Between the Hunter and the Grove

This is the very condensed version; I'm slowly filling in more detail on other pages.

The party headed up to the mountain dwarves to give them the philosopher's stone in payment for a new, custom-designed shelter (that we're supposed to be figuring out the design of). They encountered some orcs who seemed to have some sort of Asmo influence (looking for invisible worms, one of which may have been inside the head of their ogre).

Up in the mountains, a war is brewing between the goblins and the dwarves. One goblin was sent visions of wom by Nuket; it appears that she, some spider faction, and the Shade Lord may all be backing the goblins in the coming conflict.

Frankel decided he'd written off the missing centaur tribe too soon, so the party went out searching for them. Turned out they'd been driven insane. Most of them were saved through infection with a slime/obliviax crossbreed, courtesy of Arbutos, a creature similar to Plant Dude (on a much smaller scale), but Arbutos used the slimes to keep control of the centaurs. Meanwhile, the tribe's leader, Kantor, who was under the inflence of a wolf mask of dubious provenance, went completely around the bend and fell in with several hag covens who were in league with Jagrmund (plus leucrotta and goblins -- grunts, a bard, and some fighter-mage types with wands). The party was able to secure the centaurs' release by bringing Arbutos the wolf mask and a hag's eye. Kantor went down in combat and died when his vampiric regeneration item prevented the party from resuscitating him. The tribe asked Frankel to become their leader, but he declined.

Silvana was left with the following suspicions (from an email Gita wrote):

1. Some time ago, an evil extraplanar probably related to Juiblex was released in the valley. The centaur tribe was exposed to the creature (possibly they were meant to be sacrificed) and some centaurs, including Kantor, were driven insane.
2. The plant creature (Arbutos) was able to assimilate the Juiblex creature (like Pdude ate Nabassa) and derives strength from holding the extraplanar captive. Commune with nature confirms the presence of evil extraplanars in the valley, which is probably what Silv detected on her det evil. Energy from the demon is being used to produce the green slimes and grow grass over the valley. Unfortunately Arbutos has occasional bouts of insanity caused by the assimilation of such a powerful creature (just like Pdude Hajing out).
3. Arbutos cured the centaurs of insanity using the green slime/memory moss hybrid to wipe their memories (Rahul confirms that insanity caused by extraplanars can be cured by erasing all memories of the creature). Kantor's insanity was never cured because the slimes never caught up with him.
4. After curing the centaurs, Arbutos became greedy (similar to Pdude) and refused to release the centaurs, even though some other members of the council probably disapproved of his actions. Our presence gave him sufficient motivation to decide to release the centaurs, since he felt he had received some yum-yums as compensation.
5. It's unclear who released the Juiblex creature in the first place -- did the druids release the creature with a plan to assimilate it for energy or did they step in after the creature was released? My hunch is that the Shade Lord might be involved in this matter, since hags are her known allies. (On another note, Whitemoon forced Pdude to release Nabassa so we might see her again in the future). The hag's plan to send the goblin to fireball the grove was very sly since a fight between our party and Arbutos would have been distracting enough to cause the accidental release of the demon, which would have been very bad.

On the return trip, the party encountered some well-equipped Gruumsh-worshipping orcs in plate mail who were out looking for information about spiders and Rakni on behalf of someone called Lord Zarath (who communicated with the patrol leader via an item). They got useless discourse from Lorcan (who they assumed was the leader because he wore plate) and vaguely useful stuff from Ganeth and Silvana.

Click around here to head to:

the main Campaign page

the summaries index

the index for my piece of the Campaign site

my home page