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cursewoodrecap · 4 years ago

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Session 15: Burn the Temple, Topple the Thorns

We may have stretched the bounds of simple country hospitality too far.

Underground, Valeria and Clem consider a pressing question: are there any doors they can go through where they DON’T have to talk to the smug hobbit man? Good cave walls make good neighbors.

Investigating around can’t hurt, right? Clem picks a door at random - maybe all the cheesecaves are connected, like one big Cheesecave Factory - and peers in with her darkvision.

Not the next one over, but the one after that, since. Maybe they’re connected. Clem peers into the gloom of the cave with her darkvision, and can make out some lumpy outlines. As she creeps in, the ground under her feet feels disturbingly soft.

“Should I get the light?” asks Valeria. Clem nods. Valeria lights up A-Luxor. As the little floating beetle fills the cave with light, they see there is a carpet of fungus on the ground. Up against one wall, half-formed, a large, vaguely humanoid figure is growing out of this patch of fungus.

Valeria is like, “That’s horrifying. I was gonna just leave and shut the door? But we have to do something about that.” Clem agrees. Maybe they should set it on fire. As the half-formed creature stirs in the sudden light, she glimpses a small barrel someone has wedged into a nearby pillar. Oh, huh, there’s a length of fuse coming out of it. What on earth could this be?

We could sit here and wonder why this thing is rigged to explode, but the fungus creature is moving and growing in the light. The misshapen lump where a head would be pulls free and turns toward the two adventurers. With a massive effort, a big clublike arm tears away from the wall and slugs Valeria.

The other arm and legs don’t look fully formed, and Clem wastes no time hacking at the weak points with her sword. The body is soft and incomplete; there’s something fleshy underneath, but if there was ever a person in there, it’s long gone. It’s almost dead – this thing would have been a real monster if it had finished growing, but as it is it’s weak and unprepared. Valeria chops its bulbous head off, and it slops to the ground with a sickening flop. The thing lurches over and falls.

As it does so, a red splotch appears in the mottled green blanket of fungus over the walls, spreading rapidly outward.

Clem doesn’t like the look of that. “…should we run?”

Valeria shrugs. “We probably shouldn’t stay overnight. Maybe we just leave and close the door?”

The spreading red patch reaches a bulbous puffball mushroom bulging out of the corner, which turns a pulsing red and begins to emit an earsplitting, high pitched scream.

Oops.

Gral and Shoshana are skedaddling, because the temple worshippers have started gathering up torches and particularly sharp farm implements - you know, good old-fashioned angry mob stuff. Luckily, Gral and Shosha have enough warning to get well away before they come pouring out, making a beeline for the inn, so the spellcasters scoot back to the meeting place without detection. Rebecca’s hiding in the bushes right where she said she’d be.

“I got your friends to the safehouse, they’re fine,” she reassures them, with full dramatic irony.

They head a ways through the valley, but it’s not long before the torches in the distance make a sudden sharp turn and start heading down road we’ve been going down.

“Rebecca, they don’t know where the safehouse is, right?”

“No!”

“Because they’re coming right for us. They couldn’t have seen us, could they?”

The mob hasn’t even gotten to the inn yet; they can’t have already discovered we’re gone.

They hear a rustling from the wheat field.

They fuckin’ book it.

The awful sound echoes through the room. As similar screaming starts to emerge from the adjacent caves as well, the door that Rebecca had originally indicated flies open, and a bunch of figures hurry out, pulling on bags and cloaks.

“What the hell happened?” someone shouts. “Are those the people Rebecca was bringing?!”

“Quickly! Zis place is burned. Set off ze charges.” A Demish voice begins snapping orders. Torches light up as figures of all shapes and sizes start running toward cave doors.

A short silhouette glares up at the tanks. “Oh. I see. Bonjour.”

Clem audibly sighs.

Henri has no time for this. “You have no idea what you’ve done here, do you?” he hisses. “Before you begin with ze noble indignant speech, now is not ze time. Run! Stay out of ze fields!”

They don’t need telling twice. Valeria and Clem charge back down the path to meet up with the spellcasters.

