Radiating Gnome
Adventurer
Goonies in Dyvers II
Goonies in Dyvers II
The group settled in to a bit of routine for a few days. Eli was putting the finishing touches on a homemade bow, Pah was showing off her shooting trickery to the other Dragoons, Uri poured over item creation books in Solen’s lab while Minimonk complied his list of his favorite Uri one-liners, and Irk . . . well, Irk sharpened his axe.
In tavern crawls after hours the group started to hear stories about a core group of the claws – a gang of mercenary adventurers lead by a vicious dwarf named Brottkil.
One morning, things seemed odd. The men were walking around, looking at the heroes a bit oddly, as if they were waiting for something to happen, some reaction to something. No one was quite sure what to make of it. After a while, most of the group was off doing their thing, when Uri shuffled off to the latrine for his morning constitutional, still puzzled by the wide berth the other Dragoons were giving him. He shut himself in, squatted down on the worn pine seat, and looked up idly at the wall. There he saw what the fuss was about. A couplet had been carved into the wood.
Have you heard of the heroes of Spittlemarch
A short band of Rogues with no spines
Uri was incensed, to say the least.
He raced back to the lab, grabbed a sheet of parchment and a bit of charcoal, and raced back to the latrine. He took a rubbing of the carving to show the others, then took out a dagger and scratched it out, gouging up the wood something fierce.
Meanwhile, the rest of the party was trying to find out more about what was going on in and around the Dragon Temple. A day of investigating allowed them to gather a great deal of information. The dragon priests had bought or seized a great deal of land around their existing temple -- small temples and shops in the area were driven out of business and then the land bought from creditors. A huge construction project was underway on the site -- every mason, carpenter, and laborer in the city had been hired away from other jobs, most making double their usual daily salary. The construction site was confused and chaotic to the outside observer -- it seemed like everything was going up at once.
Using a hat of disguise, Pah was able to sneak into the site and steal a plan from a dwarven architect. The goonies slunk back to the Dragoon barracks to try to see what was going on.
Conferring with Solen and Nikolai, they looked over the map. Solen was aghast at the audacity of the plan. The Dragon Priests were building a walled city within Dyvers. Dragon City would have it's own barracks, it's own mercantile and tavern district, a stableyard big enough to handle a great deal of livestock (much more than seemed necessary to mount all of the claws garrisoned there) and a much larger temple complex. But more than that, there was a huge section of the walled area -- an area with even thicker, taller walls than those that separated Dragon City from Dyvers. And the notation on the map for that area read simply "Nursery."
Within the Nursery were the plans for a great tower -- something the remembered having seen the first four levels of already from outside the walls. That tower looked like it would house the leaders of the cult the tallest building in Dyvers, and a more commanding presence than even the Magister's palace.
Solen was furious, and panicked, and he started to race about, composing three or four letters at once. The party slipped back out of the lab. It was getting on towards evening, and they weren't sure what their next move would be.
Uri remembered the bit of verse from the latrine wall, and showed his rubbing to the rest of the group. They were a bit disturbed, but didn't know what to make of it. Then Olaf came back to the barracks from one of the nearby taverns, white as a sheet.
He approached the Goonies. "You had better get down to thy Slaked Throat. "
"Why?" asked Eli.
"Just go."
So they went. There was a performer at the tavern -- a bard of mediocre talent. the crowd was lively but a bit edgy once the party entered. Then, someone towards the front, who hadn't seen the Goonies come in, begged the bard to sing "it" one more time. So the bard began to sing.
Have you heard of the heroes of Spittlemarch
A short band of rogues with no spine
They kill peasants in the fields for their breakfast
slaughter children in their beds when they dine
The dwarf is a burly whoreson called Geezer.
Breadless and old, he can't walk a straight line
A hobbit with guns called Thunderpants
who farts great green clouds when she dines
An elf with a bow they call Cherrypicker
He'll fight from a distance, but up close he'll surrender and whine
And the little wizard, a peck called Bugboy
He crals on his belly to find the roaches on which he dines
Those are the heroes of spittle march
A short band of rogues with no spine.
As the bard began a second reprise, Irk pushed his way towards the bar. Over the sound of most of the tavern singing along, Irk ordered a small barrel of beer. Once it came, he hefted it once, testing the weight and balance. Then he threw it at the Bard.
