PF - Wherin I Send Two Goblins Down The Hole Of The Darklands

[unseenmage]

My irl GM is pretty burned out after running a game for two optimized gestalt PF // Spheres characters so I'm letting them play for a change.

Started at level 3. No Spheres, Mythic, technology, or guns. No space travel. Monsters as characters is fine. Race builder is fine. Downtime rules a yes, as always. High point buy, we like our heroes beefy. No evil and they gotta be a team player, no PvP.

There are two PCs. Both goblins. One is a spry young medium size barbarian while the other is a crotchety old small size kineticist. The eldest is NG and the younger CG.
They hail from the most peaceful town I could find on Golarion; Oldfen in Andoran.

Before the game they each recieve one piece of unique info. The kineticist's favorite barkeeper has been acting odd as of late, as though sleep deprived.

And the barbarian slays an odd hound while out hunting. A small sized dog with the face of a bat which was cowering from the daylight in a thicket.

The young buck itches to go adventuring while his elderly distant uncle lives in a hut outside town (still a legal, voting resident!) and uses sleight of hand to earn beer money.

Their debut day started with meeting up at their favorite tavern. After a long day of watching the proprieter's wife run the inn alone some hubbub is observed as the innkeeper's best friend, a city guardsman arrives looking for the innkeeper.

While the guardsman is explaining to the wife that only his innkeeper buddy knows about the secret way to jimmy the door to the guard station open and that a lot of equipment has gone missing, it becomes apperant that their daughter hasn't come home either. It is now getting on towards sunset and that girl has a strict before-dark curfew!

The daughter being the more pressing concern our goblins volunteer to go fetch her, a harmless enough task as the daughter adores the elderly goblin's parlour tricks.
They make their way down the block to the daughter's alchemy instructor. An elderly apothecary who has kindly taken the girl on as an apprentice.
Here they learn that the child hasnt been seen this day and that the child is an alchemy prodigy instantly memorizing any text related to alchemy, while being rubbish with other studies.

Upon their return to the inn with this news they learn that the innkeeper was seen headed to the West by an Eastward merchant newly arrived in town.

There is also a werewolf hunting suspected Fangwatch captain on the scene who ardently calms and questions the frantic wife. The elderly goblin, as one familiar with but not too close to the suspect, accompanies the captain to search the suspect innkeepers residence and belongings.

All that is found is a strange half jar of white viscous liquid which reeks of mushrooms and hidden beside a bedside stand. The captain, convinced this isnt a lycanthrope case, politely excused himself to attend more important business.

The wife explains that their businesses coffers are also empty and that the milky substance was supposed to be a potential new beverage for sale. She thought her husband had tasted it and discarded it already.

The goblins are left the task of investigating the suspicious liquid. They make haste back to the apothecary who, now fearful for her lost apprentice and all fired up tears through her bookcases until finally finding a black leather bound tome partially filled with exotic mushroom samples.

The goblins recognize that the strange language within is uncommon, and the binding is actually drow skin. The apothecary isnt very surprised, she'd purchased the book for its priceless samples regardless of their source. Towards the back of the volume there is a small paragraph about a mushroom milk which is fairly harmless but for being extremely addictive. Our goblins are now convinced the innkeeper has taken his own daughter to sell in the darklands for drug money.

The apothecary sends our goblins to an associate of hers in uptown, a genuine alchemist. The goblins discuss and decide they need more information and that the innkeeper already has a head start and that travelling werewolf infested woodland roads at night would be suicide. They go to the alchemist.

The alchemist lives in uptown, a literal upslope set of neighborhoods at an elevation slightly above the rest of the town. His maidservant, sleepy eyed, brings the goblins in after some convincing. The alchemist is fascinated with such an unusual sample and leads the two down to his fortified, reinforced sub sub basement where he runs munitions experiments. (The man is trying to put dynamite into bullets, he is brilliant and talented but not long for this world at the rate he's going.)

