Episode 25: Runaway Goblin Report

General Summary

The Enemy Within: Enemy in Shadows Episode 25 - “Runaway Goblin” 2/3/22 Post-Game Notes   Day 83 - Angestag 1 Brauzeit, 2512 IC   Picks up immediately following the midday Middenball match against the Wolf’s Tail Wardens.

• The Crew, still relishing their contributions to the Journeymen’s victory on the pitch, decide to stroll through the festival grounds before returning to celebrate at the Inn later that evening.
• Gurni: “Goes without saying, me boys, but your money’s no good at the Journey’s End! Let’s celebrate tonight!”

As the boys debate which part of the festival to hit next, Roberta helps reach a decision. “Buy me a cup of wine and let’s go see Doctor Malthusius.”

• Beau and God recollect the overzealous witch-hunter’s words of caution towards the charlatan. He may be more than a simple carnival owner.
• Upon approaching the cordoned off area of Malthusius’s Zoocoepia, up against the city wall, a gruff dwarven caretaker shoos them away and tells them to come back in an hour.

The Crew decide to check out the wrestling ring. Beau and Kris are immediately drawn to the promise of winning two crowns for lasting three minutes with the champ.

• Karl and Godabert both pick up on the fact that “Crusher” Braugen’s apparent state of exhaustion is a ruse.
• Kris is unperturbed, and eager to show off his athleticism. He jumps into the ring first.
• Crusher spends the first few rounds dancing around and assessing Kris. Kris taunts him repeatedly and locks him up three separate times, including following a crowd-pleasing self-catapult off the ropes.
• The crowd starts chanting “Crusher,” but it’s unclear which one they’re rooting for.
• Despite the action-packed engagement, Kris soon realizes that athleticism doesn’t factor as heavily as he would have hoped. Each grapple is promptly broken by the champ.
• After about a minute and a half, the champ has had enough of near-miss pins, and puts a devastating choke-hold on Kris, knocking him out almost immediately.
• Godabert, newly schooled in the soft arts, checks Kris for a concussion, and mends him up well enough to continue with the day.
• Beau opts out of a spin in the ring, but he proudly notes that his “maybe the Emperor is a mutant griffon” nonsense is making the rounds.
• The crew lead a slightly dazed Kris back to the Zoocoepia via the closest beer tent, and Roberta leads the way to the front of the crowd.

The exhibit creatures are still in their cages, obscured by tarps, but they do spot a pathetic little goblin, who appears to have an extra appendage, languishing by a pole in his trailer, an iron collar around his neck. As the good Doctor tries to drum up business in anticipation of the main event, the dwarven menial approaches the goblin cage with his trusty poking pole and the little greenskin bastard loses his shit… snaps the iron collar, squeezes through the bars, and runs straight towards the Crew.

• Karl bravely draws his sword. God points and laughs. Roberta trips the three-legged bastard and plants her heeled boot on its neck.
• Doctor Malthusias is extremely grateful, and gives each of the five Crewmates a shilling and free entry to see his exhibits. Beau, appreciative of anyone doing what it takes to make a copper in this grim and perilous world, gets friendly with the gregarious entertainer. Beau starts to wonder whether or not the psychotic witch-hunting zealot is actually the more sinister threat in this situation.

Gunni leads the critters out one by one.

• The Horrendously Hairy Horror of the Hochland! (Kris: “I think that’s what they call a go-rill-ah.”)
• The Dastardly One-Eyed Dog of Diesdorf! (A cyclopean canine. Kinda gross.)
• The Immeasurable Maw of the Middle Mountains! (Beau: “You call that a squig? Puny.”)
• The Ghastly Three-Legged Goblin of the Grissenwald!
• After his three-second taste of freedom, the creepy gobbo boldly decides to make another break for it. He bites Gunni on the hand, rips loose of his leash and, in a flash, escapes through the shrieking crowd to the city wall. He slips through a rusted grate and vanishes down a breathing hole into the sewer.

While Gunni is busy cursing up a storm, Malthusius attempts to calm the crowd. He’s clearly distraught. The Crew sense an opportunity, and they offer up some bounty services.

• Malthusius, grateful for some discreet assistance, offers up three gold crowns for the safe return of one of his prize attractions.
• During the negotiation, a Watch patrol of state soldiers arrives to restore the peace. Beau tries to convince them that it was nothing more than a three-legged dog escaping into the city, but there are enough onlookers squealing about a mutant goblin that the officers decide that this needs to be handled by Magistrate Richter in the Festival Court.

Magistrate Heinz Richter recognizes the Crew as the good samaritans who caught the Lowhaven halfling who fed the Journeymen their diarrhea pies and who paid for the release of the vagrant dwarf. When it’s clear that there’s a mutant goblin lose in Bogenhafen, Richter demands answers. He reminds the court that it’s been almost a hundred years since the Grom Waaaagh sack of the city, and folks still claim to smell dung idols.

