Adventure Recap - Day 0 (the pre-quest)

(I intend this to be first in a line of post-adventure posts so that we have a record, however meager and biased, of our adventures that at which we can look back and giggle.)

With Moonglum on the sidelines due to an acute case of being weak, the six of us (Lord Bolt, Taran, Malak, Lotheryn, Iuean, and "Angela") started out on a grey, mournful day in the remote, uncivilized town of ... heck, I don't know, Grant's Pass? It wasn't a very remarkable town. In fact, it was kind of dingy... but crawling with women! Malak's kind of town, as he unsuccessfully tried to convey non-verbally (Malak requires an unskilled "show emotion other than rage check" to use body language -- he rolled a 2) to the group. Anyway, the weather wasn't the only thing that was depressing... all the women seemed depressed, and didn't want to talk to a fly brother (or his crew). We wasted no time in learning more...

after the jump, more on our first adventure.

Anyway, after Malak failed to make any progress by intimidating anyone, finally Ieuan the Bard figured out the source of the women's trouble... all the men went to a mine and never came back. A few awkward conversations later, we found out that a group of racially oppressed goblins ("kobolds") had taken over the silver mine (or so they assumed) and had also, somehow, poisoned the well water. Despite the protests of Lord Bolt and Malak (who both had better things to do than solve someone else's problems), and despite the annoying insistence of Taran the Ranger that Lord Bolt was supposed to care about the problems assailing the village, the whole group went down to the mine.

At the mine, things went from bad to worse. First of all, we couldn't figure out who was supposed to hold the torch. Or whether we should even use a torch and not a hooded lantern. Then we couldn't decide who should stand in the back of the group, and even though we had our best people on the case (Angela and Taran), we kept sniffing down hallways to no avail. We were assaulted by various traps and crappy enemies, pausing just long enough in each room to contract a disease before finally dealing roughly 10 times the damage we needed to just to kill the Kobolds we stumbled across. Malak was probably the star of the show, missing rarely and getting hit even less. Lotheryn struggled with her pet, but healed Ay-Ven at a particularly critical moment, and generally made herself useful. Taran mostly shook his head in the back of the group and wondered how he got here, and Lord Bolt charged to the front heroically (showing some of that Paladin can-do) and missed... and missed... and missed. Occasionally he died. It was very embarassing.

The encounter reached its climax in a long room with shelves, where after dealing with a cloud of baking powder exploding and getting in our face, we killed a bunch of kobolds, then a bunch of rats, and then carelessly freed a Dire Weasel who proceeded to wreak havoc on our sense of self-worth by relentlessly resisting our efforts to just step on it and be done with it. The danger didn't cease with the cessation of the Weasel, though, as Lord Bolt's predatory nature got the best of him at last... he ate diseased oats and fell gravely ill, causing his constitution to briefly drop into negative numbers. Fortunately, though, Angela looted like it was going out of style, and brought back a metric ton of gems, which we promptly "slanged" to the local community.

Oh, we didn't bring back their men. Nor did we find out what was wrong with their well water. But eventually a cleric did heal Lord Bolt's diseases.