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AAR: Innocent Exile

Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2018 5:07 am
by Reyntrannin
AAR: Innocent Exile
Time: 2018-10-19 17:00 GMT (1 PM ET)
GM: ReynTrannin
Circle: 2
Difficulty: Medium


Player Rewards:
Bob: 3 TIPs, 3 Booster Potions, 155sp
Cordwaine: 800LP, 3 TIPs, 5 booster potions, 1/2 price circling of nethermancer, 5sp
Fliver: 800 Legend, 3 TIP's . Last chance Salve (pay 140 extra)
Stathin: 800 legend, 3 TIPs, 30 silver, Booster Potion, Kelix' Poultice, Healing Potion

GM Reward:
Blaethynn: 10,000 Legend, 1050 sp, 1 TIP

Downtime Actions:
Fliver: Research (Rank 3, Step 11, step 13).
Fliver: Mapmaking (Rank 1, Step 9 - spend downtime to possess charts of locations and routes)

Re: AAR: Innocent Exile

Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2018 11:44 pm
by ChrisDDickey
From the journal of Fliver of Middle Jothan.

There was word of strangers lurching about the countryside west of Merrith. Local rumormongers think it is the work of a hermit who left the village some time ago after accusations of unsavory magic acts began surfacing. Cordwaine, a windling Nethermancer, Anderafinastathin, an Elvish Swordmaster, Bobitanthalnasatrythomoloso an Obsidiman warrior, and myself decided to check out the rumors.

We arrived at Merrith, and started our investigations with the watch there. I must say I am not impressed. The guards there seem incompetent, and not at all worthy of the trust that has been placed in them to protect the settlement from horrors and other threats. In a world were strange things do stalk the countryside, strange sightings should not be dismissed as cavalierly as these drunkards and layabouts dismiss reports of strange goings on. One can almost forgive the watch for their slovenliness in this instance, since the young children who made the report were unusually stupid and uninformative. We left the town with almost no greater information than when we arrived. Some strange figures were seen at a distance West of town, they looked like trees walking around, and nobody lives west of town other than an old hermit about 10 miles out. There are hints that he is a Nethermancer.

We traveled the trail about 5 miles, when we were set upon by strange figures, attacking from both the North and South. The figures seemed to be crude statues made of wood. The four made of Pine were fairly easy to reduce to splinters. The three made of Oak were much tougher. I cast Mountainous Mantel upon our two melee fighters, then started shooting TEB's. By the time the last of the wooden men were reduced to splinters both our melee fighters were sore wounded. I spent hours with my physicians kit stitching them up. Bob still needed some rest, so I had plenty of time to look for tracks. It seems like the seven of them arrived in 3 separate groups from 3 different directions. They had not seemed to wait around for us at all, it appeared as if all 4 groups arrived at the site of the battle at the same time, and their 3 groups broke into an immediate charge as soon as they saw us. It seems very strange.

The three groups of wooden men had arrived from the NW, W, and S. Since we were traveling west anyway, we decided to leave the trail and track the group that arrived from the West. After about an hour the tracks ended abruptly, as if in mid-stride. We were not far from the trail, so decided to cut across to the trail and keep following it West to the hermits place. We arrived at the residence, a rather nice cottage with detached barn and a large vegetable garden. An elderly man was hoeing in the garden.

We talked to him. He said he had not seen anything out of the ordinary. I think we all felt that some passion or another had guided our footsteps to this place, and that there was something important to be discovered here, but the hermit seemed so reasonable, and he claimed to know nothing of consequence to our mission, and his answers, though useless and uninformative, were so non-objectionable, there seemed no civilized way to get any information out of him. Our polite questions were not getting anything useful, and there seemed no cause for more forceful methods. The footprints of the constructs on the other hand seemed like a much more promising clue. So after several minutes of polite conversation yielded no information of interest, we excused ourselves and went back to the site of the attack, and followed more sets of footprints. The other sets of footprints also ended abruptly about one hour's straight-line travel from the site of our encounter.

