Hmmm.......no word from the troops at the front......maybe they were all slaughtered by supposedly random lightning bolts descending from a clear blue sky?
Amber's on vacation in Vegas. Orc Hordes resumes on Friday, I think/hope. I'm going through withdrawal.
Vacation!? That is no excuse!
She should have either red eyed her way back to Edmonton to get the weekly session done or bought you all tickets and have you play in Las Vegas. Either would have been acceptable.
In the latest thrilling episode of HUZZAH! & THE PIRATE DRAGONS in ORC HORDES OF THE KING'S FOREST...
-The orc population in King's Forest suffered a steep decline as our heroes effected a thrilling rescue of the missing townsfolk!
-The team shared the plans for the bandit attack on the big ball in a little under a tenday to the Purple Dragons and arranged for the authorities to catch the thugs in the act! BUT...
-Bort secretly arranged for the Purple Dragons to be awaiting the bandits at the wrong gate, because of reasons nobody knows!
-In the tunnels beneath the bandit camp, the Pirate Dragons plus their two Purple Dragon escorts (for some reason, the lead Purple Dragon didn't entirely trust the Pirate Dragons, possibly because Bort was doing the talking) encountered an ugly orc!
-No, even uglier than that.
-Seriously, this thing was UGLY. Loose floppy skin with sores all over it, white claws, with its mouth sewn shut. Uh-uh-uh-uh-GLY.
-Willers finally managed to roll more than a 10 to hit something, and sliced his target in half with an 18!
-Unfortunately, his target was a jelly, and the end result had him get mauled by the two jellies he'd created by cutting the first one in half!
-While the jelly was getting dealt with by half the party, Karp and Egbert Rockpuncher ran into two more Ugly Orcs in a vile temple to a fiendish god--and promptly closed the door until the rest of the party got there!
-Edisum and Bort demonstrated for the umpteenth time how nice it is to have an attack that doesn't have an attack roll! Why don't I have a magic missile spell, I ask you?
-After the Ugly Orcs were dealt with, an unusually irritated Huzzah! thoroughly defiled the shrine to the Ugly Orc god, and now the entire party knows that gnome urine smells fantastic!
-Seriously. Huzzah! peed on the stinking bloody altar and afterwards everything smelled better. I'M NOT MAKING THAT UP.
-The party agreed to stay late at work so they could take down Kroach, the orc leader, who'd managed to avoid the Purple Dragon ambush twice, first by not going to the gate that wasn't being watched by Purple Dragons thanks to Bort, and secondly by not accompanying the bandits to town at all. So Huzzah! and Co. took the fiend on his own lair!
-Huzzah! effectively did 20 points of damage to Kroach by insulting him!* Which was handy, because Huzzah! only managed to roll over a 10 once the entire session!
-Edisum demonstrated the power of Phantasmal Thingummie, making Kroach think his vile disease god Yutrus was royally cheesed at him and causing him to attempt suicide while also having orcicide attempted on him by various party and Purple Dragon members!
-Having effectively defeated the villains, Bort decided to "accidentally" spit acid at the team's Purple Dragon escorts. Which wouldn't have looked nearly as suspicious if he hadn't closed the door so most of the rest of the party couldn't see him do it.
-In spite of this, the Purple Dragons had to admit the Pirate Dragons got the job done when the prisoners were rescued!
-The Pirate Dragons got all the bandit's stolen gold. They're rich now! RICH, I tells you! BUT...
-Amongst the gold were several notes, which indicate someone even more evil than Kroach with a really silly voice is behind events in the King's Forest! Actually, the silly voice might just be the way Huzzah! read the text of the note.
NEXT TIME: The power behind Kroach plans to pick him up in a couple days! If the party doesn't act very, very quickly--like, more quickly than they can possibly act, really, they're a day behind them--the Purple Dragons are going to find they're watching the wrong gate really closely, and that might not be good! And did I mention that Karp and Egbert were probably infected with some kind of magical orc disease? Yeah, that happened too. What happens next? Find out in seven days, give or take!
I really missed playing the last couple weeks.
*Huzzah insulted Kroach so badly that in an attempt to attack Huzzah! he ran past four party members and one of the Purple Dragon escorts, giving the each an attack of opportunity. AND HE DIDN'T GET TO HUZZAH! (though this was as close to feeling actually threatened as Huzzah!'s felt during this campaign to date.)
As Andrew indicates, last Friday was an exciting session for the group! In some ways it felt like the most "D&Dish" session we'd had so far.
