Episode 20: Information overload

So when we last left we were resting up from an eventful day of fighting and killing friends in the dream world. The cast of this crew is:

Fizzledorp, the Gnome Paladin of Epsu desperately trying to keep us on the straight and narrow

Vohn, the Kobold Gunslinger whose attitude far exceeds his size

Malek, the Tiefling Magus, quietly lofting magic via his arrows towards our combats

Lutor, the Asterion Cleric, boldly making friends wherever we go via food and booze

Thonk, the Orc Barbarian who believes he's a Mage, is not so bright, but oh so much fun to interact with

Meghan, the half-Drow Druid wondering what on earth she's gotten herself into

When we awoke the next day it took us a hot moment to figure out how to get out of this room. The only actual door we knew of had slammed shut when Vohn came down the tunnel. After several minutes of investigation, engineering thought, and sheer muscle power, we got the door open again and left.

As we were coming out of this complex, we ran into Shinara who said we were urgently needed elsewhere and she opened a portal to a portal junction. Their battle against the nightmare world was turning in the good-guys favor so it was now safe for use to use this portal junction to get places faster. They have many portals to many druid groves.

Meghan very much wants to spend a couple of years here, traveling and studying nature in all these groves. But they sent us through to the singing grove.

Shinara and her friends shared that they had friendly were-wolves inside the town acting as spies to let them know what is going on. The leader of the unfriendly were-wolves, Trevor, had participated in some sort of ritual recently and that has changed the dynamics in town, and that we needed to get back and deal with the situation in Warwick.

They graciously offered us magical beasts to get us faster to the edge of the forest. Let's just say, Meghan had the only horse. There may have been a rhinoceros leaving sparkly rainbows in its wake. Yes, that would be Thonk's mount. Yes, someone pranked him.

We get back to the edge of the forest and Meghan resumes her human facade. While with the party she will stay either her true form (half-drow elf) or in an animal form, but in public she still puts on her human facade (it's a magical effect).

The humans ousted from Warwick have been busy in the time we were off dealing with the portal mess. They've made some crude walls around the outpost and have semi-armed guards at the gate. When we arrive, the guards are poking at a couple of wolves through holes in the gate. The bulk of the party goes galumphing in to finish off the wolves while Malek and Meghan did more of a saunter up to the gate. We were not needed, the wolves didn't last long.

But, turns out these humans were quite cold towards us. They had had a power dynamic change, the politician mayor had been ousted by the smithy. Meghan asked her hawk friend Paul to go find the former mayor, she doesn't trust that these towns folk didn't just straight kill the former mayor. The images Paul sent back were of a disgustingly drunk shamble of a human ... but quite alive. Pickled, but alive.

So we went to the new mayor, the smithy, and he'd been hard at work. He has a slightly rickety but fully functional smithy going and is turning out weapons like mad. He's decided the town is taking their town back by force and has sent word to the government for help. He is NOT friendly towards us, even with our missives we sent back via Paul to the former mayor. The town feels like we abandoned them. We've explained what's going on with the portals and the nightmares and that seems to have appeased them a bit, but they're still not that thrilled with us.

They've been getting supplies out of town via that underground tunnel to the former Mayor's mansion, and shared that there's now 16+ werewolves in the prisons, but they do not know why the werewolves are in there. So we decide to go check it out, find out what's going on.

Getting into the farmhouse and through the tunnel is pretty easy/uneventful, it's clear they'd been using it a bit to access the town. Which is weird, as we had clobbered a couple of the unfriendly were-wolves and left them locked in one of the prison cells, so by now the unfriendly were-wolves have got to know about this tunnel. Turns out the prison cells had the two unfriendly were-wolves, now in shackles, plus about 16 other were-wolves including a few children.

Fizzledorp starts talking to them, but none seem all that interested in talking to us. One of the children (pups?) pipes up with "Its a game!" but is quickly hushed by the adult with them. A bit more talking, then Fizzledorp drops Shinara's name and they start to warm up a little towards us.

While Fizzledorp is conversing with the were-wolves, the rest of us are keeping an eye on the rest of things, when Meghan catches the movement of one of the prison doors out of the corner of her eye. While staring directly at one of the were-wolves, he pulled the prison door shut.

Turns out none of the prison doors were locked, except for the cell with the shackled were-wolves.

Apparently Shinara had been using this as a sort of underground railroad to remove were-wolves who wanted out to somewhere safe, though they don't know where the somewhere safe is. After a bit of back and forth with them and in the party it was decided that we would sneak them out to the first bandit camp/cave system we took out. Not all wanted to go, some of the young adult unattached were-wolves want to help take back the town, and we're OK with that. So we came up with a 4 day cover story to scout the town officially, while sneaking out the were-wolves and also alerting Shinara.

Unfortunately when we went back to the town to report back to the Smithy our scouting plan (not the were-wolf plan, the town people hate the were-wolves) he's like nope we're doing things my way. In 4 days there will be a contingent of military here. He needs us to go plant 5 bombs in the city, one at each gate and then one at the north wall of the temple area.

So we regrouped and agreed to plant the bombs. The six of us will take the bombs from the smithy and enter the tunnel. The plan from there though is we're going to split the party in thirds. The three un-stealthy ones -- Fizzledorp, Lutor, and Thonk -- are going to escort the helpless were-wolves to the cave system. The three stealthy ones -- Malek, Vohn, and Meghan -- are going to plant the bombs. Bonus, Vohn actually knows his way around gunpowder since he's a gunslinger. The third split is Meghan is going to ask Paul to take a missive to Shinara explaining what we're doing and the fact things are going to be very bad in about 4 days.

Along with discussing plans and trying to figure out what we're going to do, Fizzledorp and Meghan have been butting heads a bit. She doesn't think the were-wolves need an escort, he does. She doesn't have a problem with the bombs or destroying the unfriendly were-wolves food stores. Fizzledorp absolutely vetoed destroying the food stores. Meghan did have a problem with the temple bomb, she wouldn't destroy sacred ground, but where they want it is far enough away from the temple and cemetery she'll accept it.

Sounds easy enough right? What could possibly go wrong?