Gral and Shoshana hear screaming, and see their allies abandoning all stealth and clattering towards them.

Behind them, the hills explode in cascading showers of soil and flame.

Rebecca’s aghast. “They’ve been using them for months now! What happened!”

Clem humphs. “I guess this is what happens when you build a safehouse among FUNGAL ALARMS.”

“But there was a system! They had a thingthat let them turn one off every night! There was a system!”

Clem wisely chooses to omit some details. “…seems like a flawed system.”

Rebecca does not have time to unpack this right now. “What did Henri say to do?”

“Run.”

“Where?”

“THAT WAS NOT INDICATED.”

She swears. “The cultists are coming this way – we don’t have a lot of time. I know some places we could try to hide. My dad, though - he’s back at the inn, I don’t know if he’s safe-”

There are too many of the cultists between us and the inn, though, so she leads us away from the awakening wheat fields to the thicker, less-tamed trees by the river. We find the densest brush we can, Minor Image up some extra shrubbery, and hunker down.

We can clearly see the cultists’ movements by the burning lights of their torches. They reach the destroyed caves and start to fan out, breaking into 2- or 3-person search parties, soon joined by silhouettes that emerge from the wheat fields. For the time being, our hiding place seems to go unnoticed.

What’s our plan now? Hunker and wait out the night? Now that the search parties are more scattered, we could make moves back to town, Trollsburg, or even Sturmhearst, or to cross the river.

Rebecca wants to check on her father, but she’s gonna follow our lead. We’re worried that even her tentative safety has been compromised; after this, the cultists might not bother hiding during the day anymore.

As we bicker, Shoshana surveys the area. Pretty much the only place the cultists aren’t searching is the temple itself.

...hey.

Temple’s empty.

What if we burned down the temple while everyone was out?

It’s alarming how quickly the group agrees to arson.

(In deference to previous campaigns: If we find any big fancy chairs, we will knock them over, as well.)

Rebecca does not want to be there while we burn down the temple, understandably. We direct her to Trollsburg, which the townsfolk should leave alone – tell Dr. Kjeller we sent her. She slips off into the night, and we shift from defense to offense.

As we roll stealth, Shoshana crits and everyone can see the change come over her. She now has a target, and the part of her that belongs to the Hunt…goes on the hunt. Her posture changes, ever so subtly. The way she peers into the darkness makes her eyes seem even more inhuman, gleaming in the darkness. And the shadows curl around her just a little bit more.

We sneak back to the temple, the predator’s instinct guiding us deftly around our pursuers.

It appears that the temple is not wholly unguarded. There’s three people Gral can see backlit against the windows, and none of them are Zelig. Hans and Franz still have bits of the floorboard peeled up. They’ve revealed more of the fungal carpet underneath, and they’re examining it and discussing what they see in hushed tones. The fungus is a riot of shifting colors; it’s almost like they’re reading it. There’s a third man there, a farmer, and soon enough Hans and Frans tell the third guy something and he immediately runs off.

“All the plants are informants for them,” Gral realizes aloud. “They’re getting info here. They know where everyone in the valley is.”

“Oh, good thing we’re gonna burn it then.”

Valeria goes ahead and casts Aid, because this is likely to get hairy, and Shoshana turns back to the party and grins a fanged grin.

“Firesong taught me this one,” she says, and hucks a Fireball through the window.

Subtle? No. Satisfying? Oh, yes.

Hans and Franz, coughing in the smoke, pick themselves off the ground and dive for weapons. It’s obvious the blast has done some heavy damage to them. (And to their clothes. Scantily clad buff men, hell yeah.)

Hans bursts out of the door, swinging a heavy fencepost with nails pounded through it, clobbering the first Clem he sees. We thought he was buff this morning, but he’s grown impossibly more swole. A button pops off his overalls as his inflated muscles bulge out of them.

The temple begins to fill with smoke as the fire catches. We hear that awful alarm-mushroom screaming again.

Shoshana cackles and Fireballs the place again.

