Ptolus: Midwood - "The Dark Waters of Moss Pond"

[Gnome Quixote]

I genuinely believed that I had doomed poor Bufer when I had him volunteer to be Pick's hostage. Whizbang and the others didn't exactly reassure me in the OOC thread, either:

I am so dead.

Yeah, but with panache, baby. Panache!

For the record, I know Bufer offering himself up as the hostage is a baaaaad idea, but given his overprotectiveness of Hazel thus far, and his idealistic notion that kobolds and gnomes could live in peace if someone just took the first step, I believe it's what he would do.

Please speak well of him at the funeral.

Oh he won't be dead when we come out. But we might have another story about missing limbs to talk about at the Cat and Fiddle.

Now that the hostage is in kobold custody, is it a bad time to mention I'm reading the latest novel in the Song of Ice & Fire series? (Has anyone else here read those?)

No, but that has a really ominous ring to it.

I guessing Bufer won't be forced to marry the kobold royal heir, though.

So what exactly is our task, now? the group was waiting to see who showed up (kobolds). I was going to warn them about kobolds (I really am the worst deputy ever). Are we just hanging around outside until they come out or what?

YOU COME IN AND RESCUE MY SELFLESS GNOMISH BEHIND, DAMN YOU!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Pick's response to Bufer about the roots of kobold vs. gnome hatred draws both on the kobold material from Races of the Dragon and the most recent Ecology of the Kobold article from the Dragon. (Which I think is going to be reprinted in Dragon Ecologies this summer.) While the two don't always agree in their cultural details, their myths dovetail very nicely.

Green Mountain kobold culture, we'll see over time, lifts from both those sources, but is mostly its own thing, since Gax has spent centuries destroying the standard kobold power structures and creating a system that made them all as reliant on her as possible. Naturally, when she vanished, this threw the entire system into chaos, leading to the events of the Midwood campaign.

 

[Renraw Kem]

I want it on record that it was I who started the Constable/Kobold story. Tock backed me up on it.

And it's not just a rumor.

 

[Gnome Quixote]

"The kobolds stop to gag Bufer" is probaby my favorite line in the campaign thus far.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

My father, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, likes to quote 19th century Prussian soldier Helmuth von Moltke's line, "no plan survives first contact with the enemy."

This has been very true for the Midwood campaign. This entire adventure was a result of two characters trying to screw the group out of loot that, realistically, they would have probably just handed over to Renraw anyway.

In an effort to have the entire adventure not be sitting in the snow, waiting for non-existent bandits to show up, I decided to have a group of kobold adventurers from Green Mountain come by and recover the dead the Maidensbridge group had discovered inside the cairn in their first adventure.

(The stuff the kobolds allude to were things I had planned for the background of the setting, but I had set things up as sort of a sandbox and intended to let the player characters set the course for the campaign. This adventure set that course, all right.)

I figured I'd show the group -- which included several folks new to D&D -- that kobolds are both kind of wussy in general, but that not all of them will be. So I created three classed kobolds, Pick (cleric of Tiamat 3), Blacktooth (ranger 2), Wormy (rogue 2) and three level 1 warrior mooks. The group could mow down the mooks but the others would be a fun challenge for the full group, but a beatable one -- this was just supposed to be a little side trek, after all.

So, naturally, the group fractures into multiple subgroups, one of the kobolds becomes a hostage, Bufer goes nuts and volunteers himself as a hostage, and then two characters take on a challenge meant for the whole group.

Pick has the Trickery domain, and I decided to play her as smart as possible, as for the past few years, my wife has played a well-respected cleric and priest in various MMORPGs, and I wanted to impart some of that to Pick, and make her a real threat. So she uses her 2nd level domain spell, invisibility, blesses her group and then lays in with the fire-and-forget spiritual weapon, which was nastier than I realized.

Even with me forgetting to remove Emus' summoned wolf after a single round, things ended up much bloodier than expected. Not everyone is alive by the time Renraw, Katadid and Tucker arrive.

So much for plans. The consequences of Katadid's negotiation with Wormy help snowball Renraw's trick into something that eventually sends the campaign off in yet another direction in the next adventure ...

 

[Emus Graymullet]

Even with me forgetting to remove Emus' summoned wolf after a single round, things ended up much bloodier than expected.

I'd always wondered if you forgot, or if you were just being nice. So, um, thanks for forgetting!

But yeah, the plan fell to pieces when they sliced Bufer's throat before Emmerson and Emus could even do anything other than show themselves. And then Emus' first target turned invisible. And then it turned out that the kobolds had class levels (Emus really should have targeted that crossbowman, first.)

Um, I'm not actually sure that Emmerson and I really had a plan now that I reread that last paragraph.

Anyway, something I missed the first time around because I was so invested in the combat was Katadid's transition from "One and One" referring to the questions to "One and One" referring to the constable and the deputy. I thought that was neat.

 

[Trench]

Anyway, something I missed the first time around because I was so invested in the combat was Katadid's transition from "One and One" referring to the questions to "One and One" referring to the constable and the deputy. I thought that was neat.

heh. Glad you noticed. Kat's all about patterns within patterns. To his detriment.

 

[bissichan]

I'd always wondered if you forgot, or if you were just being nice. So, um, thanks for forgetting!

But yeah, the plan fell to pieces when they sliced Bufer's throat before Emmerson and Emus could even do anything other than show themselves. And then Emus' first target turned invisible. And then it turned out that the kobolds had class levels (Emus really should have targeted that crossbowman, first.)

Um, I'm not actually sure that Emmerson and I really had a plan now that I reread that last paragraph.

We had a plan. Supposedly the noisy paladin was going to stay behind and issue a challenge while the sneaky druid/barbarian was going to flank them.

I think we blew the Move Silently roll.

And we had no idea they had class levels. That was a very, very tense fight. For the first two rounds I kept thinking "This is 1/4 CR? Yikes!"

 

[Gnome Quixote]

The thing about pbp gaming is that you're frequently not around when big stuff happens that could potentially have a huge impact on the campaign. As a group, our schedules are all over place, partly due to work commitments, partly due to simple geography, so you never know when you're going to come home or wake up to an enormous info-dump of story that happened when you were foolishly off-line working or sleeping.

Such was the case for most of the group when Bufer gave himself up as the hostage, which developed in a flurry of late-night posts between Whiz, Trench and myself. Most of them went to bed thinking Hazel was the captive. I got quite a few private messages the next morning reading, essentially, "WTF, dude?!!"

Heh. I totally understood the feeling when I came home late from work about a week later to find my poor lil' gnome lying face-down in the snow with his throat slashed, as a decidedly one-sided battle raged around him. It was simultaneously the most awful and most awesome thing that could have happened in my absence.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

That's something else I wanted to show with Pick and her buddies.

The Midwood crew will have non-evil antagonists, who might be ruthless (the first of whom will show up in the Story Hour next week), but they're not actually evil.

Pick, who is as lawful as they come, is also Evil with a capital E. When she's double-crossed, she has no qualms about slaughtering Bufer like a pig. The non-evil antagonists might make things uncomfortable for the group for their own reasons, but slitting the throat of a bound and helpless hostage? Not so much.