After several hours of analysis the goblins interrupt the rapt alchemist, who informs them that this is a sample of spoiled Midnight Milk, a drug from the darklands. Someone had mixed a fungal coloring agent to turn it white from its usual black. The alchemist has spent the last hour trying to identify the exact coloring agent and why it spoiled a usually unspoilable drug.

Our now exasperated and exhausted goblins go sleep the rest of the night away so as to begin the hunt in earnest on the morrow.

The next day the goblins head out, they're curious if the odd hound the barbarian hunted could have come up from the darklands, and if so, if there is a way down nearby, perhaps that could lead them to the barkeeper. So they track the hound. Its trail weaves and meanders back and forth across the road from one patch of thick trees to the next.

While following the track the goblins stumble on a unique campsite aside the main pitstop off the road. A single pair of larger, heavily laden footprints becomes two sets of footprints once camp is made. They recognize such because the large goblin often carries his smaller elderly companion ("I can be your backpack while you run!")
The smaller set of footprints seems to flit from thicket to thicket snapping off herbs and flowers before returning to the campsite.

At this time the goblins are reminded of the little girls skill with alchemy, and they now worry that the father is bringing her along to MAKE his precious drugs.

Now the goblins track who they are convinced is the innkeeper. Eventually they see smoke rising in the distance seemingly from the neighboring town of Piren's Bluff, a fort town on the border with Cheliax.

They also come up behind a pair of loud voices over a rise laughing and bragging in undercommon about how much money they've just made so easily.
Not one's to discriminate the goblins approach loudly themselves. The voices came from two drow scouts accompanied by two bat faced dogs, quickly dubbed batdogs.

After some quips back and forth the drow sick their dogs on the goblins and all ard easily dispatched. The surviving drow is awoken, knocked out, reawoken, knocked out etc. while being questioned. His answers not forthcoming and his racism against goblins being fairly severe he is stripped naked and left in the werewolf infested roadside.

The tracks of the assumed innkeeper veer northward from theroad, and the goblins follow. Eventually they are ambushed on a wooded trail by two more drow and dogs. The dogs have all become trail rations for the barbarian. The two new drow are captured and bound. While investigating their campsite a large sack is found which wiggles, and upon being startled, leaks a puddle of frightened urine.

Upon hearing the elderly goblin's voice the little girl in the sack calms down and is rescued. She tells a take of her father bringing her with him as a helper and acting very very strange. Seems her dad still.has one good batch of Midnight Milk on him which he sips on occasion before 'thinking really really hard'. At some point he had started running and hadnt stopped all day. She was dropped somewhere in there and found by the 'bad men and bad dogs'.

The goblins decide to take the girl and their drow captives to Piren's Bluff to the knights stationed there. Along the way they are nearly arrested by a small group of patrolling greenhorn knights who mistake them for kidnappers. The elder goblin recited his polling location and political leanings and the knights are convinced of his resident status.

These knights were merely inexperienced, the veteran knights are off chasing the drow raiding party who'd attacked Piren's Bluff for slaves. The drow they'd encountered had been stragglers from this group. The goblins arrange for the little girl's transport, promising to find her father and bring him home. They also exchange their loot and prisoners for a promissory note with the fort at Piren's Bluff. A common enough occurence for patrolling knights to take custody of collected goods or prisoners from roaming adventurers who come to the fort to be paid at a later date.

It is now that they notice, the crow's coin purses were filled with Chileaxean gold... Cheliax had likely funded the drow raid in a fort town of an enemy nation. The knights are glad to have this information, the likelyhood their superiors are headed into a Cheliax trap is high.

Now out goblins are off after the innkeeper. The tracks go northish. The knights and drow were also headed almost straight north. The goblins opt to chase their actual quarry rather than possibly be sidetracked by a major battle.

