Banner of Blood
General Summary
Grolm 9, 578
about 7:30 a.m.
Rewards Granted
- Each member of the SNAFU Posse -- each of the Player Characters plus Chef -- receives 800 XP for finishing up the Nightmare Cow Level while preventing the Plant Army from emptying Purgatory Gulch!
Remember, we have worked out that your Animal Companions determine their levels off of their Chosen Person, so going forward we will not include them in XP calculations.
General note: Some of you may be within kick-a-rock distance of an experience point accumulation that qualifies you for 7th level, or even a short ways past it. Please remember that you can't Ding! and do the actual leveling up until you have time to train. Right now, it looks like you won't have a chance for that until after the end of this adventure. Record the XP, but don't level yet!
Missions/Quests Completed
- Transported the entire overloaded cart of twenty-three rescued captives back to Purgatory Gulch, healing up along the way.
- Diverted most of the Plant Army led by Scaevola Aemula away from their assigned invasion of Purgatory Gulch, sending them instead to smash the Agoseris Herd. Two hundred seventy head of Hell Bovines died in the battle, as did over a hundred Briarseed Children and possibly as many as five hundred Blood-sucking Cabbages!
- Located the protected Lair of the Dangerous Outsider
- Halted the remnant of the Plant Army raiding the town, destroying it to the last leaf of cabbage!
Character(s) interacted with
- Chica Alston of Whippetal Ranch
- Scaevola Aemula of ███ ████████
- three Lord Jack-o-Lanterns
- fifteen Briarseed Children
-
One Dangerous Outsider
Notes
Now that some of the protagonists have had a direct conversation with one of the high-ranking people involved in The Troubles, we have to wonder if the plant-altering Big Bad might actually be the current motive force behind both sides of the escalation.
- Whose idea was it, really, to turn farm hands and ranch hands into laboring captives?
- Whose decision was it, really, to respect the town's "neutrality" yet try to capture the Bicchieri Caravan and then the Mail Coach?
- If the plant-altering side came here to support the farmers, what happened two nights ago at Tarntaise Farm? For that matter, why is Braunvieh Farm empty of its resident people?
- Who and when, exactly, broke the "neutrality" of the town?
- For that matter: Who exactly judged the "neutrality" to be broken?
Most importantly:
- How can all of this be stopped?
It's high noon! The angry senior ranch hand known as Chica Alston wants to meet the SNAFU Posse's sleeping sorcerer, get resources in gear, and go sneak into Alfredo House in pursuit of her spouse's safety. She does not know that the Posse is running low on internal resources just now. She probably will not much care, either.
Scaevola Aemula, who has been leaning on the stable door at Oat Livery long enough to have heard at least one strategic fact, announces that she too knows how to get into Alfredo House the stealthy way....
and the ash cloud continues to spread . . . .
