Session 12: The Dog and the Unbaby

Sometimes a family is a time-traveling tiefelfdworc, a 20-something off-brand Bear Grylls, a century-old mushroom dwarf, and a blood-drinking unbaby. And a cart full of monster heads.

General Summary

Morning, 20th of Rottingtime - Afternoon, 21st of Rottingtime

20th
Kaiess prepares for the journey into The Darkwoods. Conor gives him her bear trap that she's never used, so that he has a spare. He also picks up the severed arm and salts it with seasoning procured from his magic spice pouch. Conor finds a burlap sack for him to carry it in.
They track the Owlbear until around noon. Just before then, its trail began to loop in on itself and lose sense of direction. They eventually find the beast, already gravely wounded, and attack. Conor lands the death blow with her fiery scimitar. From its corpse, Kaiess harvests a dozen of its flight feathers.
They examine the body and find it was attacked by something with six very large claws on each limb. The wounds are only a few hours old and left in strategic, deadly places— the back of its head, its neck, and the side of its belly. Conor finds a very large porcupine-like quill buried in its torso by its back leg, buried deep in its flesh. She gives it to Kaiess. They realize that whatever attacked the Owlbear left it grievously wounded, and that although they were only hired to kill the Owlbear, whatever attacked it is dangerous enough and close enough to the outpost that it needs to be taken out, too. They debate whether its best to try to lure the mystery beast back with food (like the Owlbear meat) or to track it down. Not knowing if the beast actually eats Owlbear, or if it just killed this one in a territory dispute, they decide to track it.

Kaiess follows the Owlbear's tracks and blood trail for about an hour until they find a clearing with signs of a struggle. There is blood splashed on the pine needles, deep gashes in the mud and the tree trunks, and Owlbear feathers litter the ground. There are a few more of the porcupine quills stuck in the mud. They find a large, clear footprint belonging to the mystery beast. The track is canid, six-toed, and has long claws.
Kneeling on the forest floor, Kaiess uses his Primeval Awareness and detects the presence of Aberrations, Elementals, Fey, and Undead within 6 miles of his location. He goes a little pale and stands up to tell his friends the news. The good news is they made the correct decision in not trying to lure the monster to them. The bad news is there’s apparently lots of dangerous, weird shit in these woods.
Not wanting to stay the night in the Darkwoods, Kaiess suggests they find the big beastie, then go back to the inn for the night. He examines the tracks and sees signs of a short scuffle between the Owlbear and the mystery beast, after which the Owlbear ran away and the creature returned back in the direction from which it came. He explains this, and indicates that, like Conor suggested, this might have been the result of a territory dispute. He also mentions, given its wolf-like paws, that he fears it might have a pack.

They follow the tracks and find gnawed-on but abandoned animal bodies littering the path. The animals are mostly larger in size, like deer, black bear, and a giant badger. Some, like rabbits and songbirds, are much smaller.
An hour into their trek, they are approached by a screech owl that watches them from a nearby tree branch. Claire waves at it, and it rotates its head to look at her upside-down. Claire mimics the motion, and the bird opens its beak to ask, "Are you mocking me?" They see that it has a human mouth inside its bird mouth. The owl asks them what they’re doing in the Darkwood. They explain that they are hunting a huge beast with paws like a wolf and quills like a porcupine, after which the owl informs them that they’re hunting “The Dog”. It asks them why they hunt The Dog, and when they tell it they want to kill it to stop its rampage, the owl tells them “good luck!” and flies off, cackling.
In the afternoon, they come across an area of rocky limestone at the base of a hill. There are large nests built on the ground under a rocky overhang in the hill. All around the clearing are dead bodies of Owlbears, five adults and four cubs, slashed to death by the claws of the mystery beast. Inside the nest, all the eggs are broken. The carnage, now being picked on by a large flock of crows, appears to be a few days old.

Knowing how close it is to sundown and how far into the Darkwoods they are, they decide to make camp in the Owlbear rook, hoping the scent of decay will mask their own smell. Claire and Conor make a space for them under the overhang, pushing nesting materials out of the way. Kaiess scouts the area looking for signs of the beast. He sees no sign of any large predators, but does find a spring and enough wild plants to feed his group for the night.
While the sun is still out, Kaiess leaves the man's arm in one of the nests and washes the sack. He dumps out all of the goop from inside the Owlbear eggs and gathers up their shells in the bag.
As sunset approaches, Kaiess builds a fire and begins cooking dinner. Claire sketches him while he works. He cooks a mushroom-tuber-berry goop that somehow manages to be really tasty despite its mismatched ingredients. When darkness falls, Conor casts Darkvision on Kaiess. He will be able to see clearly through the night.