The barrel smashed into the bard, crushing his lute and knocking him against the back wall in a pool of beer and sprung barrel staves. While the crowd looked on in shock, and the bard tried to regain his feet, Irk bounded onto the stage, snatching up a footstool in one hand, and began to pummel the soggy bard with it.
The tavern cleared pretty quickly. And it was only a matter of moments before the sound of the calls for the city watch could be heard. So the other Goonies dragged Irk off the bard and dragged the two of them off into the night, looking for a new, quiet place, where they could question him.
Uri, who had stayed behind at the barracks to try to help Solen and do some more research, discovered the entire lyrics of the song carved into the latrine wall. Convinced that there was trouble coming, he raced off to the tavern, looking for the rest of the goonies. But his search took a lot longer than he expected, because the tavern group had skittered off to hiding with the bard.
The bard told them an interesting story, once they sat him down in a dark alley for questioning. He had been hired -- for a huge fee -- to sing and play that song by a human male, wearing the colors of the claws of the dragon under a heavy cloak. he knew nothing more, had though it a prank more than anything else, but clearly had not expected the sort of theater critics the goonies (by which we mean Irk) turned out to be.
Uri failed to find the others, and returned to the barracks after a while. there he made a terrible discovery. Under the cover of night, with none of the goonies and only a few dragoons around, the Barracks area had been raided. Two night watchmen were dead. And the door to Solen's laboratory stood open.
Uri peeked inside the lab. There, on the floor, was Solen's body, a grey-black blade still thrust into his back. He was dead -- had been dead long enough to be a bit cold already.
That alarm went up. Uri ran about, barking orders and the last few Dragoons in the compound, trying to call back the others from their night revels.
Hearing the alarms as they headed back towards the barracks, the other goonies picked up the pace, racing back as fast as their stunty legs could carry them. There they found Uri, Pavel and the just-awakened and still groggy Nikolai trying to sort out what to do next.
Uri saw the rest of the group approaching. He told them the outlines of the story. "Solen's dead.
Irk shrugged with bravado he didn't quite feel. "We've been dead before."
The party examined the scene as best they could. It was pretty clear that there had been two attackers, both very skilled, and that they had come at Solen from two sides, by surprise. The most obvious clue was a dagger that the killers had left behind in Solen’s back. The Goonies took turns examining the dagger, looking for something distinctive about the long, thin, grey-steel blade. Then Eli got an idea, grabbed the dagger and ran outside into the dawn. When the early morning sunlight hit the blade it turned to dust in an instant.
“Drow?” asked Uri.
Eli nodded. Each remembered a time, a few months ago, after their victory at Spittlemarch, when Solen had used a magical water basin of scrying that had shown them Anathe, making his way through the underdark, with a Drow escort. It appeared that Anathe had brought his new allies into Dyvers with him.
Plans were made. Pavel prepared Soeln’s body for travel, and left in the early morning hours to try to find a cleric outside the city that would raise Solen, carrying a fortune in the Goonie’s financial reserves to pay for the service. At the same time, the Goonies themselves took up positions where they could watch the Dragonpriest compound, trying to figure out what was going on, and where the Drow assassins might behind.
Using her hat of disguise, Pah snuck into the construction site and managed to make off with one of the master plans for the construction site. The place was huge, and had a lot of different areas – a huge barracks area for the claws, the already complete temple, a small shopping and tavern district labeled Dragontown, and in one corner, designed to have thicker walls than the rest of the compound, there would be a area labeled the nursery. Positioned in the middle of the nursery there was a plan for a great tower – it would be the tallest building in the city when it was completed. At the moment it was only four stories tall, still quite an impressive building.
While this investigation was going on, Irk was off on another project. He had borrowed some pen and parchment from Pavel, and had been composing his own doggerel, which he then paid a handful of other bards to sing all around the city. Here is a sample:
The claws are sneaky, no-neck goons
they kill at night by the light of the moon;
they're a danger to all good Dyvers Folk,
They'd choose heir own other for a poke
They come to build a secret town
to tear tradition, the old ways, down
Assassins, cowards, at odds with law
to all that's good -- anath . . . ema
A bit of poking around, gathering information in the drinking holes frequented by the construction workers and soldiers in the area revealed some interesting information. To begin with, they heard that Anathe, Eldgrim, and several Claws (including Brottkill’s team) had left on the morning tide for parts unknown. And the heard that Anathe had already been using the tower for his residence and offices, over the objection of some of the local leaders of the faith. And one drunken guard talked about shadowy figures moving around the Tower after dark. That was enough to get the party interesting enough to investigate the tower after dark.
