Something Borrowed, Something Dead

The Hook

You are guests at the wedding of Rosalind Halloway — adventurer, occasional client, and the only person at this ceremony who has ever bought you a drink without expecting to be rescued from something afterward. The vows are lovely. The vineyard is gorgeous, all silvered fog and black-leafed vines. Then the officiant reaches 'speak now or forever hold your peace,' and a woman in a rotted wedding gown rises out of the altar's living lattice of grapevines, soaked in thirty-year-old wine, holding up a sprig of hemlock like a bouquet. She says one word — 'Objection' — and the temperature in the chapel drops forty degrees. Then she's gone, and Rosalind's future mother-in-law is fainting into the hors d'oeuvres, and the wedding planner is gripping your arm hard enough to bruise, whispering that she knows what you three did last spring with the ghoul in the tasting room, and could you please, please do that again before the final toast — because in about three hours, Château Noirvigne's most famous vintage, thirty years in the barrel and finally ready to pour, is going in front of a hundred guests, and she has a very bad feeling about what's actually in the bottle.

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