Valeria pulls out her trident with a flourish and forks Hans right in his big unnaturally round pectoral, Rack’s vines curling around him. We’ve leveled up and she gets two attacks now, so she pops him again, and Hans crumples to the ground – we’re not sure he’s DEAD dead, but he’s out of the fight.

Franz levels his big-ass crossbow at the madly cackling witch in the window. HAHAHAHHAAHAHA-oh shit. She gets blown out the window, along with 2/3 of her HP in one shot.

Clem takes a cue from Shoshana and gets WAY too into this, cackling and swinging in with her big ol’ sword. These fellas have ogre stats, but she’s a veteran badass and cleaves Franz right in two. An on-the-spot medicine check from the medic reveals that…those are definitely not fully human insides. Ew.

She flexes over his corpse in a final show of superiority. She got these muscles WITHOUT juicin’, thank you very much.

The two halves of Franz fall heavily, crashing through the weakening floorboards and revealing a cavernous space underneath the burning temple structure. The fungal carpet is very on fire. (In Shoshana’s opinion it could stand to be MORE on fire, though.)

Alarms are coming from both the temple and the carpet. Gral listens for anything else, but he can’t hear whether the townsfolk are coming over the roar of the growing blaze. Maybe we jump down there and investigate? Or do we dip out?

Screw it. There’s a tempting hole, full of danger.

Clem rips off both her sleeves and uses one as a smoke facemask.

We gotta make sure this thing burns for good. We jump in the curse hole, because of course we do. It’s more of a basement than a cave, really. The flames from the floor above illuminate some crates and shelves and boxes – normal basement stuff. (Shoshana rolls a nat 1 perception, and so is too busy cackling at fire like a terrible arson goblin.)

One side looks like the shrine to Guile, hidden as shrines to Guile always are. There’s also an empty throne for Oberok, per tradition. It falls over.

On the other side, though, there’s storage - tables stacked up for banquets, picnic tables, chairs. One big chair has been dragged out, and an imposing figure sits, staring at us impassively. Rose vines have grown out from the chair, wrapping around his heavily armored limbs.

His armor gleams with polish, though leaves poke through the seams, and his closed helmet is sculpted to fit the face of a dragonborn. It clangs as he jerkily stands to his full height.

“Marius?” Valeria gasps.

The rose-bound knight draws a trident and turns to us. The vines behind him start to wriggle and writhe as he moves.

His purple cloak of office is missing. Valeria feels it hang heavy about her shoulders.

His mouth moves as if he’s about to speak, and silent rose petals fall softly out.

Shoshana doesn’t trust this. She casts Mirror Image, the flickering fire-shadow playing games with her figure. Marius’ head tilts as he focuses in on her, the thrower of the fireballs, so the squishy sorceress dives behind her bulkier friends for extra cover. Gral follows suit and dashes the other way, spreading out the party. The knight that might be Kyr Marius hefts a mighty trident and hurls it, nailing Clem. Vines burst forth from his gauntlet and snatch the trident as it hits true, snapping it back to his hand.

Marius had a magic gauntlet that did that, but he would do it with Rack’s glowing ethereal rose vines, not these squirming physical ones. Valeria, hesitating, hopes that if he’s using his same fighting style, there might be something left of her beloved mentor inside this growth-encrusted enemy.

Clem second winds, in preparation for Doing Something Stupid, and charges Marius directly. Bracing himself against her blow, Marius reaches out to one side and fires a blast of vines at Gral, who finds himself bound in foliage but manages to resist being dragged into sword range.

As Valeria and Clem rush to engage, the knight’s faceplate opens to reveal a familiar silver face, webbed over by the delicate tendrils of roots and sprouts. He breathes not a cloud of cold, as Valeria would expect, but a barrage of toxic spores and razor-sharp seeds. Rose vines climb through the cellar floor at Valeria’s feet, tangling and impeding her movements, but only seeming to aid the knight’s passage as he glides effortlessly to where Gral is held in place by vines.

Valeria had hoped to be able to cut the vines away to disconnect Marius from the Growth’s control, but as he moves away from his makeshift throne we can see most of the plants under his armor are untethered, growing out of his body. As she moves to tear Gral free with her claws, bits of charred ceiling begin to rain down around us.

