Campaign Log -- The End of Day Three

The 9th day of the month of Obad-Hai
The 110th year of the second Ravensblood dynasty

The overseer, realizing that reinforcements cannot realistically be expected at the moment, runs up to Makpov, and takes a fairly ineffective swing at him, Makpov, burdened by a halfling riding piggyback, tries to retaliate with his battleaxe, but overbalances and misses disgracefully. Tamarie, reluctant to break out her alchemical bombs for fear of hurting Quimarel (for she is “wee” and will not take well to further damage), joins in the ballet of incompetence by flailing around with her insect arm, and Quimarel adds a flourish by missing wildly with her dagger.

The Kech breaks the theme by nearly disembowelling Makpov with a well-placed claw, and Makpov, thanks to our handy critical-hit table, responds by slicing its leg off at the knee. The others beat on him while he’s prone -- Tamarie stabs him with a knitting needle -- and the screaming, bleeding Kech starts dragging himself away. The chain gang cheers from the sidelines. Makpov, in a rare burst of “good idea”, drags the Kech to the door, shoves him through, and shuts the door again. A few seconds later, they hear louder screams that abruptly cut off, accompanied by the sound of spiders eating.

GM: All right, you just threw the Kech overseer to the spiders. Now what?
Quimarel OOC: I take his robe.
GM: He’s being eaten by spiders.
Quimarel OOC: Crap.
Hiddlebatch OOC: We already HAVE robes. From their room.

Quimarel tries to disguise Makpov as a Kech; it’s fairly unconvincing, but they figure it will pass in dim light. The party assumes that any reinforcements that might have been alerted by the screaming Kech will be delayed by spiders, so Tamarie sets to picking the locks on the chain gang’s manacles.

***

Elsewhere in the cavern complex, Hiddlebatch has decided to check out the swearing she heard behind that door earlier. She opens the door as quietly as possible, and sees a room full of broken, rusty furniture & equipment. Another basidirond seems to be growing in the ruins, and a small humanoid creature -- the source of the swearing -- seems to be attempting to kill it. The creature resembles a blue-skinned caricature of a goblin, complete with a mouth full of enormous, unwieldy fangs (probably the reason for the speech defect noted earlier). It also has backwards-facing hands.

Hiddlebatch has more points in relevant knowledge skills than the others, and rolls above 20 on its check, so it recognizes the backwards hands as the identifying characteristic of a rakshasa, a creature of which it has heard rumors and stories.

Apparently, when giving Hiddlebatch’s player a quick rundown of what a rakshasa is, I used the phrase “pretty dang evil”. I need to prepare my exposition better.

The rakshasa notices Hiddlebatch, having beaten its Stealth check by a good margin. It turns towards Hiddlebatch… who closes the door and runs away.

Voice from behind Hiddlebatch: WHO IN THE HELLSH WASH THAT?

Hiddlebatch runs towards the room full of purple moss, yelling for the goblins to follow H and hold their breath. They go through the room, and come out in the same cavern that the rest of the party arrived in. Hiddlebatch cautiously proceeds towards a partially-buried building… and a darkmantle drops on H’s head. H casts Inflict Light Wounds, causing the creature to shriek and abandon its prey.

Hiddlebatch’s player rolls a Knowledge [nature] check to identify the beast as a darkmantle, and we have another conversation about whether this creature has any tricky vulnerabilities or immunities. (I blame myself for having them deal with fey in the last campaign -- now they’re always looking for the equivalent of cold iron.) Eventually we establish that they are, in my words, “just… THINGS”, and that they are vulnerable to being stabbed with pointy bits of metal.

After some exploration, Hiddlebatch decides to enter a sizable, partially-buried building on the grounds that there don’t seem to be any Kech or dangerous wildlife behind that door, just some rats. H flies above them, careful in case there’s another acid-spitting surprise in store. It leaves the goblins behind, attempting to take shelter from the darkmantles.

H ducks through a door on the far side of the rat room, only to find an enormous ballroom where a pair of spider-things are snacking on corpses. As it tries to decide what to do, a goblin with Makpov’s battle axe comes through another door, followed by an ablative layer of other goblins, followed by the PCs. (Quimarel’s plans are all about not hurting Quimarel.) A quick and largely silent reunion ensues, and the group slips past the distracted spiders to the original cavern.

They gather the human slaves Quimarel’s group freed and the goblin slaves Hiddlebatch freed. Tamarie picks the locks on the remaining leg irons, and Hiddlebatch decides to make an impromptu speech to the liberated chain gangs..
“You see? You doubted the great and mighty Khurgorbaeyag --”
“We did?”
“ -- I told you that he would see us through this -- ”
“You did?”
“I did! He has seen us through! You will go to the chapel to pay your respects!” Hiddlebatch rolls a 26 to Intimidate, and shows them one of her frightening little carven idols. They are intimidated, and consider attending the chapel, or possibly leaving town as soon as possible.