The party poked around the bandit camp for a time and learned that not only Croach, but his second-in-command (another full orc) had sores on their skin, though they didn't seem particularly sickly. Some human bandits told the party that other orcs served Croach in the sawmill building, but they only rarely came out. When they did, they emerged at night and kept their distance from the rest of the camp.
The party returned to Arabel and requested a meeting with the leader of the Purple Dragons, a silver dragonborn named Commander Brightscale. Carp stayed outside as he is a fugitive, per his background. Bort told the commander that the bandits would be attacking from the west gate (when really they'd be attacking from the east, but no one in the party realized the deception and so no one said anything. East, west, what's the difference?)
Brightscale took some convincing. He'd been a commander for years and seemed reluctant to trust the word of a group of strange adventurers who'd just come to town and who wanted him to place all his forces at one specific point in the city. In the end he agreed to the plan but sent two Purple Dragon knights to travel with the PCs and ensure they didn't escape if the attack turned out to be a trap. The party kept trying to encourage the Purple Dragons to fight on their behalf, but the knights were also experienced soldiers. They kept a sharp eye on the party, didn't endanger themselves, and made sure the party's actions were in the best interests of Arabel and the missing citizens. This put a serious crimp in Bort's style.
The PCs returned to the bandit camp and watched while the bulk of the bandits left for the attack on the city. They entered the camp and killed the few remaining bandits before entering the sawmill. It was empty, but the grate they'd spotted before covered a tunnel leading to underground chambers. Carp picked the lock on the pit and the party descended.
Not long after they entered the tunnel, the PCs encountered an orc guard. "Is this where the bathrooms are?" Egbert asked. "It's my first day."
The orc shambled into the party's light radius and they saw with horror that there was something seriously wrong with this creature. The orc had loose, rotting skin covered in sores and long, filthy white talons. His mouth had been sewn shut and an improvised feeding tube was jammed in his side surrounded by inflamed, pus-filled sores. Egbert shrieked, "BURN IT WITH FIRE!" and they all attacked, putting down the orc with relative speed.
The tunnel branched left and right and the party chose right. They found a long tunnel with two doors and opened the first. Within was a scene of rank horror. A pool of water had been deliberately contaminated with rotting meat and animal corpses, making it a fetid pool of scum and fatty globules. Barrels and tins in the room implied the orcs had been contaminating the bandits' drinking-water with this foul cesspit. Edisum went to the edge of the pool to try to see if any of the flesh belonged to the missing prisoners, and discovered the "scum" on the top of the pool was a whitish jelly that attacked and did serious damage to him. Willers charged forward and cut the jelly in half, which resulted in two jellies!
While the party dealt with the jellies, Carp snuck down the hall and tried to peek in the other door. He flubbed his Stealth check and one of the two orc guards in the next room spotted him. Thus began an epic battle between the two rooms and the tunnel as everyone tried to keep the orcs at bay until the jelly was dealt with. Both Carp and Egbert were infected with disease as the orcs dug into them with filthy claws.
Once the guards were dead, the party investigated the other room. They found it to be a shrine to Yurtrus, orc god of disease and plagues. Huzzah! defiled the shrine and a pleasant summery breeze blew through the room to everyone's surprise.
After a short rest, the party returned to the left-hand tunnel. They came to a door and Egbert knocked. "Is this the bathroom?" he called out. "It's my first day." A sawblade trap triggered and swung down on the dwarf and the party members nearest him. The party took this as an invitation to enter and threw open the door.
Croach stood there, flanked by two orc guards. Edisum demanded to know where the prisoners were, and Croach sneered and said not to worry, they were taking good care of the prisoners. A fierce battle followed, which ended when Edisum conjured an illusion of Yurtrus to intimidate Croach into falling to his knees and killing himself as the party rained blows down on him. Bort tried to secretly attack the Purple Dragon knights during the battle but they were having none of it. [Unknown to Bort, Commander Brightscale is a paladin and used detect evil on the party, revealing that Bort was the only evil one. As Bort is also a green dragonborn, Brightscale instructed his knights to be especially suspicious of Bort's actions and keep a close eye on him.]
The PCs found all the bandit's treasure in Croach's room, a bounty that will surely change their fortunes. But they also found two letters to Croach's master, Urmgech. The letters plus the prisoners (who were found in an adjacent room, diseased but otherwise unharmed) indicated that the orc's plan had been to use the bandit raids as a cover for kidnapping Arabel's citizens. The prisoners would then be infected with the orcs' disease and sent back to town to start a plague. What the PCs do with this information remains to be seen...
