Pirates of Bloodspur Bay - Part 2

Kismet's Summary:

Short Version:

Other notes:
 * The pirates have a number of slave towns where they take children to raise them as pirates and extract tithes in the form of farmed and other goods.
 * One of the “pirates” we captured (Steve) is from the town where the 5 other dragon wyrmlings were being raised.  He offered us more intel if we saved his family from the slave town. We instead liberated the entire 300 person town and brought them back to Ardoch.  They’re being set up to homestead in some unused land.
 * At least 2 of the 5 remaining wyrmlings escaped when we liberated the slave town.
 * New intel received about pirates:
 * Raven stops by the slave towns randomly to check in on/scare them.  Maybe ~1/month
 * Physical description of Raven: very big, stockily built, 6.5’, seaweed black hair, scars all on his face and body
 * Bloodspur Bay City is as big as the farming village (Tarrin) but with no farmers, all fighters.  Maybe 300 pirates.
 * Ships are usually out to sea, but there are maybe 3-4 ships total.
 * Ships are 40-50 ft long.  Can carry maybe 30-40 pirates.
 * We now have a map to Bloodspur Bay City.


 * The skeletal warrior we saw before was the agent of a vampire that took blood sacrifice from nearby towns. The vampire (Ophelia) knows us now, and is way too strong for us.  We collapsed the cave path to keep her from following us.
 * Bugbears live in the main forest on the other side of the mountain and attack anyone who gets near them.
 * The shades in the ancient colosseum respawn after a few days and you have to clear them out again.

Long Version: Those two live informants that we captured paid off a lot faster than I’d expected. I figured in a few weeks or months we would see if the realization that they were not going to be able to either escape or kill themselves would loosen their tongues a bit, maybe they’d trade information for some more comfortable accommodations. Instead, nearly the minute that Steve (the less… angry looking of the two prisoners) started talking almost the minute he realized that he was out of reach of Raven.

He started begging us to save his family. Apparently, while many of the pirates are taken from slave towns as children and brainwashed, at least a few like Steve join as adults in order to try to shield their families from Raven’s wrath. He promised that if we could bring his family to safety, he could offer us more intel on the pirates. Straightforward, right? Bring back 3 people. No big deal.

The short version of the next series of events is that we may have gotten a little carried away. We found Steve’s village, but our plan to quietly contact Melinda (Steve’s Wife) and leave were ruined the moment when we arrived at the town. The skeletal warrior we has seen the previous week walking across the plains was here, most of the town was gathered watching a man try to hand the skeleton the lead to a goat, and then the skeleton chopped off the man's legs saying something about needing “more blood.”

After killing (re-killing?  Destroying? We’ll go with destroying) the skeleton we talked to the village elder and offered to bring the entire town to safety instead of just Steve’s family, which they accepted. So we had the villagers pack up and led them away, released their wyrmlings so the pirates couldn’t use them, and burned down the village. I think the different colors of dragon don’t get along well, they fought with each other after they were free and we only saw two flying away in the end. Hopefully the pirates will think the village was destroyed by the dragons and everyone fled, as opposed to knowing we rescued them.

Now here’s the truly terrifying part. On the first night of our journey back to Ardok a strange pale creature that looked like a woman came out of the woods while I was on watch. She creeped me out like nothing else and didn’t respond when I yelled at her to identify herself, so I threw a firebolt at her. Solid hit, burned right through her upper arm, and then… there was no damage. I may as well have been throwing bubbles, it didn’t even bother her! 

The creature said her name was Ophelia. She wanted to know why we had killed her skeletal servant. She wanted to know what we thought we were doing, taking away her slaves. And she wanted blood, right now. We gave her one of the cattle that the villagers had brought with us and took it and left, but the whole night there were bats flying overhead watching us. After the next day of travel she showed up again. We gave her several calves, and she picked up each one, bit it on the neck, and drained it dry before leaving. She visited us one more night before we made it back to the passageway through the mountain and made it clear that she wasn’t leaving us alone, so after we got all the villagers through we used dynamite to seal the cave. Hopefully that will be enough to stop her…

Captain Warlin in Ardoch got the homesteading paperwork started for the villagers we rescued to start a new town near Ardoch (after a few complaints about the amount of work we dropped on his plate) and Lennart, Roi, and I headed back to Travencall to collect our quest reward. For everything we found, two captured pirates, and three hundred villagers who can give intel on Raven and the pirates, there’s no way we don’t earn that bonus.