Session 39 - Ogre on a Bridge (recap) - The Saga of the Looting Luters

In this session, our party made plans with Leosin and Ontharr Frume, fought an Ogre and Crocodile, lost Zoyana, and made it to Baldur’s Gate…

Celebration

Pliny was the hero of the grand melee.
There was chanting, there was celebration, there was the giving of magical items.
- Lady Constance went to Aegar
- The Inspector General went to Pliny
- an alchemy jug went to Zoyana
- and several other awards were distributed.
The party was swept up in a throng, and end up back at The Pair of Black Antlers, the inn where they you had met Frume before, and a night of revelry ensued.,
Pliny played like a madman, drank like a madman, and sometimes played while drinking.
- It turned out that Dragons Lullaby could hold two pints inside of the thing, and so Pliny filled it up and you drank from it as he was playing.
It didn’t take long for Zoyana to go from “Pliny’s awesome” to “PLINY’S AWESOME!!!” to “WOOOOOO!!!” and dancing…
- Zoyana spent her night saluting Pliny and consuming her alcohol she kept plying Aegar with drinks.
Aegar, half way through the night, still nursing his first drink: “Zoyana, where are you getting all of these?”
- Z: “The nice men at the bar. Every time the dancing takes me over there, one of them buys me a drink.”
- A: “And are you paying?”
- Z: “What? No. They give them to me.”
- A: “Zoyana, these are a lot of drinks…”
- Every time Zoyana turned away, Aegar looked around and found people to give them to. Even so, he ends up, with a half-moon of drinks creating a wall around his table.
- Z: “Oh, I might pay the cute ones with a kiss…” then went dancing off once again.

Aegar & Frume

Aegar & Ontharr had a private conversation about:
- the Order of the Gauntlet and what it means to be a paladin
- Founding another orphange (in the middle of the night)

The Grand Tour

The Pair of Black Antlers, while a nice establishment, could not hold the celebration that was Pliny and Zoyana having won tournament games. A tour ensued.
- Aegar, being the grand champion in the tournament but also being Aegar, followed and nursed his drink.
- The party ended up hopping between bars and picked up a large group of people to take the tour with them and seeing a lot of the folks from the competition. Including, obviously there was some drinking with Thrump.
They traveled from bar to bar until Aegar finally gathered the team.
- While trying to gather Pliny into a fireman’s carry, Aegar ended up with a half-elf on his shoulders, playing his loot and serenading the town.
- And as soon as Pliny strummed his first tune, the gents heard from behind them a “Woo!”
The party ended up back at the Pair of Black Antlers where Aegar had arranged for rooms.,
- The night ended with Pliny on the dance floor in the craziness with a gaggle of the ladies, and maybe a couple gentlemen in there too. And Zoyana was dancing away on the dance floor.
And you at one point, Aegar looked over and Zoyana was just gone, and he decided to just go ahead and assume that it was fine.
Much like a drunken uncle at a wedding reception he didn’t plan, Pliny piled as many people as possible in his room room.
- It wasn’t all that late when he looked around and realized that there were five women in the room with Pliny. And the peak life of Pliny happened off screen.
As the celebration wound down, Aegar finally headed to bed.

The Next Morning

Zoyana woke in a tangle of appendages, and looked over to see the halfling woman from the archery contest on one side and Thrump on the other.
- At some point, she made it downstairs for breakfast.
Not much later, once risen, the party did that post-wedding thing where there was a wide variety of when people woke up, but it still worked out that the meandering breakfast included all the people.,
- As the they were clearing the breakfast for everybody, one of the squires approached and invited the party over to the same private room that Frume was in the day before, and closed the door when he left.

Short Summary:

