Waypoint and the Giants 

March 11, 2021

The ringing of battle in the cave trails off.  The group faces a short human dressed in better traveling clothes.  He straightens up and says, "So, what do you want?"  

"What are you talking about?"  

"Well, there is no point to fight now, with Travis dead, so what do you want?"  

"Who are you?"  

"I am Josef Spellblade, of Luskan.  In fact, it's funny.  We nearly met in Silverymoon.  I was looking for a way to Sundabar to follow my compatriots and had heard of a group heading to Sundabar.  I mean, I don't know if it was you or not but I gathered due to the orcs, not many were traveling and I was hoping to find a group.  I suppose, it doesn't matter now."  Josef trails off in speaking.  Gorstag doesn't look amused.  

"So," asks Dio, "are you here for research or knowledge?"  

"What's the difference?" asks Josef.  

Dio sputters a bit on an answer and Gorstag finally says, "What's to stop us killing you?"  

"Well, that's why I'm talking.  Ask your questions as there is nothing for me now that Travis is dead."

"What were you here to learn?" asks Dio.  

"How to become an undead, I should think that was obvious," retorts Josef.

"You wanted to become undead?" asks Dio, incredulously.  "Why?"  

"Ah, Dio," says Josef, smiling a bit when Dio realizes he hasn't said his name.  "We could go round and round debating and discussing it but something tell me that I, a member of the Arcane Brotherhood," Josef pauses for effect.  Seeing no one react, he looks shocked.  "Do you seriously not know of the Arcane Brotherhood?  I thought you were good!  I figured a spellcaster from Luskan, and that should be enough to make the connection?  No?"  Josef clicks his tongue as he shakes his head.  "Can it be that you have just been lucky?"  He straightens up again.  "Anyway, Dio, to your point.  As a faithful follower of Moradin, I doubt I would ever convince you of the reasons why some choose to be undead.  Suffice it to say that my organization does.  I have been following someone who came to Luskan three seasons ago.  They thought they covered their tracks or what they were doing but not well enough.  We knew they they were looking into undead but didn't find out who.  When my compatriots let me know they had found someone recently changed into a vampire, I thought maybe we had our break.  

"However, Travis was not the one who did this, even to himself.  He was a fighter from the south, a Zhent."  Pausing for dramatic effect, Josef is again disappointed at the blank stares of the group.  He mutters and shakes his head.  "Where he was, he would never amount to more than a guard and Travis wanted more.  He came up here to form something but Sundabar didn't want him.  He eventually came here and setup Newfort, bringing in followers.  You know, the tragic part in all of this is he wasn't as ambitious as I think Sundabar thought.  He wanted to be remembered and starting a town might have done it.  When offered more, he took it but I don't think he really thought it through."

"So, he didn't make himself a vampire," asks Dio.  

"Aren't you listening?" retorts Josef.  "Travis was a fighting man.  He had no magical aptitude at all.  He needed someone to do this to him.  And I think it was a experiment of someone else but not sure of what or why."  

"So, who did it," asks Dio.

"That's what I was hear to find out.  However, that happened," he points to the ice block that is Travis, then gestures around to the bodies of the undead.  "I didn't learn it before this fight.   Now now, please stop coming closer," says Josef.  Dio kept getting closer, as did Gorstag and Rolen.  Kaji moved closer but more because the others were doing so.  Josef, though, kept moving back, not letting them get that close.  "What else do you want to know?"  

"Are you going back to Luskan?  Will we see you again?"  

"I am  headed back to Luskan.  I am not a diviner to answer the second but I can say there is nothing keeping me in this area now."  

The group isn't happy but also doesn't attack, so Josef turns and moves off into the caves.  The darkness swallows him up and Kaji feels magic being activated, probably a teleportation circle.  The group searches the caves but doesn't find anything.  The unfinished houses, or at least, no doors on them, intrigue Dio and he looks at them closer.  Best he can tell, is they are using a dwarven design where a priest then shapes a door into it but either they didn't know that or didn't understand it.  A few have the door and Dio bashes into one to find it empty.  They find a passage going west and decide to keep going.

An hour of trudging through caves makes Rolen wonder why they went this way.  And kept going.  Eventually, he hears something up ahead, stops the rest, and goes to check it out.  He finds Hook Horrors eating a meal, of something like sheep.  They decide to keep going, as he sees passages out of this small cave room, and so they attack.  Kaji leads with a fireball and then the rest jump into the fight.  The hook horrors react faster than Rolen thought they would as several manage to move forward and attack, every once in a while, getting a hit with their single, large claw.  As he sees the stone giant, he wonders if they are trouble but the stone giant seems more curious and is just watching.  Once the Hook Horrors are defeated, several more stone giants come forward.  One has runes carved into his skin and does the talking.  Rolen has to translate from giant.  

The stone giants explain that the group isn't welcome and should head back west.  The east is in their hands now.  At first, the giants say that Sundabar isn't welcome and the group should head back to the west.  When the group lays no claim to Sundabar, the giants say they will take them to the surface.  They warn them against going to Waypoint, as Waypoint fed on itself and soon their cold cousins will own that.  However, they take them to the surface and don't go with, allowing the group to do as they please.  

