Session 304

# March 9th, 2023 - Terrors in the Night

## Terrors in the Night

The session began right where we last left our heroes, staring down the last of the dragonborn veterans after surviving the bloodshed in the rebel camp. As some members bound their new prisoner others looked through the tents and bodies for loot. There wasn’t anything other than personal clothing items and their weapons and armor among the dead. Watch came out from under the fallen command tent with the footlocker underarm. The warlock was able to pick the lock after working on it for a bit, even though he was not proficient in the task.

The small footlocker was full of coin with a piece of parchment and a compass sitting at the top. The compass was finely made, and the parchment was torn and contained a roughly drawn map of the region. It had a lot of runic markings on it, that none of the party could interpret. It looked most closely to dwarven runes, but was not dwarvish. There were 386 gold, 263 silver, and 48 copper pieces within. Watch distributed the coin evenly among the group as they began to question the prisoner. Joakim took the ‘bad guard’ route of questioning and then Watch joined in as ‘good guard’.

The dragonborn veteran confirmed what they expected, the bloodshed was the result of only half the group of rebels being actual rebels. The rest were loyalists pretending, with the goal of eliminating the traitors. The veteran apparently didn’t know much about Lord Joffrey, but did describe that the guard tower he was likely being returned to was taken by a full company (100) of soldiers. Roughly half had come to this rebel camp. He described how the tower had multiple groups patrolling, and had orders to secure the tower in preparation for coming troop movements south.

He only freely spoke after the promise of being set free, and the threat of… abuse… from Joakim. The party did not let him go freely, as the interrogation ended with blood spilling from the dragonborn’s neck. It was only an hour or two after the fighting stopped that the party was all done and prepared to move out with their wagon. They mostly emptied it, but carried their extra food supplies and the plate armor set from the dead dragonborn knight as they prepared to move at a fast pace to try to catch up to those soldiers that fled with Lord Joffrey. They debated returning to the Grainvic army camp, but their charge was to protect the lord and sabotage the bridge the guard tower overlooked - so they set off on their own.

The party sped along, running the single horse pulling the wagon, for most of the day. By mid afternoon they should have caught up to their targets, but they came upon a broken campsite where multiple sets of horse tracks set off. It appeared the loyalists had prepared well for this slaughter. The group took the rest of the day at a more normal pace, attempting to be on the lookout for signs of patrols. As the night approached they crested another hill and through the trees finally saw the guard tower off in the distance atop a hill. It was very well positioned to overlook the surrounding few miles, and the party decided to sleep in the forest most of the night before attempting to approach the tower and scout the surroundings - many were still wounded and now exhausted from their day of forced marching.

They camped off the path in a small clearing, where they only laid out bedrolls and did not make a campfire. The wood elf Raven stayed on lookout for the first four hours, and then he went to sleep as two others would rotate. Carlton took the next watch, and during his shift now late into the night he saw the signal fire atop the tower go out. He thought nothing of it, as morning would soon be approaching it likely would not be easy to see during the day. Finally, Watch took the last shift and as usual went up into a tree where he waited.

About an hour later, he saw a scaled creature moving below among the bushes towards his sleeping companions. He tried as quietly as he could to scale down the tree and come up behind the creature. It had black scales that he could see with his *darkvision*, and it was four legged with a tail, larger than a dog but smaller than a horse. The beast reached the edge of the small clearing and was tensing up as if it was preparing to pounce. Watch reacted and used his *mold earth* trick again to cause the beast to fall into a pit, with the dirt flung out to the side. Almost immediately afterwards, he felt the pierce of a spear from behind.

He turned as the spear tip was pulled out and saw four dragonborn soldiers rushing through the trees, with two other small dragon like creatures - guard drakes - pouncing. The enemy patrol burst into the clearing as the party started to wake, two of them as they were speared in their bedrolls. Between shouts and cries of pain the party scrambled to their feet and fought off the attackers. Carlton used his *shield of faith* and taunted the enemies to keep them near, and the party found the guard drakes to be the largest threat. The drake that had been dropped into a pit, crawled and dug itself out to join the fighting.

The party was able to overcome the beasts and kill most of the soldiers, but Carlton took care to not kill the final soldier, only knocking him unconscious. As the light of dawn peeked above the horizon the group tied up the surviving soldier and wrapped wounds. They discussed how their plans will change, now likely they would spend the daylight healing - again - and questioning this soldier about the defenses around the tower. Even though they had now killed perhaps a quarter of the soldiers said to have taken the tower, they were debating whether they could overtake it in a direct fight, or whether they would be best to try and sabotage the bridge.

That is where the session ended, on the morning of the tenth day after leaving Black Landing.

**Click Here for the next Session**

**Click Here for the Session Summary Page**