Dear Diary
I’ve just returned home from a rather exhausting journey in which we nearly all died.
Guess we’re off on a good start…
I entered the tavern only to be greeted with a rag-tag group of fellows who had signed up for a request to scout the Silent forest because of reports of creatures from there causing trouble. They were a member short so I decided to tag along, what way to best learn the layout of the lands but to travel them.
We traveled through a portal to establish a base of operations in a tavern called The Bitter Dwarf, a small-ish establishment that smells pungently of Goblins, Alcohol, and Food.
I introduced myself and they did too, there were some who clearly could barely even speak common, though one could converse decently in Dwarfish, and apparently Giant (though I don’t speak that, fortunately, it sounds so….crude). One of my dark skinned brethren was there as well, at least they seemed to be of reasonable intelligence, for a Drow
After establishing a route and path to take towards our destination, we set out, not encountering much on the road at first, until we encountered what seemed like a tar pit, which could be interesting for its resources, but the others clearly didn’t know it was here, even though it was just off the road, so someone ought to have spotted it before and exploited its resources given its proximity to town (?!), but that clearly wasn’t the case. Quite peculiar…
We decided to check out what was going on with the tar pit by checking its depth and viscosity, it was surprisingly shallow a pool. Our group decided to lift some rocks in to make a path to the centre, were a thing was apparently floating in mid air, twitching and moving, an odd sticky blob of unidentified nature. As one of ours came within reach, something appeared from the tar, it seemed to be a big, rotting, floating eyeball, with a bunch of smaller eyeballs on stalks on its body, and it seemed quite intent on eating and/or murdering us for whatever reason the undead have for doing that.
Needless to say we weren’t going to take that laying down, so we fought back with vigor and valor, though our resident drow seemed to have issues firing their bow in the harsh sunlight. The rotting floating thing shot of ray after ray at us, and clipped me quite viciously, after which the arcane energies caused me to black out, even though I dodged most of the hit. Fortunately I was quickly awoken by the soothing healing words of one of my allies, and then the Drow, one Xenon, healed me back up to full. The fight didn’t last much longer as our team concentrated their efforts and we brought the creature down.
After the fight I decided I must investigate further into its nature and performed a rudimentary autopsy on the field, the outer shell seems to have been mostly inflated by the gasses of its own rotting flesh underneath, like a rigid balloon over a rotting piece of meat. After some effort I managed to extract a fair set of its rather intact teeth, viciously sharp, fortunately I managed not to cut myself on them, that may have caused some form of infection given the state of decay on this corpse. I also extracted an eyeball which I considered to be of some alchemical worth should I be able to return it back to a proper alchemical laboratory.
After we were all patched up we continued onwards, back to our objective. Further down the road we met some goblins who were making a tollbooth of some sort, intrigued by their rudimentary business skill, and their leaders relative sharp wit, for a goblin ofcourse, I gave them some advice in an attempt not to have to pay their toll, after the trip here I was rather strapped for cash honestly, and had some things I needed to acquire before I spent my hard-earned money on such silly things as a goblin toll booth.
I managed to…persuade them to more reasonable terms and was given leave to pass, one of my allies was a bit less…understanding of the situation and handed them a sack of his gold, silly individual, after which we moved on.
As night fell we made camp and decided on watches. I quickly went to bed after an exhausting day on the road, pretty pleased with myself for the day’s adventure.
My watch came and went uneventfully, but I was woken up later by one of our allies, a rather wounded and sickly looking centaur had made his way into camp and we were apparently going to take care of it during the night.
I was awoken by screams. the centaur had become corrupted or something odd, and was now rampaging among my allies who were fighting to subdue the creature, not one intent on being a murdered of the innocent, I did my best to help out, though I only really had my dagger at hand, which wasn’t that effective.
As one of ours struck the knockdown blow, instead of falling unconscious, it instead erupted in a volley of nasty, rather painful spikes, which caught me by surprise, and the thing withered away. The person who was watching it apparently didn’t see fit to inform us it had already died during the night and this was some odd twisted risen corrupted thing instead of the centaur we thought to protect…
The spikes seemed to be toxic, fortunately one of our paladins offered to cleanse me and himself, seeing that the centaur of last night had died to these same kind of wounds I took him up on his offer, and one person offered to heal another two, the paladin and healer also healed themselves, Xenon, the Drow, had taken the sacrifice of not receiving a heal as we didn’t have enough magic for all six of us. Unfortunately his conditions quickly worsened and we were at loss of what to do. After debating we decided to put my alchemical talents to use to try to make a cure or at least a temporary solution to his worsening condition. After a lot of mucking about, the conditions were abysmal at best, I managed to make something that would hold the disease at bay, at least temporarily. We quickly made haste back to town. Rushing through the darkness of night, helping each other along through the exhaustion from the trip. We managed to dash into a Guildhall, in which we found a healer, one Hjalrig, a dragonborn of some renown around here. He patched up Xenon, after the two of us half walked, half stumbled, back to the tavern, we had a good few drinks to reflect upon the day and conversed some about our lives…or well me mostly about mine. A silent fellow that one.
That concludes my two days worth of adventure for now.
Will write further should interesting developments present themself
Rael Erewyn.