Oh, right, the building’s on fire.

Shoshana pew-pews over a few spare pews, but her spells bounce off his armor, and Gral’s fear effects are just as ineffective.

Kyr Marius draws his sword, long-thorned vines growing from out of his gauntlet to wrap around it, a warped mirror-image of how Valeria’s smites manifest. He moves swiftly, pinning Gral with his trident and plunging in his sword for the killing blow - luckily only destroying Gral’s illusory duplicate, but brutally efficient nonetheless. Whatever this knight is, it’s certainly retained the veteran paladin’s skill.

Valeria bites the bullet and abandons her hesitation, imposing herself like a protective wall between her mentor and her friend. Nose-to-nose with him, his faceplate hanging open, she can see just how much the Growth has infested the once-mighty paladin. Tiny sprouts creep out from under his silver scales, thorns nesting side-by-side with his fangs and a riot of green plant matter all down his snarling throat. His eyes are gone, vibrant roses blooming in the empty sockets.

This...this is not a living dragonborn knight, by any metric. Kyr Marius is gone, and has been for a long time.

Turns out the Growth can’t really corrupt paladins much, but it can certainly make use of them.

Another chunk of the ceiling falls in, narrowly missing Shoshana. She lobs another Chromatic Orb at Marius, but again it breaks harmlessly on his armor.

The vines across the floor continue to expand around the party, blooming into roses with long, deadly thorns.

Marius swings in at Valeria. She catches it on the Eyegis, which blinks back at him. Marius does not blink back at it, his flower eyes entirely impassive.

Gral throws a Faerie Fire. Marius cannot get out of the way, but he crosses his arms in a defensive stance as vines cocoon him, absorbing the Faerie Fire, and he bursts free unmarked. He focuses in on Gral, raining blows down, an implacable, inevitable executioner.

Valeria interposes herself again, forcing Marius to take his attention off the bard. His sickly green vines wrestle with her glowing, translucent ones as her mighty Smite meets his swinging blade.

It’s eerie how little he reacts to Valeria’s sword tearing into him, an unstoppable automaton of plant.

One more Chromatic Orb fails. Shoshana, in frustration and fear at seeing her friends get clobbered, dashes forwards toward the melee.

Marius raises a wall of thorns around himself, finally acting in defense even as his face shows no pain. He looks like he might be preparing to heal himself.

Luckily, Gral’s got a way of dealing with walls. He strikes a minor key and passes through the thorn wall, zipping behind Marius and nocking one of his Heart-Seeking Bolts. The advantage granted allows Gral to bury it into a crack in the silver armor for a whopping 20 damage. Marius retaliates, whirling to hurl his trident, but it barely damages the half-solid orc.

Clementine tires of this fight. She charges through the wall of thorns – damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead – and swings in brutally for three hits, three maneuvers. 43 damage on a SINGLE TURN. Frickin’ Battlemasters!

Just as the vine-encrusted knight is distracted by Gral, Clem drives her greatsword straight into his chest, and SUPLEXES HIM INTO THE GROUND. He crashes to the ground, Clem’s full weight driving the blade in to the hilt.

Marius briefly tries to move. We can see through his damaged armor that it’s more like the vines are moving him than he is moving himself. But there’s just not enough knight left for the vines. He slumps with a spore-heavy gasp, his weapons clattering to the ground.

Kyr Marius of the Order of the Rose is dead. But we suspect he has been for a very, very long time.

We look to Valeria. She kneels by the body, solemnly collecting his weapons and his magic gauntlet, but laying his engraved dagger upon his chest, the one Flynn found in the hands of a fungus creature far down the river.

As Valeria kneels and offers a prayer to Rack, giving Marius what last rites she can, the rest of us take our last chance to case the basement before we flee the blaze.

We find mushrooms and fire. Whatever symbols and tools the cultists had were either made of ephemeral plants or upstairs and on fire. We kick over the rose-entwined chair, though. Fuck that chair.