I've reached the portion of the game where I actually have to sit down and write out the overarching plot. Usually I start a campaign with only a general idea of where I'm going, maybe a few cool scenes or characters in my head. Then once the players get farther along, there are enough pieces to fill in the blanks and get something solid going. I've spent an hour or so today writing out the main story for this section of the campaign. Now on to prepping for tomorrow's session!
The PCs returned to Arabel in triumph. Along with the standard nameless prisoners, they had rescued three people who possessed finely honed adventuring skills and who wanted to repay their rescuers by traveling alongside them for a time. These included:
Kilmer, a silver dragonborn ranger ( @BenArledge ) Carric, a somewhat flashy high elf rogue ( @eedok ) Five-Eyes, a bespectacled elf cleric of Tymora ( @Dee )
As the party began their trek back to Arabel with the sickened prisoners (and their two sick teammates, Egbert and Carp who had been infected by the plague orcs), Edisum told the party that he had been summoned back to his home in the Lightning Pass. He would return to the group when he could. With that, he rode off into the sunset (well, the sunrise actually. The Lightning Pass being east.)
Once at Arabel, the party made camp outside the city gates. The Purple Dragon Knights sent word within and soon clerics arrived to heal the sick and make sure everyone was non-infectious. Lesser restorations were cast, chants chanted, and pepperminty incense water sprinkled on our heroes' heads. Eventually the clerics pronounced everyone cured and the heroes re-entered the city, where they were immediately summoned to meet with Commander Brightscale.
Brightscale welcomed the party into a large conference room. Huzzah! immediately spotted knights waiting in hiding on either side of the room, and the exit to the room was blocked with more knights. Brightscale congratulated the party on having rescued the prisoners and said if they hadn't, they "would all be dead right now." He then charged the party with treason and plotting against the city. He said that he had not sent all his men to the western gate as Bort insisted, but divided them among the gates. The guards at the eastern gate spotted a peasant creeping up to unlock the gates at midnight and arrested him. The man broke down and said someone had paid him 15 gold to unlock the gate, and gave a description that matched Bort. Divinations had told the rest. Brightscale called his knights to the eastern gate and killed or arrested all the bandits--the captured ones readily admitted that Bort had told them to approach the eastern gate.
The rest of the party protested that this was Bort's doing, not theirs. Brightscale pointed out that the party had been representing themselves as the "Pirate Dragons" and had a banner and possibly a theme song. He said that since the party had done as they promised and rescued the prisoners, they wouldn't be executed but instead had a choice: a term of 10 years in jail, or they could perform a service for the city. The letters found in the bandit camp indicated that a carriage was coming to take Croach and his allies to an orc base somewhere nearby. The PCs could represent themselves as Croach, take the carriage to the orc base, and eradicate the threat to Arabel. Given those two choices, the PCs agreed to take the carriage.
A few days later the cart came as expected. The drivers knew only the name of the person they were picking up, not his description, and so Bort easily passed himself off as Croach. The party rode into the King's Forest for several days, heading for the town of Waymoot. On the evening on the second day, they were deep in the forest looking for a place to camp when a man came charging down the road screaming, "Run! Run!"
"Run from what?" shouted Bort, and the man screamed back, "INVISIBLE CATS!"
The party, in some confusion, took cover and drew weapons. Seconds later, two displacer beasts erupted from the shadows and attacked. A fierce battle followed in which I almost killed Bort in a single hit (he had 13 hp and I did 23 damage). Only the quick action of the new cleric, Five-Eyes, saved Bort's life. Carp was also knocked unconscious but was healed by the strange man who'd come tearing down the path and was now hiding in the PC's cart.
Eventually the party killed the displacer beasts and turned to their new visitor. The man introduced himself as Brother Case, a priest of Ilmater who was also traveling to Waymoot. The party agreed to let him travel with them, and they all reached the town safely together.
The driver of the carriage told the PCs that his job was to take them to a trail a couple of hours out of Waymoot. The trail once led to a dwarven mine, Minroe, but it had been abandoned decades ago and the trail was all overgrown. There the PC's contact would meet them. The party decided to send a few individuals (Carp, Egbert, Kilmer, and Five-Eyes iirc) out that night to scout the meeting place and then they'd decide what to do the next day. The rest of the party settled down in the Moon & Stars inn for some gossip and drinks by the fireside.
I'm not *absolutely* sure, but I'm, like, 99% sure that once I delivered the line I actually mugged for the camera. Which would've been tricky, because I'm still not clear on where the camera actually was.
