Session 4 - The Kaitjitsu Blossom

We all climb aboard the rowboat behind Megus' shack, and start to row towards the point on the map where we've been pointed out to find the second shipwreck.

We approach the wreck.  It's far more intact than the other one, this one doesn't seem to have been burned.  However, it's still clearly been here for quite some time and is clearly very dilapidated.

The boat also appears to be Tien in origin, same as the Kaijitsu Star.  As we approach the boat, a few skeletons assemble from bits and pieces in the mud and shamble towards us.

We beat them up until they stay down.  As we're searching the leftover bone piles we notice that the ones that look the most dead were the ones that Sula knocked out with her Quarterstaff, and all of our slashing type weapons seem to have mostly just glanced off of the bones without causing as much damage.

The nameplate on the ship reads "Kaijitsu Blossom".  It's a little bit bigger than the Kaijitsu Star.  We search it all over, but there's nothing of value left.  It's clearly been here for quite a long time and been looted pretty well by now.

So we leave, and row the boat towards the location of the cave on the maps.  We row up a small river and search around.  Eventually we find the entrance to the cave.  It's overgrown with vines, although they appear to have been recently disturbed somewhat.

We can't see any footprints, but we think someone's been through here fairly recently.  We start to head through.  Qunna makes it through no problem.  Shadow touches the vines and discovers that they're stinging nettles.  Bukka fixes up the stings, and we cut down the vines from the entrance before the rest of us enter.

The inside of the cave is wet, algae grows on the walls.  The only sound in the cave is the sound of running water over the cave floor.  There's a small stream twisting through the various rooms of the cave.  We walk into one of the rooms, and wade through some of the water.  It's about three feet deep.

As we round a bend a giant spider scuttles out of a corner and rears up at us.  In the corner is the body of a huge gecko that the spider was eating.  The spider tries really hard to eat us, but we don't let it. 

Once we've dealt with that we keep exploring.  There's several forks in the cave, and we manage to determine that a few of them are connected to each other.  One of the forks we explore leads to a dead end with a bit of a deeper pool of water in it.  Bukka casts light on a rock from the cave floor and we throw it down into the pool.  We can see something sparkling down at the bottom of the pool.

We discuss the best way to get it, as nobody really thinks that getting into the water might be the best idea.  While we're all squabbling over how best to retrieve the sparkly thing, Shadow sneaks away from the group and dives into the water to retrieve it.  As she's swimming to the bottom she's slammed by a giant amoeba.

After we dispatch the amoeba, we dive down again and retrieve the sparkly objects.

As it turns out, they're gemstones.  None of us is exactly sure what they are, but we all think they're probably worth at least some money, so we take them with us.

Session 3 - The Witch's Walk

After defeating the goblin chief, we head back into the store room to have a real look through the contents of the fancy chest.  There's a bunch of stuff in there, but the one thing that draws our eyes the most is a fancy paper fan with a map scrawled on the back.

After reviewing the map for a while, we think it's a map of the swamp.  It's got a few places marked on it that we've been, and a few that we're going to check out, including another boat wreck.

We gather up the rest of our stuff and carry on searching the rest of the camp.  We search through a bunch of empty filthy goblin houses and another guard tower.  Shadow sneaks into the next building ahead of us and finds that there's a single goblin left in there.  It's the same one that we beat up earlier who ran away.  It's squabbling over some things it's trying to pack up, and while it isn't paying attention, Qunna catches it in her net so we can ask it some questions.

• What's up with all the burned bodies in the pit?
• "The Big Boss took the chest from the cave, from the empties.  The empties came.  Like longshanks, but no meat!"  We all know that longshanks is the goblin word for humans and other tall folks.
• What about the bodies in the moat?
• He seems proud as he explains that the goblins killed some of the empties.  "Not helpless!  Did it all myself!"
• Did the empties burn the house?
• "No!  Scribbles used words!  Words take souls!"  He explains that the goblins burned that house on their own.
• Do you know about Megus?
• "Don't go there!  She catches goblins...  Changes them...  Not good.  Not good."  He seems genuinely a bit afraid.
• Did the longshank empties come from the witch?
• "No, from the cave.  Nice chest!  But empties didn't like us taking it."
• Where is the cave?
• "Down."  Helpful.
• How did some of you survive when the empties attacked?
• "The empties just left."

