Grasslands & Ganking
Last week, the party prepared to tragically leave Whitefall as planned to journey into the Expanse. However, they decided to take a day of rest to relax and train Tobias, their new hawk friend, so he could return there with a message later. During that day, Whitefall told the party that she was blocking some sort of magical scrying and/or teleportation from reaching Camilla. Gregory asked Camilla if she had any idea why that might be, and after some gentle prodding, she explained that it was probably her family trying to forcibly bring her back to Praxis. She was fairly confident about this because she had received a sending from them on the journey to Whitefall where they told her that she had to come back to the family immediately. The party decided to take some precautions for the journey ahead, and Ayala attuned with the mystical waters in Whitefall's purview to prepare some appropriate magic.
The next day, the party left Whitefall, and Ayala kept up a constant ward against invisible effects like scrying sensors. Sure enough, once the party got far enough away from Whitefall, a scrying sensor popped up on Camilla. Ayala undetectably cast a spell to reverse the scrying, allowing her to see its source: a middle-aged male elf performing a scrying ritual in the basement that bore the insignia of the Sables, Camilla's family. Although the actual reversal of the scrying was undetectable, Ayala's difficulty in convincingly walking blindly while seeing through her sensor combined with the party's reactions to the visible sensor tipped off the mage, and he broke the reversed sensor before Ayala could see who was coming down the stairs to talk with him. Based on Ayala's description, Camilla identified the mage casting the spell as Elmeiar, a long-time servant of the Sables.
About an hour later, the party was travelling through the grasslands separating the Northern Forest from the Expanse when they were suddenly ambushed by well-concealed assassins. The assassins leapt on the unaware Ayala, and would certainly have torn her to pieces with massive criticals if she didn't happen to be immune to criticals at the time due to being mostly water. This almost complete failure to take advantage of their big ambush round spelled doom for the assassins. They weren't trained for sustained combat, and the party managed to defeat the rest without suffering serious injury. Charlie's abilities to both draw attention with large-scale magic and be unexpectedly resilient to attack helped out significantly, diverting the assassins' attention from more vulnerable targets.
One of the assassins surrendered instead of being killed, and the party interrogated him. He explained that he and the rest of the assassins had been hired by the Sables to kidnap Camilla and bring her back alive. They had been told that the lives of everyone else with her were completely irrelevant to the Sables, and were allowed discretion about whether to negotiate with Camilla or try to take her by force. Their leader, Renguth, had been brutally killed by the party in a ferocious combined assault, and everyone agreed that his decision to try to take Camilla by force was, in retrospect, not the best of plans.
Join us this week to figure out what to do with your captive and journey into the Expanse itself!
Stupid Awards
These were were mostly consumed by the void due to mysterious and powerful electrical interference! But we have one: Charlie:- Let's All Get The Caster!