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The “A-Team”, a group of ragtag adventurers from various walks of life, recently assisted the village of Opal Town in fending off a goblin raid searching for a mysterious onyx figure of the goblin deity of oppression and slavery.

Shump, having previously been tempted by the figure, was unable to resist trying to use the figure, but due to his limited understanding of its nature, he was injured in the process. In spite of that, he did see a brief vision of something in the forest, but the vision was there and gone before he really knew what was happening. The next morning, he consulted Shelby about the figure, and she suggested they travel to Biel, the capital city of Iounin, to pay a wizard to Identify the magic item.

Their first day out on the road was relatively uneventful. As they made camp to rest, Rose attempted to speak with some squirrels in the area to learn about any local dangers. She successfully learned that several squirrels had been killed by a hawk recently, and that the squirrels were very concerned about getting their nuts stored in time for winter.

On the second day of travel, the party came across a group of mercenaries resting on the roadside. Their cart, and several of their crew, were shot with arrows. They said they’d been hired by the Hearing House in Biel to drive out goblins in the south due to the increasing number of raids and had been ambushed, barely fending the goblins off. They offered the group 100 gold from their fronted payment if the A-Team would assist them in catching the goblins before they could escape. The group agreed, and set off into the woods.

They traveled for about an hour before finally locating the goblins. They’d had made a hasty camp and were tending to many wounded. The A-Team began to draw up a battle plan, but Shadyboi and Brottor noticed many of them weren’t armed and their medicine bowls had the markings of Meriadar, the Patient One, the goblinoid deity of pacifism, compassion, and understanding.

Just before they attacked, the chief, Fric Rockmore, called for them to stay their weapons and invited them to rest in their camp. He explained that they were on a mission to restore goblin relations among the nations of Tandaree and convert their fellow goblinfolk to their way of peace and compassion. They’d stopped to help the mercenaries, whom they thought were broken down on the side of the road, but instead the mercenaries had attacked them. Fric explained that he understood why they’d done so–goblins have a notorious reputation after all–but this unfair treatment incensed the A-Team.

They decided to make their way back to the mercenaries for revenge. They seemed unsure, at first, whether they wanted to simply rob the mercenaries or kill them, but once the mercenaries began insulting them, calling them monsters, they ultimately decided to kill the mercenaries and bring their rations and gold back to the goblin tribe. Then, they assisted in healing the goblin wounded, and everyone agreed to make camp together for the night and enjoy celebrating newly forged friendships.

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We had to miss our Tuesday session due to some scheduling issues, so we set decided to play on Saturday as a pick up session. Brandon was out because of that, and Oscar missed another week, which was too bad. I’m particularly proud of this little leg of the journey.

I’d been reading a few Reddit posts on how to make travel in D&D interesting without simply throwing random combat encounters at the party. I was reading through a table of random social encounters, and noticed one option mentioned “you cross paths with mercenaries.”

In my game world, anything that’s not vaguely human–namely anything not dwarf, elf, halfling, gnome, or human–is distrusted and considered monstrous. Many many ages ago, the world was nearly destroyed when a bunch of monsters invaded the land. Since then, if you don’t look like a “person”? Get fucked. I decided this BEFORE almost everyone decided to roll monstrous races, so it’s been interesting dealing with the consequences. I haven’t explored that as much as I would like, but I hope to in the near future.

I don’t like D&D’s deterministic way of dealing with good and evil. On the one hand, yes it’s a doofy game about fantasy creatures, but on the other hand, it explicitly says that if a creature is listed as evil, they must fight their very nature if they want not to be evil. I think that’s bunk. D&D also tendS to encourage unchecked murder sprees (murder hobos), and goblins seem particularly easy to set up as de facto boogeymen since they’re little monsters. It makes them easy to mass slaughter without feeling guilty since they don’t look like people. So, why not have the mercenaries be the dickheads and the goblins actually good guys?

Anyway, the prompt got me to thinking: obviously, if mercenaries were in the area, it would likely be due to goblins–the party had just saved a town from such a raid, after all. I was so proud of the pay off to this. I set them up by literally starting the game with a goblin raid, and then I threw them off balance and made them question themselves by running into good goblins that they ALLLMOST killed. They got just high enough an intelligence check to notice the bowls, and just so happened to miss their first attack. I think it taught them not to just immediately kill whoever they come across. Although…they did then turn around and murder a group of state-sanctioned mercenaries, but, hey, what can you do?

This has given me an idea of who I want to be the villain of at least this arc, if not the overall campaign. I’m very excited for the next session.

‘Til next time.

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