Date: Planting 13–16, 576 CY
Region: The Slaver Stockade — Drachensgrab Hills, eastern Wild Coast
Weather: Cold. Underground air heavy with torch smoke and old blood. Above, a grey sky and a wind with teeth.
Players Present
Dog the Ranger
Irving the Reluctant
TerryOr the Cleric of St. Cuthbert
Silversun Ubermage the Magic-User
Slash the Bard
Tiger Wong, Monk of the Eastern Lands
Kern Blackshield of Safeton
Lady Morwen Ellisar (NPC)
(new) Talon, Paladin of St. Cuthbert
Episode 94 — Planting 13, 576 CY
The Alchemist's Wing
Eight hours.
That was all they asked of the stone.
Three of the party lay broken — mummy rot still threading through Kern's blood, Dog weakened where the shadow had touched him and taken something that should not have been taken. TerryOr and Silversun took the first watch. Kern and another took the second. The room was as secure as anything in this place could be, which was not saying much.
Dog did not rest with them.
He moved.
The others had chosen stillness. Dog chose motion. He had slept in worse places than a goblin-infested stronghold, and the shadow's theft still sat behind his eyes like a cold coal — a wrongness, a dimming, the sense of being two measures slower than he should have been. Lying still made it worse.
The corridors breathed.
He knew these smells now. Mold and torchlight. Cooked rat. The particular sweetness of goblin-oil lanterns. He had moved through enough of them to know where sound carried and where it died.
When the goblins came — fifteen of them, shambling and arguing in their rasp-language — they found a crate braced against the door and two of the party's best fighters waiting just beyond it.
Irving kicked the crate aside.
The hall collapsed into noise.
Kern drove into the mass first, shield high. Irving came in on his left, mace working in short brutal arcs. The goblins had numbers and nothing else. Silversun put three of them down with a single gesture, magic missiles punching neat holes through the rush. Kern finished the last.
They questioned the survivors.
Two goblins, bound and miserable, confirmed what the party already suspected: their leader held court past the laboratory. Hundreds of guards, they said. The word hundreds was delivered with the sincerity of creatures who had never been good at counting.
Terry suggested not killing helpless prisoners.
Slash volunteered to handle it.
The cleric looked away.
The torture chamber gave them three secret doors.
The first concealed a narrow passage and a storeroom of no consequence. The second opened into a ten-by-ten room that smelled of sulfur and old flame — an alchemist's workroom in miniature. Shelves of flasks marked with letters. A small box of lead pellets. Three books of formulae, one titled FYND A X in a hand that suggested its author had been both brilliant and erratic.
Tiger Wong examined one of the pellets.
It examined him back.
The flashbang left him blinking and swearing, singed at the edges. The party stared. Tiger said nothing further about the pellets.
Three mystery flasks were pocketed — one confirmed as a potion of giant strength, one as levitation, the third still unknown. Irving tucked the levitation potion away with the practiced care of a man who had learned what it meant to lack options.
The third secret door opened onto a cavern passage. Narrow. Dark.
Dog went first.
The passage ended at a man.
He was reaching for a dagger when Dog's arrow found him.
The alchemist — for that was clearly what he had been — dropped without ceremony. On his finger, a signet ring. The letter F in the wax.
"Findex," Silversun said quietly, turning the ring.
No one recognized the name.
A trapped coffer stood in the corner. TerryOr touched it. His hand stuck fast to the lid. He stared at the ceiling for a long moment, then used his ring of free action to peel himself loose with the quiet dignity of a man who had long since stopped being surprised by the indignities of this work.
The coffer held something. They chose to leave it.
The southern door opened onto the laboratory.
It was large. It was occupied.
Goblins packed the main floor and a balcony above. And behind a worktable, assembling herself with the cold efficiency of someone interrupted rather than caught, stood a woman in dark robes who was very clearly not a woman.
Her skin was wrong.
Her eyes were wrong.
The hair, perfect and dark, was a wig. Beneath it: the silver-white of a drow.
She moved first. Lightning crackled from her fingers and Dog took sixteen points of it across the chest and did not go down, though it was a near thing.
Silversun put a fireball into twenty goblins on the south end of the room.