Valeria stands, finishing her achingly brief farewell. There’s nothing left for us here, and the fire is threatening to overwhelm the temple.

The plants’ screeching has stopped; the puffball mushroom alarms seem to have burned. The room is full of thick, choking smoke and leaping flames, but it’s a small room and we’re PCs. We charge at top speed out through the collapsing walls, escaping with only moderate burns seconds before the roof falls in and the temple collapses entirely.

As we cough the smoke out of our lungs, we’re immediately on the defense - surely the villagers will have noticed their temple going up in flames, and we’re gonna need to dodge pitchforks.

Or...are we? The torchlights are still speckled across the valley. There are villagers on the road up to the temple, but they’ve collapsed to the ground, their torches flickering where they’ve fallen in the dirt. We cautiously approach and realize they are writhing and moaning in awful pain, as if they’re experiencing the fire firsthand.

“Good,” Valeria whispers viciously. It’s hard to tell whether there’s a trace of Hunt in her voice or simply raw, bitter grief.

Clem does a quick medical once-over of the nearest fallen farmer. Judging by this guy, the cultists aren’t quite fully human - there’s fungal growth under the skin, though not to the bulging extent of Hans and Franz. The feel of the growths isn’t quite like human muscles; they’re lumpy, like clay slapped onto a human figure by clumsy hands, tumors rather than integrated, natural growth.

Other than that there’s nothing physically wrong with them to be causing such pain, though they seem absolutely furious - Clem’s patient spits and tries to claw at Clem’s throat, but is too weak to do much more than twitch.

Valeria’s heard stories about this kind of thing. In her lessons about demonic cults, she’s heard of groups that form a pseudo-hive mind with their dark master. When the paladins would strike down the creature, the followers are struck down with sympathetic psychic pain. In especially entangled cases, usually the cults’ high priests, the mental blow is enough to kill them. Most followers just suffer incredible pain as the link to is severed, but physically will recover fully.

We don’t know if they’ll still be cultists when they wake up. The entity’s control will be severed, but they’ll still be the same people who willingly joined up in the first place.

If they won’t be down for good, we gotta get the hell out of here, stat. We book it to the inn to see what’s become of our guide Rebecca and her dad Aaron. At the inn, a battered-looking Aaron is pulling himself together as Rebecca helps him to his feet. Surrounding them are a few of the cultists, knocked out by the psychic feedback.

As Valeria rushes to Lay on Hands, Rebecca frets. “You’re back - what the hell did you do tonight?!” The, the temple’s on fire, and they were hurting my dad-”

“Oh, I did most of this to myself,” Aaron interrupts. “It was my cover story, I was gonna tell ‘em the four of you had broken out, grabbed Rebecca and run across the river. But they weren’t especially interested in listening.”

Valeria nods as she heals him, but doesn’t trust herself to talk. Gral takes over instead. “They’re disabled for now, no time to talk. Let’s get to Trollsburg.”

“Trollsburg? That thing Zelig was building?”

“Yeah. For now, it should be safe - nobody’s gonna try attacking a whole settlement of trolls. We’ll see how much damage the cult actually took in the morning.”

We hustle down to the river. Behind us, slowly, the lights from the search parties begin to move again, disorganized and scattered. Most head directly for the temple, the fire still blazing starkly against the night sky.

At the bridge, the massive overgrown troll Kjell is shouting in pain on the bank. “Ugh, what’s...happening...” he moans, clutching at his side. He doesn’t seem to be knocked for as much of a loop as the cultists, but something’s definitely not right.

Valeria approaches cautiously and gives him a Curing Disease worth of Lay on Hands. There’s a flash of anger in his eyes as if he’s about to unthinkingly strike her, but she calms him for long enough to take the cure, and it seems to soothe his pain.

The big troll rubs at his side exhaustedly. “Uh, thank you, shiny lady. That, that was – I dunno, that was somethin’ nasty. It started around the same time as the big fire. Woke me up! Woss goin’ on?”