And so, they girded their loins and hit the outer walls after dark. Of course, scaling walls isn’t much of a challenge for most of the Goonies anymore . With two cloaks of arachnia, and a set of slippers of spider climb, most of the party was able to get up the wall with very little difficulty. Irk was actually strong enough to carry Minimonk and Pah up (Halflings fit into big pockets for Irk.)
Once in the nursery area, they found themselves in a garden under construction. The ground was freshly plowed, there were plans and trees waiting to be put into the ground, and the area was deathly quiet.
They made their way to the tower, and decided to scale the outside of the building and work their way in from the top, once again taking advantage of the spider climb abilities at their disposal.
Once they hit the roof, though, things got ugly fast. It turned out that they had not been as unobserved crossing the nursery grounds as they thought, and a pair of Drow assassins were waiting for them on the top level.
The two drow assassins gave the party a healthy bit of exercise, first knocking Pah out with bolts from hand crossbows coated with sleeping poison. They managed to aggravate the party before escaping to the lower levels. The group took control of the top level of the tower, and then made their way down into the lower levels after the drow.
The battle picked up again in the lower levels as the drow struck from hiding again and again, working to find flanking positions and take advantage of their sneak attacks. In the end, though they took a beating, they managed to defeat the drow assassins and get a quick look around. They found a chamber that looked like someone had been living in it and using it as a sort of bedroom/office. On a table they found several letters. (I’ll post the letters as separate posts).
With the letters and other look they could carry away, they managed to escape over the walls again and return to the Dragoon compound. Once there they found that the Dragoons that were left (only 8 and Nikolai, there was no sign of Alexei and four Dragoons that had been sent out into the taverns to gather a little information for the party) had moved their belongings onto the ship (the Mystery Machine, according to the freshly painted stern) and were peeking over the gunwales with their muskets, looking like armed yet terrified gophers. They were relieved to hear that the drow assassins were dead, but they were not willing to leave the ship.
And that left the party, without Solen, and Pavel, to try to figure out what their next move would be.
Goonies in Dyvers II
The group settled in to a bit of routine for a few days. Eli was putting the finishing touches on a homemade bow, Pah was showing off her shooting trickery to the other Dragoons, Uri poured over item creation books in Solen’s lab while Minimonk complied his list of his favorite Uri one-liners, and Irk . . . well, Irk sharpened his axe.
In tavern crawls after hours the group started to hear stories about a core group of the claws – a gang of mercenary adventurers lead by a vicious dwarf named Brottkil.
One morning, things seemed odd. The men were walking around, looking at the heroes a bit oddly, as if they were waiting for something to happen, some reaction to something. No one was quite sure what to make of it. After a while, most of the group was off doing their thing, when Uri shuffled off to the latrine for his morning constitutional, still puzzled by the wide berth the other Dragoons were giving him. He shut himself in, squatted down on the worn pine seat, and looked up idly at the wall. There he saw what the fuss was about. A couplet had been carved into the wood.
Have you heard of the heroes of Spittlemarch
A short band of Rogues with no spines
Uri was incensed, to say the least.
He raced back to the lab, grabbed a sheet of parchment and a bit of charcoal, and raced back to the latrine. He took a rubbing of the carving to show the others, then took out a dagger and scratched it out, gouging up the wood something fierce.
Meanwhile, the rest of the party was trying to find out more about what was going on in and around the Dragon Temple. A day of investigating allowed them to gather a great deal of information. The dragon priests had bought or seized a great deal of land around their existing temple -- small temples and shops in the area were driven out of business and then the land bought from creditors. A huge construction project was underway on the site -- every mason, carpenter, and laborer in the city had been hired away from other jobs, most making double their usual daily salary. The construction site was confused and chaotic to the outside observer -- it seemed like everything was going up at once.
Using a hat of disguise, Pah was able to sneak into the site and steal a plan from a dwarven architect. The goonies slunk back to the Dragoon barracks to try to see what was going on.
