Let me tell you about my game, sessions 8-9

In the ongoing story of the campaign, our heros had just bushwhacked an evil Chelaxian diplomat and his party en route to the Citadel of Three Brothers, a city occupied by monsters and mostly carved into the sandstone walls and columns of a deep canyon.

The party now had to infiltrate the Citadel itself.

Fortunately for them, having the diplomat's trademark silver oni facemask made it a lot easier to pass as the man. Even so, officious hobgoblin guards at the Citadel's gate checked and double-checked the diplomat's captured papers - the number of PCs didn't quite match up to the party specified in the papers - and only bribing the gnoll guards at the same gateway allowed the party in without further hastle.

And inside the Citadel? A riot of color, noise, bodies, and smells. The sound and scents of everyday life filled the air from windows in the canyon walls high above, here and there decorated by clotheslines. Vendors in stalls throughout the floor of the canyon sold goods from fabric to weapons to rat-on-a-stick. The streets would have been filled by kobolds, gnolls, orcs, a few humans and dwarves, people of every description - except for the way there were no streets. It was also obvious that the goblins lived in shanties and much nastier caves on one side of the Citadel - despite their key role in taking the place, they'd obviously gotten less than they'd bargained for.

Paiva bribed a part-gnoll street urchin to do research for her, and the party headed for the nearest inn. The nearest inn was The Pit, which lived up to its name quite literally. The common room was dominated by a huge hole in the floor - visitors could entertain themselves fighting there, or placing bets on the people slugging each other in the pit itself. (Like the silver oni mask, this is something I swiped from an old Dungeon adventure set in Spinecastle. I love love love love that adventure and this was the closest I am probably ever going to get to running it. It's awesome.) A single kobold bard with an old but well-made harp as his sole possession was desperately trying to make himself heard over the noise, to no avail.

The characters immediately took a room from the innkeeper - a human who'd run the place back in its old Thieves' Guild days and who was still able to get material smuggled in - and found out about the network of tunnels around the place. Flowerbell talked to the kobold about the town, after playing music with him and establishing herself as sympathetic. Yukiko decided to experiment with mixed drinks, and found herself with a rum-based thing with a frilly umbrella served in an antelope skull (I now forget what we were calling it).

All the information the characters could get amounted to the same things. The goblins, unhappy with just how sour their bargain had turned, were willing to smuggle people and goods in and out of the Citadel, using their spider mounts. An alternative exit to the Citadel would lead through a twisting set of caves mostly occupied by foul otyughs. And if the boy the characters were looking for were even still there, there was a good chance he was being held by Garinda the Sly - a huge gnoll (said to be half-giant) of enormous appetites, who basically ran the slave auctions for the entire Citadel.

Yland, Paiva and Dakaz went to the goblin part of town to negotiate getting transport out of the canyon. The goblins were happy to be paid for doing something that would bother the gnolls and hobgoblins, and they were overjoyed at the prospect of getting to have a mighty dwarf spider-webbed and helpless while being transported to the top of the canyons.

Then the characters decided that they'd try the unlikely; they'd go to Garinda, and try to buy the boy from her before the slave auctions took place. They passed loomingly huge half-giant gnolls and talked to Garinda herself, through her robed and veiled translator (obviously something scaled and non-human), as she lay on her immense, perfumed dais. And surprisingly it worked! Garinda and her translator - actually her business partner, lover, and a medusa - were perfectly happy to make a chunk of money getting the player characters out of the way. Not that this stopped them from making another chunk of money on the people who originally wanted the boy as a slave or worse...

... for, as the party very simply walked out the front gate, they were being tracked. They had just enough time to take cover among cacti as the villains caught up to them. This time, they faced a mixed group - a ranger with her armored hyenas, a cleric, a fighter, and a mysterious but beautiful sorceress clad in red robes. Could this be the Red Lady they'd heard so much about?

Well, no. The fight was pretty hard - the cleric's ability to heal her allies really made up for just how much damage the PCs could dish out. (I could have, and should have, made the whole thing more difficult by leading with not buff spells but an illusory Hellish terrain spell. Darn!) But in the end the characters triumphed, with the apparent Red Lady crumbling to a pile of incense - a simulacrum. For a brief moment before that happened, Dakaz thought he'd spotted a tiger's face in among the robes, but couldn't be sure.

The characters healed their wounds as best they could and headed back towards Baltwell.

Next time; more labor unrest, and the Tomb of the Cylops Kings!