It takes the better part of the evening to follow the goblins directions, and it’s ludicrously easy to ambush the lairs guard in the dim light of morning. The creatures have taken refuge in a natural cave formation, barely bothering to tunnel through the stone or shape the rooms to make it more comfortable. Although the lair is cramped and sized for goblins, the taller copperheads manage to make it through most of the tunnels with a great deal of cursing and scraping of steel. Occasionally they meet pockets of resistance, small alcoves in the tunnels where goblin warriors have clustered together, but while the height of the caverns are to the goblins advantage both Brind and Yip are born for close-quarter combats. They mow through resistance with a minimum of fuss, even when the cramped conditions reduce them to clumsy strikes or daggers.
From time to time the tunnels turn into narrow crawl spaces, large enough for Goblins or Yip to crawl through, but a tight squeeze for everyone else. Geoffrey and Brind are both forced to take off their armour in order to advance, the metal spikes forged by the Thorbeck dwarves to bulky for such cramped conditions, but after sending Yip through to scout it’s quickly determined that there is little resistance on the far side of the crawl ways.
“These goblins are either very overconfident, unbelievably savage or entirely stupid,” Halgo complains after they pass through the third crawl way without meeting resistance. “They find one of the more defensible natural cave formations that I’ve seen, and proceed to put guards posts and living quarters on the wrong side time after time. I wonder if it ever occurred to them that attackers tend to come inwards, rather than starting at the centre and working out.”
“Most of them are wearing bad leather and wielding clubs,” Brind points out. “I think savage could be on the mark. Their fighting style certainly doesn’t have much sophistication. Charge in, fight on pure rage, hope you win. Doesn’t exactly have a long life-expectancy.”
“And they all do it,” Halgo marvels. “I wonder how this tribe survives?”
His musings are broken up by another room of goblins, all screaming and chanting unintelligible war-cries for the fifteen seconds it takes for them to be cut down.
After a few hours of exploring, the group finds a crude rope bridge suspended over deep crevice in a long, wide cavern. They can hear the sounds of chanting from the far side, echoing off the cavern walls, and everyone is dubious as Yip tests the bridge.
“Not strong,” the kobold reports. “Hold weight, but easy to tip. Be careful.”
Geoffrey grumbles quietly as he takes his armour off once more.
“I hate this,” he mutters as he inches across the walkway. His mood isn’t improved when Yip walks in front of him on his hands, the kobold monk’s balance near perfect on the swaying ropes.
(Authors Note: This part of the storyhour takes place on fast-forward because, quite honestly, it’s the one session of the campaign that I don’t think many of us were fond of. It uses the module Depth’s of Rage from Dungeon 83, and is one of those adventures which is a good premise but poor execution. What you miss in the retelling are the arduous hours of skill checks for no reason, the lack of variety in the opponents “Oh look, another room with 12 goblin barbarians,” and the palpable dislike many of the players had for the session. It’s about this point in the game when I actually hit the fast-forward button on the module itself, and proceeded to get us to the good part.)
There are far fewer twisting strands to the cave on the far side of the crevice, and the dim sound of goblin chanting gets louder as they crawl further through the winding tunnels. The breath of relief when the group actually finds a sizable chamber, large enough for all of them to stand at their full height, is loud enough that it echoes off the stone walls. Tunnels lead off in all directions, but the sound of goblin chanting is distinct from one leading to the north east.
“What are they saying?” Geoffrey asks Yip.
“We take gift of swords and spirit,” Yip translates. “We make strong with death of enemies.”
There is a bloodthirsty scream, noticeably elvish.
“I take it we’ve found some of the people we’re looking for?” Brind asks. No-one justifies his question with a reply.
“The way I figure it,” Halgo says, looking around the chamber, “we can either go in after them and try to ambush them while their performing the ritual, which will probably fail because the only person whose fitting through that tunnel with anything approaching stealth is Yip and he can’t take them on his own, or we can make a really, really loud noise and taunt them into coming here where we’ve got the space to fight and cast spells. Anyone got any objections to plan B?”
No-one does. Geoffrey looks at Yip and gives him a single order.
“Get their attention.”
Not that I'm blaming him, or complaining.
