Valkor

Valkor:
"The plan was simple: the shaman would disguise himself as the current leader, and lure him to the sacrificial circle, where we would attack and ambush him. The place smelled a bit foul and I certainly didn't like being there, but it was an interesting experience. We waited in the nearby brushes for nearly an hour when finally the disguised lizardman emerged and cast silence on all of us to prevent us from giving away our location."

"Soon, the 'meeting' was on its way, with both identical looking lizardmen arguing over something we couldn't hear. All of a sudden, they attacked each other, and the silence dropped. I noted that one of them actually cast a spell, ergo the other one must have taken the time to drop the silence, ergo the first must have been the bad-lizardman. Complicated? Yes. That's why I'm the wizard."

"The fight was furious, and as soon as we revealed ourselves, the bad-lizardman cast a spell, and I felt my limbs growing slow and heavy. It didn't bother me too much, as I rattled off a spell to blind the lizarman. It seemed to work, but then he used my own tactics against me: he enveloped us in a big mass of sticky webbing. I eventually willed myself out of it, but soon after, I was hit with another web. Again! I was getting tired of this, so I decided to cast my own web spell. Soon after, it was all over. The bad-lizardman was killed, and the sort of bad one agreed to take us back to the ship. The adventure was profitable too, as we managed to find a sizable stash of goods that we were allowed to keep."

"Soon after, we decided on how best to get to Bellatune. We hired an abler sailor to help us chart our course. It seemed to be correct, as we managed to arrive at the island this time around with no serious issues. It seemed to be sparsely populated, with only a small hamlet it seemed. We had to paddle our row boats to shore, and got the lay of the land a bit. It appeared that there were really only three notable things on the island: the first was some old ruins that no one has been around in some time. The second was an old coot that lived on some mountaintop. Finally, there was some woman that lived in the forests of the island, occasionally coming out to make contact with the villagers. Since none of the villagers knew anyone named Miranda in town, we assumed that the slightly mysterious woman must be her."

"We were first off to an inauspicious start. We didn't know where to start looking for Miranda, so Stimpy got the bright idea to go up the mountain to talk to the old man, because all old men living on mountaintops must be wise, he claimed. Well, we did go talk to him, after spending a good part of the day going up, and to no real avail. He didn't want to tell us right away, and asked us to come back in a week. In that time we would have been able to scour the entire island for this woman, and that's what we did. After the first day of fruitless searching, we set up camp and rested for the evening."

"I had said that there were three notable things on the island. Well, I was wrong, there were four: the forth being the very large, vicious, and aggressive animals that inhabited the island. The attacked us at night, and we awoke to hear Stimpy cry out as he went down in a pile. The other two jumped into action, as I calmly stood up and cast my signature spell at the time: a mass of sticky webbing to trap the wolves. However, they were stronger than I thought, and one of them managed to break free and get right next to me. I could spell its rancid breath in my face. I took a step back and cast another spell, blinding the wolf. After that, the battle was all but decided. The blinded wolf staggered around and snapped ineffecually at the air, while the other one trapped in the web was unable to attack Edmund with any serious danger."

"After the battle, we got Stimpy back on his feet and we were catching our breath when a strange but fairly attractive woman showed up. She didn't fit Miranda's description, and she warned us against camping in the forest while at the same time praising out combat prowess. I thought all of this was a bit strange, especially after I turned and saw Edmund and Stimpy with their mouths agape, and little droplets of saliva dripping down the sides of their mouths..."

Landfall on Bellatune

We sailed around to the lizardman side of Raora and dropped anchor out of sight of lande. We rowed in closer and then the shaman cast a spell and dropped over the side. We followed after him and sure enough we were able to breathe as if it were air. We grabbed rocks to keep us down on the sea floor and walked in towards shore. At a certain point the shaman poked his head above the water to check and then we completed our trip. and came out on shore in safety.

He led us to a clearing which I can only assume by the bloody altar in the middle was the “place of sacrifice” he’d mentioned. He had a spell which transformed his appearance, and he warned us to stay put while he went to get the other shaman.

