Body Double

23 September 2010-

Despite fantasies of early retirement (to be funded by our presumptive sale of eMichael's dwarven drow-magnet to the drow, collecting the reward, and living to tell the tale), our party was still short on cash and in need of a subtle way to leave town. How fortunate, then, that such an opportunity came our way- though in a most unusual fashion.

While in the town marketplace, we intervened in an attempted kidnapping- which earned us a job. It turns out that our half-elf samurai bears enough of a resemblance to a local merchant's daughter (insert your own joke about the gender ambiguity of elves here) that the merchant has hired us to impersonate her for a little while. She is, it seems, going to get married to a man in a nearby city, but has been threatened with death by a rival merchant out to scare off her father. We are to leave the town and head for that city, drawing off the team of assassins sent to kill her long enough for her to get to her wedding safely. The journey will be perilous, of course, as it leads through a dangerous short-cut to the city in question, and will be even harder to manage since we need to fend off the yuan-ti assassin without killing him for at least three days, since that would alert the rival merchant to the nature of the deception.

We'll just paint a big target on the back of the samurai's frilly new dress...

Long Overdue Update

18 September 2010-

Let me explain. No- there is too much- let me sum up...

We defeated the halflings' plan (the halflings themselves still live, unfortunately), and discovered that the pig had belonged to the innkeeper, but had been stolen then somehow been enlarged and armored. It was then goaded into action by the halflings, who beat feet when they realized that we were on to them. We tried to go after them, but were delayed by the reconstruction of the samurai ("Gentlemen, we can rebuild him... We have the technology"), and they got away.

Soon, we arrived at another small village, and were attracted by the crowd at the manor house. It turned out that there had been some sort of attack on the manor, and that the lord and his family were presumed to be dead- with a group of traveling dwarves as the likely culprits. We had met the dwarves on the road, but had felt them to be friendly, so we decided to investigate. We discovered that the family had indeed been slaughtered, but not by the dwarves. Instead, they had been attacked by a group of diminutive creatures that came in through an underground river that the family used as a cold cellar, and those creatures had made off with the eldest son of the house- a promising student of magic.

We tracked the culprits to the underground river, and then to a series of tunnels blocked by a wall of darkness. Once we dissipated the darkness with eBill's light spell, we charged in, only to meet the bad guys- black-skinned, white-haired gnomes- on their own turf: an underground cavern in the dark. They once again turned out the lights, and we suddenly had a pitched battle in pitch blackness. Our own light spells gave us little help, but we drove them back until a group of drow came down the hall and joined the party. They obviously were gunning for the gnomes, but opened up on us when they saw eMichael- he's on "Llolth's Most Wanted" almost every week, it seems, and they want him alive only long enough to torture him to death.

We grabbed our wounded and the heir to the manor family and made a rapid tactical advance to the rear, locking the gate behind us. Once on the surface, we made nice with everyone, cleared the dwarves' names, recommended that everyone who wanted to live find a new village, then headed for the nearest large town. We just hope that we can get there before a drow raiding party finds us. Perhaps if we hogtie eMichael's dwarf they'll let the rest of us leave...