Norwickian Trade Disruption?
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One by one, trade caravans start going missing. It doesn't seem particularly noteworthy at first, perhaps about what one would expect from the dangerous paths of the underdark….but what is particularly distressing is the lack of evidence. Typically there isn't any left along the path taken by the trade caravans, occasionally part of a wagon will be found, but nothing that would seem to indicate who or what is doing the attacking.
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Perfidy! The severed heads of traders reported missing over the past few days have been showing up in gruesome states of decomposition all over Oscura. None seem to know how they show up where they do or who is leaving them, and they're found in all manner of places. Some of the more disturbed children throughout the city even seem to take finding the heads as a sort of game.
Some of the more unusual places where they have shown up have included the atop the fireplace in the Shiny Coppers, lining the bridge by the west gate, and even upon the neutral altar in the temple of the caverns.
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As the days drag on, fewer and fewer traders seem to be coming back. What was once routine business as usual now seems to be becoming something the merchants of the city are legitimately worried about as more and more of their colleagues simply vanish. While Ostromog's representatives play at politics and reinforce rumors of PFLN involvement, rumor around the costers focus on more sinister, unknowable forces within the underdark.
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Ostromog's ambassador to Oscura, Rath Nergal, releases a public and extremely long statement condemning the attack on the Shrine of Tempus and on Peltarch soldiers as "the act of the criminal terrorists of the PFLN, designed to bring Peltarch into an unjustified war of aggression with its peace-loving neighbors, Norwick and Oscura." The speech ends with a plea for Peltarch not to be fooled, and to "join the larger Narfell community of city-states to find, question, and dispose of these mad terror beasts who kill and assassinate and slay innocent civilians to further their twisted ideology."
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Before long, the word is out on the street that the missing caravans were slaughtered by the PFLN.
