Session 2

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Session 2
The gang ventured down the mountainside in the darkness to scout out the small village situated on the east coast of the island. It was a fairly small town, with palisade walls and one gate and no visible guards. The construction was uniformly shoddy, and there were no apparent guards.

Greg stealthily climbed the wall and looked around. Under the faint moonlight, the village almost looked like a ghost town for pint-sized hobos. There were dozens of shacks, each sized for creatures no taller than hip-height, and about one in five had at least a wall or part of the roof collapsed. There was firelight here and there near the shore, and Greg could make out some taller, more substantial-looking buildings near the shore as well.

The six friends moved out to the north side of the village, checking the walls for weak point, and found almost laughable carelessness when they reached the shore. Palisade posts splayed out lazily once the wall reached the sand, and any creature with a care could easily wade through a foot of water to walk around the wall entirely.

There were a number of small docks on the shore toward the center of the coastal openings of the palisade wall. There was only one ship docked, however. It was a smallish looking vessels with two masts, built for light ocean travel. There were no lights or fires on the ship.

Erin realized that she had the ability to talk with nearby animals, and spotted a fish swimming in the clear water near shore. She waded in and entered conversation with the creature, quickly realizing that fish are not particularly wise or insightful beings. She was able to glean, however, that the fish had little respect for the denizens of the village as hunters, and also that when the ship came into port a couple days previous, there was a fight and everyone who had been on the ship were killed and thrown into the water. From the fish’s estimation, the people who lived in the village were considerably shorter than Erin, and the people who were on the ship were a little taller.

The six decided to wait until morning and announce themselves to the village. With sunrise, the central gate opened, and a number of shoddily-dressed people filed out. They were short, maybe a little over 3 feet tall, with dull-orange skin and low, flat heads with pointed and curled ears. They looked like an anthropomorphic combination of a monkey, a chihuahua, and a drowned rat.

“Goblins,” Sam and Dave noted at once. Each of the little creatures carried something that looked like a shepherd’s crook, and they seemed to be heading to the south, where in the distance a herd a sheep-like animals grazed.

The group moved forward with weapons stowed and hailed the group of goblin shepherds. The goblin shepherds panicked, sprinted back into the village and the gate slammed shut. A pair of sentries appeared on the top of the wall with spears brandished.

For some reason, the sentries spoke a mangled form of German that Maggey, Paul and Erin could keep up with. Greg was able to get the general idea, and that was that This was the glorious town of Bromach, and its mighty army would defeat any huge creatures that tried to attack it.

Erin and Paul managed to convince the guards that the weren’t there to attack the village, and that they wanted to trade and find safe passage. The guards finally agreed to take the six travelers to their queen, but obviously were suspicious about the nature of the tall, pale skinned creatures who had appeared seemingly from out of nowhere.

The towns guards - a group of fifteen goblins with spears - escorted the group into the town and toward a two story stone building near the shore. A noisy crowd of what must have been every goblin in the village had gathered around the escort. Sam noted that a handful of other creatures that might have been kobolds or lizardfolk were gathered as well.

With much hullabaloo,  the door of the stone building swung open and a pair of gaudily dressed goblin females stepped out, dropping flowers and leaves on the ground next to the door. In their odd form of German, they loudly squeeked, “hail to queen Felonna!” A number of goblins in the crowd and all the guards echoed, “hail Felonna” with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Out from the building sauntered a goblin female that clearly thought she was all that and a bowl of chips. Towering over the other goblins on her platform shoes (not heels, just four inch lifts), this goblin was dressed like a primitive society’s half-hearted approximation of a Vegas showgirl. Her outfit left unfortunately little to the imagination and was covered in shiny pebbles and shells. She wore a huge headdress of what looked like seagull feathers, and likewise had a corona of assorted feathers blossoming from her backside and shoulders. Despite this, she was easily the most attractive goblin in the village by a wide margin, and may have even had a bath in the last few days. With extreme difficulty, Paul managed to not fall down laughing at the sheer absurdity of it.

Queen Felonna screeched aloud an imperious welcome to the visitors and then demanded to know what they were.

Erin stepped forward, and with a flourish of her hands, announced in German, “We are wind gods!”

Not losing a beat, Sam activated his coffer of hygiene and magic ring in rapid succession. He was deluged with water, then a tiny localized tornado swirled around Sam, drying him off. Just before the winds died down, metal plates flowed out from Sam’s hands to cover the rest of him in his half-plate armor, including a helmet.

Suddenly there was a WIDE empty circle around the group of humans. The assembled mass just couldn’t get away from them fast enough. The guards scurried off to about twenty feet away, but looked terrified.

Only Queen Felonna and her attendants were uncowed, “The glorious village of Bromach has not seen wind gods here for many years, what do you want?”

An almost ludicrous negotiation for the ship at the dock began, with the goblin queen demanding 900 gold for a trip on it, and Erin thinking that passage off the island should be more in the 2 gold per person range.

Eventually, Erin talked the queen into realizing that the only creature capable of sailing the ship was a prisoner currently locked up. After about twenty minutes of back-and-forth negotiation with insanity, Erin managed to negotiate the freedom of the prisoner and the ship itself for about 30 gold.

Six of the guards were sent to fetch the prisoner, an angry-looking creature with skin the color lime yogurt, sinewy muscles and many badly-cared-for wounds and bruises. The green-skinned man had two tusks jutting up from his lower jaw and a wide, upturned nose. His head was shaved bald, and his skin was raised by branding scars across his arms and chest, and he was almost as tall as Greg. Anyone who had remotely heard of orcs knew that this was one, though not the hulking brute that some imagine.

“Here is the pilot! Take the ship and leave before Felonna reconsiders our deal!” shrieked the goblin leader.

Erin and Paul found that the orc could speak halting German, so they used that to communicate that they could get out of the place together. The orc looked suspicious, but definitely wanted to not be stabbed by goblin spears anymore. He shuffled onto the boat with them, and directed the humans to untie from the dock and push off. Once they were about fifty feet from the dock, Felonna hollered a shrill war cry and every goblin with a spear or javelin in the village rushed the dock to hurl their pointed sticks at the ship. Most fell laughably short, some hit the side, a small handful skittered off the deck, uncomfortably close to the mark.

Queen Felonna and her attendants used magic to launch bolts of acid at the ship, but being fairly stupid, targeted the side of the ship instead of anything valuable. Sam used a spell to summon water and wash away the acid, while Paul knocked Felonna on her ass with a well-directed orb of magical fire. With Felonna down and wailing, the attack on the ship disintegrated as the goblins scrambled to drag the feathered mess of a sorceress to safety as Paul continued to hurl orbs of fire at anyone who looked like they had a javelin and a bad idea.

With the help of the orc, the group got the ship’s sails filled with air and moving out to sea. Paul and Dave figured out how to get the captain's chains off, while Erin cast a spell of healing that closed up most of his wounds. The orc’s name was Kanawa, and he had been captain of the ship. It was a merchant ship, with five other sailors aboard, trading with other villages on the islands off the coast of a mainland he called Waritu.

Kanawa didn’t seem to believe for one second that the humans were wind gods, because why would wind gods need a boat? He was thankful for their help, however, and urged them to go back to the village with him and wipe out the goblins.

No one was really down with exterminating a village of goblins, even if Sam had picked up a pretty high background radiation on his ‘evildar.’ Captain Kanawa did not register on Sam’s evildar. The captain was disappointed that they wouldn’t be getting revenge today, but hoped they’d reconsider when they made it back to his village and armed themselves properly.

Continue to Session 3