As usual this is a follow-up on a previous entry

Last time we turned into a cloud with Cleric’s Wind Walk and emerged from the troll tunnel after a fight to find the ruins of an old mining town: Grint Skarrenruf, as we hover over the place our Barbarian spotted what looked like dwarves riding spiders, so we landed to take a closer look, Barbarian’s prized axe Grudge settler started to fire up and upon inspection turns out that these were Duergar (think evil cousins of dwarves) Steeders:

There were 4 of them with 10 smaller spiders carrying other stuff and around 40 slaves (varying races: humans, elves, goblins and gnomes) bound to each other by their hands, after failing to sneak upon them (Cleric and me, a Paladin are very bad at stealth) we were discovered and a fight ensued (apparently they hold a very old grudge towards dwarves so they didn’t take kindly to our dwarven warlock)

Hilarity ensued when we were discussing freeing the slaves:

• Our warlock hates elves and wanted to kill them, but was ok with liberating everyone else
• Our Barbarian hates goblins and wanted to kill them, but he was ok with liberating everyone else

At some point we talked to all of them, apparently one of the goblins was a diplomat in service of the King under the mountain (Barbarian was suspicious) , the elves were from the mountain glades and they said they kill poachers (Warlock was suspicious) and one of the gnomes was Eleksis Dossa, a princess that requested to be escorted to her secret city. We agreed to help her and she promised a reward

In preparation for the journey the gnomes requested a day and a half to rest so we set up camp, opened a keg of ale (we captured 2 of the cargo spiders) and thought that Cleric had gotten drunk since he smacked Barbarian but it turns out we were attacked by more Duergar during the night so we defended ourselves. One of them became shrunk so that we couldn’t see him (which was annoying)

The next day we resolved to investigate the Duergar outpost and the entrance to The Underdark (where the slavers were heading to). So we left Cleric guarding the rescued slaves and used Teal’C (Warlock’s familiar) as a scout , we discovered a dungeon entrance so we went back to the rescued slaves, had Cleric hide them in the forest and proceeded to the dungeon

We had to battle Duergar, Duergar screamers and a Drow:

We could have avoided that last one because he was just there to buy slaves and once we dealt with the first wave of defenders he said he would just leave without causing trouble, but Warlock had other plans and attacked him arguing that he was against slavery (we suspect he was trying to justify killing an elf) and we joined him although under protest

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Day 50 of my 2020’s #100DaysToOffload

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