For one moment I honestly misread part of the opening paragraph as "they had rescued three people who possessed finely honed advertising skills" and thought I'd stumbled into a Douglas Adams plot!
Comments
They need to cast the Zone of Fresh Air and quickly.
She should have either red eyed her way back to Edmonton to get the weekly session done or bought you all tickets and have you play in Las Vegas. Either would have been acceptable.
This... this! certainly isn't.
[I'm back now, so game resumes tomorrow!]
-The orc population in King's Forest suffered a steep decline as our heroes effected a thrilling rescue of the missing townsfolk!
-The team shared the plans for the bandit attack on the big ball in a little under a tenday to the Purple Dragons and arranged for the authorities to catch the thugs in the act! BUT...
-Bort secretly arranged for the Purple Dragons to be awaiting the bandits at the wrong gate, because of reasons nobody knows!
-In the tunnels beneath the bandit camp, the Pirate Dragons plus their two Purple Dragon escorts (for some reason, the lead Purple Dragon didn't entirely trust the Pirate Dragons, possibly because Bort was doing the talking) encountered an ugly orc!
-No, even uglier than that.
-Seriously, this thing was UGLY. Loose floppy skin with sores all over it, white claws, with its mouth sewn shut. Uh-uh-uh-uh-GLY.
-Willers finally managed to roll more than a 10 to hit something, and sliced his target in half with an 18!
-Unfortunately, his target was a jelly, and the end result had him get mauled by the two jellies he'd created by cutting the first one in half!
-While the jelly was getting dealt with by half the party, Karp and Egbert Rockpuncher ran into two more Ugly Orcs in a vile temple to a fiendish god--and promptly closed the door until the rest of the party got there!
-Edisum and Bort demonstrated for the umpteenth time how nice it is to have an attack that doesn't have an attack roll! Why don't I have a magic missile spell, I ask you?
-After the Ugly Orcs were dealt with, an unusually irritated Huzzah! thoroughly defiled the shrine to the Ugly Orc god, and now the entire party knows that gnome urine smells fantastic!
-Seriously. Huzzah! peed on the stinking bloody altar and afterwards everything smelled better. I'M NOT MAKING THAT UP.
-The party agreed to stay late at work so they could take down Kroach, the orc leader, who'd managed to avoid the Purple Dragon ambush twice, first by not going to the gate that wasn't being watched by Purple Dragons thanks to Bort, and secondly by not accompanying the bandits to town at all. So Huzzah! and Co. took the fiend on his own lair!
-Huzzah! effectively did 20 points of damage to Kroach by insulting him!* Which was handy, because Huzzah! only managed to roll over a 10 once the entire session!
-Edisum demonstrated the power of Phantasmal Thingummie, making Kroach think his vile disease god Yutrus was royally cheesed at him and causing him to attempt suicide while also having orcicide attempted on him by various party and Purple Dragon members!
-Having effectively defeated the villains, Bort decided to "accidentally" spit acid at the team's Purple Dragon escorts. Which wouldn't have looked nearly as suspicious if he hadn't closed the door so most of the rest of the party couldn't see him do it.
-In spite of this, the Purple Dragons had to admit the Pirate Dragons got the job done when the prisoners were rescued!
-The Pirate Dragons got all the bandit's stolen gold. They're rich now! RICH, I tells you! BUT...
-Amongst the gold were several notes, which indicate someone even more evil than Kroach with a really silly voice is behind events in the King's Forest! Actually, the silly voice might just be the way Huzzah! read the text of the note.
NEXT TIME: The power behind Kroach plans to pick him up in a couple days! If the party doesn't act very, very quickly--like, more quickly than they can possibly act, really, they're a day behind them--the Purple Dragons are going to find they're watching the wrong gate really closely, and that might not be good! And did I mention that Karp and Egbert were probably infected with some kind of magical orc disease? Yeah, that happened too. What happens next? Find out in seven days, give or take!
I really missed playing the last couple weeks.
*Huzzah insulted Kroach so badly that in an attempt to attack Huzzah! he ran past four party members and one of the Purple Dragon escorts, giving the each an attack of opportunity. AND HE DIDN'T GET TO HUZZAH! (though this was as close to feeling actually threatened as Huzzah!'s felt during this campaign to date.)
The party poked around the bandit camp for a time and learned that not only Croach, but his second-in-command (another full orc) had sores on their skin, though they didn't seem particularly sickly. Some human bandits told the party that other orcs served Croach in the sawmill building, but they only rarely came out. When they did, they emerged at night and kept their distance from the rest of the camp.