• Malthusias, the consummate suck-up, explains that he is a concerned member of the citizenship, and it is important he plays his part in securing the menace. He offers the party now ten crowns to secure the beast.
• Richter is impressed with this civic talk, and matches the reward with an additional ten GC from the City’s coffers.
• Crew is all in. Start immediately: Captain Ach here will meet you at the sewer entrance just east of the Adel Ring with some torches.
• Roberta: sounds fun, but we’ll meet up later, Karl.

Watch meets the Crew at the open manhole, and offers an eight-foot ladder to the most athletic Crewmate. The ladder needs to be secured at the bottom of the seven-foot shaft to facilitate the others’ descent.

• Kris: finally! A chance to shine! (But let’s tie this rope around you to be safe.)
• He clumsily ricochets off every foothold and splashes directly into the effluent below. Luckily, thanks to a combination of friends negotiating the security rope and the cushioning effects of the town’s stinking waste, he avoids major damage.
• After being assailed by the stench, both Kris and Karl become nauseated. Kris actually vomits down the front of his armor, passes out, and is about to drop back into the soup before God snatches him and gives him a chance to recover.

With Beau leading the way, the Crew looks for traces of the goblin.

• Karl keeps hearing strange noises up ahead… like gravelly laughter.
• Crew is alarmed by something gelatinous skimming along the surface in the opposite direction of the effluent flow.
• Karl spots the greenish-black blood trail (much of it on Beau’s boots as he accidentally cleaned a good deal of evidence from the sewer ledge) and the Crew doubles back to a north-south junction heading towards the river.
• The trail leads across the channel to an opposite ledge. The only one of the four who negotiates his leap successfully is Kris, which means now all four adventurers are covered in shit.

They follow the trail farther downstream until Karl is alerted to a noise behind them. He sees a rat skimming along the surface of the effluent suddenly enveloped and swallowed up by a gelatinous puddle. He alerts his comrades in time for them to prepare for an attack by a giant sewage amoeba.

• Godabert retreats along the ledge. Beau comes forward to strike. Kris leaps across the channel to attack the creature from the opposite side.
• The first round of attack proves largely fruitless for the Crew: Beau’s mace seems to do little damage, but a loose portion of amoeba flesh lingers on the weapon and seems to sizzle away at the wood and leather material; Godabert’s arrow penetrates and sticks within the beast, dissolving away inside leaving only the arrowhead; Kris’s stab with Saif seems to only mildly irritate the amoeba.
• Then it strikes with multiple tentacles erupting from the effluent. Beau takes a gelatin hammer to the face which breaks his jaw and knocks him out; Kris takes some damage; Karl gets clobbered and is knocked out.
• Kris, who saw how the tentacle recoiled from Karl’s dropped torch, opts to swing his own torch at the beastie instead of his sword. With a giant hiss, the amoeba retreats ten yards and half-submerges in the upstream sewage. Alongside God’s hands of healing, Beau and Karl resolve to shake off their concussions, and the four scramble down the channel.

Until they find a door.

• The Mutant Goblin’s trail ends at a stout wooden door set into the wall of the sewer. There is a small opening with iron bars at about eye height, through which can be dimly seen a large cellar. A smoky torch burns in a wall bracket, casting flickering shadows around the room.
• Kris sees some sort of metal-ringed circle in the room, adorned with silvery candlesticks maybe?
• Godabert senses dark magic within.
• Beau skips a rock through the opening and it clanks against something metallic against the back wall.
• Karl sees a goblin-sized footprint halfway up the door. It kicked its way in? But the door now is barred…
• Beau hammers away at the door and pries it open. They can now more clearly see an eight-pointed star in the center of the room with a beast head at its center; a pile of bones in a corner; a metallic cabinet in the back; and a shiny white piece of fabric in another corner.
• Before entering the room, Kris and God break up the copper ring and knock over some candles with the grappling hook and weapons.

Beau heads to the back and picks up a monogrammed silk handkerchief: “F.S.” The metal cabinet is locked. Kris goes about knocking over candles and disrupting the circle while God pockets as many silver candlesticks as he can.   Karl notes that there is writing around the beast head.

• Beau: “Don’t bother trying to make sense of the words, Karl. I’ll take a look.”
• Karl: “I can fucking read you know.”
• Beau: “You can read? What? Since when? Well, don’t read that aloud.”
• Karl (reading aloud): “Ordo Septenarius.”

A stream of thick, foul-smelling, black smoke flecked with blue and pink suddenly begins to issue from the center of the octagram. The smoke rapidly coalesces into a horned, fang-filled creature with multiple glowing eyes, four beclawed arms, and multiple lash-like tongues. The entity howls as it coalesces, and magical energies whip out in all directions, lighting the room in blue and pink coruscating light. A Daemon.

• The Daemon doesn’t attack right away, which is a good thing. Most of the Crew are overcome with fear.
• The creature of chaos gibbers and cackles something unearthly, incomprehensible to all of them… except for Karl.
• It’s telling us to leave. It can’t let us stay. We must leave. It told the goblin the same thing, but it wouldn’t listen… so the demon ate it.
• The Crew listens.
• On the way out, scrambling for the door, Beau grabs a small three-socketed pelvis on the ground.
• Kris covers the beast head with the silk hanky.