Once Hiddlebatch is done terrifying the populace, Quimarel tells her what they found out earlier -- there’s something valuable in one of the rooms nearby, but the Kech can’t get at it because of some sort of invisible creature that wandered in recently and took up residence. PCs being PCs, they decide to go check this out. They also are sticking to their original “set it on fire” approach. A quick inventory determines that they have plenty of flammable material, including rope, clothing, and goblins.

Quimarel suggests collecting a large quantity of blood, then splashing the phantom fungus (Knowledge [nature] courtesy of Hiddlebatch) with it to make it visible.

GM: Why do you go straight for blood?
Quimarel OOC: Well, what other semi-liquids do we have?
GM: Mud?
Quimarel OOC: There’s mud in here?
GM: You’re in a big hole in the ground!

Eventually, a plan is hatched. They take the robe they were using to disguise Makpov and light it on fire, then Hiddlebatch flies into the room with the phantom fungus (which turns out to be an old library) and drops the flaming robe onto the beast. There is much inhuman shrieking, and Hiddlebatch continues to the area beyond the library while it is distracted.

On the other side of the library is a small open cavern that contains a single mostly-buried building. Hiddlebatch avoids the predations of a cave fisher and enters the building. It proves to be empty, except for some sort of rusty metal display case that contains a grime-covered spear. A quick casting of Knock opens the case, Hiddlebatch grabs the spear, and then flies back out through the somewhat-on-fire library. The party agrees that it’s time to leave very quickly.

Hiddlebatch flies up, lowers the rope from the original well, and helps the others out of the caverns. There are no further falling-related adventures. The liberated chain gangs also follow them up, at which point they scatter. Most of them aren’t from this area, and they strike out for home. A minority decide to stay in town for a while.

The Brambleforth trade caravan leaves abruptly that afternoon.

The PCs head back to the Squirting Squid and start discussing how to deal with recent events. Hiddlebatch asks if they should go to the authorities.
“Hey,” says Tamarie, acting out this scenario, “we found some slaves…”
“The whole town is basically evil,” Quimarel reminds the others. “If the authorities are getting a kickback from this cult, or if they hold some sort of sway over them, they’re not going to give a crap.”
“But these guys are really suspicious,” says Tamarie. “Wouldn’t they want to know what these suspicious people are doing?”
“Remember yesterday?” Quimarel asks. “One of them was talking to the guard. I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but I could tell that they were talking, and the guards were real willing to let them go and look at us.”
Tamarie thinks about this. “I would not put it above the guards to go, ‘these people are causing trouble for the foreigners who are bribing us’.”

There is a pause, and an abrupt change of subject. Tamarie asks, “so what kind of spear did you get there?”

They don’t know. And then, once they realize there is stuff they don’t know, their grad-student instincts kick in. Quimarel starts making a list of things they need to research at the library, and they head over there. At the library, they dig up a couple books. Dunyz Tribe Far-Eye’s Taxonomy of Creatures has an entry on the rakshasa, which I cobble together from the Pathfinder Bestiary and my campaign notes. Hiddlebatch wants to know if there’s anything in there about emeralds, but Quimarel is pretty sure that the bags of gems are just their “petty cash”.

They also, when looking for anything about buried cities, dig up a scroll about goblin folklore that recounts “The Legend of Vyutommourt”. The players note that the legend of Vyutommourt fits into a pretty standard goblin-folklore archetype, i.e., “we used to be awesome and now we aren’t, but it’s not our fault; someone else screwed us over.” This sort of thing is pretty integral to the goblin worldview.

Hiddlebatch asks where the vulture guy fits in, and the party starts putting it together. In Vyutommourt, they worshipped the Lord of Life and Death, who made the fields and orchards grow in exchange for sacrifice. The vulture-headed god had a sacrifice on his statue when the party found it, and Quimarel recalls that the shield that was dug out of that field a while back showed him in an orchard… they begin to wonder whether there’s a way to force the dead god into reincarnation. Hiddlebatch is frustrated that there is no mention of the spear.

They leave the library and try to appraise the spear’s value. Brushing away the dirt and grime, they find intricate carvings along the shaft, and the spearhead proves to be solid gold. Hiddlebatch, possibly spurred on by the uselessness of a mundane weapon made of gold, casts Detect Magic and finds that it glows intensely under magical sight.

Quimarel comes up with a test to find out what the spear does. “Stab a live thing, then stab a dead thing. Then stab both things again.” They round up some verminous rodents for test subjects, and proceed. During the test, they notice that wherever they carry the spear, there seems to be a cold wind coming from nowhere, and the spear ices over whenever they use it to stab something. Some extremely low Knowledge [arcana] rolls result in them really not knowing much at all, but Quimarel’s Bardic Knowledge tells her that there are many stories about magical weapons with elemental motifs.

There is some discussion about the extent of the freezing on the dead rodents to try and determine whether the spear has been doing cold damage. They decide it probably has been. Quimarel begins speculating about the value of a Summon Ham spell to distract any giant spider-things they encounter in future, and the session ends.