The screaming was brief.
She fought. She was good. She was a fifth-level mage in disguise makeup with a short sword of speed and a contempt for the living that was almost philosophical.
She was not good enough.
Kern took her sword arm. Irving closed the distance. The disguise failed by stages — the makeup smearing, the wig finally abandoned, the drow's true face bare in the torchlight.
The Markessa.
Or someone who had been playing her.
She died on the floor of her own laboratory with twenty goblins for company and a hawk-engraved medallion worth fourteen hundred gold on a cord around her neck. They found five thousand gold pieces in a locked chest. A gem. An inventory of slaves. A map to a place marked Airy — a name the party had seen before, somewhere, in worse company.
Total XP Awarded: 2,700 XP each.
46 goblins. One drow mage.
The real Marquesa's fate: still unknown.
Episode 95 — Planting 14, 576 CY
The Hobgoblin Hall
The door at the end of the balcony opened onto something larger.
A hulking figure stood in the threshold — seven and a half feet of scale mail and sunken eyes, staring at them with the unhurried interest of something that had not yet decided whether to be entertained or annoyed.
Kern was the only one surprised.
The rest of them moved.
Tiger flew in with a kick that connected clean against armor class four — a good hit, clean and hard. The figure staggered. Then it dissolved.
Not dead. Changing.
The gaseous form rose and drifted back down the corridor while the party stared at the space where a body should have been.
"Vampire," someone said.
A hall full of hobgoblins confirmed the assessment was the least of their problems.
Four rows of them. Armed. Torches held high. Moving with the grim purpose of soldiers who outnumber their opposition and know it.
Terry filled the corridor with burning oil.
Four hobgoblins died in the first splash. The oil spread and caught and the screaming was different from goblins — lower, angrier, the sound of creatures that had known real war.
Kern held the front. Irving drank the giant strength potion and became briefly terrifying. The back rank of hobgoblins began heating oil of their own — a tactical thought that Terry noted, respected, and countered with a flask thrown over the fighters' heads before the enemy could act.
The fire ate them.
What remained pushed through smoke and stumbling bodies and still came on.
A goblin broke through the line and entered the room. Dog and Slash handled it.
The smoke-filled hall led to a locked door.
Irving opened it with cloud giant strength and no ceremony whatsoever.
Beyond: a corridor. Two chained wargs in an alcove, their chains just long enough to reach the center of the passage. Dog's new sword — the speed blade taken from the Marquesa — worked quickly and well. The wargs died.
Behind their alcoves: a secret door.
A narrow passage. An L-turn. A small room with a shaft opening in the ceiling and an iron ladder ascending forty feet into darkness.
Tiger volunteered to climb.
The session paused while Tiger took a phone call.
In the break, the party discussed crows at length. TerryOr told a story about one that had recognized him after several years apart. The crow had remembered. The crow had been pleased to see him.
This was, the party agreed, slightly unsettling in its own way.
They climbed.
The ladder was iron. The shaft was forty feet. The darkness above was complete.
Dog fell.
Kern fell.
Both landed badly. Both survived.
The vampire was waiting at the top.
It had not changed. Still the same sunken eyes. Still the same unhurried contempt. It moved across the upper room like it owned the stone itself — which, in a sense, it did.
Tiger hit it twice. Irving, giant-strong and furious, connected hard. The creature staggered.
It died harder than it should have.
When it was done, they counted themselves and their wounds and found the math unsatisfying. Kern, Dog, and Tiger sat at the bottom of the stairs to wait for the world to stop spinning.
500 XP awarded to each player.
Episode 96 — Planting 14, 576 CY
The Warg Riders
Three were unconscious. Two were not.
Slash and TerryOr spiked the secret door shut with iron and determination, then settled in for eight hours of listening to stone breathe. Slash took the whole watch himself. He sat with his lantern oil burning low and his back against the wall and did not complain, which was unusual enough that the others noted it.
Dog, Kern, and Tiger woke with full hit points and the slightly confused look of people who had expected not to.
TerryOr cast cure disease. Twice. The mummy rot retreated.
The ladder question remained.
