Pattern Seekers – Episode 7: Gold, Gold, Gold (Part 2)

Our heroes are on their way out of the mines when Pho stops and bristles at somethingahead.  Thea calls on people to stop and Dr Martin see a trio of black circular stones on the ground ahead and rushes forward to bottle one . . . only to have them unfurl into giant scorpions!   Dr. Martin in caught in the scorpions claw and stung, leaving him badly wounded as the rest of the character rush forward to engage.

Scorpion

The combat is furious, with a greased Dr. Martin wiggling free of the claw, Malik the monk grappling one of the scorpion’s tail and then ripping it off!  Zendrink the sorcerer getting caught by a scorpion and electrocuting it (and himself) with shocking grasp.  But soon enough the scorpions are slain, and the characters badly bloodied, just as the Solar troops and Bradley arrive to see what all the noise is.  The scorpions swirled back down into the black stones, now damaged, except for the scorpion tail (held by Malik) and some poison harvested by Dr Martin.

They are escorted back to the Sun Temple camp where their wounds are treated, somewhat, and they can rest.  They decide that the next thing to do is to try and solve the bandit problem that is bedeviling both sides as a step toward getting them to the negotiating table.  So, they decide to borrow a wagon, make it look like it is transporting gold (via props and simple illusions) and then surprise the bandits when they attacked the wagon.  A good plan, so naturally it did not work . . .

Wagon

Nikko and Malik were scouting ahead of the wagon when Niko spotted a deadfall prepared to block the road, he circled back to warn the wagon but failed to warn Malik who blithly continued on and had the deadfall dropped upon him.  Malik managed to avoid being crushed and hide among the detritus of the deadfall.  Six bandits scrambled down to take up position behind the rubble.  As the wagon came into view, the tallist of the bandits called out for the wagon to halt, “Leave the wagon and you will come to no harm.”

Our heroes started to fall back, positioning themselves to leap out and trap the bandits when Malik leap up out of the deadfall and tackled the tallist bandit.  The other five bandits starting beating Malik with the butts of their crossbows.  After some confusion, the rest of turn back or reveal themselves and leap out of the wagon to engage the bandits.  As they rushed forward to engage the now confused bandits” Niko shot a poison dart into the grappled leader, Bradley tossed a poisoned knife into another bandit, Thea summoned a sphere of fire (dropping it on a bandit) and Zendrik using said sphere to generate a cloud of choking black smoke.  The smoke, opaque to vision, shut the combat down, those in the cloud could not see and two-thirds of the bandits were rendered helpless by it.  As the smoke cleared, Dr. Martin -now transformed into his bestial form- rushed in and bit the head off of one of the mostly helpless bandits, inducing the others (apart from two who had fled) to surrender.  So, three bandits captured -one deeply unconscious having been grappled, poisoned and smoked- and one killed for no casualties beyond one badly bruised monk.

Returning in triumph, the slightly blood splattered Dr Martin found himself avoided by the Solars, especially once the stories from the bandits starting circulating, and the bandits were questioned throughout the night.  Where they revealed the following information:

• They are members of the Bandits of the Black Band.
• They move camp often and the camp will have moved as soon as word of what happened get back.
• Their leader, Evran the Crow,  was informed of the situation and -possible- financially encouraged to get involved but a person unknown to the bandits.

Next stop, the bandit camp, next time.

Notes: C did not make it, so no dwarven cleric, by B was along so we had wacky monk action as the above shows (we decided that he had been there all along).  And while the bandit combat is described quite shortly, it actually took a lot of time as we were laughing through most of it as the plan totally collapsed.

Scorpion photo by Mike Baird used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, wagon photo by Jeremy Burgin and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.