S05E05: The Gang Investigates Druid Attacks

Averlyth impersonates a doctor. Nissa befriends a lonely housewife.Kanye makes a conspiracy theory corkboard.
The gang heads to the small town of Interesting… which claims to be under attack by a neighboring tribe of druids. They meet the mayor, who refers them to several crime scenes around town. The gang finds some clues that the attacks may have been faked, or designed to look like the work of druids, and prepare to follow a set of tracks left by the perpetrator into the woods.
==Background:==
Kanye wasn't here last time, so now he's picking an upgrade for his magical item.
He has chosen: That's a Good Point, Actually - You or any ally automatically succeed on your next charisma check.
The group is back in the field office in Neverwinter, and we're about to set out on our new quest!
Apparently Kanye's woolley berserker claws will glitter/light up when he punches. This will happen whenenever he uses them.
Averlyth purchases a single explosive grenade.
Kanye is requesting a grill in his mouth that spells out "Kanye".
Carlos has pointed out that's an odd number.
Kanye adds an exclamation mark to make it symmetrical.
== Assignment: ==
The mayor of a small town is offering a reward for any group of adventurers willing to discover why the neighboring druid tribe has been sending wild animals to attack the townspeople.
== Session: ==
The group goes for a shopping trip at Fantasy Costco!
* (800) Nissa purchases a Billow Branch (advantage for Persuasion or Intimidation checks)
* (1500) Carlos purchases an arcane trickster's glove (turns a Mage Hand invisible)
* (900) Kanye purchases the slicer of tapeir-weir isles (allows someone to trade it for anything)
* (1200) Nissa purchases laughing amulet (oneliners after a fight make earn health or do damage)
* (1200) Kanye purchases a pocket workshop (can make shit whenever)
* (800) Averlyth purchasess mystery powder (roll on wild surge roll)
Um: "Is there anything we can do to prepare for dealing with animals?"Kanye: "I think a flamethrower would help!"The group triggers their teleporters and appear in a small town in the middle of bum fuck nowhere. It is after sundown, we are a couple minutes walk down the town from the road. As we approach the town, it is evident that the vast majority of the town are in the local tavern.
The group approaches the tavern - Kanye hovers by the door, Carlos just walks in, Averlyth peeks in through the window. What we see is a loud town meeting where a lot of people are complaining. A person that appears to be the mayor is trying to calm them all down.
Kanye kicks the door in for the element of surprise.
There is a bit of a bustle as everyone turns around to look at Kanye. The person at the front goes "great great, I'll talk to you all later, these are the contractors, I need to go talk to them" and the meeting appears to end.
This lady approaches us in what looks like dressy clothes for the area. She introduces herself as Priscilla, female human mayor of Interesting... (dots included), a rough and tumble cowboy town where everything is wood. There are taxidermied animals, a big albino stag head, etc. The crowd seems to be farmers, living out in the middle of nowhere.Priscilla: "The short of it is there's a tribe of druids in the forest bordering the town. We've both been here for generations, never really been any problems. It's always been a little tense, we try to stay out of it best we can, there's been some disputes. But lately some things have gone crazy, and my town's calling for blood, they're ready to go to war. I need you guys to investigate this and find out what's up."Carlos: "How do you know it's the druids?"Priscilla: "I guess technically I don't know, but.... well there are 5 people you should talk to. First of all, there's the bartender here that can talk to you about the patrons and when they go home in town - there's a lot of reports of just generally being menaced by wild animals, coyotes in the street at night. There's a family at the edge of town you'll want to talk to - they were attacked by an owlbear in the middle of the night. There's a hunter in town who was mauled by a regular bear, and then there's a farm at the end of town that's seen a bunch of weird shit. The cows are behaving weird, the hens are laying weirdly, animals are acting weird around the farm. And then there's one guy you should talk but he might be hesitant to since what happened to him is kind of embarassing, but his wife got seduced by a wild animal?"Averlyth is chatting up Hayden Wanna-beer. He mentions that some of the regulars that go home at 3AM are having weird things happen all of a sudden. Coyotes are stalking them as they go home, raccoons peering at them the whole time, possums hanging off their front gate. Nobody has been attacked, but they have been menaced.
The bartender sounds a little embarrassed since he knows it doesn't sound that big. He does not sound like he's lying or making it up, however, and he sounds like he believes the people. He's not sure if there have been any attacks in the day, and no seeming attacks on people's houses. The attacks have been starting from about 6 months ago.
The beers are not free so Carlos puts it on the mayor's tab.
We decide to next talk to the hunter that was mauled by the "bear-bear" (not the "owl-bear"), and are directed to a man's house. Everything in the house shows that he makes his living as a hunter. Apparently his name is Baer Bahr, and his wife, Ursa Major Bahr opens the door.
We go into a one room house, and Baer is just lying on the bed. Averlyth can tell that he's no longer in life-threatening condition, but has clearly been healing for awhile. Before she can heal him, Nissa attempts to take the bandages off to investigate the wounds; she uses her daily charisma check to convince him she should be allowed to do this (he goes "ah, well go ahead doctor" and she does not correct him). Once the investigation is over, Averlyth leaves him in much better shape than he started.Carlos: "So what happened?"Baer: "It's stupid really. Everybody knows you don't get between a cub and a mama bear. I was creeping through the woods, stalking a deer, and I saw a bear cub, and before I realized what had happened, the mama bear was behind me on the other side and thought I was threatening the cub. I did what I was supposed to do, went limp and played dead, and then I dragged my sorry ass home."Apparently Baer thinks it was a normal bear attack, doesn't seem to agree with the rest of the town that the Druids are behind everything. He's seen Druids out there, although they mostly keep to themselves. They usually just don't get in each other's ways, just both remain respectful. Apparently his dad had a few tense interactions with the Druids back when he was hunter for the village, and the Druids thought they were over-poaching the deer in the woods and wanted them to cut back, but they had worked out the tension.Carlos: "Is there anti-druid racism in your town?"Baer admits that the town is a bit biased against the druids, but doesn't think that the whole town is really that up in arms against them, it's just a simmering tension. He gave some basic advice about what to do in the woods to avoid conflict with the druids (leaving things clean, being respectful, etc.) and mentioned that the further in we go, the more likely we'd run into them.
