Evil!Party: Death of a Baron

 We search over the temple and find miscellaneous equipment, and after a while we find some caves back into the mountain. That’s where they hid all the stuff from the castle. Notably, the magic items include a Bracelet of Friends. We decide to keep that one. It’s a ton of money: 100K GP worth of loot.

Meanwhile, Forkbeard and the militia are stationed by the town when Master Fedoku shows up, running with the Baron under one arm and his wife under the under arm and kid clinging to his back. As soon as he focuses on them, he Dimension Doors on past. The remaining monks and priests (such as they are) charge Forkbeard and his troops. The priests destroy about half of Durest’s undead troop, and drive the other half away. 

The militia forces drop arrows on the first group of monks, taking out two of them; they continue their advance and throw shuriken at Forkbeard. The battle is engaged! The monks tear into the militia, but Forkbeard is holding his own on the front line. The clerics come in much more slowly behind them, but the monks are mixing it up and the right side of our front line is starting to fold. The back line drops crossbow bolts on the monks, and the front line holds. The monks keep whittling down the front line. The first two groups of monks take out a lot of militia before they get annihilated. Forkbeard turns to attack one of the clerics as the last two groups of monks reach the front line on the left end. 

The back line fires crossbows at the nearest priest and injures him. The priest responds by using Searing Ray on some of the front line troopers. Forkbeard pulls back and switches to crossbow, injuring the cleric further. The monks are down to one group of three, but the priests and their spells are still going to be a problem. Forbear continues attacking the nearest priest at range, and two other squads take out two more of the monks with their crossbows, 

The last of the monks goes down, and the militia turn their fire on the nearest priest, who is still picking people off with searing light. The cleric pauses to Cure Critical Wounds on himself, and immediately gets a flight of crossbow bolts for his trouble. This repeats, until he runs out of healing and goes down. The remaining three priests are still moving in, and the militia are still using focused fire on a single priest at a time, to wear them down. A second priest goes down. The last two are carving up the front line, but now the nearer of them becomes the target. He goes down more quickly. The last priest is still trying to get past, but the militia is still in decent shape; he elects to kill Forkbeard and heal himself. 

The troops are still feeling the confidence of their numbers, though, and they keep tagging him with arrows. He does his best to carve through, but he dies. By the time we return, our forces are down to 81 out of our original 181 troops. 

The troops greet Jenny with breakfast tacos the next morning. Durest casts Raise Dead to bring Forkbeard back. 

Once he’s had a chance to recover he goes and gives a little speech to his men. Chuck steps in to rebuild their morale, by collecting vampire spawn with an eye towards opening his own house of ill repute. He’s basically setting up From Dusk ‘Til Dawn but with a tent. 

Durest and Jenny head over to the estate where Master Fedoki calls a challenge to Jenny, demanding single combat, and Durest steps back as they square off. Fedoki moves in first and hits her with a Stunning Fist. She ignores it and hits him back, and he unleashes a full-round attack and stuns her. 

Nobody bothered to set terms for the fight, so Durest sends his wraiths off to kill everyone in the house. 

Master Fedoki attacks again, hitting Jenny a bunch and taking her down. Durest immediately casts fly and goes 40’ up in the air. Master Fedoki chases after the wraiths and attacks one. Durest drops back down and casts Heal on Jenny. 

Fedoki immediately zips back over and tries to hit Jenny with a Stunning Fist. He misses, and Jenny rages and attacks from the ground, hitting him. Durest rises back up into the air and tage Fedoki with Dimensional Anchor, so Fedoki can’t leave. Fedoki pounds the crap out of Jenny but this time fails to take her down. 

Jenny attacks again, hitting twice. Durest drops down and Heals Jenny again; Fedoki slips away and uses Wholeness of Body on himself. Jenny gets back to her feet and shoots him with a longbow. The wraiths attack him but miss. Master Fedoki sprints away at inhuman speed. 

We check the house and find that there was an escape tunnel. Durest sends the wraith down it, and then he and Jenny follow. Jenny moves ahead to a portcullis, and promptly sets off an explosive trap which collapses the tunnel, leaving us pinned under rubble. Durest uses Dimension Door to get loose, and pops outside to find that the wraiths have brought back the baron and his wife and child. He calls for Bob and Ferroustopher to dig Jenny out, and sends one of the wraiths to go get Chuck. 

Chuck arrives just as Ferrous is dragging Jenny out of the house. 

Jenny executes the Baron and his wife with Bob’s old axe, while Chuck pretends to bite the child but instead sets her aside for ransom. Except… she’s not the heir, so she isn’t worth anything.

Laroche shows up the next night and agrees to send the child back to Wellfort; meanwhile, we’ve sent the wraiths to kill the local brother at his winery, leaving only one remaining brother to be the heir. That guy’s up in Falshire. 

Laroche is disappointed that Fedoki escaped – as are we, honestly – but he’s more interested in what we want to do with the city. He’s thinking it could be turned over to the Iron Lion (the mercenary leader from waaaaay back in the campaign; Durest knows him by reputation) or the Ogre chieftain. 

Laroche had brought presents for us. A tiara of Health +6 for Jenny, plus improved natural armor; Durest gets a better ring of protection and a Mitre of Health +6. For Chuck, some scrolls to help tide him over until he gets to higher level spells:

1x Weird

2x Horrid WIlting

4x Prismatic Spray

6x Chain Lightning

Next town up the road is Flowerhedge, but it’s behind enemy lines. That being the case, they want us to hold here for a while – and it may be a couple of months. Flowerhedge is a key city; we’ll need to destroy the defenses and sack the town, but we’ll also need to destroy the bridge. They’re likely to defend the bridge and possibly pull in Solari from nearby towns. They might be able to pull the army out into the field, leaving us free to destroy the bridge. 

Once we get through Flowerhedge, Brightland starts to meet up with the main thrust of our attack; If we can take Brightland, they will share with me the secrets of becoming a lich. 

We take advantage of this downtime to, um, do stuff.