They eventually track the innkeeper to a vent leading into the darklands that was hidden with a clever optical illusion advanced enough that it was detectable as a trap. They climb down the shaft, being barely able to make the DC. The barbarian carries the kineticist and has to remove his armor AND brace against one of the corners of the squarish hewn stone vent shaft to make it.

As they climb they begin finding blood handprints of the innkeeper. Then bloody toe prints as the man's commkner shoes begin to give out. They reach the bottom at the end of the night exhausted and worried. Bloody footprints make their friend easy to track, both by a couple of tired goblins and by any other awful thing residing in the darkness below.

And here we stopped for the night. I originally underestimated how fast they can climb down. Climbing all night and day would give you miles of depth. The darklands start like a thousand feet down and the middle darklands are a couple thousand feet down. Miles of progress would be too far.

I'm thinking of retaining that there were a lot of up and down sections and that they were disguised with reverse gravity areas that just didnt get detected as traps.

[unseenmage]

This is a fun bit of adventure. Thrills, chills, randomly selected encounters from the littlest of homemade encounter charts... y'know, adveeeentuuuure.

The players start off in the Gallery of Wonders as presented in The Beggar's Pearl adventure. The bloody trail left by the hallucinating, addicted barkeeper leads down via whatever is the fastest route. So the players avoided literally every encounter in this area; and I forgot to have them fight ants when they entered the mushroom forest. Eh, no great loss there.

When they got to the mushroom forest I described it more as a mushroom jungle. Warm, wet, and overgrown with all manner of fungal life analogous to jungle vegetation. They were already moving slowly to track so having everything be difficult terrain wasn't much of a hindrance.

A note on caves and how I imagined/described the floor: uneven. In tis area the mushrooms have overgrown and covered the cavern floor. What was a stoney area of rough ups and downs and protuberances is still an uneven, not-flat area but now covered in fungal growth. Frequent floods have brought all manner of sediment down from the surface while residents and wildlife have caused the fungus woods here to overgrow and consume the cavern floor. I described the initial area as if it were a fungus orchard or tree farm gone wild and overgrown. Everything else was an extension of that.

As the goblins made they way slowly through the woods they encounter traps and bat-faced dogs. They easily deal with both. As there are only two of them though the damage slowly stacks up. The elderly goblin is a kineticist and it is his healing they use so ever so slowly subdual damage accrues on the barbarian. The kineticist himself is immune to damage unless its of a certain amount meaning as the night wears on he repeatedly isn't harmed by the few potshots that are fired his way.

The hollow mushroom tree with kobold merchants inside is bypassed, but not before they overhear the kobolds discussing someone who seems like they are probably the barkeeper and that the kobolds plan to break camp to pursue the potential slave. Our intrepid goblins hurry past hoping to catch their friend before the denizens of the Darklands do.

Moving on the goblins evade a deviously placed headchomper trap, basically a poisoned bear trap set on the ceiling so it clamps on one's head. They eventually run into an escaped prisoner from the attack on Piren's Bluff. The Piren's Bluff knights had caught up to the slavers and several slaves had escaped in the confusion. This woman turns out to be a maid of the town's leader. Only the town's head households were targeted by this slaving raid. The maid wields a sharpened needle the size of a adgger but after getting into an argument about local politics with the elderly goblin she believes that these two are surface residents instead of Darklands creatures. That they both have the goblin equivalent of a tan helps too.

They pick up one more maid (who'd been poisoned by a headchomper), an elderly household mage, and a knight's page on their way. Lastly they are met by an actual knight captain, who takes the civilians to rendezvous with the rest of her company at the cavern entrance.

Our goblins eventually find themselves on a long, wide, gravelly downslope. it's everything they can do not to slip and slide down into the interminable darkness. Suddenly, gravel and stones begin sliding down past them from upslope! A group of six kobolds and their overburdened duergar slave are rapelling down the slope on exceedinly long lengths of silken rope. The kobolds are dressed as merchants. The duergar is loaded high with boxes and bags of every sort. After some bandying back and forth the slaver kobolds decide that two outnumbered goblins would make excellent product. These kobolds have blackened hands and wrists, such as most kobolds from this area. this denotes them as kobolds of the Black Claw tribe. Though how they become so is a mystery to our goblins.