The altar concerned me. What was it they were used to sacrificing???

We stayed hidden in the trees and before long the shaman returned, apparently asking us to cast any spells we needed before he cast a silence over us (the better to stay hidden until the fighting began).

He slipped off again and before long he entered the clearing with three guards. Or was it him? He was disguised as the other shaman and hadn’t told us how we would tell them apart.

Then another shaman entered from the other side with two guards. I had no idea which was which and could only hope that “our” shaman had been correct when he said we’d know which one to attack when the time came.

They seemed to be arguing, but even if I hadn’t been hiding in a zone of silence I wouldn’t have understood the Draconic to know what they were fighting over. I’m not sure I would have cared—we made a deal and I don’t like to go back on my word.

One of the shamen stepped back and cast a spell and the three guards moved forward to engage. The two on the other side also moved in and all of a sudden the silence vanished so I guessed our boy was the one on the left. We started to move to join the fight and the bad shaman (by which I mean not ours) cast a spell and everything else seemed to be moving way too fast. Before I could do much he cast another spell (how did he do that?) and i was trapped in a mass of sticky webs. I’ve seen Valkor use this spell and it was not a pleasant experience being on the other end of it.

I couldn’t see much of what was happening but I tried to fight my way out, and Stimpy was doing the same but he was closer to the edge than I. Even so we weren’t getting very far so Stimpy pulled something out of belt pouch that sparked into flame and set fire to the webs around him. He seemed unconcerned about the damage he was causing to himself. Before leaving the webbed area he dropped the stick in the area next to me where the webs burned away eaving me a clear path out as soon as I could free myself from the goop immediately around me.

I was just pushing free when splat! The whole area was covered in a fresh mess of sticky webs and I was stuck all over again.

I managed to push free eventually to see that on the one side was, I presume, our shaman and on the other was the other shaman and one guard stuck in some webs cast by Valkor (or so I guessed). Kat was pinging away with arrows but seemed to be unable to find a spot she was comfortable with as she kept running around all over the place. The guard, for some reason, was swinging at the shaman trapped right next to him even though I’m sure they were on the same side originally.

The bad shaman went down soon and then we concentrated on the guard who didn’t last much longer.

Our shaman went off to get us an escort back to shore and we set to searching the corpses. Stimpy went to check out the altar and I followed. As I was looking at the blood it seemed to me that it hadn’t been used in several months. While I was looking I found an odd stick and threw it over to Valkor who was determining whether any of the items we’d found were magical.

The shaman returned, and somewhat surprisingly stuck to his word. We were escorted back to shore and even given a boat to keep for our troubles.

We sailed around to Able to reprovision, get our magical treasures identified and sell them. Some of it was quite impressive—apparently the stick I found was a wand to cast the spell Hold Person, and while the spell cast from the wand was somewhat ineffective it was worth over 1000 gold and would make us some money when we could sell it. Unfortunately there was nobody in Able that could afford to buy the more expensive items and we were going to have to return to Seawell.

There, we were able to cash in the items we didn’t care about. The others also wanted to pay someone to set our course to Bellatune for us, which we did. There was also talk about hiring someone to sail with us but I managed to talk them out of that.

Sure enough, in three days we could see an island on the horizon and we sailed towards it. I cast a spell to give me some idea of the general landscape and we headed for what seemed the main population centre.

It wasn’t terribly large and had no dock so we were forced to drop anchor off shore and row in. A small delegation of the locals came to meet us and they were friendly enough though apparently unaccustomed to visitors. We asked about Miranda but they didn’t know her by name or description. They said there was a woman that wandered around the forest a lot and they occasionally saw, but she didn’t mix with them much and they didn’t know her name.

They also told us about a man that lived on the top of the nearby mountain and for some reason Stimpy seemed to think that meant it was some sort of guru. So we spent a day traipsing to the mountain, and more time straining to climb our way to the top.

