Welcome back. As we left our heroes they were celebrating the outcome of a recent bout with boars. And as hillarious as such moments are, somehow I kept myself from providing the group with enough boar meat to open a Jewish Deli. Also I was concerned that Tanic might not make it to the first area of the game. . .
But I figured one more group of angry swine couldn't hurt. The group dispatched them with ease this time and managed to make it the rest of the way to Augerhead un-gored and without any impromptu costume balls.
As the group climbed the steep trail up to the gnomish town of Augerhead nestled within the eastern end of the Sword Mountains, Tanic scouted ahead. Presumably he was ensuring that the area was Sus Scrofa free before relaxing. However as he reaches the courtyard in front of the main gate something struck him as off. The dead bodies tossed artfully about in a tribute to chaos theory was the big one, but he'd seen such before. Hell, sometimes that was how he left an area. But a quick check of his travel journal revealed that he'd never been here before.
Which was good because that would have been an awkward explanation to the gnome, who'd spent the trip telling the group about how he'd been raised in Augerhead. And so he headed back gleeful in the knowledge that he only had to tell his new costume friend that it appeared that someone had slaughtered his town.
For some reason this knowledge created a rift in the group. The Gnome handled the information fine, but Zubat and Calith for some reason decided to stay and watch the horses. It's possible they had rocks in their boots. Or perhaps they were taking the moment to rest. Or . . . they were too squeamish to go wading through bloody, mangled, rotting gnome bodies. Who can tell?
Either way it was rather frustrating to the rest of the members of this newly formed (and as yet unnamed) group. This feeling intensified in them as they climbed the last stretch and saw the dead bodies splayed out. Annoyed at their behavior Vex turned back and applied what she knew of motivational speaking. "GET UP HERE!" she yelled.
As the yell carried through the mountains they realized that said mangled gnomes weren't quite as dead as they'd thought. A better definition would have been undead actually. As the corpses started clawing their way to their feet Calith and Zubat rushed up the hill. The other three took those stretched moments to glare meaningfully at Vex.