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The “Doubley-Doos”, a recently christened adventuring group, have been assisting the firbolg village of Erydark after a slaad was found impersonating one of the representatives of the Hearing House — the ruling body of Iounin located in the city of Biel.

After defeating the slaad and investigating the representative’s quarters, they found and quietly took a variety of official Hearing House meeting documents, along with what appeared to be a partial key that the slaad had been working on to decrypt the Hearing House code.

Dormin and Badger worked together to complete the key based on the work the slaad had already completed and were able to translate most of the note, getting a rough idea of the message: the government is considering taking militarized action against the goblin tribes in the region. In addition, they also found a list of names and their corresponding locations throughout Iounin, but they do not recognize the names or the significance of the list.

The mayor of Erydark asked the group to escort their nilbog prisoner to Biel, a city with the ability to properly detain him until he could stand trial. The group agreed, but after leaving the village, Rhass suggested they leverage the nilbog’s desire for Shump’s goblin totem, holding it ransom unless the nilbog uses his connections to other goblin tribes to locate Klaas. Rhass reasoned that with that information, they could possibly track down Klaas and cut the head off the goblin rebellion off before things got out of hand. 

On the road to Biel, they encountered a gnomish woman bard named Lidla and her three associates. Although the party was initially suspicious, the bard woman greeted them heartily. She requested their help in getting their money back from a band of bards who had recently taken over a nearby town. According to what the locals told her, these performers were powerful enough to fend off a dragon attack and have since ruled the town under their thumb, extorting protection for a hefty fee.

The Doubley-Doos agreed to help. Rather than trying to deal with both the party of abusive bards and their prisoner, Rhass argued that they should set the nilbog free so that he could get started leveraging his contacts. Before they freed him, they made him promise to meet outside the gates of Biel in two weeks.

With the nilbog gone, they got as much information from Lidla and her crew as they could. She told them there were five performers — two blade dancers, a magician, a singer, and a strongarm that appeared to be the leader of the group. The group then began planning how they’d deal with this group of punitive performers.

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To be honest, the past several months have been extremely tough on me. I’ve been dealing with some very severe depressive episodes, and at the time of this session, I was just starting into that. I couldn’t come up with any way to continue with the main story, so I looked up “potential D&D social encounters” and came across some mention of “you meet a stranger on the road.” I wanted to work in my new players’ backstories more since the whole campaign is a continuation of Shelby’s and Shump’s stories from the first game, so I decided they’d come across some bards.

Unfortunately, Rhass’s backstory is…complex. He’s from the elemental plane of air, and is not just a bard, but a cleric of Akadi. I don’t necessarily want to introduce interplanar stuff into the game just yet as it’ll be a lot of work to build around, so while I did write up a bit of stuff if they knew each other, since Rhass has only been on this plane for at most a few months, he wouldn’t have made a lot of contacts.

So this was mostly just filler because I couldn’t come up with any further developments of the main goblin rebellion stuff.

I will say I was shocked that they decided to release the nilbog and trusted him enough to come back. That gives me a lot of things to think about. Thankfully, I have a fair amount of time to think on that.

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