They walk back to Newfort and stay the night there.  In the morning, the tree outside the room where they were staying slowly dies in front of them.  Leaves fall and turn to dust before they hit the ground.  Branches wilt.  It spreads to other trees and the grass as well.  They aren't sure if there was a starting point or it happened all over at once.  It is contained to the walls.  Indeed, the building they are in has an exit to the north, and it goes onto healthy grass.  They leave that way and Dio wonders if he could heal it with time.  However, he figured it will take a lot of people to do this even within a tenday.  

They head north and go past the road and come at Waypoint from the northwest.  At the end of the day, Gorstag uses the cloak to fly down and check out Waypoint.  He sees no one.  The manor house has lights and some smoke rising, but the rest of the buildings don't.  He gets a sense of someone being at the manor but doesn't see anyone so flies back.  The next morning, the group cautiously approaches from the northwest.  They are still several hundred yards away when they hear the "cold cousins" arguing with someone, probably near the manor.  They are too far away to hear the words.  They sneak up closer although they could have ran and it's doubtful the giants would have cared.  The see a woman, covered in blood, being yelled at by a frost giant.  Rolen has enough and shoots!  

The arrows, having been prepared by Kaji, flame up as they streak toward the giant but sputter out before they hit him.  The arrows still hit but Rolen isn't happy to see the fire go out.  There are four giants and they move forward, looking more to talk but the group isn't having it and attack!  The giants fight back.  

This is a tough fight.  Olaf uses the ice spear that they helped get for him and it makes him immune to fire.  Kaji watches in horror and spell after spell of his from Kossuth doesn't touch Olaf.  One giant just throws rocks and those that land, hurt.  The others pull out great axes and attack.  Olaf calls forth a white dragon and that's when the group wonders if they can win this fight.  

The group was using items they had been holding for months, all the way back to Siobhan in Ashriver.  Gorstag went through all of his best healing potions and still got knocked down several times.  Rolen went through a lot of arrows and had to avoid the dragon.  The breath weapon didn't hurt as much due to his scale armor and the dragon didn't seem happy with Rolen wearing the scales of a white dragon.  The white dragon got hit by flame and arrow and went down.  However, it got lucky and managed to stabilize, heal itself, and get back into the fight.  Before Rolen could shoot it again, the dragon landed on top of him, crushing Rolen to death!  Nearly got Kaji as well.  

Prior to the crushing, Kaji managed to use the healing wand to help Dio and Gorstag.  They would get up and keep fighting the giants.  They took out the three smaller frost giants with axes but Olaf proved more resilient and the spear gave him several powers that they were having a tough time overcoming.  Kaji helped Dio and Gorstag get up, even after Olaf stabbed both of them again and again, and Dio healed himself to be able to fight.  As Kaji went to get Rolen, that's when he got crushed.  Gorstag and Dio worked together and managed to finish off Olaf.  The woman had been watching this whole time and when she finally moved, it was to eat the giant?  That seemed to rejuvenate her, and maybe give her some bloodlust, as she went after Dio!  However, before more could be done, a lich, another gods damned lich, came out from the house.  As Dio braced himself for an attack and wondered what he had left, the lich stopped the woman from attacking.  Dio went to try and help Rolen but it was too late.  They did manage to help Kaji and get him out before he was crushed.  

Of course, death is a small obstacle but now they have to get back to Sundabar and Erik's temple.  And what did the lich want?

15,000 xp

GM Notes

• I don't think I play good NPCs.  Specifically, someone who can be rude but still charming.  I certainly can't do both.  Or use sarcasm is just the right way that it's not insulting.  That's how I see several NPCs.
• I think they felt the lack of Rikard in this fight as they kept using potions.   
• This was a pretty epic fight. 
• The regular frost giants did decent damage but also went down faster than Olaf. 
• Olaf's spear not only gave him immunity to fire but also was quite a potent weapon, that he could use three times.
• The dragon was not nearly as tough as the first one they fought but it also had no lair abilities to use. 
• They seriously used up all of their best potions to keep going in this fight.  Even Gorstag, taking half damage, used up all he had to keep going. 
• I think they were glad the lich wanted to talk!
• I did talk about and explain several plot points they missed at times. 
• Several times, they found big things and stored them instead of use them. 
• Most of these items had sub plots around them, some of them politics, some not, but they never found them out.
• We talked about how they stopped the sisters but don't know what the sisters were even doing. 
• I told them how there was more planned at Sundabar and the guild wars but when they didn't sign up to work for Sundabar, and it wasn't needed anymore, I dropped that whole storyline. 
• I did expect a bit more with Sundabar but they never even moved inside the walls to stay.  I guess I shouldn't be surprised that they didn't end up working for Sundabar.   
• Really happy with google translate!  Again, picked a language for the giants and then while I'm sure I didn't represent that language well, it worked to say that out loud and send the translation to the person who understood giant. 
• Again, a few times place names were used and it gets the interest of the others.
• I really like how this works out.
• I do see what happened in Newfort as something that could be fixed but that's a larger effort for later, not something to do in the middle.   

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