The Call of Atropus: Phantom of the West

The party answered an inquiry from the Harpers. Travelling to Waterdeep, they came upon a suspiciously empty music shop. After exploring it, they found that it appeared to be a disguised entrance to a Harpers outpost! They managed, with help from Hecate, to discern the way to enter the outpost. They found themselves in a massive complex, far too large for the space that it was supposedly inside of. After speaking with Elias, a Harpers agent, they learned that children had begun to disappear in a specific neighborhood near the trades district. They investigated the neighborhood, and spoke with the mother of the most recently disappeared child. She was distraught, and clearly did not trust many of the party members. However, they were able to learn a good deal about the nature of the disappearance. The children vanished in the middle of the night, and the doors and windows had been locked. There were no signs of forced entry. In the child's bedroom, they found a porcelain doll, which had a strange aura of menace around it. Suddenly, the doll began to speak, and the party quickly realized that this creature was a corrupted manifestation of a child's soul, though not the child they were looking for. They then went to speak with the family of the first child to disappear, who had been missing for over a month. They found another doll in their house, and managed to restrain and bind it. They forced the doll to speak, and the doll informed them that it was simply doing the work of its master. The doll agreed to take them to its master, as it seemed to believe that it was bringing its creator another meal, and that the party posed little threat. After travelling through the Forest of Myths, to the East, they came upon a cave, which itself contained an aura of desecration and malice. They ventured inside, and found a strange abomination, a creature that seemed to be in the middle of some sort of dark alchemy. They dispatched the entity, with some effort, and found the bound children. They freed the children, and learned that this entity was known to be one of the "Dollmakers," fiendish creatures that use the souls of children to create corporeal abberations that take the form of toys, which then speak to their new owners and attempt to corrupt them. The goal of amassing this many souls is unclear, but the party found ledgers containing the names of all of the children's souls that this Dollmaker had claimed over the years.