Campaign Log -- Day One

The following covers the first in-game day of the campaign, which in the real world covered about half of the first session. My attempt to make an audio recording didn't work due to faulty equipment, so this is pieced together from some hasty notes I scribbled after the game, whatever details I could remember, and some outright embellishment (mostly in expanding & developing "primary documents" like the conversation between the robed foreigners and the text from the Basketwild book). However, this is why NPCs like the barkeep don't get much dialogue -- I only remember the gist of what they were saying, and it seemed excessive to construct conversations between them and the PCs out of whole cloth.

Session One
The 7th Day of the Month of Obad-Hai
The 110th Year of the Second Ravensblood Dynasty

Krich the Xenophilic, the only kobold employee of the Squirting Squid, was out last night with Alton Brambleforth, a halfling trader and a regular customer. They met at the Broken Stone, where Brambleforth was staying while in town. At some point during the night, the two of them seem to have vanished completely.

This is very concerning to Quimarel, who can’t afford to lose employees like that, especially since Krich would be awfully hard to replace. There aren’t many kobolds in the area, and the… unusual niche market that makes Krich profitable to have on staff isn’t one she wants to lose. The local guard, however, aren’t taking this terribly seriously. They seem to have concluded that Krich and Brambleforth ran off together, and are making no effort to investigate further. Quimarel is therefore forced to look into this independently. In case of danger, she recruits a few of her more dangerous-looking acquaintances: Hiddlebatch, Tamarie, and Makpov.

The four of them go to the Broken Stone and speak to the goblin barkeep, Drugoz Tribe Muck-Laugh. He definitely remembers seeing Krich and Brambleforth drinking in the common area last night. (Krich is pretty hard to miss, generally. Not only is she one of only a few members of her species in town -- Noroiras is, after all, something like 75% goblinoid -- but her lineage goes back to gold dragons, and she’s inherited their gleaming scales & little facial tendrils. She stands out in a crowd.) According to him, the pair of them, after imbibing a healthy amount of alcohol, went out into the large field behind the inn. “Lots of couples like to go back there,” he explains with a wink. “Plenty of space to get away from prying eyes, look at the stars, lay down in the long grass for privacy… it’s a good spot for, ah, romance.”

So the PCs head out back, where there is indeed a large empty field. It’s sometimes used for religious festivals and other big town gatherings, but right now there isn’t anything there except long grass and the ruins of some old outbuildings & dry wells. (The Broken Stone is the oldest building in town by a sizable margin… over the centuries, a number of things have been built in the area behind it and later fallen to pieces.) They spend some time poking around, and find some blood on the ground, which Makpov’s gnollish sense of smell tentatively identifies as halfling. They try to track the scent (in addition to Makpov’s nose, Hiddlebatch has a slightly-tame wolf), but run into difficulty. There are some failed Survival rolls. Hiddlebatch tries to convince its (I checked with Hiddlebatch’s player -- she says that “it” is Hiddlebatch’s preferred pronoun) wolf to follow the scent trail, botches a Handle Animal check, and ends up bitten for its troubles. They decide to check out one of the wells located in the field -- one that hasn’t dried up -- and Hiddlebatch falls in. Luckily, Hiddlebatch can fly, though not very fast. The players are deeply amused by the image of the enormous hobgoblin slowly drifting upward on colorful butterfly wings, frantically flapping to support its weight, dripping with well water. (Hiddlebatch’s player has decided that her character flies like Watto from the Star Wars prequels: proportionally-small wings flapping absurdly fast to support its weight.) As Hiddlebatch is nursing its injured pride and the others are trying to figure out what to do next, they notice a robed figure skulking about the field some ways off. Naturally, they find this suspicious, and decide to go check it out.

At this point, I should say that I picked the species of the robed figures (they’re Kech, slightly reskinned because I thought long, tangled sloth-like fur was cooler than them just being bald) out of the Tome of Horrors for purely aesthetic reasons. They looked vaguely creepy but not demonic, they weren’t terribly nice people, and they were from the right kind of environment. (In this world,, they come from a distant and largely unexplored rainforest-y region to the far south, which is why nobody has seen them before and they tend to wear heavy robes to cope with the northern climate.) The fact that they have a 50 ft. movement speed, a climb speed, and a permanent Pass Without Trace effect never entered my decision-making process. However, these attributes ended up screwing the players over all through the session.

The PCs go to see what the mysterious robed figure is up to. It spots them coming, and decides to get out of there, because mysterious robed figures don’t tend to like it when ragtag groups of heroes (or “heroes”) corner & interrogate them. Since it can move much more quickly than the PCs, it outdistances them easily, and once they lose sight of it, they’re pretty much lost, since they can’t track it by nonmagical means. Frustrated, they decide to head back to the Broken Stone and see if the barkeep can tell them anything about the creepy robed guys who are hanging around town, since they’re apparently not only involved, but doing something in the field right behind the inn.