The top rung had been sharpened to a triangle — a trap, deliberate and elegant, designed to slit gloves and palms and let climbers fall in silence. Dog examined it from a shield platform raised by levitation and determined it was clever and dangerous and not worth the candle.
The passage south, they decided. The one the wargs had been guarding.
They left two chests behind — four hundred and fifty gold in coin, silver, and a brass-fitted box that weighed more than it was worth to carry. The party noted the loss and accepted it. Encumbrance was a crueler master than most enemies they had faced.
The goblin caretaking room contained suits made of cheesecloth, a four-foot tun, and two casks that smelled of something fermented and probably lethal. A metal rod. Clay pots.
From an alcove came laughter and the smell of cooked meat.
Goblins. Seated at ease. Unaware.
The party chose not to engage.
They moved south.
The warg riders came at a gallop around the S-curve.
Tiger's flying kick put the first rider's mount on the ground. The warg thrashed and died on Dog's new sword. The rider — plate mail, hobgoblin, furious — clambered up and met Kern and TerryOr at the same moment and did not survive the meeting.
Silversun built a wall of fire in the corridor.
They waited seven minutes.
The goblins who had been behind the wall did not come through it.
The ones in the main cavern were a different problem.
More warg riders. More torchlight. More of the mechanical patience that made these creatures dangerous in confined spaces.
The fight was long and hard and loud in the way fights in stone corridors always are — sound bouncing back to hit you from directions that made no sense, so that by the end your ears were ringing and your sense of direction was largely theoretical.
Irving, still carrying the last of the giant strength, finally charmed the hobgoblin leader.
The hobgoblin smiled the way people smile when they have decided they love you and have not yet understood why.
"Take us to the slave pens," Irving said.
The hobgoblin nodded enthusiastically.
The party formed up behind him.
There was a brief discussion at session's end about Michael's departure from the game. His anti-paladin behavior had tested the party's patience past the breaking point, and the table had made its feelings known. Irving and others agreed: some choices make the table smaller, and that was acceptable.
The march toward the slave pens continued.
Episode 97 — Planting 15, 576 CY
The Beholder
A new player joined.
Mark.
He sat at the edge of things, learning the rhythms, asking questions about level and class. The party discussed what they needed — a paladin, perhaps, or a thief. Mark chose paladin.
No one laughed.
One cannot have too many paladins in a place like this.
The charmed hobgoblin led them through a laboratory and down corridors that smelled of old chains. They spiked two doors shut with rope as a compromise solution, TerryOr having proposed iron spikes and been overruled by common sense.
The XP from the previous session was tallied. Each player had lost 2,089 XP to abandoned treasure. Each player had gained something from the wargs and orcs. The math was not flattering but it was honest.
The cell room held thirty prisoners.
Thirty.
Humans, elves, dwarves, and in the far corner, something that registered as distinctly evil to TerryOr's prayer.
The party debated the evil prisoner. Jeffrey — the Knock spell present by convenience and expertise — suggested leaving him, since the man had not asked for help. Dog raised an eyebrow. The debate resolved in favor of pragmatism.
Two werewolves were guarding the cells.
Dog moved first. His quickness was a thing that impressed even the people who had watched it for ninety-six sessions.
Eight damage on the first strike.
The werewolves turned.
Kern took a hit. Slash took a hit. Tiger brought his staff. The combat was loud and close and ended with Kern and Slash delivering the finishing blows in the same round by accident, which felt like something.
The cells moaned.
In the far corner, a prisoner of quality looked back at the party with the expression of someone who had long since accepted that rescue, if it came, would come strange.
The sphere descended from the ceiling.
It had eyes on stalks.
Nine of them, plus the great central eye, plus a mouth full of teeth that suggested opinions about the visitors.
A beholder.
TerryOr began reading from a scroll — the Finger of Death, two segments to cast, a gamble on timing.
The beholder cast first.
Silversun sat down on the floor and heard a voice.
Come to me.
He complied, serenely.
TerryOr and Silversun both took Serious Wounds. TerryOr's holy symbol turned out to offer some protection. Not enough to make the evening pleasant.
The party catalogued the creature's abilities with the focused attention of people who expected to die and wanted to understand why.
