When last we met

This post happened the same night as the last entry: I figured that you folks can only handle so much halfling in one entry.

The three remaining adventurers — Quoras Swift, halfling rogue; Dolemite, dwarf cleric; Clant Borton, human fighter — had arrived in Neverwinter to search for a fourth party member. The guard at the gate, mistaking them for mercenaries in search of work, told them to see General Sabine at the Moonstone Mask.

They arrived at the docks, looking up to see that the Mask was an in… On a floating island.

A brawl

The group made their way to the top of the cliffs and looked at the stable, but still swaying, bridge to the Mask. They crossed one by one, taking their time so as to not, y’know, fall and die.

All safely across, they opened the door. The first thing they saw was a tall, olive skinned woman break a bottle over the head of the person next to her. The man punched back, and almost as one the entire place erupted in a giant fistfight.

Bottles, sticks, fists, anything people could grab became a weapon in the fracas. Luckily no one had any weapons. Except, that is, for Clant and Dolemite, who took one look at each other, shrugged, and ran headlong into the crowd.

Quoras, deciding that discretion was the better part of something or other, snuck through the crowd and climbed a curtain to get a view of the action. There he saw lots of punching, kicking, fighting, spitting, twisting arms behind some backs, tiny improvised attacks.

I… I don’t know what just happened. Anyway: punching. Clant and Dolemite did okay for themselves, but the tight quarters made it hard to actually hit anything. Eventually the cleric realized he knew the spell “calm emotions”, and casting it…

Everything stopped.

Now that emotions were calm

The group approached the woman, addressing her as General Sabine. She was confused: her name was Hyppolyta, and she had no love for the general or the Lord Protector. Her tribe had lived in the area, a community of warrior women, but the eruption of Mt Hotenow had left them without a home. They now wandered the region, making due as well as they could. She had come to Neverwinter to ask for help but the Protector only cared about his power, she said.

Dolemite looked at her askance. “Are you part of Occupy Neverwinter?” he asked.

Clant had a more pressing question: “Do you love the undead?” Can’t have another secret necromancer on their hands.

The group pressed her for information about Neverwinter and the resistance. When I didn’t know the name of the resistance — Because none of this was supposed to happen! The campaign never sends them to Neverwinter! — Alex called me a “dumbgeon master”. Which, I mean, is fair.

They debated what to do: Quoras got it into his head that joining the city guard sounded like a great idea, despite the whole friend-of-theirs-has-been-kidnapped pressing issue thing going on, but Hyppolyta wasn’t having it: she would consider joining them, but not to help the heads of Neverwinter.

I joked that Cally’s characters were doomed to leave the party over philosophical differences, this time before she had even really joined, but they all decided to go back to the original plan and head to Thundertree.

(spinny Batman logo but it’s a d20 or something)

And they were in Thundertree!

What was left of it, at least. The eruption of Hotenow had left it in ruins, and most of the buildings had crumbled into a pile of stones and foliage. They walked along the path, wary: Reidoth should be here, but so should a dragon. And zombies.

They looked into the first house they came across. It was dark, but something seemed wrong. Then the bushes attacked. Well, twig blights, to be more precise, but still: shrubbery.

They made quick work of the barely-sentient foliage, moving from house to house. Everything was completely ruined, though. More twig blights came, and more twig blights went: “Damage Bros, trimmin’ hedges” became the motto of the night, after the moniker that Clant and Quoras had given themselves.

Eventually they came to a larger building, which seemed to have been an inn. They smelled the byproducts of fermentation, so the group went inside. They had to muscle their way through the door, and when they did a group of figures rose slowly from the ground. Zombies.

Hyppolyta ran into the fray, slashing zombies to and fro. The first one fell, a puff of ash coming from the wound in its body. The warrior woman felt sluggish, tired. Oh, right: ash zombies.

She tried to pull back some, but the zombies managed to get close enough to gas her a few more times. As she approached the final creature she drew back her sword, and — with a roll of 20 from Cally — turned it to dust. Well, more dust. Since it was made of dust anyway.

They stood, catching their breath, and discovered all the beer was gone. Damn. They would continue on their quest.

(And then the party, in real life, went out for Justin’s birthday. A guy at The Pink really wanted to fight me. Fun times all around.)