The Unfinished Aria

The Hook

The party is hired in the storm-battered harbor town of Sallowmere by Contessa Ilaria Vesk, an elderly patroness of the arts whose family fortune sank with the opera house of Vermerin two centuries ago during a tidal cataclysm. She has secured a battered brass diving bell and a barge, and she needs escorts who won't panic when they hear singing at the bottom of the sea. She says she wants only 'one small thing' recovered from the wreck: a locket. She is lying — what she truly wants sits in the vault beneath the stage, and she has heard the aria in her dreams every night of her life, counting down verses toward a note she both craves and dreads.

🎭 The rest of this tale is the Dungeon Master's secret. You'll live it at the table.