• 2018.03.29
• Previously: The party entered the Cragmaw Hideout in search of Sildar Hallwinter in hopes of saving him from a horrible fate in the Eating Cave. They discovered a small pack of Dire Wolves chained up and managed to comfort and befriend the beasts. After breaking the laws of Magic and levitating the wolves up a natural chimney in the corner of the room, they encountered a large, armored Bugbear with 2 well-trained Dire Wolves of his own. In the ensuing battle, the enemy was routed, the Bugbear was devoured by Mayonez the Lizardfolk Monk, and a lone Goblin surrendered after watching all of his friends decimated at the hands of this merciless group of strangers. In one final act of revenge one of the Bugbear's Dire Wolves lashed out violently at Mayonez, rendering him unconscious.
• Present: Chris B., Alex, Ryan, Drey, Corey
• Party
  • 🤹 Buldrick, Eladrin Swashbuckler
  • 😈 Fisty, Tiefling Tome Pact Warlock
  • 🦆 Ducky, Gnome Wizard
  • 🛡 Tumutch, Human Paladin of the Silver Flame
  • 🛠 Dug, Dwarf Forge Cleric.

• Dug discovers his family name: Hammerhound

tl;dr: The gang flushes out the cave with a water trap, wages an epic battle in the Eatin Cave, and rescues Sildar, but not before the goblins amputated one of his arms.

1. Interrogation
2. When the Levee Breaks
3. Buldrick's Solo Adventure
4. The Eatin' Cave

Here we are once again, with the gang pressing in on all sides around a lone goblin after massacring its entire party. Fisty manacles the goblin and starts to give him the shake down while Ducky tends to the fallen and barely breathing Mayo.

Mayo is stabilized, has a health potion poured down his throat, and is somewhat revived. Hiro lowers the weak monk carefully down the trash chute and carries him back to the cart.

The group searches around the hall and finds crates of supplies marked with the seal of the Lion Shield Costco.

The obvious implication is that these supplies were stolen from a merchant caravan, but it is uncertain whether or not Costco might actually secretly be bankrolling the Cragmaw!

Ducky finds a treasure chest full of coins, healing potions, and a little jade frog statue.

Meanwhile Fisty and Buldrick are playing Bad Cop/Sleazy Cop. Undeterred by the language barrier, the rogue gleefully shows a palm full of ball bearings to the confused goblin.

The interrogation is quite effective!

They learn the following:

• The goblin's name is Glom.

• Who we thought was King Grol is revealed to actually be Foo Fighter Dave Grohl.

• The hulking bugbear the gang just killed was indeed Commander Klarg

• Klarg has a second-in-command named Kleeniq who is guarding Sildar back in the Eatin' Cave.

And they get some general info about the layout of the cave and its defenses, in addition to some info about the location of Castle Cragmaw.

The group learns that the gushing waterfall they've been hearing this whole time has been dammed up just outside this hall, creating a reserve of water that can be released as a torrent to flush out the whole front of the cave.

They decide to spring the water trap on the goblins.

Achievement: The group lets a hostage live!

Fisty magically disguises himself as Klarg. He and Thatso go back down the trash chute and approach the bugbear sentries on the bridge. Fisty delivers an outstanding performance as Klarg and orders the bugbears to gather everybody here in the mouth of the cave.

The bugbears are supremely weirded out by Klarg's unusual behavior:

"You're asking us to do the thing you previously told us to never do.."

"No, you PEON, I'm ordering you to do the thing I prev--JUST DO IT!"

A half dozen or so goblinoids eventually crowd into the hall, and when Fisty gives the signal, Ducky--who has been watching this all unfold through the eyes and ears of the familiar--orders the charge. The team rushes forward to the pools and starts attacking the two dams.

Fisty stalls while they chip away at the dams. He flies up into the air ("That is definitely NOT Klarg!") and taunts the goblinoids and turns the water blood-red as it finally starts to surge and swell. And then a torrent of water floods the cave. Fisty just barely stays aloft over the water as the goblinoids are swept away and flushed out of the cave and washed up onto the shores of the stream outside. Several of them just give up and die right then and right there.

One lone hobgobin is able to withstand the deluge by clinging desperately to the side of the cave. It is an impressive feat, but he is quickly killed nonetheless.

Two intrepid bugbears struggle against the current and try regain entry into the cave. One of them attempts a direct approach and is sniped off by Fisty and Ducky, who is now standing on the bridge covering Fisty. The second bugbear turns off into the wolf kennel.

The team rushes forward, loudly and clumsily. (Fisty attempts to push his way through what looks like a small passage into the cavern ahead but is swept down by the passing water and falls down.) At the other end of the bridge is a narrow hall opening up into a broad cavern.

Thatso flies ahead into what appears to be the Eatin Cave and is promptly pierced by an arrow loosed by one of the goblins, all of whom have readied their attacks because of the commotion outside.

Thatso bursts into a fine mist and vanishes from existence. Back on the bridge, Ducky shudders and feels a sense of loss.

💀🦉

Buldrick moves forward in the direction that Thatso went and is able to hear movement in the room ahead. Not wanting to walk into an ambush but also not willing to use all of his ball bearings, he deliberately counts out 900 ball bearings and scatters them across the entrance to the cavern, retaining 100 to be used later in some awful and obscene manner of his choosing. The group then retreats into the hallway and regroups.

Tumutch plays his bagpipes in the soft candlelight in an attempt to draw out the occupants of the cave. It's not very effective. Tumutch then breaks his bagpipes.