We found the man who said we could call him “Red”. If failing to answer questions makes a man a guru then this guy was definitely a guru. Stimpy asked him about Miranda and he told us to come back a week later and he’d share his wisdom with us.

I was kind of annoyed about being dragged up the mountain for nothing so I waited until we were down again before pointing out to Stimpy that he probably should have asked the guy about the ruins we knew were on the island as well. You should have seen the angry shade of red he turned! It was hard to keep a straight face as he berated me for not reminding him.

With a week to fill in we went for my original plan of searching in the forest aimlessly, as Stimpy had called it. We camped for the night and can’t have been asleep long when we woken by Stimpy’s screams (he had the first watch). We saw that there were two extremely large wolves attacking him and scrambled to join the fight just as Stimpy went down. Valkor cast another of his famous webs and I took on one of the wolves while Valkor pulled Stimpy away and the other wolf struggled loose and attacked Kat.

I was able to take the first wolf down and then went to help Kat with hers. We were beat up pretty bad before the second one was down as well but by then Valkor had Stimpy back on his feet and with a judicious application of the healing wand we were pretty much patched up.

We were getting ready to settle down again when we noticed a woman entering our camp from the trees. This was obviously the woman we’d been told about, but she didn’t match the description we’d been given of Miranda on Raora. She complimented us on our foolhardiness in camping in the forest, but also on our combat skills in fighting off the wolves.

And she would have to be the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.

I found the remains of the party at the drunken clam, one of the midrange inns in town, after a surprisingly large amount of detective work. I managed to bump into them in the woods north of town, right after Edmund, the anti-social one, had killed some sort of weird gorilla-sea creature. The slightly nerdy mage figured out what he thinks it is from some legend. Apparently, there have been stories of intelligent sea creatures occasionally get it on with normal land animals, making these abominations. I guess there are desperate farmers under the sea as well.

I joined with the group and we bought a rowboat, to go to their ship. We also bought a sextant to try to navigate. We ran into lizardmen, firing off of the cliff towards the boat. On the good side, since we were so far away, their shots were pretty ineffective. However, their ship used to be stocked with supplies, pretty valuable goods and goods that could provide an easy cover as a (strange) band of merchants. Especially since adventurers searching for an elusive mage aren't always welcomed in most towns, at least not without some gold to lubricate their arrival.

We tried to sail off towards an island where there were rumors of Miranda living.
Unfortunately, our travels were more like the blind leading the deaf and dumb. I figured I could get lucky with guiding the ship, but since I'd never actually guided a ship before, and had only been out on the open sea a few times in my life.... it didn't go as planned. We wound up in the middle of the sea. When trying to sail back to Raora, our luck wasn't too much better. However, with some help from Stimpy's albatross, we found a small island. And on that island was a very interesting lizardman, one who actually spoke common. He was a former shaman of one of the tribes on the island. He wanted our help to regain his position, and in return, he would direct us back to our island. It might be possible, I'm not sure. Of course, it's also possible to set him off on the land, and sail away quickly. Since we weren't expecting him to speak common, nobody realized that he would understand when we brought up this point. He might be expecting it. And I'm not sure how powerful this guy is...

His plan is to cast a spell to allow us to breathe underwater, swimming undetected to the coast, then to sneak up and kill the shaman. It could be very risky, even though the lizardmen are far from intelligent, 500 of them versus 5 of us is not exactly the best odds. Of course, there could be some monetary gain available. I'd still feel better about going through with this if we had another 50 soldiers to back us up. And instead of getting rid of the shaman, just did away with the whole tribe.

New beginnings

Most everyone left for Mota, leaving just Valkor and myself in Seawell. I don’t know where I want to go, but it certainly isn’t Mota!

We still have a ship and I thought everyone was keen on going to find Miranda but I guess they just couldn’t be trusted. Is it any surprise I don’t like people? You don’t get this sort of crap from animals...

