As part of my game, I've been doing extended session recaps, since it is often a month or more between our marathon, 4-8 hour sessions. Here's a recap of our first session. I tried to get them to go to a tavern in a "Bog Standard" town. Most of them went to another thavern I had to make up on the spot. Etc.
Ripples of news leaked out from the town of Boggrove
following the events on the night of the harvest festival.
At the harvest festival, much merriment was had by many, and
many contests were won and lost. However, of all the attendees, one seemed to
have an above-average degree of success at the games. Glüur, A half-Orc
Barbarian boasted of his strength before slamming a beer at the fastest rate in
the county. Then, fueled by ale and success, he smashed a tiny, potentially
racist, rag-doll image of an orc into weensy bits at the whack-an-orc table,
besting the carnival’s strong-man, and earning a second win in the carnival’s
games. Looking up in victory, he laughed, as a puny elf staggered off of the
eldritch scrambler tilt-a-whirl, stumbled to the rail of the fairground, and
proceeded to vomit the better part of his lunch into the dirt. Half-orcs
apparently know better than elves not to gamble, and Glüur watched a pair of
oddly-dressed woodland folk lose their money to a quicker hustler than
themselves. In an uncharacteristically cultured move, the mighty warrior
managed to win at “name that bard,” surprising many, and achieving his third
and final reward of the night, all of which would be redeemed for emboldening
bottles of Fey Whisper Select, the fair’s liquor sponsor.
Gluur, Sylvan and Coasai (the bad gambling elves), and Ryn
(the barfing elf), all separately made their way from the fairground to
Boggrove proper. Boggrove is a small seaside town, where most folks are fishers
or employees of the large liquor and alchemy industries. The latter are
particularly prosperous here because the town’s proximity to some of the most
fecund, if not the safest, woods, which are full of rare and exotic plant life—good
for making excellent distilled liqueurs and magical reagents alike.
Glüur’s tales of his own superiority earned him only
disdainful silence from his likely opponents at the following day’s melee
tournament, the Jade Falcon company, at the Peg-Leg Tavern. Not wanting to
start a 4-on-one fight, he stumbled outside and cut the first thing he saw in
half lengthwise. It was gross. Luckily, that thing was a lizardfolk scout, the
first of many who would fall to Glüur’s axe. Shortly, the Jade Falcons would
watch down their noses as Glüur fought of waves of lizards, joined by an
unlikely crew of elves from a nearby tavern. Why they were drinking in the
townie tavern is unclear, but their assistance was invaluable. In a flurry of
dark cloaks and swift arrows, Cosai injured and enraged a lizard captain. A
mysterious elf by the name of Slyvan drew magical vines up from the muck of the
waterfront, incapacitating lizardmen who came ashore before unleashing flaming
globes of fire towards the lizards but really mostly upon the façade of the
peg-leg tavern, burning his hand, and ultimately relying on a tried and true
shortbow to skewer a lizard or two. Cosai’s arrows continued to fly true,
catching an unwary lizard scout through his lower back, and another between the
plates of his scaly armored carapace, murdering them right good. Not wanting to
be shown up, members of the jade falcon company stumbled through some vines and
stabbed themselves horribly in the feet, essentially teeing themselves up for a
killing blow from a powerful lizard warrior, who killed Baldy, the group’s
ranger. Despite having a cool-looking, purple-glowing sword in the hands of
Kestrel, last year's melee winner, the Falcons ran for their pathetic lives. A
still-reeling-from-the-scrambler warlock, Ryn, attempted to redeem himself from
his pukey disgrace at the festival by unleashing bolts of crackling eldritch energy,
mostly against the front of the tavern, but also into a few restrained
lizardmen warriors, one of whom succumbed to his powerful blasts. Glüur, no
slouch during the fight, was nearly ready to fall to the lizards' vicious
bites, but thought better of it and cut down the final lizard warrior with his
greataxe. By that time, he was absolutely covered in their icky green-black blood
(and quite a bit of his own), and looked as handsome as a half-orc could
possibly look to an another half-orc, which is to say: totally disgusting and
yet somehow beaming with glory.
At the end of this wicked-awesome battle, a black dragon
swooped down from the sky, bit a bunch of town guardsmen in half, and used its
acid breath to remove a beacon of holy light from its place in the town’s central
square, before flying off into the night. A priest would run from Boggrove’s
temple and whine about it like a little crybaby.
The peg-leg’s bartender, Wulfa, thinking better of scolding
the guys who honestly mostly really fucked up the front of his bar, invited
them in for a drink, and let them in on some of the happenings around town. A
retired druidic warrior himself, he had sensed an uptick in monstrous beast
sightings and odd happenings in recent weeks that reached levels he hadn’t seen
since his own band of sword-and-spell- slinging friends had cleared the lands
of most major threats a decade ago. What took his leg, and ended his career, he
was wary of telling these out-of-towners, but he did mention that two of his
regular customers, the medievally-spelled but still normally-pronounced Darric
and Georg, had not been back after going on a routing potion-supply gathering
run for the local potioneer, Antonio. When asked about the statue defaced by
the dragon, Wulfa didn’t have much to say, but pointed the group to the town’s
priest, Tane, who used to be part of his old party of adventurers. Lightening
up, Wulfa pointed out the trophy of a crocodile head on the wall, its mouth
held open by a peg-leg, indicating the tavern's origin and the end of his
adventuring career.
The haphazardly formed alliance, led by Cosai and backed up
by a silent but disdainful Glüur, approached Tane to ask him about the statue.
Tane divulged that nothing of this sort of dragon attack had been seen or
foretold in the town’s history. The party asked some questions that offended
Tane’s god, and then stood around silently as the dead member of the Jade
falcons stumbled from the temple as a resurrected zombie, only to be smashed to
bits by Tane, who it turns out was a cleric of mighty power the whole time.
Tane then used words like gosh and nincompoop to berate the party for their
inaction in the face of abominations in the eyes of Bahomet, his holy god.
The party pretty much flipped him off, and inquired about
Darric and Georg’s itinerary at the potion-maker’s shop, where Antionio
described a pair of hills leading to a cave filled with lichens and toadstools
necessary in the creation of many of his potions. He wouldn’t give out family
potion recipe secrets, nor pay and gold in advance for the contents of
D&G’s pouches, but did give the group a healing potion and promise a reward
of potions for their safe return (the pouches, that is, not the dudes. He was
kind of a prick about the dudes, actually, and didn’t really seem to care about
their wellbeing. Potion-shop-owners, amirite?).
With the glint of adventure in their eyes, the party
returned to the peg-leg for a “long rest” before heading out to this cave of
alchemical resources, seeking the spines of the toadstool and whatever else it
was that the waylaid townsfolk had been gathering. What with the crazy events
of the night before, it was bound to be an exciting trip, and with such
newfound semi-competent companions around, what could possibly go wrong? Find
out next time, adventurers!
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