Town, Umbrage Hill, Town, Trail, Orcs, Mine and Rat-Men

Back at Butterskull Ranch, we cleaned up after the fight. We bandaged wounds, caught our breath, and spoke a bit with Alphonse (or, Big Al if you asked him). We buried all the bodies which caused a fair amount of grumbling from my compatriots. The orcs went into a shallow, mass grave and the ranchers went into a much nicer set of plots. I said a few words over them.
 
With he Ranch so damaged, the workers dead, and the animals having run off, Big Al opted to come back to Phanlin with us. We had the three horses we had found on the way in and we picked up Bessie the cow so I suppose we were officially a cattle drive. We encountered no challenges on the sway back to town. Big Al did provide riding instructions to party members who needed that.
 
Back in town we handed Big Al over to Harbin Westor. We had to ask for payment and Harbin paid out 100 GP. He took Big Al into his house which is the first person we have seen enter or leave. Harbin makes a point of reminding us how important the Westor family is. I’m not really sure I heard of them before coming out to the frontier. They may run a number of businesses but that just makes them upjumped townies, not nobles. True nobles lead, then don’t hide and cower.
 
We then immediately heard that Adabrah Guinn’s place had been attacked by the dragon again so we did some minimal business and headed out immediately, arriving after dusk. Adabrah was fine. She had used the safe room that we had previously built. The dragon ate her farm animals. The tower did not attract too much wrath. A couple town militia kids (Bill and Ted) had come up to provide security. Adabrah was happy to see us and provided dinner, a place to crash for the night, and breakfast. As all was well, we headed back to Phanlyn.
 
We hit Harbin’s job board and there were two items of note. First was to deliver someone named Don Jon (DJ) Raskin to the Mountain’s Tow gold mine (100 GP). This was supposed to be 15 miles up into the mountains. The second was to go find, clear, evaluate, and possibly prep for use and old dwarven fortress called Axehome. This is somewhere up in the mountains and it is not perfectly clear how we find it. (250 GP). We collect both jobs. As we are going to do escort DJ to the mine first, Harbin puts the Axehome job back on the board. I collect it again as we leave.
 
We collect DJ at the inn and head out immediately. Tuath asks DJ about himself and we get a collection of stories about how competent and useful he is. He does not look like that much but I suppose we may see.
As we got a late start, we have to camp. At least we are all on the same page here. In the wilderness, we minimize our tracks. We do not make un-needed fires. We camp off any trail. We keep watches with party members (and allow non-party members to double up watches but never leave it to just them). On this particular night, Balderdash sees orcs passing by. He wakes us and we watch. Tuath does a bit of scouting but the orcs have missed us and are headed away. Tuath can not both close with them to get a good count and maintain his stealth so he let’s them go. We are careful with watches but finish our rest. In the morning, Tuath does some tracking and determines that there is a bit of an orc trail through here. Lat night’s band was about a dozen orcs. We make a note of it in case we want to come back to it later.
 
We head along our trail some more and see, off to the side, the remains of a fight. There are six orcs, all dead several days. These look like they had been flask frozen (and since thawed). There are signs of a larger fight and there are a total of 15 orc axes in the area. We have to take it that they fought the dragon and the dragon took a few to eat. We bury the bodies in a shallow grave. My team mates whine about the work but it is a religious duty and we get it done.
 
We continue along our train and do manage to find the Mountain’s Toe mine in the early afternoon. It even has a sign above the evident entrance. It seems that the mine might be under new management as, when we go to enter, we are waned off by some rat-men. DJ does not seem to know what to do with them and they are not willing to produce the current mine overseer until night fall. We back off for a short party conference. We consider our options and decide that the most likely case is that there are miners to be saved and that we will force our way in. If the rat-men do not yield, we will fight. We head back and give that ultimatum. They do not yield. Ozzie clearly thinks negotiations are over and is the first to swing.
 
The fight is odd. We hit well and hard but the rat-men shake off the wounds like they are nothing. They bleed almost not at all and their wounds heal in moments. I am using a new attack cantrip which does necrotic damage. This deals damage that seems to really hurt them and does not immediately heal. I add in a spiritual weapon that does force damage and this seems to also work to good effect. Given that blades and arrows are seeming to be ineffectual, we perform a strategic withdrawal. The rat-men do not follow us into the sunlight and I seemed to have killed one with the spiritual weapon on the way out.
 
We are 2 rounds into the spiritual weapon. We are either going to have to go right back in with the weapons that works (my spells), or leave the area and come back when we have a plan to deal with the rat-men. I think three rat-men are still in the cave. They are not that tough as I did not do great damage and still took one down. If we can hang in this fight for 4-5 rounds, I can beat them. If the dwarves and elf were to grapple to keep them off of me while I took them out…
 
If we retreat, we may have to go to the city of Fareen where I can consult with both my family and the church on humanoid rats, who wear clothes, use short swords, hand crossbows and bite in combat, and are seemingly immune to blades and arrows. If we do this, we can also research the location of Axehome.