Not quite up to the task right now of taking on a huge room full of goblins, the group decides to stop and strategize for about an hour and let Tumutch fix his bagpipes. Short rest!

Two things happen during this rest:

1. The goblins apparently get hungry. They cut off Sildar's arm in the back of the cavern, attach it to a spit, and start roasting it over the fire.

2. Responding to some stimuli felt by him and him alone (retcon: remembering that there was a bear trap in the Costco boxes), Buldrick turns and sprints away back across the bridge. The group watches him go, collectively shrug their shoulders, and continue reading, eating, drinking, and talking.

Buldrick, visions of bear traps dancing in his head, is sprinting through the caves, back across the bridge, past the broken dams, past the now depleted pools, back into Klarg's hall where he finds a huge bugbear and the original Fab Four pack of dire wolves, now agitated and primed for combat by the bugbear.

The rogue assesses his five to one odds, and decides to grab the bear trap he came for and get out of there.

Drawing on his ancestral connection to the feywild, Buldrick dashes straight toward the enemies in front of him, shimmers and fades from sight, and rematerializes behind them. He dives for the trash chute and climbs down to the kennels.

The bugbear pursues him, and much more happy with the one-on-one scenario, the rogue engages.

Daggers flash during the fight that ensues, and somehow Buldrick is able to lure the bugbear around a stagglemite, lay a friggin bear trap on the other side of it, and then continue to draw the bugbear around and right into the jaws of the trap, which springs and slams shut over the creature's leg.

Now taking his time, Buldrick finishes off the beast in a theacrobatic fashion like only Buldrick can do, and goes about trying to retrieve his trap from the bugbear's corpse.

This proves to be much more difficult than expected and Buldrick eventually just hacks and stomps at the corpse until the whole leg is removed.

He trails the leg behind him and returns to the group.

By way of explaining his absence, and the gruesome severed appendage he's carrying, he simply offers "Fell down a trash shoot and almost trapped myself in the trap."

The group collectively nods and accepts this. "That's so Buldrick!"

Fisty, still in the form of Klarg, attempts to approach the mouth of the cave, crawling carefully through the ball bearings, sweeping them to the side and calling out, "It's me! It's Klarg! I'm covered in blood! My god! There's blood everywhere!" (He poured the contents of a waterskin on his head and turned it blood red)

But the goblins aren't having any of that nonsense and they fire on him as he enters the entryway. Fisty bravely crawls away.

The group gathers up all their nerve and follows as Tumutch charges blindly into the room. Chaotic battle ensues.

At the back of the cave, Kleeniq is holding a wretched and one-armed Sildar. Between Kleeniq and the group lie multiple goblin archers, and a mad goblin dressed up like a court jester is entertaining himself and giggling to himself in the corner.

Kleeniq calls out to the group and offers a deal in exchange for the Klarg's life. Somebody yells back, "Klarg? We killed that guy way back in episode three!" and Kleeniq's like, "Oh, cool. Okay, nice, I was gonna double cross you anyway. Kill these fools!"

And then he hurls Sildar over the ledge behind him. Sildar tumbles down toward the roasting spit and Klenniq enters the fray himself.

Combat continues.

The weird little jester is sniping at the team with its bow and arrow between inept attempts to cast some kind of magic with a little stick that he's brandishing as though it's a wand, making sounds exactly like the sound of Eric making squealing goblin gibberish noises.

Buldrick lands what should be a lethal attack on the creature, but his daggers pass harmlessly through. Ducky sees this and assumes physical immunity, assumes vulnerability to magic, and plunges a huge round of Magic Missile into the creature to absolutely no effect.

Ducky tries to distract the creature with cream pie antics, and by prestidigitating so that Kleeniq appears to have soiled himself. This is only somewhat effective. Then, drawing on her knowledge of History, Ducky determines that this creature must be one of the nilbog, a goblin possessed and driven insane by one of it's crazy goblin gods.

Ducky shouts at Tumutch to heal the nilbog. Tumutch is like, "I got this," uncorks one of his healing potions, and empties it out over the nilbog's head. The nilbog gets wet and immediately hates Tumutch.

The nilbog then tries repeatedly to hit Tumutch with his stick magic managing to successfully hit him once to little effect.

Next Ducky approaches the nilbog and pulls out her last two remaining health potions. She sips both, showing that the contents are safe to drink, and hands one to the nilbog, offers a hearty Cheers! and downs the potion.

Fisty, bloodied and quite hurt from battle, looks on with despair as the last two healing potions are quaffed.

As the nilbog downs its potion, the possessing spirit rises up out of the body, into the air, and dissipates. The goblin, now free, experiences a brief moment of lucidity before swaying on its feet and falling down dead.

Meanwhile, Dug, Fisty, and Buldrick are occupied in the back of the room, wailing on Kleeniq.

Buldrick crouches down into position and yells, "Shield!" and everybody looks around expecting Hiro to appear to complete the maneuver, but he doesn't because he's still back at the cart tending to Mayonez.

Combat continues.

Kleeniq finally falls at Dug's hands, and the remaining goblins lower their weapons in surrender.

Sildar is freed (this closes #1) and is decidedly unappreciative, but he just had his arm cut off and roasted in front of him, so the group cuts him some slack.

Buldrick assassinates one of the surrendered, groveling goblins because, Buldrick.

the end?

• The Gang spend a really long time leading up this session creating a detailed, intricate plan with multiple contingencies and lots of Its Always Sunny in Philadephia references. A plan which almost immediately went straight out the window. RIP the D.E.N.N.I.S. System