Seawell is already feeling claustrophobic, so I slept there at night but was usually out at first light. I tried to check out whether the locals had put anyone new in the lighthouse but our ropes over the gorge had been cut or otherwise wasted away and I didn’t care enough to risk my neck trying to jump the gorge or scale it down this side and up the other. And of course I’d have to get back again... How do the people in the lighthouse keep supplied? They have to be able to get to Seawell occasionally, and it’s not like you can just row around with the tides and reefs at this part of the island.

The next day I went the other direction. There was some forest on the coast West of Seawell that I thought might be interesting. If the rumours of Miranda being some sort of aquatic are accurate this is also the place she most likely lived while she was here. Sure, there are dangerous things on this island but I passed some woodsmen on the way so help wasn’t too far off if I found something I couldn’t handle.

I heard something dropping from the trees behind me and got my weapons out just in time. I was distracted by the bizarre appearance of whatever it was and the fight took longer than it should have but a couple of good strikes finished it off just as Valkor and some other guy showed up. The other guy looked like a bigger, pudgier, um “simpler“ version of Ren and it turned out it was his younger brother Stimpy. Okay... So we were talking about what this freak was when some girl jumps out of the bushes and joins in the conversation like she belongs there. Says her name’s “Kat” or some such and that she knows all about the island. What is she—some sort of freaking genie???

Well apparently “all about the island” doesn’t include the freakshow lying dead at my feet. I cast about and eventually find a trail leading back to the shore. No surprise, while the thing didn’t look like any sort of sea creature I’ve seen before the fur looked kind of matted as if it’s used to being wet and the eyes were kind of deepset and looked like they weren’t very strong. As if it spent a long, long time deep in the water where it’s dark and eyes don’t help you much.

At this point Valkor perks up and says he recalls reading sometime about intelligent sea creatures doing the nasty with land animals, giving rise to “things” that have no place in nature. Hard to tell if he really read this somewhere or was just making up a story to impress the newcomers but the truth is it makes no real difference either way.

We headed back to town and these new people just kept hanging around talking as if they were my new best friends. Well, if they really were then they should know I don’t like people.

Not only that, but some other loser in purple sharkskin armour shows up and starts hanging around as well. Oh come on! Why doesn’t he just carry a sign around saying “Hey everybody, look at me!!!” Which also means everybody else was staring at the rest of us as well. It made me feel very uncomfortable, and I don’t like that. Apart from anything if Percy sends anybody to track me down this guy is going to ensure everybody remembers I was here.

Yeah, it’s definitely time to get off this island. Anywhere else we go I’m going to play it extra low key and hope that nobody notices me amongst the bright, shiny baubles that have hung themselves on our group.

I don’t trust any of these new people. Not sure I trust Valkor either, but at least he’s proved himself to me. As we head for bed I slap 10 gold on the counter and tell the innkeeper to find me some information on these new people. He greedil;y scoops it up and says he’ll have something by the end of the next day. I figure that should be fine—we have plenty to do before we leave Seawell.

The next day everything moves very quickly. We purchase a boat in no time and load it up. The others want to leave around the middle of the day but I don’t have my information so I’m not going anywhere. I can’t even recall what excuse I gave—it was a lie and I assume they know it’s a lie. I want them to understand that I have no intention of answering to them and prying won’t get them squat.

The innkeeper’s report didn’t tell me much, but at least there was nothing obvious to make me worry so next morning we left. I can’t remember what these dingleberries call themselves... Hah—while I’m trying to remember it seems that if you mix up their names slightly you get Gimpy Cat Skin. Yes, that will help me remember. Well, at least as close as I care about.

So the safe route is to row almost all the way around the island. We put in at Able for the night, where the people seem preoccupied with working out how to profit most from the fact that they have water and the other towns don’t. Yes, that’s a clever attitude. They’ve clearly never seen the guards from Seawell fighting...

We head off the next day and even though we try to stay a safe distance from shore we start getting some arrows as we pass the lizardman area. I’m busy rowing and trying to get us out of there before me get mobbed. Skin, I mean Glynn, is on the other oar but then just drops it to go do something to attack the lizardmen. I yell for someone else to grab it and, um, Stimpy jumps in. There’s a bit of a scuffle but nothing too bad and before long we’re out of there.

