While you wait..

As you are waiting on the person or persons who called you here, you take in the sites and the sounds in the room. In the background you can hear the troupe of minstrels playing the room upstairs, the sound almost earily floating in the room. You guess there must be openings from the main room to the cellar as the noise is not muffled as you would expect. There are tabacco and other smells from many regions most unfamiliar to you. The same could be said for the garb of the various others here. They appear to come from all the races and cultures you have ever heard of, and many you haven't. The common tongue of trade is spoken by most, but with accents varied and thick which you have never heard and can't fathom their origins.

You listen to many people gathering rumors and information as you can:

Lipparood is not just a town, but the name of a province in the duchy.
They only worhip on god here.
There is a curse on an entire town to the north.
The caravans from the south and east are raided far more often than they used to be, and it is getting worse.
Farms in the area are being ransacked, some say by monsters, some say by demons or undead.
Keeps have even been attacked and it is said one was lost.
The Wizard in the south has not been heard from in months.
There is something strange happening in the abbey.
The earle cares not at all for his people, he has abandoned Hareth to it's fate.

You know not of these things, whether they are true or not, the locations you have never heard of. But you wait and listen, hoping to learn something of what is to come.