Shoshana tries to give him a brief rundown. “I don’t want to alarm you, but the fungus we were talking about earlier, I think it might have started to infect you-”

“An infection?! I should wake up the phee-zee-ologist then!” Seems he’s already managed that; trolls do not suffer quietly, and three trolls are coming down the hill to see what all the yelling’s about. In the light of A-Luxor, we can see Dr. Kjeller in the lead, wielding the crude glaive he calls his amputatin’ stick.

“Hey, uh, woss goin’ on out here?! Did you folks have somethin’ to do with that there fire?”

“Uh, yyyyyes?” Gral admits, trying to figure out how to simplify the situation for trolls. “The danger was in the church. Many of the villagers were trying to trick you. Whatever Kjell got, they were trying to infect you all with it.”

Kjell sees the doctor and interrupts. “When the temple started burnin’ it hurt right here – “

“Where?”

He points to a spot on his abdomen, and Dr. Kjeller immediately swings his doctorin’ stick, expertly cutting out the bit pointed to. Man, troll regeneration makes surgery easy.

The Doc pulls out an extra-large jeweler’s loop and crams it into his eye as he pulls apart the hunk of flesh with his claws. “Yeup, that’s a fungus all right. This was growin’ inside you? Does it still hurt?”

“Uh, yes?” Kjell points to the bleeding hole in his stomach.

“That’ll pass, you’re a healthy troll. What happened in dat spot? I need yer medical history. Let me find your chart.” He listens to Kjell’s abdomen. “Arright, chartbeat sounds good.”

Clem, in all her medical knowledge, has no idea what a “chart” is, but the Doc was damn sure not listening to the heart area. Dr. Kjeller cheerfully neglects to explain.

“Yep, that’ll grow back soon enough. Don’t worry about it,” he tells the larger troll, who seems to be recovering quickly. “What happened there?”

“I remember I got hurt at one point? A beastie from the wood attacked me. Hit me with some kinda acid, an’ it didn’t grow back like normal. But that nice lady Zelig came by and healed me with magics. A real nice lady, she was.”

“So...Zelig is the one spreading the illness,” we tell the trolls. They’re pretty well convinced, given the hunk o’junkus in Kjell’s gut.

“All the villagers are behind this?”

“Some of them. Maybe most? It’s hard to tell. They can look like normal villagers,” Gral explains. “They’ve been infected a lot more than Kjell was; they can’t think straight. We’ve brought two who are okay.”

Kjell brightens at the sight of the innkeeper’s daughter. “Oh, I know Rebecca! She used ta bring me rabbits! Hiya, Aaron!”

“Hi, Kjell,” the innkeeper smiles tiredly.

“How’s the leg?”

He blinks. “That was 12 years ago?”

“...So, is it better, then? You humans don’t heal.”

“We do, just slower!”

“Dat sounds real inconvenient,” the troll says, his gaping wound already starting to close.

Dr. Kjeller clears his throat. “Well. I tink we are going to have a discussion. You folks are welcome to wait in my house. This is a very important business that must be discussed, but it is troll business.”

That seems reasonable. Shoshana raises a hand. “Can we pass out?”

“If you deem it medically necessary. Would you like me to carry you, so you may pass out earlier?”

“Um, no, that’s okay.”

He says something similar to “gather round” in a guttural language vaguely like Old Valdian, and the trolls gather and begin a heated discussion.

As all 12 trolls hurry over and join the discussion, Rebecca whispers, “Are we gonna be safe here?”

Gral gets Rebecca up to speed on what we know about the trolls, and how except for Kjell they all seem to be unaffected by the Growth. We’re as safe as we’re gonna get in this valley, at least for now.

“Great, I’m gonna fall asleep now,” she tells us. “It’s been a day.”

We start our rest but keep watches. About an hour or two later, Dr Kjeller returns to the house. “We have reached an accord,” he tells us solemnly. “We intend to leave.

“There are still many villagers, and we can see ‘em massing on the other side of the river. We trolls do not wish war. Now, we are pretty mad - lotsa folks had some thoughts about waging war against these people who tried to trick us. We don’t appreciate dat. But we must consider the eyeballs.

