Tim (Anpago Yost) and Mike (Grod Sangaree) indicate that they have better things to do than to hang around with the likes of us for lunch, so they show up when they darn well please. Bruce (Longfellow Yost) is perfectly willing to show up for lunch, but feels that he has every right to walk off early. Only Chris (Tonk Sangaree), Chuck (once Morgan Sangaree until his untimely death last session, but now Darg Sangaree) and Paul are true and honorable members of the group.
Darg Sangaree is (oddly enough) the fraternal twin brother of the lamented Morgan Sangaree. Being a fraternal twin, he is almost totally unlike Morgan. He is a 2nd level Fighter and a 2nd level Cleric of Kord. While Morgan was effete and thin-blooded, Darg is vigorous and powerful. While Morgan practiced the feeble musical disciplines of the Bard, Darg is able to break plywood boards with his head, and frequently does so.
The characters make their mournful way back to Crobin's Crossing with the body of their fallen comrade Morgan Sangaree. They have four potions taken from the body of the gnoll barbarian that have not been identified. They also have a variety of goods taken from both the gnolls and from Morgan that need to be distributed. These include:
Morgan also left behind a dozen darts and a note indicating that they should go to Longfellow Yost, who has already demonstrated that he is second to none in the mastery of the dart.
The young boar Yellow-Tusk, Longfellow's first animal companion, was killed by villainous gnolls. Stricken with sadness, Longfellow Yost heads out into the forest with his werebear friend Robert to find himself a brown bear as replacement. The other characters are a bit less than enthusiastic when Longfellow brings in Watches-Birds-at-Dawn and introduces them to him. Longfellow assures them that he has already taught Watches-Birds one important trick: "Don't kill and eat my friends." Tonk Sangaree is skeptical.
Anpago Yost buys up some ingredients and tries out his alchemical skills. He only narrowly manages to avoid ruining his raw materials in three failed attempts to manufacture some alchemist's fire. He does manage to produce enough for cooking, or possibly to torture someone. He then turns to identifying the four potions taken from the gnolls. He decides that two are similar and two are not. He is quite proud of this discovery until Grod Sangaree points out that two of the potions are bright green in round bottles, one is blue in a square bottle, and the last is orange in a hexagonal bottle. Anpago adopts an appropriately recondite expression and devotes himself to obtaining some more useful information. He eventually tells the others that they have:
This takes him a total of five days, counting the three days he wastes making high-quality vegetable oil and naphtha into low-grade sludge.
Tonk and Darg Sangaree each take one potion of Cure Moderate Wounds. Anpago Yost takes the potion of Lesser Restoration. Longfellow Yost ends up with the potion of Delay Poison.
Tonk Sangaree heads into town to sell various items, including the Fire Opal pendant, a gold statuette of Erythnul, and suits of half-plate armor and banded mail. He sells the pendant to the local jeweler for 1200 gold. He gets an offer from Crobin for the statue for 250 gold, which is quite a bit below the nominal value of 600 gold, but which is enough to convince the characters to accept the deal. The half-plate has been modified to be worn by a gnoll, and only fetches 200 gold.
Each character gets 330 gold. Grod Sangaree and Robert the werebear also get a share.
At this point, the characters have learned the location of the gnoll outpost. The creatures have taken over a forest gnome settlement to the northeast of Crobin's Crossing, deep in the Murderwood Forest. Knowing that there are probably at least twenty-five gnolls still living in the place, the characters throw caution to the winds and advance into the forest towards it.
They venture fairly close, then send Longfellow Yost ahead as an advance scout. He draws upon all of his gnarly druid tricks to avoid detection and gather information, including his ability to move through forests as if they weren't there. On his way in, he comes across the scene of a battle. Some blood is about, but no remains. He thinks that a chimera might have been involved based upon the tufts of fur scattered around. He can't tell if the chimera was killed, but Longfellow is able to hear Tonk's ghostly voice in his ear telling him, "Excellent! I think those things are dirt stupid, and rich!" There are a lot of gnoll-style broken arrows scattered across the field, but no direct signs of dead gnolls. This not all that surprising because gnolls are both cannibals and very efficient: like American Indians, they eat every part of the animal. Apparently hyenas are able to digest every part of an animal except hair, horns and hooves, which they spit up as pellets. They are even able to crush and digest bones.
Undeterred by the signs of recent conflict and bloodshed, Longfellow approaches the gnoll camp. He finds no visible sign of a camp. However, he knows that most forest gnome settlements are underground and hidden, which is why nobody even knew they existed even before they got taken over by the gnolls. Longfellow continues to approach. He sees that a nearby tree once had a concealed door that has since been shattered and enlarged to gnoll size.
Continuing closer still, Longfellow manages to pass a couple of sentries without even noticing them. Fortunately, they don't notice him either. Unfortunately, a third sentry spots Longfellow just as Longfellow sees him. The sentry is located up in a blind in a tree. He has a pair of blue spectacles perched upon his nose that look ridiculous, but Longfellow isn't laughing. He is also armed with a mighty mighty composite bow with a sniper scope. Longfellow has never been farther from laughing ever in his life.
Longfellow sees the gnoll nock an arrow. He quaffs his potion of Hiding and runs away. Oddly enough, he finds that he has a fairly good chance of hiding while at a dead run. Sadly, this still isn't enough to keep the gnoll from seeing him. Fortunately, Longfellow manages to interpose enough brambles and brush between himself and the gnoll to spoil the creature's aim.