Conferring with Solen and Nikolai, they looked over the map. Solen was aghast at the audacity of the plan. The Dragon Priests were building a walled city within Dyvers. Dragon City would have it's own barracks, it's own mercantile and tavern district, a stableyard big enough to handle a great deal of livestock (much more than seemed necessary to mount all of the claws garrisoned there) and a much larger temple complex. But more than that, there was a huge section of the walled area -- an area with even thicker, taller walls than those that separated Dragon City from Dyvers. And the notation on the map for that area read simply "Nursery."
Within the Nursery were the plans for a great tower -- something the remembered having seen the first four levels of already from outside the walls. That tower looked like it would house the leaders of the cult the tallest building in Dyvers, and a more commanding presence than even the Magister's palace.
Solen was furious, and panicked, and he started to race about, composing three or four letters at once. The party slipped back out of the lab. It was getting on towards evening, and they weren't sure what their next move would be.
Uri remembered the bit of verse from the latrine wall, and showed his rubbing to the rest of the group. They were a bit disturbed, but didn't know what to make of it. Then Olaf came back to the barracks from one of the nearby taverns, white as a sheet.
He approached the Goonies. "You had better get down to thy Slaked Throat. "
"Why?" asked Eli.
"Just go."
So they went. There was a performer at the tavern -- a bard of mediocre talent. the crowd was lively but a bit edgy once the party entered. Then, someone towards the front, who hadn't seen the Goonies come in, begged the bard to sing "it" one more time. So the bard began to sing.
Have you heard of the heroes of Spittlemarch
A short band of rogues with no spine
They kill peasants in the fields for their breakfast
slaughter children in their beds when they dine
The dwarf is a burly whoreson called Geezer.
Breadless and old, he can't walk a straight line
A hobbit with guns called Thunderpants
who farts great green clouds when she dines
An elf with a bow they call Cherrypicker
He'll fight from a distance, but up close he'll surrender and whine
And the little wizard, a peck called Bugboy
He crals on his belly to find the roaches on which he dines
Those are the heroes of spittle march
A short band of rogues with no spine.
As the bard began a second reprise, Irk pushed his way towards the bar. Over the sound of most of the tavern singing along, Irk ordered a small barrel of beer. Once it came, he hefted it once, testing the weight and balance. Then he threw it at the Bard.
The barrel smashed into the bard, crushing his lute and knocking him against the back wall in a pool of beer and sprung barrel staves. While the crowd looked on in shock, and the bard tried to regain his feet, Irk bounded onto the stage, snatching up a footstool in one hand, and began to pummel the soggy bard with it.
The tavern cleared pretty quickly. And it was only a matter of moments before the sound of the calls for the city watch could be heard. So the other Goonies dragged Irk off the bard and dragged the two of them off into the night, looking for a new, quiet place, where they could question him.
Uri, who had stayed behind at the barracks to try to help Solen and do some more research, discovered the entire lyrics of the song carved into the latrine wall. Convinced that there was trouble coming, he raced off to the tavern, looking for the rest of the goonies. But his search took a lot longer than he expected, because the tavern group had skittered off to hiding with the bard.
The bard told them an interesting story, once they sat him down in a dark alley for questioning. He had been hired -- for a huge fee -- to sing and play that song by a human male, wearing the colors of the claws of the dragon under a heavy cloak. he knew nothing more, had though it a prank more than anything else, but clearly had not expected the sort of theater critics the goonies (by which we mean Irk) turned out to be.
Uri failed to find the others, and returned to the barracks after a while. there he made a terrible discovery. Under the cover of night, with none of the goonies and only a few dragoons around, the Barracks area had been raided. Two night watchmen were dead. And the door to Solen's laboratory stood open.
Uri peeked inside the lab. There, on the floor, was Solen's body, a grey-black blade still thrust into his back. He was dead -- had been dead long enough to be a bit cold already.
That alarm went up. Uri ran about, barking orders and the last few Dragoons in the compound, trying to call back the others from their night revels.
Hearing the alarms as they headed back towards the barracks, the other goonies picked up the pace, racing back as fast as their stunty legs could carry them. There they found Uri, Pavel and the just-awakened and still groggy Nikolai trying to sort out what to do next.
Uri saw the rest of the group approaching. He told them the outlines of the story. "Solen's dead.
Irk shrugged with bravado he didn't quite feel. "We've been dead before."
