Night's Dark Terror Session Report: Horses Aren't Important Anymore

most importantly Scrud Pud is still around

 Session 3:

I have figured out the name of everyone’s character except for the thief. I am now too embarrassed to ask.

The dwarf is named Bytor
The magic user is named Io
The fighting man is named Oso
My Cleric is named Yutnib.

Hold on I am going to check the email chain for the name of the thief… Nope, the guy playing the thief doesn’t send emails either.

Anyway, our characters don’t even get to go to sleep before we have to go after these horses. Also we are looking for a map not a scroll? So, anyway the NPCs decide we have to go after their horses and we are like ok fine. Scrud Pud rides with Yutnib.

We ride until we find some dead goblins and horses. They are being eaten by giant gross beetles. The beetles attack us on sight. We do our best to ignore them and ride away. I am not trying to fight a bunch of stupid beetles for no reason. I have found in my experience that the monsters that will be the most embarrassing to die to are the most dangerous.

Then there is a female goblin running through the woods. she gets eaten by beetles. It seemed kind of unnecessary and needlessly gory, but you know The Dymrak Woods, or wherever we are, are a tough place.

Anyway we keep riding and there is  some sketchy elf horse trader who has apparently been living less than a day’s ride from the fort where the horse breeders have been living but the horse breeders never knew she existed, but the goblins apparently did and the goblins sold the horses  to these sketchy horse breeder.

We get into a discussion of whether the elf horsetrader and her bandit suboordinates are bonafide purchasers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_purchaser the elf is losing the argument and resorts to both physical and magical violence. Luckily, she puts her own men to sleep with the sleep. She apparently didn’t read the description closely enough before casting i into the melee. Also the thief stabbed her in the back. while she was stabbing the party in the back.

Anyway we take the horses and her stuff. Her stuff includes a spell book. I whine unti the spellbook contains charm person so we can charm Scrud Pud and make him our friend forever. I told the dm that if he didn’t put charm person in the spell book I would derail the whole campaign and make the whole party go on a quest to get the charm person spell.

When we get back to the fort it turns out that no one even cares about the horses anymore because the guy that told us to get involved in this whole horse debacle has been kidnapped by goblins. The conversation  went something like this:

NPC guy: Waaah!!! Save my brother!

Us: Yeah… so about these horses we just murdered a bunch of people over…

NPC guy : Waaahhh my brother. Go do that instead.

Us: ok, I guess.

So we go to see if this guy is at Scrud Pud’s house. He isn’t. no one is.  There are some stirge though. We kill them and then we fight some type of vicious rodent. Scrud Pud although charmed and friendly seemed to have precious little intel on his own home where he had presumably lived his entire life. Poor guy must be traumatized.

This is a my best rendering of a stirge

The thief almost dies disarming a trap. The trap was an exploding magic ruby. The thief then wondered why a goblin lair would have such a sophisticated magic trap in a goblin lair. The dungeon master gives him an icy blank stare and then begins describing the contents of the treasure chest. There is a map that seems to depict plans for goblin raids or something.

We head back to fort to rest and heal.

The thief's arm caught on fire