God notes that the room is rapidly filling with black smoke tendrils, noting their corrupting influence. Instead of going back the way they came, the Crew heads downstream to another major sewer junction. They see a sizeable blockage in the effluent channel ahead. The approaching light disturbs a dog-sized rat sitting on the blockage — its beady eyes glare at them, then it dives into the sewage and swims away. On closer inspection, the obstruction is seen to be the eviscerated corpse of a bedraggled, male Dwarf. It’s Gottri, their vagrant drunken pal from yesterday.

• He’s missing an arm, his body is covered with knife cuts. Oh, and his chest is ripped open revealing a missing heart.
• Time to go!

The Crew uses Kris’s grappling hook to maneuver up the shaft and out of the sewers, ending up topside along the Kaufman Strasse.     Interlude:   The Crew plod east along the Strasse, shivering in pale moonlight emanating from an uncharacteristically large springtime Morrslieb. Their leathers are putrid, their hair stained with sewage, and their demeanor hushed with apprehension and alarm.   “We need to tell someone about this. Immediately.” Godabert advocates being as forthcoming as possible. “The temple, the demon, everything.”   “I agree that we need to alert the authorities, but aren’t we best served by just getting someone to investigate the sewers?” Kris wants to exercise a little discretion. “If we mention the demon, we’re likely to come off as crazy. Especially looking the way we do. Let’s just tell them we found dead bodies in the sewer.”   “I like that plan. Explain why we were down there – sewer-jacking for a runaway goblin,” Karl flicks a chunk of solid waste off the back of his hand onto the cobbles. “and we came across a hidden basement and murder victims. What do you think, Beau?”   “Murphhghh duhrmuhn wurrble.”   “Oh jeez. Try not to strain yourself Beau.” Godabert offers a sympathetic wince. “We’ll need to find someone with a bit more expertise to set that break. What a shame that we won’t be able to make out your sparkling conversation for the next few weeks…”   As they approach the walled-off and well-patrolled Adel Ring, a four-man Watch contingent approaches the Crew.   “Oy! You fetid lot are heading in the wrong direction. The Pit is on the other side of town!” The Watch Captain edges a bit closer, recoils for a moment from the collective stench, then spies a little silver glint from a bulge in Godabert’s pack. “Hello? What’s all this then?”   The Crew explain themselves hurriedly, and include as much as possible, save several key details like the demon and summoning circle. Beau punctuates the retold exploits by holding up the three-socketed goblinoid pelvis.   “Urndeh furnduh fizh!”   One of the Watchmen steps forward. “Captain, my bunkmate is in Captain Ach’s patrol, and he told me about this. They led a group of bounty hunters into the sewers this evening to recapture a goblin that escaped from the festival. I think they’re telling the truth.”   “Urnduhm furrguhuhn urgh!”   “Right, well.” The captain takes another step back. “We’ll report this to the Precinct right now then. You lot had best hold on to…” He points a finger in the direction of the chewed bone. “The evidence… and present that to Magistrate Richter in the morning. Clean yourselves up first, of course.”   * * *   The door to the Journey’s End flies open and Godabert comes face to bristle with the wide end of heavy straw broom. At the other end of the broom, well inside the inn, is the proprietor.   “Not another step closer, you! We could smell you coming from the Platz! No way are you walking through my taproom dripping Bogen-gong all over my newly swept floor!” She rattles the broom in God’s face, like she’s trying to shoo away mice.   “Now, now, Odelina. Is that any way to treat this morning’s middenball heroes?” A tall man, obscured within the darkened interior, steps forward, his speech marked by a heavy Bretonnian accent.   “Take this, please.” He holds up several coins near her outstretched hands. “And have your staff meet me around back with buckets of hot water and an empty keg or two. We’ll take some brewhouse baths, yes? Just like the campaign days of old!”   Sir Pierre steps forward into the doorway and smiles. His handsome face is framed by a large bandage that is wrapped tightly against his right ear. “Then, my good friends, we can share a drink and tell some stories, yes? It seems we both have some adventures to catch up on!”   * * *

Rewards Granted

XP:

• 40 for a swell session, full of better-part-of-valor decision-making (all)
• 5 for falling into the sewer (all)
• 10 for lasting 90 seconds with Crusher (Kris)
• 5 for debuting a useful new healing skill (God)
• 10 for apprehending the goblin during his first escape attempt (all)
• 15 for chasing away the amoeba (all)
• 10 for defiling the cultish circle (all)
• 5 for finding and securing the three-socketed goblin pelvis (Beau)
• 5 for discovering Gottri’s body, sans heart (all)

• Godabert: 90
• Beau: 90
• Karl: 85
• Kris: 95

  Loot:

• 1/- apiece from Malthusius for catching the goblin during its first escape attempt.
• 8 torches, half of them mildly used. All of them stinky.

Character(s) interacted with

Locations scouted and new NPC’s engaged:

• “Crusher” Braugen, pit fighter
• Doctor Malthusius, entertainer
• Gunni, the Doctor’s menial
• Sgt. William Ach, of the Bogenhafen city watch

The sewers under Bogenhafen   Hidden temple; approximate location above-ground