Run #44 featured only a tiny combat, but was filled with plot-tastic goodness. As such, it’s more suited to an actual Story Hour-type post (which Piratecat will doubtless get around to someday
) than this sort of tactical analysis. Still, here’s a summary.
Actually, before we get to the run proper, I’d like to mention an extremely cool thing that Piratecat does. I and my wife (who plays Bramble) have two daughters, now ages 3 and 5. We bring them to game nights and put them to sleep just before we start, but sometimes Piratecat runs a little 5-minute “mini-adventure” for my 5-year-old, who loves to play my wife’s Spirit Companion, Thicket. He did this again before the run, allowing my daughter to talk to a “branch with eyes and a mouth” who was ostensibly guarding the way from the treasure room back to the swamp surface. Bramble and Thicket eventually convinced the branch to divert us to the swamp (as opposed to some “bad place”) by singing a song to it.
So… we dived down into a sucking whirlpool and found ourselves mostly back on the swampy surface. There were two complications:
1. Due to an astoundingly bad series of Athletics checks, about half the party was stuck in subaquatic muck and started drowning, and
2. We were immediately attacked by an enormous underwater alligator, which none of us could actually see.
The drowning proved just as perilous as the reptile, but soon we were all on the surface, and the alligator (with only 70-some hit points) was dispatched. Gilran the Sorcerer, one of those stuck in the mud and drowning, extricated himself in flamboyant fashion by using Thunder Leap.
It was night, and there were no land-masses anywhere near us, but there were many trees growing up out of the swamp. The Create Campsite ritual made us vine-hammocks in the trees and set alight a stump for a campfire, so things were less dire than they might have been.
Furthermore, with Grimble’s ability to read the stars, we realized that we were dozens of miles away from where we had started, and (hooray!) extremely close to our next destination – the city of Laroch. You may recall that most of our adventures have been side-distractions from one of our earliest missions for the Guard – finding the AWOL Caducity Skirr. Our only intel on her whereabouts was a ritual that placed her in or around Laroch some weeks earlier.
Political background: Laroch is in the country of Croghan, whose government set up that of Iskaine, promising to assist in their rebellion and then betraying them to the Empire.
Personal background: the reason my character (Cobalt) joined the Grey Guard was because he was otherwise going to be executed for the accidental death of Anders Riverlimb during a bar brawl. Riverlimb was some kind of nobleman from Croghan.
Now, what are the odds that someone in the small town of Laroch will know or care about this? Turns out: 100%. In fact, coming into the town (sans Grimble, who was honor-bound to return to his tower), we saw a burned effigy in a cage hanging outside of town – of someone who looked suspiciously like Cobalt. The reason for this: Anders Riverlimb was the son of the local Lord of Laroch.
Le Sigh.
Despite our best attempts to disguise and hide Cobalt, we weren’t fooling anyone. For one thing, we had told the guard at the city wall that we were from Floodford when we arrived. For another, we now have evidence that Caducity not only was here in town, but is actively in league with the local Lord Riverlimb, and it was probably her that told His Lordship exactly how his son had died, what Cobalt looked like, etc.
And to top it off, we think Lord Riverlimb’s handwriting matches that we saw on a weapons order, where said weapons had been delivered to marauding lizardfolk attacking Floodford months ago. Which means his late son Anders was probably in Floodford to help arrange delivery of weapons to be used against the town!
Anyway, to wrap this up, we had a meeting with His Lordship (since it was natural for us to present ourselves to him upon arrival), and we both pretended that everything was fine, but he knew who we were, and now we know that he knew, and for all we know he knows that we know that he knows, etc. He left us with a parting gift of some wine (the town is famous for its wineries), which our resident specialists (Logan and Caldwell) discovered afterward (and before we consumed any) contain one part of a two-part paralytic poison. Part two will no doubt be delivered tomorrow during the dinner to which we have been invited – and which we still intend to attend, for better or worse.
