Valentine Duell

January 15, 2023 5:32 PM
"Well, this is a fine mess you all have gotten us into." Valentine glared around at the folks at the gaming table. The mission had seemed easy enough to the adventurous souls sitting in a warm and cozy tavern listening to the local town sheriff talk about it. A young nobleman had been kidnapped by some bandits. They demanded a ransom, the family was willing to pay it, but wanted an intermediary to make the exchange. That was all the group had to do, swap money for a lordling in some ruins outside of town. Simple.

Nothing is ever simple. So after the family's second group of mercenaries interfered trying to recover both the boy and the treasure, and the kobalds swarmed up from below, the adventurers had a bit of a problem. They were trussed up three levels down in the ruins, with the unhappy mercenary captain and the 17 year old lordling who was entirely unsuited for this situation. There were kobalds all around them and the location of the money and remaining mercenaries and bandits were completely unknown.

The map was magicked up out of the table, using some of the tricks in Gary and Ness' book of GMing spells. Appropriate lighting effects flickered over the map and their figures were in position on the map.

Valentine smiled at her players. "After commenting Captain Morthel ignores you all and starts to take in the environment better. As far as you can tell, there isn't much more to see. You're sitting tied up in a 10' by 10' stone block room with a very damp floor. Your obvious weapons have been taken, and the only source of light comes through the door into the main room which, as best you can tell, contains a cooking fire. There are somewhere between fifteen or twenty kobalds in that room moving about, doing various ordinary tasks. Two have been positioned at your doorway as guards, but they seem more interested in the main room than yours." She grinned, "That may change at any moment, or if you make a lot of noise."

"Oh yes, young Lord Winston is still whimpering quietly in the back of the room. It seems he would like to very much just go home again." Val leaned back in her chair, "What would you like to do?" This was the fun part now, she got to listen to them come up with whatever scheme they thought might work best. The ropes wouldn't be a big problem, she was sure one or two of the characters had knives tucked away well enough that the kobalds hadn't found them. Plus, Morthel did. Past that, it would be interesting to see what they would do. Individually a kobald was barely a threat, but a large group might be an issue, if they had someone they needed to protect. Plus the players knew by now that kobalds liked their traps, and there were certainly a few of those sprinkled around the ruins.

The big problem they may run into is that Morthel was promised half of the reward money for getting both back safely and he won't give it up easily. He'd be awful stubborn about leaving without it. He may change his mind though, if they find it. Since it is another level down tossed on the dragon's horde who is sleeping upon it.


OOC: Hopefully you all can have some fun with this. Make up whatever character you want and be as specific or vague as you wish. You can set up threads for this escape scene, or other ones about venturing further.
Subthreads:
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