CAST OF CHARACTERS:
Vuk Thuul - level 1 half-elf snake oracle
Leliana Vess - level 1 sylph witch
Nahash - level 1 lizardman barbarian
*****
A Big Score
When we left our adventurous trio, they were in the goblins' basement treasure room digging through all the cool stuff they had found.
Nahash used his cheap 50' rope to strap the two treasure chests to his back. Throwing the last of their hacked-apart neanderthal corpses outside the room distracted the two surviving anemone men enough for the PCs to escape the basement. Imagining themselves safe, they barred the door and rested for the night to recover spells and a few hit points. At this point the wildmen leader snuck into the inn in the dead of night seeking revenge.
Nahash heard something, and crept upstairs to investigate. Unfortunately lizardmen don't have darkvision, so when he saw a pale shape moving in the darkness and lunged with his spear, he succeeded only in crashing into a pile of furniture and waking up the other PCs. Lucky for him, since the wildmen leader's greatclub smote him fiercely for 12 points of damage, leaving the seemingly-indestructible 15-hp barbarian close to a KO. Leliana woke up, ran into the mix and one sleep hex later, Vuk Thuul knifed his ass and everyone went back to bed.
The next day the PCs headed back home with the treasure. [The wandering monster tables were quite lenient these two sessions, and I wonder if I should step them up even more, but that's a subject for another post]. They scrambled back up the cliff and arrived, muddy and bleeding, back in Land's End. The first order was paying the sage Vantadel to house Nahash away from the prying eyes of the villagers (nobody likes foreigners, especially not 6-foot talking lizards with spears).
After all the gold, silver, trinkets and art objects were tallied up the crew had raked in about 5400 silver, and almost 6000 XP!! Vuk Thuul used most of his share paying the sage for research projects. The other PCs bought new clothes, backpacks, adventuring gear and a few better weapons.
[I am using a silver standard, but the costs in gold listed in the Pathfinder book - so everything is 10 times the price it normally would be. They had to pull in this big score just to get some 'standard-grade' items instead of rope that's falling apart, weapons that break, etc.]
Return to the Inn: Exploration and Revelations
Deciding to push their fucking luck in a serious way, the party returned to get paid by the goblins who first gave them the job. You know, the job where they swiped all the goblins' treasure they could carry?
After burying their visible loot (Nahash's bone sword, etc) they returned to the goblins' ruined fort and showed them some wildmen scalps. Sgt. Horgh gave them their bounty of silver and offered a new job: go north to the goblins' caves near the quarry, and find out why nothing's been heard from them for weeks. They elected to rest up in the fort and spent some of their night trying out the strange magical torches they... erh... looted from the goblins' treasure room. [I don't think any of the players realized what they were doing. When those turn up missing, someone might remember those adventurers...]
Instead of going north, the team returned to the goblins' inn and climb down the well they meant to check out before. Turns out it opened into an old cave system underneath! The wildmen had wrecked everything, and fled with some goblin prisoners. Those they didn't eat, kill or enslave were a few goblin children and some wounded adults in a cage. They spoke common (these goblins are a pretty well-educated bunch. I wonder why?) and were a bit helpful, especially when the PCs released them and Leliana healed everyone with a hex [the witch is a resource monster - those hexes never run out. Jesus Christ].
Delving deeper, they passed through a deep flooded cave and into the goblins' underground base, originally built by the dwarves in ages past. The place was ransacked, corpses of goblin and neanderthals everywhere. The wildmen had fled with the valuables, except a few boxes of palm-sized heavy brass coins stamped with outlandish faces and creatures. The party took a few as the full crates were far too heavy to carry.
One barred door opened into a tiny foul-smelling room. A great crude stone idol of a hideous toad squatted on a defaced altar to the dwarven gods. Ritual implements, knives and tools littered the room. In the center, a great basin filled with slime, covered in moss and mold, emanated a deathly odor. The party poked into it with a stick, which promptly dissolved and they decided to leave it a lone. Leliana did find a wickedly curved ritual knife (normal dagger stats, but a well-made metal weapon is still a precious commodity at this point in the game!). Nahash pried the smooth yellow-green gemstone eyes out of the frog statue.
[I know I put them there, and it was kind of obvious, but my heart still filled with joy when he pried those eyes out with the other two holding a blanket so they wouldn't fall into the vat of slime.]
Another room had goblin-sized fortifications in it - facing inwards. In the center was a shaft going straight down, with climbing gear, anchors for ropes and travelling equipment everywhere. When Vuk Thuul cast light on a pebble and dropped it in, I played him this video:
They elected not to climb down. [Smart.]
The last door in the complex had debris and furniture piled haphazardly in front of it. Clearing it away and sticking his head through the door, Nahash was greeted warmly.
"Come in," a deep and sinister voice purred. "I've been waiting for more visitors..."
The voice belonged to an eight-foot tall, fire engine-red talking slug with a smug grin. ABSALOM GLOP was trapped inside a glowing circle of salt on the floor. Leliana's arcane knowledge identified it as a Magic Circle against Law. Curious...