We show him the map on the fan.  He points to a shipwreck and tells us that that's where the fireworks came from.  It's not the one we've already visited, it's a bit further into the swamp.  He also points to where the empties cave is.  Since he was actually helpful, we decide to let him go.  Qunna flings him over the fence and we hear him scamper off into the woods.

The last room in the building are an empty storeroom full of rusty tools.  We come across another guard tower and a couple more empty houses.  One is a little fancier than the others and has only a single bed in it as opposed to the rows of bunks we've seen in the other houses.  Nothing worth noting stands out to us in any of the houses though.

We decide that rather than head back to town now we're going to keep pushing ahead into the swamp and investigate the last few points of interest that we've got to take a look at.  But the day is drawing to a close, so we think it would be wise to sleep here instead of exploring the swamp at night.

The Chief's hall seems to be the sturdiest building of the lot, so we head there, clean up some of the battle gore, barricade the doors, and sleep for the night.

---

In the morning we talk through our plan.  We're going to check out the second boat wreck that the goblin claims is where they found the fireworks first, then try to find Megus and see if she can tell us anything.

We head out of the goblin village, and as we're leaving, we notice that there's a path broken through the swamp.  What's strange is that it's taller than a path that would have been left by a goblin.  We think maybe the empties probably left it.  We decide to follow it and see where it leads us.  We come to a narrow place in a small river probably about 50 feet across.  We swim to the other side.

We pick up the trail again, lose it for a minute, find it again, and follow it to the end.  It opens up into a proper walking path.  Based on where we are, we think heading left will lead us out of the swamp, and heading right should lead to the shore.  We head right.

After a few minutes we pop out at a weathered looking shack with an outbuilding. 

We approach the outbuilding first.  It's very run down.  The door is swollen shut from the wet swamp air, and the walls a broken up in several places.  Peering in, we can see that it's just a storage shed, there's some gardening tools and supplies, but most interestingly, there's three dire rats who jump out and attack us.

We fight the rats for a while and eventually fend them off.  We get in the shed and look closer, but all we find is rat droppings and rat prints.  There's some other prints mixed in, they look like they were made by tiny human hands.  We aren't really sure what to make of them.  They aren't doing anything particularly interesting, just wandering around, but it's still pretty strange.

We head over to the house, and peek in some windows.  Someone thinks they see a small flash of movement, but nobody can pin down anything specific.  We knock on the door, but nobody answers.  This door is also swollen and stuck, so Sula kicks it in.

The inside of the house is overgrown with fungus.  It's growing on the walls and the floors.  Everything is damp and humid and gross.  There's a usable broom in one corner, but otherwise, nothing special.  We find what at one point would have been a bedroom.  There's some bookshelves, but all the books are moldy, and we don't really want to take any of them.  We also find a porch, a toilet, and a kitchen.  All of which are covered in fungus.  As we're poking around in the kitchen, a rat with a human face runs in from a hole in the wall yelling "Intruders!"  It attacks us.

We fight with it for a while, and it runs into another hole in the wall on the other side of the room.  We think it's run off, but it pops out behind us and attacks again.  We eventually manage to kill the monstrosity.  Sula looks into the wall where it was popping in and out, but there's nothing special about it, it's just a hole in a wall.

We move past the kitchen and find what looks like it could best be described as a lab.  There's a workbench with chemical stains and crystalline growths on it.   And in a chair in front of the bench is a totally bizarre looking skeleton. 

The skull is half melted, one arm has talons, and there's huge spurs of bones protruding from the ribs, both inward and outward.  It looks like some kind of horrible experiment gone wrong.

In the lab we find another map of the swamp, this one more proper.  We finally put two and two together and realize that we've found the witches hut, and Megus is no longer around to ask questions of.  As we leave we set off a firework in the house to burn away the filth and hopefully deter other vermin from gathering in the area.

We set off to find the other shipwreck, and as we're leaving, we notice that there's a path leading from the house to the shore.  Down by the shore we find a small pier with a well maintained rowboat big enough to seat the four of us.  As Megus won't be needing it anymore, we decide to take it to get over to the other shipwreck.