Honour is an ephemeral thing...

Next thing I know Vistar is shaking me awake whispering he heard something out in the scrubland.
I wake Ofa while Vistar tries to wake Jiak and Callista. Enora is nowhere to be seen.
Suddenly a voice speaks out from the night, in an odd accent. My Elven heritage pays off as I see a few Hobgoblins standing just out of bow range.

They demand our maps and notes and money. Or we die. I've had better offers to be honest. Vistar sidles up next to me and says that Callista won't wake up. Apparently she and Jiak were smoking some of Valthruns pipeweed last night and its affected her badly... wonderful.

Jiak opens with an acid arrow splashing three of the Hobgoblins, I think they blamed me for that as one of them then charged me and smacked me in the face with an axe, I was really injured by that and had to expend my healing energy just to keep myself alive.

Vistar gets revenge for me and uses a new technique he learned and smashes them all senseless. Ofa then took an almighty swing at the nearest Hobgoblin... and missed! But it must of scared the Hobgoblin having an axe swing that close because he convulsed and died on the spot from fright!
Jiak decides to forgo fire and uses his magic missile at another Hobgoblin, but out of the shadows Jiak is hit by an arrow. Vistar seeing this erupts in a fit of rage and attempts to use his bloody ending attack to take down the Hobgobs....

Which would of been brilliant....except I think his new earlier attack made him just a little dizzy and so he pretty much missed all the Hobgoblins! Ah well better luck next time. I decide to help out rather than heal people and asked Bahamut to give me the strength to blast the Hobgobs with a lance of faith and for some strange reason it worked!!! I was stunned! I didn't have long to celebrate that fact as Jiak sent up a flare to reveal the creatures shooting us in the shadows, more goblins. Jiak then flames one of the Goblins...ok well he lasted almost an entire fight! Luckily this time the fire worked and he fried the goblin, enough to scare him and his mates away! Face the fury of Bahamuts divine wrath cowards!

Vistar manages to kill another one and I run round to mortally wound the last one, this generated a feedback for Ofa so when she killed the Hobgoblin it healed her of her wounds. With that the blood is wiped of our weapons I heal the party and we carry on our way to the Six Kings.

Oh by that point Callista wakes up and vows never to take pipeweed again!

It takes another few hours and the view of the statues grows with every mile. Until we see a cave in the foothills with some Goblins.

Great more Goblins.

Actually closer inspection reveals that these are the "good" Goblins as we approach them we are challenged to reveal our identities. By a goblin with heavy tattoos and a gold hilted sword. Hmmm this must be the contact we were told about.

They know we have the dagger and are looking for the other pieces of the crown, they demand we leave the dagger and return to Sharn. I was under the impression they wanted our help!
It takes a bit of persuading to get them to even accept we can help and it seems that to seal the deal we need to take part in an honour duel... ok, different.

So Vistar steps up first and in about two seconds bullrushes the Goblin leader out of the ring! Impressive!
Callista was next and it takes longer but she also throws her opponent out the ring. Then to win the contest Ofa needed to beat her opponent, which would be good as this was a contest of strength and I'm not that strong. Luckily Ofa threw her guy out of the ring after it finished jumping around her. I think she just got bored and booted it out!

Well job done, we, sorry they, won the contest. Thanks to Bahamut giving us strength! The Goblin leader seemed pleased with our win and then allowed us to join the hunt for the pieces. She told us that two pieces resided in Six Kings. We would find one piece, her party the other.

The hunt was on....

The six kings

We were well on our travels to the Six Kings when we came across a bunch of humanoids in the road intimidating a goblin. Now normal common sense in the world says "big deal" but we were on a mission to help goblins....I know, weird.

Anyway closer inspection revealed that humanoids were in fact the followers of Orcus. bad guys we would quite happily beat up all day after what we saw in the Shadowfell. So predictably we dived in and slew the lot of them. Ok well actually I should say that Ofa and Vistar did most of the work supplemented by Jiak and his pyromaniac traits!

So duty done, we rescued the goblin, who turned out to be one of the Wordbearers we were supposed to be helping....he was less than grateful but hey its a goblin I don't expect much from them! He carried on his way and we turned back onto the road to the Six Kings... we didn't get much farther along the road when we were confronted by a huge Minotaur and some gnolls. We had caught them finishing the remains of a grizzly feast of human flesh..... Being half human that got my blood up! Jiak ran off to the side ready to cover the unholy beasts in fire and acid. I readied my spells to blast them in holy light.
The Minotaur charged forward and then no more than 20 seconds later was dead at the feet of Ofa! She had managed to cut it to pieces in one or two hits! It spooked the other beasts and they fought with less courage, eventually we drove them off and slew the stragglers. I had time to cast a quick prayer on the remains of the eaten humans...its sad things like this that make me glad I have the chance to enact revenge on unholy creatures.

