Here’s the third of our party’s Adventure Report for the humongous Dungeons & Dragons campaign Storm King’s Thunder.

(I’m finally getting around to posting these!)

Session 2, 3/26/19:

The party is joined by the halfling rogue Halberticus Darkleaf, an old friend, in Nightstone. Hal meets them at the temple after everyone takes a short rest after the battle with the goblins and the worgs. The two soldiers from the keep are also accompanying the team, and they’re anxious to find the missing townspeople after the giant attack.

However, before they can move out of Nightstone, they hear meowing from a ruined house. Mavthos and Hal go to investigate, but their bumbling scares off the creature, which they hear skittering inside the house. Luckily, Torinn uses some monk skills to corral the creature, which turns out to be a tressym — a winged cat with a tag on its neck that says “Normanx”! Normanx and Torinn are quickly inseparable.

And as soon as Normanx is at Torinn’s side, the tressym hisses when he hears something in the ruined Nightstone Inn just twenty feet away. Torinn, Normanx, Brother Broosel, and Sir Frost Breaker sneak into the Inn, while Mavthos, Hal, and the 2 soldiers remain outside, near the hole left by the stolen nightstone.

Inside the Inn, the trio and tressym find a dead goblin, pierced by a crossbow bolt, and he looks relatively freshly killed. Normanx hears scuffling sounds upstairs, and Sir Frost Breaker flies up on his broom to meet a strange woman wearing black who claims to be a traveler who was injured in the attack and who’s now trapped inside the Inn. She also has a mysterious flying snake. After a game of chance with Sir Frost Breaker (which she loses), the woman must tell the truth about herslf: she’s Kella Darkhope, a member of the Zhentarim, and she’s waiting for her fellow Zhents to arrive in town. The trio agrees to leave her in the Inn instead of attacking her, and they go back outside.

Meanwhile, Mavthos and Hal have found a strange rune in the ground near the hole left by the nightstone, and they can’t seem to make heads or tails of it. At last, someone recognizes the rune as a giant rune that means “cloud.” Mavthos draws it as best he can and the party hurries out of town before the afternoon gets away from them.

They follow the tracks to the Dripping Caves, led by Alara, the female soldier. The caves are wet and rough-edged, and dark. The party gets ten feet inside when they see an ogre taking a mud bath, and initiative is rolled! Along with the ogre, the team finds themselves surrounded by five goblin archers spread around the huge cave, and the goblins start peppering them with arrows. Torinn spend two Ki points to cast Thunderwave at the ogre and goblin, Mavthos hits them with multiple Eldritch Blasts, Sir Frost Breaker uses Thunderous Smith, and Brother Broosel gets in on the action with a Spiritual Weapon. Finally, the ogre is defeated along with 4 of the goblins.

However, one of the goblins escapes into the caves to the northeast, and the echo of the Thunder spells have rocked the Dripping Caves. It’s safe to say that the party has let every other creature inside the caves know that they have arrived…