Captured! The Mürmaids Face a New Threat | D&D Session #3

Seeking Adventure; the Mürmaids Find New Enemies

Following their recuperation in the last d&d session, the Mürmaids decided to continue following the tributary northeast, in an attempt to find an old goblin temple, lately over-run with kobolds. According to Clyde, their dwarf henchman, there was some kind of treasure there, of great value to the goblins.

DM's Note

Two notes to add to this post, if my players reading this blog can forgive me demonstrating something to my other target audience, potential dungeon masters. First and foremost, this session was a great example of some of the Dungeon Master's Tips that I posted over the past few weeks. First, I let them lose. Second, I didn't say no, and let the players do whatever they felt like, even if it ended up hurting them. I think these are great points, since the loss of the River Maven, the loss of one of the player characters and the loss of the combat in general will make the drama much better later on, and make their victories more valuable when (if) they achieve them. Second, the fate of characters, however unfortunate, when I did not say no will be laughed about for many sessions to come.

The second note is on the presence of the "cursed" die, or the "death die." I have a very lucky 20 sided die. It was used yesterday. Everyone who plays against my red die hates that die, since when it rolls, it rolls 20's. We've agreed, as a team, that it is so uncanny that it needs to be tested to see it it is weighted or out of balance. This is the oldest die that I have, and I got it from some early starter set for 1st edition Dungeons and Dragons. I would hate to find out that it is out of balance, not only because I've been using it for so long, but because if we find that it is unfair, that means I have to stop using it, and the suspense that it causes when the red die skitters across the table has to go away. But stay tuned, we'll be testing the DM's 20-sided die of death in the near future (seriously, this die has killed more characters than dragons and dysentery combined).

Arrival Near the Kobold Lair

Clyde led the group upriver to a landmark called the Knoll of the Great Man, where apparently the kobold lair was nearby.

Upon approach to the knoll, Horace docked their ship, while the remainder of the party listened for any disturbances. Sure enough, Phil overheard some kind of mumbling, and identified that it was on the other side of the great stone man before them. The party, save Oliver (Alejandro was absent for this session, perhaps that was lucky of him), went ashore, and attempted to sneak up to the knoll and spy on whatever was making the noise around the other side. Clyde stayed at the sandy shore of the river, since he wouldn't be quiet upon approach, and awaited a signal.

Battle at the Knoll

Phil and Horace elected to scale the great stone monstrosity, while Guido snuck, quiet as a whisper up around the woods alongside it. While Phil spotted at least a few people moving around behind a thick patch of underbrush, Horace began to take aim with his shortbow. Guido, unfortunately, attempted to move too close and failed his move silently roll, and the gig was up. The leader of the group, hiding behind a tree, called for his surrender. A few lines were exchanged back and forth about why someone would be in this part of the wilderness, but the hidden man wouldn't have any of it, he demanded Guido drop all of his belongings, and walk away without trouble.

So the battle began. Horace fired upon the hidden party from atop the stone giant's head, scoring one hit fairly quickly. Guido lashed out with his spear and shortsword, scoring another solid hit. The leader of the hidden group, severely wounded, tried to retreat into the underbrush while his lackey and two kobolds they were apparently meeting with came forward to fight.

Phil, however, wasn't so lucky. In the first round he threw a dagger, and missed, then decided that the best movement he could make would be to try to hurl himself down from the head of the giant into a tree, from where he could fall upon his opponents (a good dungeon master should never say no). One failed dexterity check, and Phil took the full brunt of 5d6 falling damage, killing him instantly. Jon picked up the NPC Clyndice Cindercaught (aka Clyde) as his new PC.

For a moment after this, things actually went well. Guido landed a hit against the second human with his short sword, the first was still limping away having been wounded by his spear. The kobolds were miserable failures with their slings, and Horace was landing 50/50 with his bow. Clyde was sprinting as fast as he could manage towards the battle scene. But, in a single turn, as it always happens, things turn sour.

The second human, injured, but not retreating, punctured through Guido's defenses with his spear, and the brave fighter-thief went down, bleeding heavily (die of death 20 #1!). The kobolds, having spotted the man remaining atop the knoll, turned their attention to the half-elf Horace. After a few missed shots, and lucky dodges from the sling bullets (I don't think Skip realized a good hit with a sling bullet could have knocked him off the statue as well), Horace dropped the man, and the kobolds tried to flee. Clyde caught up to them, killing one while Horace killed the second from high above, and the first human, wounded horribly, surrendered.