Longfellow quickly turns himself invisible to animals and hides. A party of twelve gnolls with six hyenas come around looking for him, but he is easily avoids them. He notices that the bespectacled gnoll with the hyperactive longbow is among them. Unwilling to go back to the other characters with no news other than, "They spotted me, so I ran," he decides to try and draw the gnolls on. Though he starts out by deliberately leaving a trail for them to follow, he finds out that even though the hyenas can't see him, they can track him by scent. The gnolls complain "Looks like druid spoor." "Damn druids. He's mocking us."
Longfellow leads the gnoll patrol back closer towards the characters' camp, but not directly to it. The gnolls aren't particularly quiet in their passage, so the other characters have a lot of warning before the gnolls approach.
The other characters observe that Longfellow is leading the gnolls past their camp. They spring into action. Anpago starts out by throwing his biggest fireball straight at the gnoll leader Targnash. He manages to kill four common gnolls straight off. Targnash seems more upset than injured. The hyenas wheel about and crash into the characters while the gnolls unlimber their bows and start turning Anpago and Tonk into pincushions. Targnash sends an arrow towards Darg, once again proving that gnollish rangers can take "human" as their favored enemy. Darg sucks wind through his chest as the arrow chews directly through his shiny new breastplate.
Anpago hurls his second fireball, leveling one gnoll but once again leaving Targnash more irritated than hurt. Watches-Birds steps into the action and shatters a hyena in a single blow. Tonk's war dogs circle in, knocking down one gnoll and worrying away at a hyena. Darg demonstrates his worth by slaughtering the grounded gnoll and putting to rest all rumors that he might not be as effective a fighter as the brown bear.
The gnolls agree that Darg is very effective, and compliment him by putting yet another arrow through his wishbone. Darg indicates that he would prefer to not be so complimented in the future. Tonk is flanked, bitten, chopped, and finally tripped by a collection of gnolls and hyenas.
Anpago hurls his last fireball into the midst of the gnoll archers, charring two of them. As before, Targnash is still going strong. Longfellow sneaks up behind him and throws a dart at him. It sticks harmlessly into his armor. Targnash plucks the dart out of his armor and thinks, "Wouldn't you know, it's a dart. Should I worry about this, or should I pay attention to the joker who's been throwing fireballs at me? Well, joker it is..." Longfellow seethes in impotence. In contrast, Watches-Birds simply walks through two hyenas without even pausing to take a breath. Tonk and the dogs cut down another hyena. Darg goes on the defensive, casting an Entropic Shield upon himself.
Anpago finds himself out of fireballs, so he afflicts Targnash with Tasha's Hideous Laughter. The gnoll bellows disturbing peals of evil laughter through the clearing. Anpago follows up by casting Sleep at another gnoll and sending it off to dream-land.
Watches-Birds steps up to the next hyena and eats it whole. Tonk is hit by the spray of blood and... whatever. Watches-Birds belches with feeling, then steps over to break a gnoll's neck. In the process he once again shows up Longfellow, who trips on a root and drops his dart. The one surviving hyena resolves to fight to the death against the dogs, which it proceeds to do.
All three of Tonk's dogs fall upon the last surviving hyena. It isn't a pretty sight. Tonk wades up to the one remaining badly-wounded gnoll warrior and chops him in half. Darg does for Targnash, who is helpless with laughter. But still alive after the attack. Anpago notices that Targnash is coming out of his laughter, and tries throwing another spell, which Targnash actually manages to brush off. Longfellow runs up to make a so-called sneak attack with his knife, but still barely manages to inflict a respectable scratch. It falls to Tonk to strike the death blow. Targnash stops laughing, and his glasses fly off.
The one remaining gnoll is completely undamaged, just asleep. The war dogs fall upon it. Again, it isn't pretty.
Like all good player characters, the group turns to looting the dead. After a brief interlude of tearing and ripping sounds, they come up with:
Tonk picks up the glasses and tries them on. He finds that he can see really well, as if he were a person who had never worn glasses before but never realized that he needed them. Longfellow lays claim to them. He finds that they are Eyes of the Eagle and provide +5 to Spot rolls. Darg takes Targnash's mighty mighty masterwork composite longbow.
The characters conclude that they are all hurt badly, and after a quick round of healing spells they decide to draw back to recover and learn some spells more appropriate to violence. Some of the crueler characters speculate that they should tell the townsfolk that Longfellow single-handedly killed all thirty or so gnolls. Longfellow points out that this would be a really horrible idea.
The characters approach the gnoll encampment again, then send Longfellow ahead to scout. He is able to find two hollowed trees with gnoll-sized entrances, and three sentry posts up in trees. The sentry posts are connected by bridges. It is also very possible that there is a way to get up into the sentry posts without moving into exposed ground.
Characters approach from the south. Anpago puts the sentry to sleep. Just after he does so, Bruce heads off to do other things, leaving the rest of the story to be largely untold.
By the actual end of the session, the characters have finished the entire gnoll tribe off and rescued the small numbers of surviving forest gnomes. They also find themselves custodians of thirty gnollish children. After a quick debate on the merits of turning them into crows'-meat, the characters decide that they should find some way to raise the little gnoll-lings as productive and respectable members of society. They end up handing the creatures over to a pair of shedu who promise to raise the gnolls as nice lawful monks. Darg Sangaree decides to adopt one of the gnolls, a youngster named Friday who is just big enough to shatter a soup-bone in his jaws.