“If a group of trolls is invited to a place, and then attacks dat place and wipes it out, that would be very bad eyeballs. Bad for public troll families. No, not eyeballs, what was the word dat guy used? Optics. Yes, the eyeballs would be very bad.

“In da morning, we intend to depart from this place. Without the town, the moot can’t happen. There’s just not enough food. Well, there is, but now we can’t trust it. I will keep an eye on poor Kjell, he’ll travel with me a bit. He has a good heart, and a good chart. His dart I’m a little worried about, sounds like dat lady might have made it extra big to impress all us other trolls. I wish to keep him under observation; dunno what other conditions may happen if dat lady isn’t boosting him with her evil magics.

We will travel south in the morning. This area is dangerous...but we are twelve trolls. Once we are a ways from the valley, we will disperse. Kjell will stay with me and serve as my assistant and bodyguard. You see, sometimes I do an autopsy but lotsa creatures want to feed on the body so I need someone to stand there and guard it. Y’know, a body guard.”

The party considers our options. We’re missing one last plant for our spell, but the trolls will probably be willing to stop briefly for some flower-pickin’. It’s not like we’re gonna run into trouble with a frickin’ CR 25 encounter as our escort. Also, we need to stop by Sturmhearst - we should at least let Flynn and Fiona know what’s up.

We go back to the trolls, and realize Kjell is crying. “I must demolish my bridge,” he explains. “We must stop them from following us.” He built that bridge with his own hands; it’s a sad occasion. As the crew of trolls help him break it down, he gathers a bunch of the stones into a backpack.

“There there, Kjell,” says the doctor. “Remember, a troll’s home is not da bridge they live under. Your home is where your hearts is. Or you can do what I do.” He pulls off his hat and reaches inside, pulling out a toy-sized stone bridge. “A troll may live under a bridge, but a bridge does not need to cross a river.”

It’s probably very touching, if you’re a troll. Anyway, we’re going the heck to bed, and awkwardly trying to be stoic as Valeria cries quietly during her evening prayers.

In the morning, we can see a group of enraged villagers standing guard on the other side of the river, fuming impotently. But they wisely choose not to pick a fight.

We stay by the bank long enough to find a nice patch of Norbert’s Wort for our spell, and then make tracks to the annex. We enter the Sturmhearst camp around noon; trolls are hardly fast-moving. The trolls are wary of the annex proper; they’re well aware of what those flamethrowers can do. They’re just gonna go have a lovely picnic and we can catch up later.

Professor Ulmus greets us. “Welcome back! What’s that commotion out there, sounds like a pack of trolls stomping through.”

SO, ABOUT THAT.

We give her, Flynn, and Fiona a rundown and let them know the villagers are now incredibly hostile.

Flynn stands, reaching to buckle on his sword. “Sounds like we must set out immediately and defeat this evi!l”

“The...one we burned in the temple basement?”

“Aw, you’ve already defeated the evil? Is there any evil left to defeat? I’ve been off my game.”

Shoshana sighs. “So, I hesitate to tell you this, but I know your sister will pick you up and carry you in the opposite direction if you do anything stupid.” Fiona nods, and Shoshana explains that Zelig the evil ex-druid is still up and about, and she’ll be surrounded by cultists.

“Hmm. Well, I’m up for some heroics, but an entire town of cultists? I’m probably not up for quite that much heroics yet. Are you intending to stick around and hunt her down?”

“No, we were thinking we’d head for Mornheim and get our ritual done.”

“Yes, I’d rather this cult did not besiege my campus to get at you; it would be disruptive to our experiments,” Professor Ulmus snarks dryly. As we explain the trolls’ plans, though, a change comes over her and she interrupts us excitedly.

“Wait, Dr. Kjeller is here? I’ve been a fan of his work for quite some time. He wrote a paper – well, a sheepskin – on troll regenerative physiology – one of the best resources we have. His notes are succinct and, well, rudimentary, but there’s more insight there than anyone at Sturmhearst has ever provided! This could be key to my work!”