Drugoz the barkeep has a few things to say on the matter. He is vocally dismissive of foreigners of all sorts, but allows that they pay very well, and a group of four of them are currently renting one of his rooms upstairs. They come downstairs for meals, at which point he can overhear them talking in gibbers and hoots; they hardly ever speak in plain Goblin. He only tolerates them because he is criminally overcharging them -- they pay in small emeralds rather than Capran coinage, and he has neglected to inform them that each of their gems would easily cover several months’ stay in his inn.

After some discussion. the PCs come up with a Plan. Like many of their subsequent plans, it is slipshod and not terrible well-thought out: they slip up to the room where the robed foreigners are staying, and try to break in. Naturally, they make no effort to determine whether anyone is currently in the room, or plan for that contingency in any way. Tamarie tries to pick the lock -- Quimarel, despite her rogue levels, doesn’t have many points in this kind of thing, since her character is more diplomacy-focused -- and fails. The PCs overhear voices inside the room, realize that scratching at the door’s lock has attracted some attention, and immediately stage a distraction. Quimarel and Hiddlebatch pretend to get into a huge screaming argument, in the hopes that the residents of the room will decide that whatever is going on outside is none of their business. Bluff and Sense Motive checks are rolled, and it works.

Their original plan having failed, the PCs decide that they’re going to hang around in the inn’s common area, drink some ale, and wait for the creepy hooded folk to come down for their next meal. They spend some time listening to local gossip, none of which is particularly interesting. Hiddlebatch’s player decides, apparently, that she hasn’t done enough to emphasize her character’s status as Evil, and ends up creeping everyone out through her method of talking one of the goblins into bed (to make more Tainted, of course, this being Hiddlebatch’s holy mission and all). Glossing over the details, she decides that instead of rolling Diplomacy to seduce this random bar patron, she’s rolling Intimidate. And… moving on…

Eventually, the quartet of robed foreigners come downstairs, order a meal and some drinks, and huddle together at a table in the corner to continue a conversation they were apparently having upstairs. This being a low-magic region (there’s exactly one known mage within a hundred miles: Lord Noroiras’s mother and predecessor, who is in retirement and rarely leaves her family’s estate) a ridiculously long way away from their homeland, they don’t seem to consider it a security risk to talk about their plans in the open, as long as they stick to their native language. So they’re in the corner hooting and gibbering (I decided they sounded kind of like howler monkeys when they spoke their native language), and Hiddlebatch suddenly realizes that it has Tongues prepared -- a necessity for someone who wants to evangelize at travellers and doesn’t speak anything but Goblin.

Hiddlebatch, long since returned from its deeply unethical tryst upstairs, tries to eavesdrop on the foreigners’ conversation, and picks up some of it:

Robed Foreigner 1: “Look, you want to scale the walls, Lu-Dingira? I bet crossbow bolts don’t hurt that much, right?”
RF2 (“Lu-Dingira”): “But, Illuvatum --”
RF1 (“Illuvatum”): “But nothing. These people may be savages, but they can at least defend a gods-cursed walled compound against someone trying to climb up the side of the building. It’s a bad plan, accept it.”
RF3: “See, Lu, I told you. Illuvatum’s right, we can’t just climb in and take it. That’s why we need to get the glaive first.”
Illuvatum: “Curse it, Buhazum, that’s just as bad. Why do you want to complicate things?”
RF4: “That’s what I’ve been saying. Why in the name of the Red Land do you think it will be easier to steal two things than to steal one?”
RF3 (“Buhazum”): “Because, Sin-Alshu, if we have the glaive, then the second theft is a trivial problem at best. And then we have two magical artifacts instead of one.”
Illuvatum: “Okay, so it’s a net gain. If it works, and that’s a big ‘if’.”
RF4 (“Sin-Alshu”): “And that’s assuming that the glaive does what you think it does.”
Buhazum: “We have it right here in black and white!” [Buhazum pulls a roll of parchment from inside his robes and brandishes it at the others] “Look, when they found it, they did some tests. The wielder of Golden Glitter can use the spell of Passwall. That’s why they locked it up in the first place -- they knew it would be useful for someone trying to do exactly what we’re doing now.”
Sin-Alshu: “That sounds awfully convenient. It could be a trap.”
Lu-Dingira: “They’re savages, Sin, remember. Even if they were canny enough to do that, they don’t know who we are or why we’re here -- how could it be a trap?”
Buhazum: “It’s not ‘convenient’; it’s kismet.”
Illuvatum: “It’s still a risky plan. If it’s locked up to keep people from doing exactly what we want to do, why do we think we can get it?”
Buhazum: “Their security on the Intelligence Corps building is only enough to keep out common thieves -- I did some reconnaissance, and anyone who has a reasonable amount of skill should be able to handle it.”
Sin-Alshu: “Well, I’m not going to try and break in and tip our hand just to get a trinket.”
Buhazum: “It’s not just a trinket; it’s a moderately powerful enchanted weapon.”
Lu-Dingira: “What kind of feather-pulling name for a weapon is ‘Golden Glitter’, anyway?”
Illuvatum: “Sounds like a gnome thing to me. Are there gnomes in this town?”
Buhazum: “Says here that the cottage where they found the thing was previously inhabited by a gnomish witch.”
Sin-Alshu: “What in the Red Land is a ‘gnome’?”
Illuvatum: “They’re the little ones that aren’t goblins or halflings. They come up a lot in the research.”
Lu-Dingira: “Whatever we’re doing, we need to do it soon. This isn’t a stable situation.”
Illuvatum: “True; the reports I’ve been getting from underground say that there’s only so long we can manage the workers and keep the barghest under wraps. Plus the problems with the local wildlife.”
Buhazum: “Then we need to go ahead and steal the glaive before things get out of control. Once we have that, we can take care of a lot of our problems much more easily. Passwall would be useful for more than just getting the shield.”
Illuvatum: “We still have a couple weeks at least. Let’s see if there’s any way we can make Buhazum’s plan work.”
Buhazum: “I can draw up a map of the building for you; it shouldn’t be that hard to find a way into the vault.”