So with our most promising lead dried up, we were left with the hermit again as our only remaining lead. We all resolved to go back to the hermits cottage, and politely but firmly insist that we look around to see if he has a woodworking shop making wooden statues. Back we went to the Hermits cottage. We got the Hermit to agree in principal that we could stay the night (though he wanted an outrageous 10 SP each for the privileged of sleeping in his barn), and I was just starting to check that this 10 overnight stay would include meals inside his cottage (since we wanted to check out both his barn and his cottage), when Cordwaine said words to the effect of "Nope, we are out of here". Once we were well outside of earshot of the house, he announced that our new plan was to wait until the middle of the night, and sneak in and check things out secretly. We had brief words about his pulling the plug on the previous plan so abruptly, but he stated firmly that talking to the hermit politely was a waste of time and absolutely nothing would do except to sneak into the place. Personally, I think Cordwaine is a huge tightwad, and the mere suggestion of us paying 10sp each put him into an absolute panic.

So we wait until 3 in the morning, change all of our spells, and approach the house under cover of our most sneaky spells. There we utterly and completely fail to surprise him. He throws an Ethereal Darkness upon us, and then the Hermit and Cordwaine take turn soliloquizing. The talk goes on so long that I eventually mange to blunder my way out of the darkness spell. Cordwaine is accusing the Hermit of acting suspiciously, which would have made me laugh if I was not already mad enough to spit. The Hermit points out correctly that we are acting much, much more suspiciously than he is. Cordwaine not only does not concede the obvious point, but argues it!

At one point the Hermit seems to think that we are moving around to much, and throws a spell that I am fairly certain was 'Binding Threads' at 3 of us. Note that not only did he throw the spell almost casually in mid sentence, but he had to have tied AT LEAST 4 extra thread to to. 2 for extra targets, and at least 2 for extra range! This of course worried all of of who could appreciate the significance of this. He was a dwarf who was casting both Nethermancer and Wizard spells, and the Wizards spell had LOTS of extra threads attached. Cordwaine changed his tone of voice right quick.

Eventually Cordwaine said that since the Hermit objected to us sneaking up in the middle of the night, that we would approach (once again) in the morning.

Now for those of you keeping track. Plan #1 was to walk west and look around, speak to the hermit when we got there. Plan #2 was to follow the wooden man tracks. Plan #3 was to talk to the hermit, which we did, but found he had nothing interesting to say. Plan #4 was to follow the other two sets of wooden man tracks. Plan #5 was to talk to the hermit into letting us look around his property, but was abandoned for no reason by Cordwaine just as it was succeeding. Plan #6 was Cordwaine's plan to sneak up on the hermit, which failed miserably. Now for plan #7 Cordewaine is proposing that we return in the morning to talk to the hermit. But this time we would do it while he was clearly mad at us, and had clear proof that we were not above stooping to nighttime raids. I saw no reason why plan #7 had any hope of success whatsoever.

Apparently, however, the hermit, being a crazy old hermit, liked having his prejudices that all name-givers were murderous scum who would as soon cut your throat in your sleep as talk to you, validated, and in the morning he finally gave us some useful information and help. He looked at the remains of the wooden men we had collected, Said that he had an academical apprentice go missing a few months ago, and, these things being demonstrability untrackable, gave us a magic gizmo to track his apprentice. So plan #8 was tracking (IE: same as plans #2 and #4, except this time we had a magical gizmo).

We activated the magic stone, and followed it to a cave. We went in and destroyed 2 more Oakmen and a Golem made of Ebon. We found the apprentice, a teenage Ork named Thomas chained to an alchemy bench. He said "Gharnik has been keeping him here, forcing him to make more". But he became catatonic before saying anything else. After breaking the shackles, we took him back to the Hermit. We have no idea who Gharnik is, nor where/how he is making the wooden men.

Re: AAR: Innocent Exile

Posted: Mon Oct 22, 2018 5:50 pm
by BattleChad
The Great Library of Throal thanks Fliver for his contribution.

Journal Rewards: 40 Legend Points and 57 Silver