The original party, back when this campaign started, set out to rescue little Jimmy from goblin captors. His parents offered a horse as payment. But the goblins didn’t fight: They negotiated: Kill a monster that harasses us, and you get little Jimmy. The party set out and killed the monster, but found a cave and went in – which led to multiple deaths at the “hands” of insects.

So far the events that led up to “Death from Above”.

Now the survivors [mostly new characters] decided to return to the goblins. One of them, Galdor, repeated like a mantra – or like a manic obsession: “Kill them all, kill them all!”

That did not win him a lot of sympathy from Ginger Fingers and Raven, who saw the goblins as our (secondary) questgivers. Ginger and Raven half-joking, half-serious threatened that given our dismal combat prowess against insects we should let those who wanted to kill the goblins go forward and try it, then come forward to apologize for them once they were dead, and bring Little Jimmy home.

“Bury them all, bury them all”

But first we had to mind our dead.

We had no shovels, so we looked for a suitable niche inside the caves and laid them to rest under piles of stones.

On the way out we noticed a huge blue crystal, one that Ginger judged highly valuable for magic users. So she insisted we collect it, if at all possible, as one big chunk.

Using iron spikes and a hammer, she went to work by the light of her lantern. A full hour she hammered away while the rest of the party stood guard with grim determination.

Success: We collected one huge block of blue crystal, plus some smaller lumps and blue shards and shavings. Ginger did not really trust the others to handle this treasure with the necessary respect, so she put it all into her own large sack to carry it.

We spent the night in the cave mouth, using up 3 oil flasks in total so far, until the sun came up. Then we made our way to the goblins, bringing them the monster heads. Galdor kept muttering “Kill them all, kill them all, kill them all, kill them all,” until we got used to it and hardly heard it any longer.

Then we reached the goblin encampment at the riverbank.

“Kill them all, kill them all….”
“You stay in the back, a’ight?”
“Kill them all, killl them all.”

*eyeroll*

We found the goblin encampment at a riverbank and went closer to speak with them and presented the monster heads that they had requested.
They were being kind of obnoxious, playing wild dominance games, hinting without coming right out with it that they did not need us any longer now that we had done the job. Still, the situation was still fine, when Galdor shouted “Kill them all! Kill them all!” and shot one of them with his bow.

“Traitors!”

The goblins were quick to respond in kind and a wild, uncoordinated skirmish broke out. Raven and Ginger both removed themselves from the immediate battle; Ginger to get some distance and Raven to circle around the combat and find Little Jimmy in the camp.

“Traitors!” shouted the goblins, “The hoomans have betrayed us!”

“Kill them all, kill them all!” yelled Galdor.

The fighters on the party side rolled pretty well and got in a lot of hits, but still the goblins were hard to take down, because they generally withstood two to three hits. 2 HD goblins? Were they even goblins?

Ginger sent a Sleep spell their way, but rolled only a 4 on 2d8 and sent a mere two enemies into morpheus’ embrace.

“Kill them All!”

It was a close shave, but our side won: Thanks to the dice we did not even lose anyone in the battle, as we hacked down the “goblins”, or rather, bugbears gnolls, while Raven intercepted Little Jimmy who fled directionless into the forest.

Winning was cool of course, but the optics were not the best. We will never know if the greenskins would have held up their side of the bargain. Which means, we will never know if we are heroes or murderers. Good guys or villains. Ginger tried to calm down the distraught boy, trying to shield him from Galdor’s happy chant of “we killed them all, we killed them all!” (which we did not, because their head honcho fled into the forest).

Most of the men slit bugbear throats and patted the bodies down for small change, while Raven looted the tents.

Then the girls pushed for leaving and motivated the boys to get going.

The dead bugbears were left behind as food for birds, worms, and ants.

Happy Family

We returned Little Jimmy to the parents and got our horse. They declared they were going to start a chicken farm close by, and that we would always be welcome.

Then we spent the night.

We woke up in a strange land, all different – maybe transferred by magic. Maybe to a different world.

We will have to find out.

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Image: Osman Sran, pexels.