With that, the robed foreigners finish their meal and head back upstairs. Hiddlebatch gives the rest of the party a summary of what it overheard, and they decide some research is needed. Most of the players are fairly new to the game, so they don’t recognize words like “barghest” off the top of their heads and need to rely on character knowledge. (They also don’t recognize “glaive”, since polearm names are fairly obscure outside of D&D,  but I don’t make them do research for that.) Luckily, they do know both in and out of character (from the handy town map I drew up for them) that there’s a library in town, funded by Magus Katarin Stenholt, the aforementioned former Lady Noroiras, where they can do most of the research they need.

Hiddlebatch’s player tends to do most of the talking out-of-character, and so she ends up directing the research efforts. This is unfortunate, because for some time she seems to forget that they’re not in 21st-century Earth, and repeatedly insists that there should be some sort of blueprints on file for public buildings like the Royal Intelligence Corps HQ. Obviously there are not -- why would a tiny impoverished goblin village bother to keep copies of building plans, and even if they did, why would an organization of spies make the layout of their headquarters public? (Also, the goblin tribe who makes up the majority of the population is predominantly Chaotic Evil, albeit mostly in terms of petty malice and resentment, and such folks tend not to be big on documentation.) They get as far as trying to hunt down the craftsgoblins who built the place -- long since dead of old age, since goblins only live 30 years or so, and the Royal Intelligence Corps was founded during the epilogue for the last campaign, over an in-game century ago -- before they eventually give up.

They do manage to find out about barghests, though, since that’s not terribly obscure knowledge in evil goblin tribes out in the wilderness. The PCs find out that barghests are demonic beings of not-insignificant power that can take goblinoid or lupine form and occasionally feed on sapient beings. It’s not uncommon for a barghest to form a cult of personality in an isolated goblin tribe, a tidbit the PCs find interesting. They theorize that the robed foreigners have one working for them somehow, and plan to use it to control the goblin population.

They also roll especially high on an attempt to figure out who these robed foreigners are in the first place, and dig up a copy of An Expedition to the Uncharted South by a halfling wizard named Lavender Basketwild. This is another byproduct of the events of the previous campaign -- the same player who runs Hiddlebatch had a character named Laika Evenstar who went on a long voyage to the southern tropics; Lavender was her cohort, and apparently put in the effort to actually take notes on the previously unknown area they were exploring. Anyway, the PCs find a description of some people who seem a lot like the creepy robed foreigners:

I have also heard many tales of the ‘Kech’, a malevolent tribe of ape-folk who apparently inhabit an area of the jungle somewhere near the western coast. They are said to move with unnatural speed, and leave no footprints where they walk, a rumor that sounds to me like unwarranted embellishment. It is far more likely, in my opinion, that these Kech merely know the terrain well and have some basic skill in stealth. They are also said to serve still more malign masters, demonic beings who make their home on some nearby island. Description of these creatures is sketchy at best, and I suspect that it is merely some sort of libelous propaganda to make the Kech more villainous in the popular imagination, perhaps to cast them as a common enemy.

The PCs decide that they have enough background information for now, and that it’s time to call it a day. In the morning, they will decide what to do next.