Absalom explained that it had been summoned from deep underground by the white goblin priest Guzboch and trapped inside the magic circle. It was desperate to be freed. This led to some hard bargaining. Absalom explained its (currently very weak) Lawful aura prevented the PCs from stealing any goblin property or taking any of their stolen loot out of the room. [Remember when they signed a mercenary contract with Guzboch back in session 1? I was planning for this.] If the circle were broken, it could leave and they'd be free to take anything they desired.
Vuk Thuul struck a deal. Absalom swore to wage no aggression against the party for one month, answer three serious questions and one personal inquiry. Vuk Thuul asked about these things:
1 - What do you know of the ancient god called VORN, who sleeps beneath the Dreaming Mountain?
3 - Tell us about the petrified forest?
Absalom answered these as its knowledge allowed, expounding on these topics long into the night. It lived deep in the earth, and has travelled far, even visiting the surface sometimes. It is is old - personally remembering the rise of Vorn's priesthood a thousand years ago, and relating some facts about that time. Of the ivory plates it could say little except they were of high elven make, thousands of years old. The stone forest was created during the cataclysmic fall of that same ancient race, when their magic ran amok and nearly destroyed the world.
4 - For his last question, Vuk Thuul pulled down his ragged bandanna to reveal the mysterious brand that mars his face and neck: two serpents coming down his chin and curving around his jaw to whisper in his ears.
Absalom was intrigued by this development, leaning in close to Vuk Thuul's face and murmuring to itself about "definitely being on the lists." It could only relate a tale of a tattooed man it had met once, who hailed from a place called Scrivenbough and named his master - ABRAXAS.
His questions answered, Vuk Thuul scratched the salt circle. Absalom was out of the room in a flash leaving only a trail of slime, diving into the cistern in the cave outside and swimming downward into the darkness out of sight.
*****
[The day after this session I realized I had forgotten to describe a series of adventure hooks in the form of the goblins' intelligence reports piled in a closet the PCs had searched. I posted them up in our 'scheduling a game' group chat. I reproduce it here so it won't get lost, and because I feel pretty good about it.]
"When you were searching the cabinets for treasure after Absalom left, there was a 'booklet' of papers bound together with string, and some loose pages scattered on top. None are magical. The booklet is written with Imperial characters, in a language or code none of you recognize. The loose papers are scratched out in Imperial Common and each one is a brief report on some subject of interest to the goblins. All written in different scribbly handwriting, they read as follows:
1 - 'Black robes a few days south in jungles. Look like pinks, maybe. Tall bone-walkers too. All of them hunting for something.'
2 - 'Tall, tall white buildings in the jungle southeast. Scouts afraid.'
3 - 'Tall green lizards more fighty for months. More with the red paint come out of the swamp into our territory. Yellow-eyes down the river too hard to fight.'
4 - 'North along the river past the fork. Stone building is covered in trees. Big snake carvings. Lots of dead black-robes around. Smells bad!'
5 - 'The rock pit by the cliffs is dangerous. A few scouts and guards have disappeared. Why do we have to build a new fort anyway?'
6 - The last piece of paper is a series of scribbles and scratches, done in charcoal. Some notes underneath in a different, more practise handwriting say: 'Stone under the inn. Bears further study.'"
The next day my brother said "Oh snap. This is better than Elder Scrolls."
Feels pretty good!!!
[The day after this session I realized I had forgotten to describe a series of adventure hooks in the form of the goblins' intelligence reports piled in a closet the PCs had searched. I posted them up in our 'scheduling a game' group chat. I reproduce it here so it won't get lost, and because I feel pretty good about it.]
"When you were searching the cabinets for treasure after Absalom left, there was a 'booklet' of papers bound together with string, and some loose pages scattered on top. None are magical. The booklet is written with Imperial characters, in a language or code none of you recognize. The loose papers are scratched out in Imperial Common and each one is a brief report on some subject of interest to the goblins. All written in different scribbly handwriting, they read as follows:
1 - 'Black robes a few days south in jungles. Look like pinks, maybe. Tall bone-walkers too. All of them hunting for something.'
2 - 'Tall, tall white buildings in the jungle southeast. Scouts afraid.'
3 - 'Tall green lizards more fighty for months. More with the red paint come out of the swamp into our territory. Yellow-eyes down the river too hard to fight.'
4 - 'North along the river past the fork. Stone building is covered in trees. Big snake carvings. Lots of dead black-robes around. Smells bad!'
5 - 'The rock pit by the cliffs is dangerous. A few scouts and guards have disappeared. Why do we have to build a new fort anyway?'
6 - The last piece of paper is a series of scribbles and scratches, done in charcoal. Some notes underneath in a different, more practise handwriting say: 'Stone under the inn. Bears further study.'"
The next day my brother said "Oh snap. This is better than Elder Scrolls."
Feels pretty good!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment