I saw this, and it reminded me of a scene in a roleplaying session playing the German RPG system “Midgard”.

A group of seven player characters, playing an “evil party” working for a witch, were dispatched to an island “owned”, or claimed, by her. She sent them there because she had been warned that some stranger had landed there with a boat, together with two armored warriors and five goons.

The team, all low-level goons or beginner warlocks etc., went there, found the pretty nice boat of the intruders, decided to steal it later, and went looking for the strangers. Not far from the harbour they stumbled upon a small ravine and unpacked their magic to peek into it with infravision.

I rolled the chances and gave them a random encounter for the forest: Martens!
How many?
I rolled a d10 and got a 7.
Seven martens of various sizes mulling around in a little ravine, a bit deeper than man-height. The dark and wind-protected place had roots from the surrounding trees sticking out and was riddled with hollows and small-ish cave mouths.

(Photo by Bailey Parsons – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0)

1+1=2

The group immediately jumped to conclusions: The intruder dude had seven guys with him, and here were seven martens. Obviously he was a powerful magician who had turned all his men into martens so they could bide their time here.

One of the group was a necromant who had an undead owl with him. He sent the owl into the ravine to harass the martens and maybe kill one or two. But that’s not how it went down: As soon as the owl moved down into the confined space of the ravine, the martens ganged up on it and tore it to pieces.

Shock-horror! By the rules, losing such a construct is a strong psychological blow to a necromant and he can’t use magic for several hours.

Also, the martens ganging up on the undead bird was the final proof the party needed: They were definitely the transformed warriors of the intruder.

The embarrassment factor

They staked out the ravine and watched it, for hours, careful to note if any martens came out.
A good two hours after midnight, one of the party, a dark paladin, said: “You know what, this is silly. Just imagine we come back to our mistress tomorrow and tell her we spent the whole night watching a hole full of martens. She will think we are crazy!”

Put like that, it really sounded like the party was punching below their weight. They crept back up to the ravine and looked in: No martens!!
They carefully climbed in and discovered several small holes and one crawlspace wide enough to allow a human to crawl in on all fours.

Again the party employed deductive reasoning: If the magician had turned his comrades into martens, but not himself, then the crawlspace was the only place he could have gone. And the martens had most likely followed him to warn him of the party.

Crawling in after them sounded like a bad idea. They had already made short work of the undead owl, they would absolutely destroy any party crawling after them single file.

Fight martens with fire

So they decided to smoke them out! They collected fire wood etc. and pushed it into the crawlspace, then poured some oil on it and lit it up. The wood was a bit wet, so it made a lot of smoke. Excellent!

They felt pretty great about it until they noticed that the smoke was escaping through various cracks and gaps in the area, and the necromant climbed out of the hole to run around and plug the gaps with dirt and moss, while the rest of the party watched the fire and was ready to kill the martens when they came out.

Filling the gaps

All this was still going on when the necromant, busy running around, plugging holes and yelling to the others how many of those holes there were, suddenly found himself the target of two archers shooting from a southwesterly direction.

This was the moment when it dawned on the party that sometimes a marten can also be just a marten.

The intruder escaped on his fancy boat, his sinister objectives completed in the six or seven hours he had roaming the witch’s island but, players being players, the party managed to bring down the two archers.

And in such a way, a random encounter can turn into a wild adventure!