Central eye: anti-magic cone, ninety degrees, one hundred fifty feet.
Eye stalks: Charm, Sleep, Telekinesis, Flesh to Stone, Disintegration, Fear, Slow, Cause Serious Wounds, Death Ray.
Slash proposed Color Spray.
The math worked. Three targets affected by the spray — the beholder, Kern, and Tiger caught in the cone. The beholder was blinded for three rounds.
Three rounds was everything.
Dog shot the main eye.
Kern charged the body.
Tiger flew in on a kick.
The eye stalks fired wild. One caught Tiger and threw him back into the wall. Kern took a stalk off with eleven points of hard steel. Irving hit twice. The body took fifty-three total damage before it stopped moving.
The beholder dropped to the stone.
Eighteen captives in the cells behind it looked out at the party with the particular expression of people who have survived something and are not yet certain they believe it.
Among them: Kern's wife.
Among them: a man the party recognized as Dame Gold's brother.
The session ended.
The cells were still locked.
Episode 98 — Planting 15, 576 CY
The Escape
Silversun— a seventh-level wizard, present for reasons that were either convenient or providential depending on one's theology — cast Knock in the center of the room.
Six cells opened.
The dwarves walked out blinking into torchlight. The half-orc behind them looked at the party with an expression of profound evaluation and then accepted a longbow and quiver from Dog without comment.
The evil prisoner in cell one was left behind.
TerryOr cast Detect Evil. One soul. One aura, dark and settled, the way evil looks when it has made its peace with what it is. Jeffrey had been correct. He had not asked for help.
They moved south.
Behind a cave wall, the faint scuff of barefoot tracks led into a low passage. Dog followed them.
Screaming, distant.
The party doubled back, retrieved the freed prisoners, distributed weapons. Daggers for the capable. The mace to the half-orc who looked like he'd used one before.
A statue waited in a side chamber.
It wore the Markessa's face.
But the fangs were wrong. The tongue was wrong. The eyes were wrong — worm-pale, coiled in stone like something had been trying to show what she truly was.
TerryOr stared at it for a long time.
Kern stood next to him.
Neither spoke.
Slash cast Heat Metal on the hobgoblin guards in the passage south.
Round one: discomfort.
Round two: pain.
Round three: they were not an obstacle anymore.
The main cavern required a different approach. Terry and Kern moved southwest. The rest of the party held the chamber with the freed prisoners. Dog stayed at the rear to cover.
Five humanoid shapes in the dark.
The largest stood nearly seven feet. Pale. Wrong.
The Goro.
Tiger's flying kick missed.
TerryOr's Hold Person found nothing to hold.
Dog's arrow hit a Goro clean — eight damage — and the creature did not flinch, did not react, did not even look down.
The energy drain came in the next round.
Tiger lost four levels.
Not hit points. Levels.
He disengaged.
TerryOr cast light on the Goro's head, turned him luminous and visible to everything in the cave. Then the holy symbol came up and the turning worked and the creatures retreated through a two-foot hole in the wall like smoke returning to a chimney.
The party sealed the hole with rocks and dirt. Dog offered to use water for a better seal. They did both.
Then they left.
The corridor north led to daylight.
Actual, genuine, unhoped-for daylight.
1,000 XP awarded.
They were on the northwest face of the valley. The stockade rose behind them to the east. The hills rolled west and north toward places that were not this.
The freed prisoners stood in the light with the expressions of people relearning what it meant.
Twenty-six of them.
Not all of them had made it.
Episode 99 — Planting 15–16, 576 CY
The Gate and the Road
The reinforced steel gate was approximately twelve feet tall and twelve feet wide and was, functionally, the difference between freedom and the stockade reasserting itself.
The party had a key.
Kern tried it while albino creatures dropped from the ceiling.
White bodies. Black eyes. Long teeth. Arms that should not have been that long.
The crowd of freed prisoners was thirty people deep in a twenty-foot corridor. Slash knocked an unconscious slave woman free of his arm — she had been holding on, which was understandable — and turned to face the creatures alone at the rear.
He was the only one back there with them.
Silversun cast Magic Missile.
One creature dropped.