The party returned to Arabel and requested a meeting with the leader of the Purple Dragons, a silver dragonborn named Commander Brightscale. Carp stayed outside as he is a fugitive, per his background. Bort told the commander that the bandits would be attacking from the west gate (when really they'd be attacking from the east, but no one in the party realized the deception and so no one said anything. East, west, what's the difference?)
Brightscale took some convincing. He'd been a commander for years and seemed reluctant to trust the word of a group of strange adventurers who'd just come to town and who wanted him to place all his forces at one specific point in the city. In the end he agreed to the plan but sent two Purple Dragon knights to travel with the PCs and ensure they didn't escape if the attack turned out to be a trap. The party kept trying to encourage the Purple Dragons to fight on their behalf, but the knights were also experienced soldiers. They kept a sharp eye on the party, didn't endanger themselves, and made sure the party's actions were in the best interests of Arabel and the missing citizens. This put a serious crimp in Bort's style.
The PCs returned to the bandit camp and watched while the bulk of the bandits left for the attack on the city. They entered the camp and killed the few remaining bandits before entering the sawmill. It was empty, but the grate they'd spotted before covered a tunnel leading to underground chambers. Carp picked the lock on the pit and the party descended.
Not long after they entered the tunnel, the PCs encountered an orc guard. "Is this where the bathrooms are?" Egbert asked. "It's my first day."
The orc shambled into the party's light radius and they saw with horror that there was something seriously wrong with this creature. The orc had loose, rotting skin covered in sores and long, filthy white talons. His mouth had been sewn shut and an improvised feeding tube was jammed in his side surrounded by inflamed, pus-filled sores. Egbert shrieked, "BURN IT WITH FIRE!" and they all attacked, putting down the orc with relative speed.
The tunnel branched left and right and the party chose right. They found a long tunnel with two doors and opened the first. Within was a scene of rank horror. A pool of water had been deliberately contaminated with rotting meat and animal corpses, making it a fetid pool of scum and fatty globules. Barrels and tins in the room implied the orcs had been contaminating the bandits' drinking-water with this foul cesspit. Edisum went to the edge of the pool to try to see if any of the flesh belonged to the missing prisoners, and discovered the "scum" on the top of the pool was a whitish jelly that attacked and did serious damage to him. Willers charged forward and cut the jelly in half, which resulted in two jellies!
While the party dealt with the jellies, Carp snuck down the hall and tried to peek in the other door. He flubbed his Stealth check and one of the two orc guards in the next room spotted him. Thus began an epic battle between the two rooms and the tunnel as everyone tried to keep the orcs at bay until the jelly was dealt with. Both Carp and Egbert were infected with disease as the orcs dug into them with filthy claws.
Once the guards were dead, the party investigated the other room. They found it to be a shrine to Yurtrus, orc god of disease and plagues. Huzzah! defiled the shrine and a pleasant summery breeze blew through the room to everyone's surprise.
After a short rest, the party returned to the left-hand tunnel. They came to a door and Egbert knocked. "Is this the bathroom?" he called out. "It's my first day." A sawblade trap triggered and swung down on the dwarf and the party members nearest him. The party took this as an invitation to enter and threw open the door.
Croach stood there, flanked by two orc guards. Edisum demanded to know where the prisoners were, and Croach sneered and said not to worry, they were taking good care of the prisoners. A fierce battle followed, which ended when Edisum conjured an illusion of Yurtrus to intimidate Croach into falling to his knees and killing himself as the party rained blows down on him. Bort tried to secretly attack the Purple Dragon knights during the battle but they were having none of it. [Unknown to Bort, Commander Brightscale is a paladin and used detect evil on the party, revealing that Bort was the only evil one. As Bort is also a green dragonborn, Brightscale instructed his knights to be especially suspicious of Bort's actions and keep a close eye on him.]
The PCs found all the bandit's treasure in Croach's room, a bounty that will surely change their fortunes. But they also found two letters to Croach's master, Urmgech. The letters plus the prisoners (who were found in an adjacent room, diseased but otherwise unharmed) indicated that the orc's plan had been to use the bandit raids as a cover for kidnapping Arabel's citizens. The prisoners would then be infected with the orcs' disease and sent back to town to start a plague. What the PCs do with this information remains to be seen...
A letter addressed to Croach.
A reply written by Croach but not yet sent.
Get well! We don't want to lose any dedicated developers!