The elderly goblin starts things off by attacking the duergar's bindings with an energized poke from his walking stick. The elderly goblin asks if the duergar would help kill the kobolds if freed. the duergar gladly agrees. These kobold's attacks are weak but many, while their armor is good. The barbarian moves to attack the strongest ranged attacker they have while being pelted with low level spell attacks and bolts. The duergar grabs the kobold leader by the throat and grapples him to the ground in a one-sided show of strength, but not before the elderly goblin adventurer narrowly avoids a surprisingly powerful strike from the leader's rapier.

Eventually the kobolds begin to fall to the party's more potent attacks. The kobold bomber is slain by by enough to've killed it twice by the barbarian's ax. The scalecaster is felled by the elderly goblin's kineticist blasts. Finally the kobold leader is pinned by the duergar long enough for the barbarian to critcally hit him and cleave him in twain, his spilled insides tumbling down the slope into the shadows below. The remaining kobold snipers flee, using their ropes to disappear downslope faster than the heroes can gather their wits.

The duergar is grateful for his freedom and leaves the goblins with a warning; Do not go to the duergar settlement here in the cavern. it is overrun with brain stealing fungus some fool slaver duergar thought to use as a tool. it now uses him, indeed all those in the settlement, as its kind's tools instead. With that he, naked but determined, disappears off on his own journey in the dark.

Our goblins have lost the trail on the gravel slope and reach the bottom. The kobold merchant's possessons, hurled downslope by the duergar in a fit of rage and strength, lie piled on boulders here. The goblins scavenge a crate of mushroom trail rations from the wreckage and explore the area looking for track. They hear the crunching of metal and flesh in the dark and look up to see a great toothey insectoid maw chewing a knight's remains and dragging the corpse backwards into a crevice in the cavern wall. They fear the worst for their barkeeping friend.

Backtracking they explore a side path they'd originally neglected while approaching the bottom of the gravel slope. This turns out to be a great semicircular crack in the side of the cavern. It runs horizontally along the cavern wall at height and as a path slowly curves downward. While the cavern itself isn't necessarilly bowl or sphere shaped, following this break in the stone it might as well be. The sounds of an immense number of bats is heard, and increases. The ground has been coated inbat guano for a while now and it's only getting deeper.

Eventually they come upon a gate with two low towers built to block the rest of the way down. In the distance somewhere over the side of the cliff kobold voices can be heard, a settlement or a camp by the sound of it. The goblin's keen senses detect the three kobolds trying to flank them who're moving along deeper in the crevice, and deeper in the guano. When revealed they are dressed as stealth units. These kobolds too have blackened claws.

It is at this point that we become aware, as players, of the kineticist's telekinesis. He can hurl up to 400 pounds of something at an opponent. So he starts hurling guano. Because it is both plentiful AND insulting. With combat engaged it becomes apparent why the kobolds were sneaking, the bats have been roused. This entire crevice of the cave is now filled with bat swarms, to which the elderly goblin is immune and the barbarian has decent resistance to. The kobolds on the wall set up tiki-torch like incence burners to keep the bats off of them, the elderly goblin kineticist TKs them away. Now our goblins are protected from the bats (which at this point I'm calculating more as an environmental hazard than actual enemies.) Guano is TKed by the 400 lb load full up onto the towers and the wall until the kobolds are forced to flee.

