eyes on where the largest stash of coins was, so we ended up chasing a group down in our new war machines. We fought them, too, got them back and returned them to their owner! That's probably fine!

Anyway... I would say I don't want to go back to Avernus, since it's generally not a great place, but I'd be lying if I said that wasn't a lot of fun.