We took camp for the night, then the next morning we set out, in the distance I could see the carvings in the mountainside that must be the Six Kings... fate it seems was going to continue testing us. After a few hours of travel Ofa and myself saw broken branches in the scrubland ahead, then a shadow. Next thing we know more Orcus followers jump out of the trees trying to ambush us. Luckily as we spotted the shadow we were prepared. That instant of surprise needed for a good ambush was gone. Nice to know that yours truly has some use other than a healer... though it would be nice if Enora did her job occasionally and scouted these things out!

I have started worrying about Jiak though...he seems to want to burn everything as an answer. In most cases it can be helpful but in forest?!?!? Luckily we managed to keep a lid on it this time.
Like the previous Orcus followers these were dispatched but we did struggle a bit, in fact I managed to exhaust myself trying to keep everybody up this time around. Bahamut is truly testing my faith, if we keep facing battles like this I may run out of energy to heal people.

After the fight we decided to call it a day and use the camp of the Orcus followers. They didn't need it anymore. I took first watch, then got some sleep.....

The story so far...

Ok in a nutshell lets catch you all up.

I was sent to the region of Shadowfell to investigate odd goings on, in my company was a Dragonborn paladin. We arrived in a quaint local town and hired some local mercenaries to accompany us to the keep on the Shadowfell.
On the way we encountered many monsters and yours truly was reduced to being the team medic. But we prevailed and defeated the followers of Orcus that had taken up residence in the Keep and managed to retrieve an egg held by Kobolds.

This egg hatched and was marked with silver, a sure sign that my God was watching over us and blessed our work. This has changed the entire area and now the Keep has become a new church dedicated to the worship of Bahamut.

One interesting thing to note, that has now become a running joke and changed the party from strangers to friends, is during our travels though the dungeon under the Keep our Halfling thief, Enora, accidently set off a trap that poisoned her in a way that slowly turned her to stone. It was easily fixed by the local wizard Valthrun, but it kept us amused trying to think of new uses for a petrified Halfling. Much to her disgust.

So mission accomplished I was free to return home. My God had other ideas, in a dream I was told to stay with this company and we would accomplish great things. Reluctantly I accepted the charge.
We have headed out to the city of Sharn at the request of Valthrun to help an old friend of his who is under attack by a swarm of Krithicks.

Horrible things, we saw some in the dungeon under the Keep, but the idea of a whole swarm was terrifying!

We took airship to Sharn. on the way we were attacked by some assassins, we never did find out who sent them, but they were easily dispatched.
Upon arrival at Sharn we found the tavern which Valthruns friend ran. (I began to worry that Valthrun was a bit of a drunk in his youth)

His friend turned out to be an obnoxious dwarf who would only really talk to our dwarf. We worked out that he had been expaning his business into the mining trade and had recently commissioned a dig not far from the tavern. ( I would like to point out that this would put it in the middle of the city?!?!)

Anyway his business partner was a Goblin, of all species, he explained the situation and asked that we go down the tunnel and try to clear the area of Krithicks so his men could resume digging.

So thats what we did, we ended up in an ancient tomb dedicated to a Goblin King. I believe the translation was Ashurta?
Anyway we fought his ghost and minions on the way of clearing out the Krithicks that had taken up residence.
This had led us into the real reason that the Goblin was digging, he was looking for the Goblin Kings blade. It was said to possess powers to unite the Goblin tribes and retake the city.... admirable but I thought this was probably a bad idea.

We actually found the blade! It also seems to have bonded to me and keeps whispering in my ear to do great deeds.

Leaving the tomb we decided to find out more about this blade, a local university teacher gave us the information that it was in fact part of a set, the Ashen Crown. When united it would have untold power. This was given to us by an Elven woman dressed as the servant of the Raven Queen who was visiting the teacher at the same time. Something didn't sit right about her..
Before we could even think we were summoned to the governors office and charged with the task of helping a Goblin tribe known as the Wordbearers to find the rest of the Ashen Crown, we were to meet them at the place of the six kings.

I question the wisdom of helping a Goblin tribe find an item that they intend to use to retake the land but the governor seemed to know the risks. I needed more information about this blade so I insisted we revisit the teacher. When we got there however there was a stench of death.
The Elven woman walked into the room and before we knew it we were fighting zombies and she herself had changed into a demon of sorts.

It nearly killed us but we defeated them and quickly left the city, heading towards the six kings...