An Opportunity for Gain

Clyde looted Phil's body, and took the human leader's longsword. They grabbed Guido, bound his wounds (thankfully before he bled out), and carried him and their new captive back to the River Maven. After some interrogation, the man revealed that he was indeed a captain of another ship, who comes to this knoll three times annually to buy captives from the kobolds and sell them off into the slave trade. The slavers's small riverboat was just upriver, and Horace assumed that there would be something of value therein, so he planned a small detour before tracking down the kobold lair could begin.

A Plot Foiled

They easily spotted the slavers' ship, and Horace left Clyde and Oliver aboard while he scouted ahead along a low bluff west of the river. As he neared, the half-elf identified three opponents abovedecks. One a drunkard, a large, bare-chested man with an axe strapped to his back drinking long pulls from a clay jug, the second a woman, with sharp ears and a sharp tongue, the third perhaps a half-elf, maybe an elf, with a cowl pulled over his head. Horace wasn't as quiet as he had hoped, but even when the woman hushed the drunken man, they couldn't spot him in the darkness. Eventually Horace tried to back away from the scene, to go get Clyde to help, but the woman heard it again, and ordered the large man to head into the woods to find the source of the noise. Before too long, Horace was found, Horace was attacked, and Horace was unconscious (die of death 20 #2!). While the drunkard was so quickly dispatching the half-elf burglar, the woman, leading the remaining pirates and slavers, ordered a small dinghy overboard with two of her fellow slavers aboard. One was the elf, in the bow of the boat with his spear, the other a previously undetected man. They found the River Maven handily enough, and Clyde attempted to up-anchor, allowing them to drift downstream. Unfortunately, no thought went into steering the vessel, and it crashed into the bluff. It has yet to be determined whether or not the ship will be repairable.

Clyde and Oliver fared well against the first opponent, with Clyde's sword and Oliver's hurled stones dispatching the elf. The human, though, proved to be a more difficult quarry. Clyde was quickly subdued (die of death 20 #3!), and without another PC awake as witness, nobody knows what happened to Oliver.

An Awakening

Thankfully, their opponents were slavers. As live bodies are worth a considerable amount of coin, especially strong ones like Clyde and Guido, and long-lived half elves like Horace, their wounds were bandaged and they were brought aboard the slavers' riverboat. Guido was the only one to awaken this session, surrounded by two other captives. Another dwarf from the Foulbriar Clan and a young hunter from a farmstead north of here. The dwarf was willing to converse quite a bit, and told of his capture by the kobolds, his time in captivity in their lair, and his eventual sale to the tall man with the whip and the sword (the first opponent Guido faced, the one who was eventually taken captive). Eventually, Guido tested his bonds. The chains were secure, but the board they were looped around was not. Rather than risk breaking some part of the hull of this rickety boat and causing leakage into the hold which would drown his two as-yet-unconscious companions, Guido decided to wait, and try to break free once they were awakened. Listening to the decks above, Guido was able to discern that there are merely three, perhaps four slavers left, though over the next few days, as they wait for Clyde and Horace to awaken, he will hear the coming and going of several kobolds as well. We agreed to start the next session with the dwarf and the half elf just awakening.

But wait! There's more......

Kathryn, playing Guido, noted that Oliver was not chained up in the hold with the remainder of the Mürmaids.

Oliver knew he was outmatched by the remaining human on the deck of the River Maven, so he threw his last stone as a distraction, and hurled himself overboard, grabbing one of Guido's spears as he did so. At first, he ran to the Great Man Knoll, and being pursued by the human pirate, threw himself under the crumpled corpse of Phil. The man eventually figured the trail had gone cold, and, rubbing the welt on his head from the last thrown rock, went back to collect his own captain, tied to the mast of the River Maven. Together, these two collected Clyde and Guido, loaded them into the dinghy, and rowed back to their own ship. Oliver took the ragged clothes off of one of the dead kobolds from the skirmish at the great man, and even severed one of their reptilian tails, and has attempted to make a disguise for himself. It services, from a distance, and he has passed himself off as a roaming kobold more than once or twice. Listening to their voices over the past few days, waiting for an opportune time to sneak aboard the slavers' ship, he has refined some of the common grunts and squeals of their language, and has used his disguise to even slip in and out of groups of them as they move back and forth to the slavers' ship for trade. He has also discovered that it is the female aboard who can speak kobold; or at least, she is the only surviving translator. So he has spent the past 2 days, skulking about the woods with a rotting kobold tail tucked into his belt, caked in the dried blood of Phil and kobolds to make himself appear more brownish-red, and shivering to sleep each night in the open mouth of the Knoll of the Great Man. His prized silk shirt, of course, is folded nicely and kept in a cool, dry place. Once and a while, his attempts to mimic the grunts and squeals of the kobolds is interrupted as he simply says "ew. yuck," at the presence of the gross, dirty stuff he's subjected himself to.

Until the next session; be excellent to one another, and party on, dudes.