Eventually we draw up to the ship and climb aboard. Some of the others go exploring and run into a small group of lizardmen. After we deal with them we find that everything we left aboard has been raided. Damn lizardmen! Fortunately the wind is with us and we can at least sail around to Seawell to resupply. We were going to have to go there anywaqy to pick up the rest of our crew, but this just means it will cost us more. A lot more. The new guys don’t have much money (of course) so Valkor coovers our costs. I could cover it too but damned if I’m covering these new guys. Let Valkor worry about them sticking around long enough to make good what they owe him. I’ll happily pay him my share. When he asks.

We set sail and the girl starts talking about how she can navigate. Fine. Let her do it. Of course she doesn’t have any charts so I watch as she uses mine. She seems to have a reasonably good idea of what she’s doing. I’m pretty sure I could do better, but if she wants to do it then let her.

Sharkskin’s a pain in the butt. First he wanted to be paid to join us. Sure I’ll pay you—how’d you like a warhammer? Between the eyes? Now we’re on the ship he wants to be the captain. Hahahahaha! He can’t navigate, and he doesn’t strike me as that impressive a sailor. Oh sure, he’s better than me, but that isn’t saying much. The other sailors give him lip service, but if we get in trouble I don’t think they’ll be listening to him. However, I don’t know who they will be listening to, and that could be a problem. I should have a talk with Valkor, and maybe fat-stupid-Ren.. Stimpy, yeah, Stimpy and decide amongst us who should really be in charge and get the word to the crew.

Crap. I didn’t pay enough attention to what the girl was doing and now we’re lost. Now they want me to take over and dig us out of this. I have no idea where we are, so I don’t know how they expect me to get us anywhere else. I try to take us back to Raora but it’s no good. We’re still lost. We sail around a bit and eventually see some gulls overhead and Stimpy somehow manages to communicate with them and they head off and we follow them. Sure enough we find an island. A very, very small island. It’s almost certainly not on my charts and probably won’t have a town but we have to look. If nothing else there might be some game we can hunt for fresh meat.

Well what do you know—there’s a lizardman! He got exiled from Raora for some reason he won’t tell us, which the others don’t seem adequately concerned about. Says his tribe of 500 lizardmen have a new shaman and if we help him get rid of the new shaman we’ll get to Raora in the process and then we’ll know where we are and can decide what we want to do about trying to get to Bellatune again.

We agree to help him. Lizardmen are close enough to people that I don’t trust him, but all I really want is to get back to somewhere I know and then take care of the navigation myself instead of trusting someone I don’t know.

Oh yeah, get this—shark boy and the girl want to draw on my charts to mark in this island that wouldn’t even be more than a speck. Over my dead body—buy your own bloody charts if you want to draw all over them. The girl tries to tell me that amongst all the other stuff she’s done she’s also been a cartographer’s assistant. Like I care one way or the other! One time I peeled onions in the kitchen too, but I’m not pretending I’m a cook!

The lizardman won’t speak Common, though he clearly understands it. So he has to get Scat to help him navigate, and mine are the only charts. I make sure there are no drawing materials in the room and I keep an eye on them any time they’re consulting my charts. If I see her trying to mark them in some way she’ll never see them again and I don’t care of that means we all rot at sea.

I don’t like people.

Valkor

Valkor:
“…I long suspected that the sail was some sort of air elemental binded to the canvas.”

“But in either case, once the commotion died down, we were greeted and welcomed as heroes in town. How things change quickly when you save everyone from some sort of a giant sail thing. Everyone except Edmund headed off to Mota or perhaps elsewhere at this point. I guess we had a pretty good run.”

“I spent the next morning in the inn, scribing some spells into some scrolls. I was approached by someone who appeared to be Ren’s bigger, stronger, and jollier brother, Stimpy. He introduced himself, and asked to join up for some adventure. Since at this point, it was just Edmund and myself, I decided that some sort of healing magic would be helpful.”