Uh, sure? We lead her over to trolls and she instantly begins an enthusiastic if baffling conversation with Dr Kjeller. As thet’re excitedly talking, Shoshana feels something tugging at her skirt. It is a squirrel, exhibiting troubling un-squirrel-like behavior. It chitters, tugs again pointedly, and runs into bushes.

Sure, what the hell. She gives a quick heads up to the team and hustles into the woods after the squirrel. Predictably, it takes her right to our grumpy druid friend, perched on a tree stump. “What the hell did you kids get up to last night All my sources are going crazy! I’ve got reports from every bird in the valley, chittering my ear off saying explosions, the temple burned down - hell, half the sources I have are saying other half are compromised! Ya kicked up a hornets nest! And then burned it down!!”

Shoshana gives him the summary, and tells him she might have figured out where the Mother Tree’s last guardian went. He nods at her description of Zelig. “Yup, that’s her. Explains why she abandoned her post, I guess. That’s another one fallen. At least it was the shroomheads this time.”

“As opposed to?”

“I’ve heard some stories. The more sociable ones, the shroom heads get em. My kind are pretty susceptible to that, you can imagine. It’s a pretty lonely life, doin’ what we do, and that whole sense of bein’ part of something greater – that’s not too far from what we do normally. And we like helpin’ things grow. Doin’ our thing and getting to be with people, that’s a hard offer to resist. But ya don’t have to worry ‘bout me, I don’t like people.

“Other types go in with the wolf guys. They go all dark and weird. They get like - y’know, I’ve seen a wolf bring down a deer midstride, yada yada the circle of life, that’s how nature be. So it can be hard to tell how many are just acceptin’ that cycle, and how many are, uh, takin’ a more active role in it, if ya get my drift.

“Still. Knowing she was behind it – I wasn’t gonna speak ill of another druid till I had proof, but it’s somethin’ else to hear it for real.” He shakes his head. “Anyway, you burned the central colony right after they all re-upped their connection; that’s gonna hurt a lot. They deserved it, probably. Anyway, Zelig’s operation in this area’s blown to shit. Dunno if she’ll stick around, maybe she’ll decide it’s time to seek more fertile pastures, as it were. I gotta stick around and guard the Mother Tree, so I’ll keep an eye out.

Not gonna lie, this was a mess. But it was more their mess than my mess, so I do owe ya one. My name’s Zalman. You can reach out to me with a message spell or somethin’, and I won’t just tell you to go fuck yourself, I’ll see what I can do. I got a lot of work to do here – you’ve given me a chance to reclaim the place.”

Shoshana shrugs uncomfortably. “Eh, my talents seem to be more for destroying than for fixing.”

“Then destroy the right thing! It goes against everything us druids stand for, but maybe we need a little fire.”

“Well, after a forest fire things regrow, right?”

“No, WE do that! It’s like a druid convention! Anyway. If you see the old bastard or his wife, treat ‘em as respectfully as you can, but tell ‘em I’d like a word. Where have they been in all this?!” He walks away grumbling, turning into a badger mid-grumble. He’s still kind of grumbling in badger.

She gets back to the annex just as Drs. Ulmus and Kjeller are saying their goodbyes.

“Thank you, Doctor! I look forward to corresponding!”

“I, too, look forward to the core of our spondence.”

As Ulmus fruitlessly tries to find out a nomadic troll’s address, Shoshana sidles up to Valeria. “You okay? I dunno if you want us to leave it alone, or to say something...”

Valeria twists her claws into her cloak, fiddling with the fabric and not meeting the sorcerer’s eyes. “...Thanks.”

The paladin is retreating into Stoic Hero Is Not Allowed To Have Feelings mode, so she’s not gonna talk about it, but she will allow a shoulder bonk of solidarity, and maybe even a light side hug.

We roll against taint as we trek out of the Growth’s domain. We all scrape by, Valeria turning down a deal from the Growth as she does.

#session recap #the growth #bad herzfeld #valeria argent #gral omokk'duu #clem haxan #shoshana bat chaya #professor ulmus #flynn fairgold #fiona fairgold #dr kjeller #druid devito #the cursewood

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