Green Pass Campaign III, Session 2: Why Are We Killing These Trolls?

August 30-31, Caudex Annales, 70 AUP
Things picked up in the hill country with the party driven off the road by a patrol of three trolls. Figuring that they have taken out over a dozen ogres last week, the party saw no particular reason to flee from trolls. The trolls were little match for an entire warband of heroes, although they did manage to draw some blood before going down.

Instead of continuing along the road toward the mountains, the party set up a base camp and dispatched all but the reserves to hunt down the lair of the trolls. After a few miles of relatively simple tracking through the hills, they began to notice signs of other organized patrols of a similar composition, all converging on a troll sizable troll village.

To test the strength of the trolls (and over the objections of Vandar), the party arranged a small ambush with a pit trap a few hundred yards outside the village. The trolls remained awake through the night, and grew increasingly agitated about the missing patrol, until eventually they sent out a number of search and rescue squads in all directions. One of the squads almost immediately blundered into the trap, one troll stumbling in and the others tottering off balance at the edge of the pit while the squad leader roared behind them. The party, watching their silhouettes against the stars from just outside of infravision range, rushed forward to assault the others.

The battle progressively saw an increasing number of trolls pushed into the pit on top of the first one, who by now had been set on fire with some judiciously applied incendiary oil. When the squad leader went down, the party hauled his body to the edge and tossed him over too, creating the worlds least-appetizing BBQ grill. (Well aside from the lizard goons, who sawed off some troll limbs to save for later.)

Troll patrol

All the commotion of battle attracted the attention of the rest of the villages squads, which had not gone farther than a few minutes away. A few stealthy members of the party (including both gnomes, Conan and Grimdark) hid again and counted no less than 20 trolls running past, in three groups. The final group obviously featured the leaders of the village, include a skull-adorned shaman and a chieftain at least a dozen feet tall. Having no interest in tussling with that many trolls, the rest of the team decided to make a run for it, breaking into multiple groups.

Meanwhile, the stealthy observers slipped past them to investigate the village. The village was still watched by a few dozen troll wives and whelps, who occupied several buildings set up against a main hall dug into the hills. The village was discretely set to the flame, torching out the guards and catching a few to perish in the conflagration. Conan put his talents as a multilingual librarian to use by inscribing the orchish message that the carnage had been wrought by a "Drago the Destroyer" and his band of marauding orcs, and then everyone headed back to base camp. (The trolls abandoned the chase in the morning.) The party moved on, puzzling over the mystery of why the trolls were so well-organized.

The expedition advanced into the mountains, and camped for a night on the edge of the tree line before the final leg of the overland journey. Advance scouting revealed that the path lead directly into the side of mountain through a crevasse guarded by dark elves, the notorious spider-worshiping slavers of the underdark. Ceremonial spider motifs decorated the entrance gate, and the doorway itself was covered by a great lattice of adamantine bars.

The gnomish Sup Foo Master, Grimdark Thunderstain, decided that the most logical course of action would be to parley with the dark elves and trick them into opening the gate, and then attack them (hahaha no that would actually make sense and we're talking about gnomes here) to mesmerize the dark elves by performing an interpretive dance. Alas, the elves were totally unimpressed by this display of lithesome gnomish artistry. So as a backup strategy, the party elected to present themselves as "monster part traders", showing off their impressive collection of slightly singed troll kneecaps. The elven sentries and their commandante waved them through (perhaps a bit too quickly, in hindsight) and gave them clearance to descend down the block-lift shaft with their caravan wagons -- but only in groups of a half-dozen or so, and only after securing their elven "captive" to shackles set into the walls.

As each group arrived at the customs inspection station at the bottom, the occupants were dismayed to discover that the lift compartment was filling with knock-out gas. After several trips, the entire party had been incapacitated, and awoke to find themselves immobilized in a rather unpleasant torture chamber with a large number of other recently acquired captives, bound hand and foot on iron racks.

The torturer-on-duty methodically branded everyone in the room on the left shoulderblade with a hot iron, to a tumult of agonized screams -- accompanied by Conan the Librarian's incessant questions about how exactly the branding irons were heated and what application of metallurgy was responsible for the sturdy construction of the shackles.

Whereupon an elderly matron with an air of authority entered the room, dressed in black velvet and lace...

Casualties
None, although pretty much everyone is in a bad spot at the moment

Treasure and Experience
Coins: None
Gems/Jewelry: None
Trade goods: None
Items of special interest: None

Total nonmagical treasure value: 0
Gold per share: 0

Killed: 2 troll champions (2x 900 xp), 5 trolls (5x 680 xp), 5 trollwives (5x 140 xp)

Total experience from treasure: 0
Total experience from kills/captures/deceptions: 6100 xp
Total experience from exploration: 0
Total experience: 6100 xp
Total experience per member: 469 xp

(Note: Mort the Wardog and Zigg's henchlizards are taking an experience half-share (and also a treasure half-share, for the lizards). Inactive "reservist" PCs are claiming neither experience or treasure -- unless their players want to split treasure between both a current and inactive PC, at their discretion.)