Farm Pests

April 27, 2020

The group enjoys more owlbear stew from what they caught.  Good to her word, Norma has them rent free for the winter months and is feeding them as well.  Business for the new Owlbear Menu continues.  

As they enjoy a meal, a better dressed man approaches them.  He wears clothes that indicate money but they are well worn now.  He asks if they are the group that got the owlbear meat for Norma.  After some hesitation, they say they are.  He introduces himself as Martin Jennings and he has a farm to the west.  East.  West.  No, it's definitely to the east, he settles on at last.  One of his fields was ravaged by ants and he is hoping that they would be amenable to taking care of this problem.  The Druid and Rangers agree quickly, much to the chagrin of some of the others, but when Martin offers five thousand silver plus anything they find it starts them rethinking.  When Martin then adds that if they don't find much, he will give them another five thousand silver, they agree.  

Martin goes out and unties a horse but doesn't ride it as the party doesn't have horses.  They talk about pleasant enough things on the walk out to his area.  Martin's estate is bigger than they realized, probably having over six thousand acres of land and many small buildings besides the house proper.  There is a blacksmith, a carpenter shop, a cookhouse, stables, storage, and a barn for animals.  It's when Martin says he has guards that the group wonders why they are needed.  

"The guards are good at guarding.  Your group just took down five owlbears, so you know how to fight something like this.  I always say to get the right tool for the job and that's y'all in this case."  Mollified, they follow him out to the field.  It takes a half hour to get to it and he points it out and then says he waits to hear how it went.  Drewgan and Shyrrik can see there is crop damage and it was eaten by something.  Indeed, as the group moves forward, they see the giant creatures in the field right now.  As they move close, Drewgan casts an entangle on a big area between them and many of the ants and then they attack.  The one they hit emits something, perhaps sound or perhaps a pheromone, and the rest come running!  Most are held up in the entangled area, making it a fight of ones and twos instead of all dozen of the creatures.  Several took acid spits to the face or damage from the ants big mandibles, giving Dakxer some things to heal, which he does.  

They find tracks from where the things originated and follow them back to a cave.  Immediately inside the cave, Raz can smell the ants, and other creatures, but also the scent of a human.  And then they see the shrine carved to the darker aspect of Silvanus.  No ants would do that!  They cautiously go inside when the spiders attack.  Swarms of hundreds of spiders explode from an alcove to bite and sting Raz and Volhoric.  They are not happy by that.  Then huge spiders appear, attack, and disappear!  The group has to stand ready to attack or the spiders will tear them apart or poison them!  

"No, no, no, nonononono!  You ruin things.  Ruin them!"  Several hear a person in a tunnel at the edge of the light spells moan this at them before hurling a fireball in the midst of the group!  He then disappears into the dark cave.  The group finishes off the spiders and then decides how to proceed to clean up this cave.  No one fireballs them and lives!  No one!

2700 xp

GM Notes

• Still working on accents but have several NPCs figured out.  
• Martin was easy by having him be from Waterdeep, since I already knew that accent. 
• Still having problems with what I picked for northern accent, a Scandinavian one.  
• The entangle spell really changed the face of the battle.  It would have been a fight against twelve creatures but the entangle stopped at least half of them when they charged through it.  Great tactics!
• More prep for me to do and I need to think of scale and a couple of other things but I think it's going well. 
• The technology has been pretty good.  A few technical issues sadly but hopefully those are few. 
• Also need to work on some more role playing scenes as it's been pretty combat heavy.   

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