Threewells Guard Captain’s Records

Threewells Guard Captain’s Records are a pair of binders containing the reports written by the guard captain of the abandoned town of Threewells in the period leading up to its fall. Broccoli Bunch recovered them while exploring the settlement and later traded them to Leonard Chand’nuit, who judged them valuable enough to pay six lesser gold and issue an Exploration Guild recommendation letter. The records therefore function both as a surviving civic archive and as the material basis for Broccoli’s first formal recognition as an explorer.

Contents and Physical Form

The records consist of two binders filled with reports, rather than a single loose ledger. Broccoli Bunch carried both volumes out of Threewells, finding them among the papers in offices on the first floor of the town’s main tower and placing them in a chest in the barracks before retrieving them. Their contents are described as the guard captain’s ledger, comprising reports that lead up to the town’s fall. Although Broccoli expected many of the entries to be exceptionally boring, the accumulated detail gives the documents an importance that exceeds their apparent mundanity: they preserve the administrative trail of a settlement that no longer functions as an ordinary human community.

The records are inseparable from the physical setting they describe. Threewells is an abandoned town whose wooden-shack architecture resembles the structures later seen around the ruins associated with the Two-Lipped Tulips, while its broader frontier environment opens toward the Darkwoods, eastern marshes, northern mountains, and a distant southern lake. The binders thus represent more than a list of incidents. They are a written map of a settlement situated within a contested and hazardous landscape, where local history, military watchfulness, monsters, and dungeon activity overlap.

Recovery and Preservation

Broccoli Bunch’s possession of the records results from a risky act of exploration. The main tower was accessible from the outside, and its third floor could be reached only by scaling the exterior wall. Broccoli searched the building despite the danger appropriate to an adventurer of a very low level, located the offices, and gathered the papers rather than leaving them behind. The records were then stored in the barracks before being carried away in the binders.

Their survival matters because Threewells itself has become a ruin rather than a functioning source of testimony. The documents are a displaced remnant of the town’s own security apparatus, carried from the abandoned settlement into a conversation with outsiders. Broccoli initially regarded them partly as unwanted weight on the journey, hoping that exchanging them would allow the binders to be replaced by proper food. That practical concern gives the archive a sharply material dimension: historical knowledge is valuable, but it must first be transported through dangerous territory by someone who needs immediate supplies.

Appraisal by Leonard Chand’nuit

Broccoli offers the records to Leonard Chand’nuit after describing the places and buildings of Threewells. The account includes the main tower, its inaccessible third floor, and the offices where the papers were found. Leonard immediately recognizes that documents from a fallen city might interest buyers at the guild. His response establishes the records as tradable information, not merely sentimental remains or loot.

The negotiation moves through successive valuations. Leonard first offers a young fool a letter of recommendation and four lesser gold for the guard captain’s ledger. After Arianne advises Broccoli to ask for more, Leonard objects to her interference but raises the payment to six lesser gold, declaring that he will not have his honour besmirched by short-changing even a fool. He then carefully sets the binders aside and asks Broccoli to tell him more about the town. The transaction therefore has two forms of return: immediate material payment and institutional access. The gold addresses Broccoli’s short-term needs, while the recommendation can open a path into the Exploration Guild.

Leonard’s interest also changes the meaning of Broccoli’s exploration. What Broccoli experienced as improvised scavenging becomes legible as reconnaissance. The records authenticate the reliability, or at least the usefulness, of Broccoli’s observations and help convert a dangerous private expedition into a credential recognized by an organized guild.

Dungeon and Frontier Intelligence

The records are connected to the unexplained mana disturbances surrounding Threewells. Overseer Hardy’s report notes large shifts in mana, concern that someone may have damaged the dungeon core, and a sighting of someone dressed in green in the forests, possibly Imperials. In response, the guards were doubled and a scout was sent to the Dunwich Dungeon. This report places Threewells within a wider security problem involving military suspicion, altered local mana, and the possible destabilization or destruction of a dungeon.

Leonard interprets Broccoli’s description of an “evil hole” as a likely entrance to a young dungeon. A mana surge had been felt by the exploration party, and Leonard explains that someone might have destroyed the dungeon after Broccoli left, though doing so would not be easy. The records consequently become part of an evidentiary chain linking the town’s decline to supernatural infrastructure rather than treating its abandonment as an isolated local mystery.

Their significance expands further through later frontier encounters. Fort Frogger contains an open and damaged gate, a courtyard filled largely with Grenoil skeletons and other undead forms, and Skeleton Knights guarding the entrance. Elsewhere, the United Republic of the Trenten Flats is described as an expansionist power whose attempted invasion of Deepmarsh was weakened by poor scouting, inexperienced leadership, swamp conditions, unfiltered water, and insects. These surrounding facts do not belong to the records’ pages themselves, but they clarify the kind of world in which the archive was produced: frontier settlements are exposed to military pressure, environmental attrition, undead occupation, and dungeon-related danger, while written reports become one of the few means of reconstructing what happened after a place falls.

Institutional Consequences and Narrative Role

The records are the first major object through which Broccoli Bunch’s independent movement through the frontier enters a formal institutional channel. At the Exploration Guild, a temporary contract offers members protections, discounts through other guilds, reduced travel costs, and possible reimbursement for food and special equipment. Leonard’s recommendation connects the recovered binders to that system. The documents therefore do not merely preserve the past; they help determine Broccoli’s access to the future.

Their journey also contrasts the guild’s systems of recognition with the arbitrary judgments Broccoli later encounters. An Exploration Guild official expedition summary identifies Expedition No. 124 of Year 398PC at the Port Royal branch and defines its mission as exploring, scouting, and mapping the region around decommissioned Fort Froger before returning to a meeting point. Against this formal language of numbered missions and standardized objectives, the Threewells records emerge from an older local bureaucracy and reach the guild through personal bargaining. Their value is recognized, but only after Broccoli must prove that the binders contain something worth buying.

As an object, Threewells Guard Captain’s Records bridge ruined settlement and organized exploration, local memory and guild commerce, danger and administrative order. They preserve the last perspective of Threewells’ own guards while enabling Broccoli Bunch to become legible to a larger institution. Their decisive consequence is that the fall of Threewells is not left as an unrecorded disappearance: its reports survive, circulate, and become evidence capable of guiding later judgments about ruins, mana, dungeons, and the contested frontier.