My players and I have segued into the events unfolding in the barony of Harkenwold. They were sent there by Faren Markelhay, the Lord Warden of Fallcrest. He had heard of how they had expertly killed two war drakes that had attacked the city, as well as the daring rescue of the Septarches daughter a month or so before. Markelhay was sending them to Harkenwold as scouts, to see why the barony had lost contact with them a few weeks ago.
The Septarch told them that this was also a good chance to lead whatever evil was chasing them away from Fallcrest. He slipped them a scroll which would teleport them back to the Septarchs tower when their mission was complete. Meaning that whatever followed them to Harkenwold would find a suddenly dead trail.
Along the way they came across a nest of giant ants, clearing the forest and dragging logs around. They snuck up to check 'em out, but decided that giant ants were much too cool to actually kill. They did spend a reasonable amount of time dwelling on how they could capture two and ride them like faithful steeds though. Other than that they couldn't find much incentive to actually go killing everything.
When they got to the valley of Harkenwold, they encountered a plume of smoke, which lead to a burning outhouse. AKA Encounter E1.
Puddle (Wizard) tried bamboozling them by pretending to be part of the marauders that were attacking the farmhouse. While he did that Greek (Rogue) snuck around to the house where she could hear a woman hollering. She slipped a note under the door saying she was there to help.
Puddle confused the marauders but it only slowed them. The two wolves that were accompanying them jumped into action and started to attack him.
The woman in the farmhouse was able to give Greek a longbow while Puddle became bloodied by the two wolves that were gnawing him on both sides, shifting in and out.
Apart from this sudden bloodying which forced Puddle to quaff a healing potion they managed to dispatch all the marauders.
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| A guy who's totally not as bad arse when HE'S the one getting set on fire. (Art not by me) |
Puddle made the decision to cut the mans throat afterwards, something that didn't seem to go down too well with Greek. A brief discussion about how unaligned "unaligned" is ensued. I have a hard time justifying alignments in DnD. Sometimes I feel like they're just sort of arbitrarily getting in the way. They've merged good and evil with order and chaos. I thought this was a bit weird when I first got into DnD, but it makes a lot of sense with the way they have rigged their gods up. And it gives most "bad" characters a reason to be destroying everything. You see, the Primordials made the world originally, forming it out of bits of the elemental chaos. The Gods are pretty much pure expressions of motives and emotions. So when the Gods saw this mint place the Primordials had made, they came down and asserted themselves in it, creating all sorts of crazy life. But to do this they had to create some order in the world to sustain everything. Nothing can really live in chaos right? So the Primordials get pissed that the world they made is getting all messed up (in their opinion) and so starts the dawn wars between the Primordials and the Gods. These ended after a while and the spirits of the world decided that the world couldn't be used as a place to scrap anymore and that the Gods and Primordials could go rack off back to wherever they came from.
To cut the story abruptly short, this is where alignments spawned from (in-game of course.) Most monsters in the game can be considered chaotic. Thus meaning they believe that the world should go back to the state it was before it was ordered into columns and grids of order. Lawful Good characters oppose this view, believing that "an ordered society protects us from evil."
In many ways the Dawn Wars continue to this very day.
This won't stop player characters from choosing "unaligned" though, since their indecisive creatures that don't want to be tied down to any sort of moral code which might deny them gold and riches.
Anyway, they met up with Dar Gremath, one of the self proclaimed leaders of the rebellion in Albridge. He was an ex-adventurer himself, so he appreciated the support from Greek and Puddle. To show him that they could be useful and awesome they went and took out an Iron Circle Caravan (Encounter E3). Greeks dice were against her however and she got bloodied rather quickly, something that hasn't happened in a while. It was quite concerning really. Especially since she was faced with a Construct.
But it all ended happily enough, so yay. They're so close to level 5! New and exciting monsters please =D.
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