The settlement below goes quiet as our goblins confirm that, yes, their barkeeper friend did go this way. Several kinds of traps are trivialized by remote TK being able to be used as a pokimg stick ahead of our heroes. Simple mechanical traps now too become set dressing instead of encounters. They find several oversize tents int he camp below. In one they find evidence of wounds being treated, and the state of the mess left behind confirms that these wounds had been to through the same terrain that the barkeeper had fled. As they move through the deserted camp they hear arguing voices ahead. In one of the tents they hear three halflings and a human arguing and spitting insult at one another. What about cannot be determined. They keep not quite coming to blows as the argument waxes and wanes. The goblins debate intervening. This camp was likely a slave exchange, or at the very least a trading camp with other races. If these are surface folk in a slaver camp in the Darklands directly beneath Andoran, the land of freedom, then they are likely criminals.

The goblins decide it is better to move on, none of these people is their friend. The barbarian though gets annoyed at the loud squabbling and kicks a tentpost collapsing the tent. The voices go silent and the people withing disappear. All that remains are two blank playing cards o the floor of the tent. The elderly goblin proceeds to carry the now collapsed tent via telekinesis and uses it to sweep for traps. It is very effective as this tribe of kobolds primarily use location triggered mechanical traps.

Many sets of tracks cover this area. it becomes apparent that many are intentional diversions leading to false hidden doors. After a thorough search of the area, which costs precious time their friend might not have, they find four potential paths forward. A ladder, a slide, an overly tight tunnel down, and a broad stairwell. All were hidden with sliding doors and false boulders and such. They settle on the broad stairwell reasoning that sending slaves down a ladder or rope would be too tedious and that a slide affords a slave too much opportunity for mischief as well. As they navigate the stairwell the oddest thing is found; tracks of a single bovine and a cow patty as well. A curious thing to be sure.

Now they come to the blackclaw kobolds infamous Vault. A prison of sorts where the blackclaws keep their slave stock mid transit to buyers. The front entrance has a trapped bridge and a pit. In the pit can be seen a gooey oozing grey stone, unidentified as the goblins have not the knowledge skills to do so. The bridge was, of course, trapped. These are easily overcome by the tent+TK combo. The front entrance is a grated gate, the TK is used to reach through the bars and flip the lever. A boulder is dropped into the entryway, the barbarian dodges it easily. The boulder rolls down the bridge, and is easily dodged by the elderly goblin, who uses TK to move the boulder right back into the structure and blocks a hallway.

Two kobold guards drop down and engage the barbarian, not knowing that their brethren in the two adjoining guard posts are off on rounds. One is swiftly defeated,the other runs to rouse help. tis is when the boulder is used to block a hallway. Beyond the boulder the kobold can be heard fruitlessly banging on a guard station door. The goblins take the other path and fight a roomful of regular kobolds. Half flee further into the complex. The guard from earlier is slain in this fight. The blackened hands of these kobolds tell our goblins that they are in the right place.

The goblins make their way through a food and goods storehouse. Now we see where the kobold merchants were bringing so many mushroom rations. This storehouse has enough food and water to last through a lengthy siege. Our heroes come across an office, training room, and bedchamber next. three adjoining rooms inaccessible from the rest of the complex. The training room is only ten feet square yet has targets for bow practice set up. The goblins move on and find the entrance to a cavernous labyrinth at the back of the complex. They've neglected a couple of other doors to get this far. Once in the twisting natural caves they begin squeezing down the rightmost path, only to be shot with arrows from the darkness beyond right before they hear armored little footsteps retreating into the distance.

Here we end for the night. Both in and out of character everyone is full up with kobolds, and traps, and darkness. The goblins suspect a formidable foe awaits them here in this barely navigable twisting cave. one who might even be capable of turning the normally next to harmless kobold dregs into actual threats if hit-and-run tactics are properly utilized. We'll see where this takes them. Will they manage to finally catch up to their lost friend and find some way to cure him of his addiction and seeming dementia? Or will he once again slip from their grasp and descend even deeper into the Darklands and their ominous shadows.

OOC I am open to ideas about how to further drag this adventure even deeper into the darkness while not causing our heroes to lose hope. I also don't want to deus ex machina too much. Though i DO have the stats for a flood ready to sink them deeper into this mess if need be.