The party examined the scene as best they could. It was pretty clear that there had been two attackers, both very skilled, and that they had come at Solen from two sides, by surprise. The most obvious clue was a dagger that the killers had left behind in Solen’s back. The Goonies took turns examining the dagger, looking for something distinctive about the long, thin, grey-steel blade. Then Eli got an idea, grabbed the dagger and ran outside into the dawn. When the early morning sunlight hit the blade it turned to dust in an instant.
“Drow?” asked Uri.
Eli nodded. Each remembered a time, a few months ago, after their victory at Spittlemarch, when Solen had used a magical water basin of scrying that had shown them Anathe, making his way through the underdark, with a Drow escort. It appeared that Anathe had brought his new allies into Dyvers with him.
Plans were made. Pavel prepared Soeln’s body for travel, and left in the early morning hours to try to find a cleric outside the city that would raise Solen, carrying a fortune in the Goonie’s financial reserves to pay for the service. At the same time, the Goonies themselves took up positions where they could watch the Dragonpriest compound, trying to figure out what was going on, and where the Drow assassins might behind.
Using her hat of disguise, Pah snuck into the construction site and managed to make off with one of the master plans for the construction site. The place was huge, and had a lot of different areas – a huge barracks area for the claws, the already complete temple, a small shopping and tavern district labeled Dragontown, and in one corner, designed to have thicker walls than the rest of the compound, there would be a area labeled the nursery. Positioned in the middle of the nursery there was a plan for a great tower – it would be the tallest building in the city when it was completed. At the moment it was only four stories tall, still quite an impressive building.
While this investigation was going on, Irk was off on another project. He had borrowed some pen and parchment from Pavel, and had been composing his own doggerel, which he then paid a handful of other bards to sing all around the city. Here is a sample:
The claws are sneaky, no-neck goons
they kill at night by the light of the moon;
they're a danger to all good Dyvers Folk,
They'd choose heir own other for a poke
They come to build a secret town
to tear tradition, the old ways, down
Assassins, cowards, at odds with law
to all that's good -- anath . . . ema
A bit of poking around, gathering information in the drinking holes frequented by the construction workers and soldiers in the area revealed some interesting information. To begin with, they heard that Anathe, Eldgrim, and several Claws (including Brottkill’s team) had left on the morning tide for parts unknown. And the heard that Anathe had already been using the tower for his residence and offices, over the objection of some of the local leaders of the faith. And one drunken guard talked about shadowy figures moving around the Tower after dark. That was enough to get the party interesting enough to investigate the tower after dark.
And so, they girded their loins and hit the outer walls after dark. Of course, scaling walls isn’t much of a challenge for most of the Goonies anymore . With two cloaks of arachnia, and a set of slippers of spider climb, most of the party was able to get up the wall with very little difficulty. Irk was actually strong enough to carry Minimonk and Pah up (Halflings fit into big pockets for Irk.)
Once in the nursery area, they found themselves in a garden under construction. The ground was freshly plowed, there were plans and trees waiting to be put into the ground, and the area was deathly quiet.
They made their way to the tower, and decided to scale the outside of the building and work their way in from the top, once again taking advantage of the spider climb abilities at their disposal.
Once they hit the roof, though, things got ugly fast. It turned out that they had not been as unobserved crossing the nursery grounds as they thought, and a pair of Drow assassins were waiting for them on the top level.
The two drow assassins gave the party a healthy bit of exercise, first knocking Pah out with bolts from hand crossbows coated with sleeping poison. They managed to aggravate the party before escaping to the lower levels. The group took control of the top level of the tower, and then made their way down into the lower levels after the drow.
The battle picked up again in the lower levels as the drow struck from hiding again and again, working to find flanking positions and take advantage of their sneak attacks. In the end, though they took a beating, they managed to defeat the drow assassins and get a quick look around. They found a chamber that looked like someone had been living in it and using it as a sort of bedroom/office. On a table they found several letters. (I’ll post the letters as separate posts).
With the letters and other look they could carry away, they managed to escape over the walls again and return to the Dragoon compound. Once there they found that the Dragoons that were left (only 8 and Nikolai, there was no sign of Alexei and four Dragoons that had been sent out into the taverns to gather a little information for the party) had moved their belongings onto the ship (the Mystery Machine, according to the freshly painted stern) and were peeking over the gunwales with their muskets, looking like armed yet terrified gophers. They were relieved to hear that the drow assassins were dead, but they were not willing to leave the ship.
And that left the party, without Solen, and Pavel, to try to figure out what their next move would be.
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