The PCs returned to Arabel in triumph. Along with the standard nameless prisoners, they had rescued three people who possessed finely honed adventuring skills and who wanted to repay their rescuers by traveling alongside them for a time. These included:
Kilmer, a silver dragonborn ranger ( @BenArledge )
Carric, a somewhat flashy high elf rogue ( @eedok )
Five-Eyes, a bespectacled elf cleric of Tymora ( @Dee )
As the party began their trek back to Arabel with the sickened prisoners (and their two sick teammates, Egbert and Carp who had been infected by the plague orcs), Edisum told the party that he had been summoned back to his home in the Lightning Pass. He would return to the group when he could. With that, he rode off into the sunset (well, the sunrise actually. The Lightning Pass being east.)
Once at Arabel, the party made camp outside the city gates. The Purple Dragon Knights sent word within and soon clerics arrived to heal the sick and make sure everyone was non-infectious. Lesser restorations were cast, chants chanted, and pepperminty incense water sprinkled on our heroes' heads. Eventually the clerics pronounced everyone cured and the heroes re-entered the city, where they were immediately summoned to meet with Commander Brightscale.
Brightscale welcomed the party into a large conference room. Huzzah! immediately spotted knights waiting in hiding on either side of the room, and the exit to the room was blocked with more knights. Brightscale congratulated the party on having rescued the prisoners and said if they hadn't, they "would all be dead right now." He then charged the party with treason and plotting against the city. He said that he had not sent all his men to the western gate as Bort insisted, but divided them among the gates. The guards at the eastern gate spotted a peasant creeping up to unlock the gates at midnight and arrested him. The man broke down and said someone had paid him 15 gold to unlock the gate, and gave a description that matched Bort. Divinations had told the rest. Brightscale called his knights to the eastern gate and killed or arrested all the bandits--the captured ones readily admitted that Bort had told them to approach the eastern gate.
The rest of the party protested that this was Bort's doing, not theirs. Brightscale pointed out that the party had been representing themselves as the "Pirate Dragons" and had a banner and possibly a theme song. He said that since the party had done as they promised and rescued the prisoners, they wouldn't be executed but instead had a choice: a term of 10 years in jail, or they could perform a service for the city. The letters found in the bandit camp indicated that a carriage was coming to take Croach and his allies to an orc base somewhere nearby. The PCs could represent themselves as Croach, take the carriage to the orc base, and eradicate the threat to Arabel. Given those two choices, the PCs agreed to take the carriage.
A few days later the cart came as expected. The drivers knew only the name of the person they were picking up, not his description, and so Bort easily passed himself off as Croach. The party rode into the King's Forest for several days, heading for the town of Waymoot. On the evening on the second day, they were deep in the forest looking for a place to camp when a man came charging down the road screaming, "Run! Run!"
"Run from what?" shouted Bort, and the man screamed back, "INVISIBLE CATS!"
The party, in some confusion, took cover and drew weapons. Seconds later, two displacer beasts erupted from the shadows and attacked. A fierce battle followed in which I almost killed Bort in a single hit (he had 13 hp and I did 23 damage). Only the quick action of the new cleric, Five-Eyes, saved Bort's life. Carp was also knocked unconscious but was healed by the strange man who'd come tearing down the path and was now hiding in the PC's cart.
Eventually the party killed the displacer beasts and turned to their new visitor. The man introduced himself as Brother Case, a priest of Ilmater who was also traveling to Waymoot. The party agreed to let him travel with them, and they all reached the town safely together.
The driver of the carriage told the PCs that his job was to take them to a trail a couple of hours out of Waymoot. The trail once led to a dwarven mine, Minroe, but it had been abandoned decades ago and the trail was all overgrown. There the PC's contact would meet them. The party decided to send a few individuals (Carp, Egbert, Kilmer, and Five-Eyes iirc) out that night to scout the meeting place and then they'd decide what to do the next day. The rest of the party settled down in the Moon & Stars inn for some gossip and drinks by the fireside.
@Amber_Scott Ah, persuasion! My favorite way of browbeat… I mean, convincing the party into another adventure right away.
I'm not *absolutely* sure, but I'm, like, 99% sure that once I delivered the line I actually mugged for the camera. Which would've been tricky, because I'm still not clear on where the camera actually was.
- Not wanting word of his violent actions to reach the outside world
- Not wanting to pay hired assistants after they've done a job
- Not wanting the Purple Dragon escorts to know of his treachery, and also to steal their gear and money.
- To betray an entire city of pink-skins to bandits in an effort to please Tiamat
Suffice to say he feels justified in his actions.