by Julio Couce
A powerful magus from another covenant visits a faerie forest near the covenant of the PCs. He is looking for the Faerie Queen, because he wants to ask her to remove a curse she placed over him a few years ago.
The Faerie Queen is reluctant, but she finally accepts to help the magus if the magus can win a contest against a group of her servants. However, if he loses, the Queen will take his apprentice.
The contest, decides the Faerie Queen, will be playing a joke on the covenant of the PCs, who have been disturbing the faeries, without knowing it. The first group to get caught will lose the contest. If none of them are caught, the faeries of the forest will decide which joke is the funniest.
The magus argues, but the Queen doesn´t change her mind, so he finally accepts and ask the Queen to give him a season to prepare for the contest.
A season later (and here begins the adventure for the PCs), the magus has invented a spell (powerful enough to ignore the aegis) to play his joke. In our adventure, this spell changed the colour of the tower where the magi live to pink (duration: sun). In general, it can be anything that cannot be interpreted as a breaking of the Code. Using Veil of Invisibility and the Seven-League Stride, he manages to cast his spell without being noticed.
Meanwhile, the faeries designated by the Queen haven´t got enough Faerie Might to enter the aegis, so they have to look for another kind of joke. They have spent the season spying the magi, and they have seen them travelling to a certain mulberry tree (their most important source of vis) and collecting some mulberries. Unfortunately, they think that the magi just like mulberries, so they root out the tree and plant it in another place. Then, they put in the original place a tree with magic mulberries, that will make anyone who eats them behave like a donkey (a real donkey: braying, crawling, etc) for several hours, but doesn´t contain vis. They expect that, when the magi arrive at the covenant, they will eat the mulberries and cause a rather funny scene to happen.
Most magi are not amused when they see the new colour of their tower and every covenfolk laughing at it. And, needless to say, if they had any desire to laugh they lose it when they realize that their mulberries have no vis in them. (In our adventure, they didn´t eat the mulberries, what a pity! However, don´t forget to ask them what they do with them).
They investigate and, eventually, learn what has actually happened. The easiest way to do so is going to the mulberry tree and using the skill Hunt, and perhaps some spells, to discover the tracks left by the rather clumsy faeries. When they arrive at the new location of their tree, they discover there a faerie watering it. He is just a very skilful gardener that has been asked to look after the tree (which would otherwise have died when moved), and he knows nothing about the contest. But if the magi are insistent, they can get some information out of him (like who asked him to look after the tree).
Finally, the magi get to talk with the Faerie Queen. She will laugh a lot when she heards their complaints, and then she will offer to pay some vis to the magi to compensate them for the troubles they have suffered. But only if they can find one of her servants, who is going to hide himself in the forest...