Kanye borrows a piece of paper from Nissa to acquire a very poor approximate map from Baer about the forest and Nissa is not pleased and Kanye owes her a piece of paper.
The group thanks Baer for his time after accidentally spending too much time trash talking his map drawing skills in front of him and then leave to go interrogate the guy whose wife was seduced by an animal.
He does not appear to be stupid but isn't worldly. He is mad he has to talk to us - he's willing to talk to us on the off chance it helps, but is not really proud of what happened. His name is Tomothy James - he grudgingly lets us in and we are sitting on his couch in a painfully awkward silence.
After dancing around the topic for awhile, the wife makes an excuse to slip out of the room and Nissa follows her. Averlyth is then able to get a story out of Tomothy.
Apparently, he came home one night from the pub and saw his wife and a large beast fucking like animals behind the house. There was a full moon, the animal had a grey coat with black diamonds, apparently his wife wasn't to blame. Carlos asks Tomothy what kind of animal it was, and there isn't really an answer for a bit.
Tomothy tells Averlyth that he believes druids are to blame for everything wrong with the town in the past 3 years. He begrudgingly admits to Carlos that the village has been expanding towards the forest.
=== Back to Nissa and the wife ===
Nissa sees that there's no laundry outside, and that the wife had blatantly made an excuse to come out, and attempts to make friendly talk.
The wife blushes furiously when questioned about what actually happened, and stammers something about it not being proper to repeat the details.
Nissa pulls out her portfolio of sketches of hot guys, and says she has a problem. Something about her being the local expert and thumbing through her collection. As she flips through the book, the wife is smiling about what she's seeing.
Eventually Nissa is able to identify that she's mostly embarrassed because of how it affects her husband. She tells the story about how she was washing clothes at the creek and then saw a naked guy, and now has been having an affair with a druid for awhile now. And then she got caught by her husband and doesn't know what to do and has been riding it out, has no idea what to do about it, and is panicking that she told Nissa to begin with.
We discover the wife does not know what the druids name and helps Nissa figure out what he looks like by making comparisons to her explicit drawings. The most distinctive detail is the direwolf cloak with the pattern. Nissa promises not to tell anyone.
Nissa tells the group about it and then decide to stay at the inn overnight before going to the farm first thing in the morning. We meet Farmer Dale Baker - he is very matter of fact: "Yeah, the farm's cursed."
When questioned, he says the cats are howling all night, the cows work in a circle in the field, the hens are laying weird. Carlos requests to be taken to the water trough and Averlyth detects magic. She was not able to rule out anything at the moment.
Apparently the weirdest stuff happened during the full moon a week ago.Carlos: "Are any of the animals.... banging any of the other animals?"Dale: "No more than usual?"Carlos: "No unusual combos?"Nissa asks for a spoiled egg as evidence, but Farmer Dale says he threw them all out. Kanye asks if we can just go get an egg and then he hands one to Nissa.
Dale says it happened about a month ago. He walks us out to the field and we see the cows in a noticeably defined ring. Averlyth detects no magic. Carlos smokes the grass and nothing happens.
Apparently the cows sound different but we can't really hear anything different because also the group has never seen a cow before.
Kanye picks Nissa up so she can get a closer look at a cow. Averlyth doesn't notice anything particularly unusual either - no obvious signs of ill health.
Kanye looks deeply into a cow's eyes.
Averlyth asks Kanye to go to the middle of the 30, 40 ft ring. He steps around more cowpies than usual, and notices that the grass in the middle is also more overgrown than the grass in the ring itself, where the cows have been grazing casually. Nothing else seem strange.
Carlos quickly whips up a corkboard from our pocket workshop, pinning all the connections that we have so far. Our leading theory is that the food produced from this farm may be inducing something in the rest of the towns people.
The farmer claims that the animals do not eat the weed one field over. Carlos insists on testing it for evidence, makes an apple pipe and verifies the weed is legit.Kanye: "How long has it been since the full moon?"DM: "Couple of weeks, so it would be a new moon?"Kanye: "Is that how long it takes?"The group decides to move onto interrogating the owl bear attack victim - we could come back to this farm over night to hear the howling cats. This family is Alice and Al Bahr (related to the other Bahr's).
They explain that they were in bed one night when the household was attacked by an owl bear. It's been about a week, the children are still having nightmares, the husbands really worried. They take us out to the back of the house, which is facing the woods (this house is at the edge of the woods).
They show us the part of the house where the owl bear was attacking - huge claw marks gouge out the side of the building, there are huge footprints all over the ground, although a little worn down. The claws don't appear to be around an opening or any apparent target and are just wild.
Averlyth realizes that no one had mentioned seeing the owlbear, but apparently they had heard the hooting. Nissa seems to recognize all of the apparent signs as an owlbear (the size is right, the footprints are right, etc). However, owlbears have three claws on their front paws, not four.
Next time, the group will follow the footprints into the forest!Category:Episodes