Dog shot another.
Slash used Spark Shower and the passage lit up bright and wrong for a moment, and in that moment a freed slave fell and Slash picked her up and kept moving.
The pursuing creatures were faster.
At thirty feet they would overtake the column.
Kern found the lock.
The key turned.
The gate opened on light.
The party pushed the freed prisoners through in a stumbling rush, six to eight of them gone in the chaos of the final minutes — taken by the creatures, by the fall, by the stockade's last claim on them.
The rest emerged blinking into cold grey morning air and the smell of grass and wind.
The gate shut behind them.
The stockade could not follow.
Talon introduced himself on the hillside.
He was a paladin. He said St. Cuthbert had guided him here.
Dog was suspicious. Dog is always suspicious of convenient divinity. He asked Kern, who was injured, to request healing.
Talon healed Kern.
Dog watched.
He did not entirely stop being suspicious, but he adjusted the weight of it.
The ranger led them over the hills rather than through the valley. Patrols were a certainty in the low ground, and certainties were to be avoided. The marching order was established: Dog thirty feet ahead, cloak up, bow in hand. TerryOr and Kern behind with Kern's wife. Silversun with the noble. The freed slaves in the center. Slash bringing up the rear with a song that no one asked for and everyone quietly needed.
The noble was from the Pomarj. He had hired guides who had sold them. He had paid for passage and received chains. He said this with the bewildered quality of a man who had grown up believing that money solved things.
Dog said nothing.
Camp was made on high ground before dark. No good site was available — Dog made do with a defensible one.
The watch was set: Dog and Kern first, Talon and TerryOr second, Silversun fourth. The fire was kept low.
During second watch, Talon spoke quietly to TerryOr about a vision. St. Cuthbert, moving through lost places, searching for those who wandered.
TerryOr thought of Irving.
Irving was not here.
Morning brought food. Dog had found and dressed a deer after dark, and twenty-six freed captives plus the party ate well for the first time in days. It was the kind of meal that has nothing to do with the food.
TerryOr healed Dog's lycanthropy in the morning light — a quiet ceremony of prayer and laying-on of hands that took twenty minutes and removed the wrongness that the werewolf's bite had left behind.
Kern took a cure light wounds.
Dog took a cure light wounds.
They both stood a little straighter afterward.
Highport was the destination. The port town. The road home, or something like it.
Four to five days on foot.
The ocean was ahead somewhere in the grey distance. The hills rolled south and west and the wind smelled of salt and approaching rain.
Dog counted the survivors.
Twenty-six who made it.
He did not count the ones who did not. He would do that later, in privacy, the way rangers count things they cannot carry.
He put his hand inside his cloak and found the necklace.
Yeti tooth. Goblin teeth. Orc and hobgoblin tusks. Owlbear feathers.
Drow finger.
He moved to the front of the column.
The hills received them.
Outcome Notes
XP Awarded — Episodes 94–99:
- Episode 94: 2,700 XP each (drow mage Marquesa, 46 goblins)
- Episode 95: 500 XP each (vampire, hobgoblins, wargs)
- Episode 96: XP adjusted for treasure abandoned (–2,089 each), partial recovery from warg and orc kills
- Episode 97: Beholder defeated; XP pending full calculation
- Episode 98: 1,000 XP each (cave escape, undead turned)
- Episode 99: 2,600 XP each (100 XP per rescued captive × 26), plus 600 XP to Talon for rescue contribution
Enemies Defeated: Drow mage (Marquesa), 46 goblins, hobgoblins, wargs, vampire, beholder, werewolves, albino corridor creatures
Prisoners Freed: 26 of 30 (Kern's wife recovered; Dame Gold's brother recovered)
Losses: 6–8 freed captives lost in the final gate corridor
New Party Member: Talon, Paladin of St. Cuthbert
Notable Item: Sword of Speed (from Markessa), magical studded leather armor
Next Session: Planting 16 — road south to Highport, slaves in tow, hills between the party and pursuit
The stockade is broken.
The chains are open.
And somewhere behind them in the dark, something with a signet ring and a F on it still has not been accounted for.
Watch the sessions live at @thedmandfriends on YouTube.
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