We played through a session of our "Dreams of Erthe" campaign today, running through an adventure I named "Hyena Arena.". The party was ambushed while traveling by 8 gnolls, a gnoll druid with a hyena animal companion, two gnoll fighters, a dire hyena, and a leucrotta. It was a pretty tough fight, but the fact that my dice betrayed me on several occasions helped them to take out all but one of the gnoll fighters (who scarpered while it was still possible).
They tracked him down to the lair the pack has been using, an abandoned dwarven arena at the foot of the mountains, where the PCs rescued a half-dozen human slaves, ended up killing off the rest of the pack, and finding their pack leader asleep in a dream coma. After deciding whether or not to kill her (would doing so deprive the Nightmare King of whatever he gains by putting people into these dream comas?), they decided to tie up her physical body and then go rescue her from the dreamlands. In her dream, she was fighting off a dozen hyenas in the arena, but each time she'd kill one it would remanifest. The PCs quickly learned that when they killed a hyena, it stayed dead, so eventually they were able to kill them all and awaken the pack leader.
Once awake, the pack leader explained she saw the dream as a sending from the god of battle that she had led her pack onto a wrong path (why else would the hyenas be attacking her like that in her dream?) and vowed to lead her pack away and go back to the old ways of hunting for their own food instead of buying slaves. (Too late: the rest of her pack had already been slain.) The PCs let her go, though, after the half-orc cleric paladin insisted she be given an opportunity to turn her life around.
Johnathan
They tracked him down to the lair the pack has been using, an abandoned dwarven arena at the foot of the mountains, where the PCs rescued a half-dozen human slaves, ended up killing off the rest of the pack, and finding their pack leader asleep in a dream coma. After deciding whether or not to kill her (would doing so deprive the Nightmare King of whatever he gains by putting people into these dream comas?), they decided to tie up her physical body and then go rescue her from the dreamlands. In her dream, she was fighting off a dozen hyenas in the arena, but each time she'd kill one it would remanifest. The PCs quickly learned that when they killed a hyena, it stayed dead, so eventually they were able to kill them all and awaken the pack leader.
Once awake, the pack leader explained she saw the dream as a sending from the god of battle that she had led her pack onto a wrong path (why else would the hyenas be attacking her like that in her dream?) and vowed to lead her pack away and go back to the old ways of hunting for their own food instead of buying slaves. (Too late: the rest of her pack had already been slain.) The PCs let her go, though, after the half-orc cleric paladin insisted she be given an opportunity to turn her life around.
Johnathan