Waiting for them in the room were the broad-shouldered human paladin, the monk Leosin, and many pitchers of dark red wine. The paladin’s face wore a serious expression, unlike its prior open countenance.
- “My friends, we have important business to discuss. At this point, you know almost as much about it as we do, and thanks to you, we know twice as much today as we did a tenday ago. Something rotten is afoot. We have no formal organization to oppose these rascals — not yet anyway. We’re working on that. And we need people like you, who know how and when to fight, and how and when to keep their heads down and observe. We can’t promise you anything except long days filled with danger and stress — but what could be better than that, eh?”
Everybody updated everyone else
- Order of the Gauntlet vs kobolds = tournament
  - Frume’s kobolds were tied to the Cult of the Dragon (lots of discussion of “the little fuckers”)
- The Cult of the Dragon:
  - Timing is an issue. The tracks leaving the cultists’ camp and the map from Mondath’s chamber both indicate that the wagons were heading west to pick up the Coast Way road, where they would turn north to Beregost and Baldur’s Gate. That’s about 550 miles, so 25-30 days.
- Leosin is leaving to follow up on Varram the White
- Frume was happy with the destruction of the dragon eggs. Leosin was still so-so.
- Frume is going to try to gather support for investigating and dealing with the threat
- The party is going to Baldur’s Gate to try to find Resmir’s wagons and follow them north (to the Mere of Dead Men north of Waterdeep?) and better understand the cult’s plans.
  - Frume gave them a contact in the Blackgate district: a human trader named Ackyn Selebon
    - “She runs an equipment business and so she coordinates and outfits merchant caravans going North. Which means that she knows everything going north, but for Baldur’s Gate to know everything going North means you need to know everything coming from the South and going through the South, and you need to know everything going in and out of the port.”
    - “She sells all the material needed for long-distance freight hauling: wagons, rope, netting, grease, chains, wheels, and so on. Her shop also repairs wagons. She is not directly involved in the hiring of guards for caravans, but she knows people who are. With her to vouch for you, you should have no trouble getting hired on as guards for a northbound caravan, even if she can’t give you work with a specific merchant.”
  - With the party’s travel time and the time it should take to go down river, they should get to Baldur’s gate with 2-3 weeks before the Cult’s wagons get there.
  - Frume arranged a boat, so 3-4 days to get to Baldur’s Gate, if they left that afternoon.
  - Frume sent one of his paladins, Krusk, to accompany the party and possibly help them find Ackyn Selebon.
- Zoyana also pulled Leosin aside and got an update on her Purple Mist questions.
  - Updates:
    - Conjuration magic
    - Blood magic
    - Astral plane (or maybe the ethereal, I’m not sure that source knew the difference)
    - Teleportation
    - Appearing: the tarrasque, pixies & purple dust.
    - Cities disappearing:
      - The mists of Ravenloft
      - Abir/toril
      - Cities transported into the astral sea
  - Zoyana interjected numerous times to see about cities disappearing and whether the could be transported somewhere else.
    - There are places where the worlds get too close, and things can cross over Abir/Toril, etc.
    - There are lots of stories of like kingdoms in the where you know the the whole the castle or the city got transported to now it’s floating in the astral scene becomes the home base of some thing because it takes kind of a lot of magic to transport, a city.
      - A village: “still feels like a lot of work to me.”
    - “How much are fairy tales and how much are real? How much are myths and how much reality? I mean dragons fly in our skies so who knows…”
    - “There are stories of mists where you you fall asleep in a place in a fog rolls in when you wake up you’re in an entirely different place.”
    - “As for the purple mist… it sure feels like a purple mist is a mysterious mist…”
  - After feeling hope at hearing Leosin’s thoughts, Zoyana spilled her guts about her backstory.
  - The conversation continued with a bit more back and forth, and ended with Leosin a little frustrated, communicating that “I don’t know the answer to your question right now. We can work to figure it out, but this isn’t the kind of thing that anyone just walks around with the answer in their head.”
  - At the end, he looked to Pliny:
    - “College boy. Go visit the library when you’re in Baldur’s Gate and learn more. You do know where the library is, don’t you?”

An Ogre on a Bridge

Two days downriver, the party came across an ogre on a bridge.
- They failed miserably to pay off the ogre or convince him to let them go peacefully (which is to say they rolled well, then convinced him to fight anyway.)
In the ensuing fight:
- Pliny blasted a Thunderwave
- Aegar smited
- Krusk took a bunch of hits
- Fang did some healing and successfully Suggested the ogre open the gate.
- Zoyana got pulled off the boat by a giant crocodile, got knocked out of her brown bear form by the croc, disappeared under water, emerged as a giant crocodile herself, told Aegar telepathically “Get the ogre! I’ll catch up with you or I’ll see you in Baldur’s Gate”, took a giant bite of the other croc, and the crocodiles disappeared.
After the party ended the ogre, Aegar lamented the loss of life, and the party searched for Zoyana
- Downstream, they found the body of a giant crocodile, and concluded it couldn’t be Zoyana: she would turn back into a halfling if killed.
- After some time, they continued on, trusting in her skills…

Travel

The remaining party members passed the next day uneventfully

Baldur’s Gate

The session ended as the Wyrm’s Crossing bridge coming into view…

Loot

+

NPCs Interacted With

Ontharr Frume
Leosin
Krusk, the Paladin

Locations Visited

Elturel
River Chionthar
Baldur’s Gate

Experience Per Character

Session	Task or Accomplishment	Aegar	Pliny	Zoyana	Fang
39	Celebration & the Grand Tour	100	100	100	-
39	Paladin Bonding	100	-	-	-
39	Playing on the dragonborn’s shoulders	-	-	25	-
39	Thrumping	-	-	25	-
39	Planning with Leosin & Frume	200	200	200	-
39	Learning more about the Purple Mist	-	-	25	-
39	On a Boat	25	25	25	-
39	Ogre on a Bridge	563	563	563	563
39	Travel	0	0	-	-
39	Arrival at Baldur’s Gate	100	100	-	-
	Total	1088	988	963	563