“Edmund told me that he’d be to the west, so we left to look for him together. Eventually, we found him, and he had just slain some sort of strange creature. We had never seen such a thing before, and decided that a bit of tracking and scouting would be in order. At this point, some strangely dressed woodswoman approached us and said that she’d tag along too. Her name was Kat, and ahe seemed to know the island pretty well, so we let her come as well. She was a bit odd though.”

“We followed its trail winding through the forest, and eventually came out on the beach. It seems that whatever it was, it was amphibious. With no other leads to follow, we returned to town. I thought about it the whole way, and it occurred to me that I had read about something like this somewhere. It was some sort of a bizarre monstrosity, the result of some sort of intelligent sea-based being mating with a land based creature.”

“Back at the tavern, we were approached by yet another person, who introduced himself as Glen. He was a garishly dressed fellow, sporting purple sharkskin leather. The others couldn’t stop having fun at his expense, so I agreed let him join us. If nothing else, the jokes would provide plenty of amusement.”

“We later decided that the next course of action would be to row out to that old pirate ship, and sail it to meet Miranda. We purchased a rowboat in town and paddled around the island. About halfway there, we encountered a bunch of lizardfolk, who promptly attacked us by firing arrows. We pulled back and rowed to the ship without further incident.”

“However, what was on the ship was a whole other story. Everything on that ship was raided and looted, and we encountered 4 straggler lizardmen who promptly attacked us. They weren’t much of a match for us. From what I can tell, Kat was a fast attacker, tumbling around the foes and keeping them off balance. Stimpy was like his older brother, a druid. Glen seemed to be one of my more belligerent brethren. Forsaking all but the most simplest of destructive magic in order to master casting spells with very little somatic components.”

“We soon set sail for the other island, or at least, we attempted to. In not too long, we were hopelessly lost, and we were forced to turn back. Too bad we got lost doing that too. We eventually came across a small island, and we encountered a single lizardman. He agreed to help us navigate back to Raora in exchange for our aid in defeating the reigning lizardman shaman on Raora. We agreed, figuring that we didn’t like the lizardmen much after they attacked us for no good reason. There was also the potential for some treasure too. So we were able to get back to Raora, and our deposed lizardman host told us the plan…”

I was always a bit of a tomboy, running off into the woods to play with the other kids instead of helping my parents around the house or at my father's fletcher's store. Of course, Seawell being the calm and relatively prosperous town it is, that wasn't too serious of a problem, though my mother took it more seriously than my father. When we played guards and lizardmen, I'd always choose to be a lizardman, and enjoyed climbing into the branches of trees and jumping down on top of the other kids to scare them.

As I grew older I started to take my playing in the woods more seriously. I started to help some of the local hunters as they went out. I excelled at finding and stalking the prey. And in return for making their hunt quicker and more successful, they started giving me a few silver after they had sold the meat at market. I was starting to make a small business by lending my services.

When I was 16 I tried a brief stint with the town guard. It didn't work out. I have always been a bit of a loner and following all the rules and regulations was a bore. Plus, you never see new recruits with shiney new clothes and armor, do you? I did learn some valuable skills, however, such as more survival techniques and the lay of the island.

After I decided to leave the guard, they offered me a deal as a freelancer. See, the lizardmen raided fairly regularly every 2 years or so. I think it was because they had forgotten about the last time they got their asses kicked in that time and wanted another taste of our goods. It had been a year and a half, and the mayor and guard were getting a bit worried about where, when, and how they would strike next. I would be paid to find and spy on them for a little while, see if they had any plans to strike soon or if i could find out their plan for the future. I've always been good at languages, I picked up Dwarven and Elven just from talking to the visitors to Seawell, so I figured Draconic wouldn't be too much of a problem. Finding the lizardmen was easy, and I spent about 3 months studying them. Their plans weren't exactly organized, but it seems like they were starting to set their eyes on a ranch on the outskirts of town with some well fed cows. The town guard easily fended them off, and I got a reputation. I'd still aid hunters from time to time, but mostly I would follow people.

I've been watching you...