A Sinking Feeling
(Adventure used Red Hand of Doom Part 2: The Ruins of Rhest
Heading into the Suss Forest to discover just what a "Saarvith" was, the party spotted the small fort blocking the road. Expecting trouble, they made a complicated plan to assault it involving cover from illusory fog, flying enlarged dwarves, and other complications. Their over-planning resulted in the group splitting themselves up, with the dwarf fighter and his warforged cohort inside and killing everything and the rest of the party outside taking a few random bowshots but otherwise doing nothing. Fortunately for the party the defenders were incompetent enough to not only be left at a minor road block, but unable to figure out how to defend themselves against the assault, even when a random patrol showed up to help. In the end, all they did was add to the party's stock of consumables.
Continuing on, the party found themselves baffled by the extensive marshland. The map they found indicated something was here, but the flooded ground was doing a good job of defeating them. When they finally found a dry place to camp and plan their next move they immediately spotted the dead owl followed by spotting what caused the dead owl - a massive minotaur. (A centaur-like "opposite" of a minotaur, replacing the dragonspawn.) Defaulting by the near surprise to simple tactics of "hack it to death - FAST!", they managed to take it down before it could cause serious injury. Doing the usual post-combat search, they found tag on the dead owl, along with the manotaur's treasure, just as the grugach (wild elves) flew in on more owls.
At this point failed die rolls helped them a bit, as none of them realized just how close to death they were on general principle from the grugach. (Said GP being "kill all trespassers first, speak with dead to find out what they were up to later".) Combined with offering the owl tag and a quick mention of wanting to kill goblins got them an invitation back to the elven camp.
At the camp some reasonable discussions followed with the party convincing the grugach they merely wanted to brutally exterminate some hobgoblins and had no intention of trespassing. The grugach, pushed to the edge by the incursions, agreed to allow the party to execute the trespassers for them provided they left immediately afterward. This was perfectly acceptable to the party, so of course they found a way to nearly mess things up, insisting on leaving immediately without a guide who had to oversee the funeral of her brother. (Who had been eaten by the recently deceased manotaur.) At the last moment they realized that "wasting" a day for the funeral would take less time than wandering the trackless marsh without a guide, so they stayed, even offering up an epic recitation of an ad hoc saga about slaughtering goblinoids. (High charisma for leadership purposes is useful for other things at times.)
And so the party headed off to the ruined "city" of Rhest. The wizard suspected it of being related to ancient Suel migrants who, according to legend, built a lost city in the Suss Forest during the migrations. As such it could be expected to yield a significant store of ancient lore. Naturally they would immediately forget this adventure seed while dealing with the rest of the adventure.
Reaching the lake, they spotted and identified the bell tower and city hall, and after due consideration and noting that the warforged could just walk across the bottom, they came up with a plan to capsize a canoe and have the warforged "tug" them out for the attack. Naturally with such a great plan they had to find a way to mess it up. They did by sending only two people up the bell tower, expecting them to overwhelm the defenders, while the rest waited. The running battle there alerted the main force, and the party now prepared for a straight up fight. At this point dumb luck and brute force saved the day for them, as they dropped directly into the massed giants and ogres at the city hall and promptly slaughtered them out of hand. When the hobgoblin mindbender (bard/mindbender) tried to dominate them, they spotted him instantly and cut him down after making one save. Saarvith, the goblin ranger mounted on a chimera, proved considerably more difficult to deal with. (I did a slight rebuild on him to turn him into a hand crossbow sniper with a bunch of magical bolts. Combined with chimera flyby, they tore the party up.) Finally, a combination of magic missiles from a wand, a flying, enlarged, dwarf fighter, and some illusions confusing the chimera to slow it down, it died, Saarvith was waterlogged, and the party victorious.
Saarvith, with no mount and no crossbow, was pretty much useless. So, like any self-respecting goblin, he immediately surrendered and offered to spill everything in exchange for his life. After much debate the party accepted, making it clear that "life" didn't mean equipment or protection from the grugach. Saarvith agreed, and revealed everything he knew about the Ghostlord and the plans for attacking Fenrill. This included noting that he was in charge of the hatchery for their "air force", which was right in that building over there. Also, that funny thing in the box was the Ghostlord's phylactery. Saarvith was released with an admonition to leave very quickly.
A quick trip to the hatchery resulted in a moment of severe terror as the guardian was a gorgon (again replacing a dragonspawn), and the party wasn't prepared to turn stone back to flesh. It was just one though, so the eggs were destroyed and those reinforcements for the horde dealt with.
Returning to the grugach encampment the party was accepted for having done a valuable service. After considerable internal discussion, the grugach had even decided to help the party, offering some giant owls to travel to the Ghostlord's lair, and promising to send a detachment of owl archers to the impending battle at Fenrill.
With that, the party healed up, and prepared to mount their owls and seek out this Ghostlord.
Next: He'd have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling heroes and their darned owls.