1st watch:
Kaiess hears wolves howling in the night, though they sound far away. Another howl joins them, more like a dog than a wolf, but the howl is twisted and wrong. The wolves fall silent.
2nd watch:
Conor's watch is quiet, and the night grows colder. The only life she sees is an owl swooping down to grab some small creature from the underbrush. Halfway through her watch, the fire sputters and dies down to just its embers, as if snuffed out by a sharp wind that she did not feel. She drags more dry wood in from the Owlbear nests and sets to rebuilding the fire. In the moment before the kindling catches, she looks out towards the forest and sees eyes looking back at her out of the dark. Most of them seem to be at beast-height, but one pair stands six feet off the ground. As the firelight washes over the clearing, the eyes disappear. Conor shakes Claire awake and quietly tells her about the eyes, and to be careful.
3rd watch:
Claire, very creeped out by the idea of eyes watching them from the forest, sketches in her notebook to keep herself calm. Just before dawn, she hears a baby crying in the woods. it doesn't wake the others. Claire goes off, alone, to investigate.

21st
Claire follows the sound of the weak, struggling cries of the infant into the forest. A short ways away from their campsite, she finds a baby wrapped in rough-spun swaddling, propped up in a crook in the roots of a tree. She picks it up and cuddles it to her chest. She returns to her campsite and wakes up her friends, apologizing for their surprise fourth member of the party.
Conor and Kaiess examine the baby in Claire's arms. It seems to be a little tiefling child, perhaps two months old, with orange-tinted skin and little nubby horns. Kaiess crushes up a Goodberry and feeds it to the baby like applesauce. Knowing they can't track The Dog with an infant in tow, they decide to walk back to the Lost Pine Outpost and see if anyone can take it to an orphanage. Claire cradles the now cooing child on the three hour walk out of the Darkwoods.
They emerge from the forest into the Lost Pine Outpost and seek out Diego Donahue in his office. Kaiess gives him the news. The good news, which he demonstrates with an Owlbear feather driven into the wood of Diego's desk, is that they killed the Owlbear. The bad news is that it was already horribly wounded by another, more fearsome beast. The weird news is that they found a baby in the Darkwoods. They show him the baby and try to figure out if he knows where to take it, but he recoils and calls it a demon. Claire is offended, and takes the infant outside. Diego pays them 600 GP he owes them for killing the Owlbear and tells them if they plan to try to kill this other beast, they should go to Crowhill and seek out the duke, who offers a standing bounty on monster heads taken from the Darkwoods. Kaiess asks Diego if he has any sacks, and an assistant fetches him a stack of ten bags. Kaiess gives Diego eleven of the Owlbear feathers for him and his employees to share, and he and Conor leave.

Outside, they see Claire sitting alone with the baby, rocking it. They notice that she's looking a little weak. Kaiess asks her to give him the baby, but it cries when she starts to hand it over. Thinking the baby might be afraid of Kaiess, she hands it to Conor. As soon as the baby leaves her hands, Claire instantly takes 14 points of necrotic damage and falls to the ground, still conscious but badly hurt.
Kaiess casts cure wounds on her and orders Conor to put the baby on the ground. Conor tries to go look for a basket to put it in. Kaiess offers to put the child in one of his new sacks, but Conor and Claire both immediately reject that idea. Frustrated, Kaiess tells Conor there’s no time and tries to grab the child. Kaiess, Conor, and Claire all grapple for the child, but Conor keeps a hold of the crying baby. She walks over to the side of Diego's office, where lots of storage containers are stacked. She finds a basket and puts the baby inside, using one of Kaiess's bags for a blanket. She brings it back to where her friends are waiting.
Conor and Kaiess agree that the child cannot be a regular humanoid. Kaiess speculates that it is probably fey, and that such creatures can mimic children to trick humans. He kneels down and uses Primeval Awareness to scan his immediate surroundings, and finds no hint of any supernatural presence. He explains his findings to his friends, and says that not only is the child not a fey, it isn't an aberration, a celestial, a dragon, an elemental, a fiend, or undead.
Kaiess and Conor debate what this unbaby could be, while it sits on the ground, wailing in its basket. Conor asks Claire if she’s part tiefling, to which Claire answers yes. Conor then asks her if she knows if baby tieflings suck energy to feed, to which Claire answers no, they don't. During their conversation, Conor and Kaiess notice a small patch of blood seeping through Claire's shirt where she was cradling the unbaby to her chest. Claire sinks to the ground, overwhelmed. Conor finishes healing her wounds. Claire uses Detect Magic on the area around her, but sees nothing except the magical items in her and her friends' possession. She pulls her collar down and sees a rapidly fading mark the size of a quarter on her collarbone, like a bite from a leech.

Kaiess returns to the outpost office and asks Diego to look for books on magic. Diego tells them he’ll look, but that he needs the demon child gone from the settlement, or he’ll take care of it himself.
Claire goes the Angry Shoemaker and finds the innkeeper. She asks the woman if she knows any stories about people finding babies in the Darkwoods. The innkeeper tells her that in the stories she’s heard, babies are left, not found. Unwed mothers, cheating wives, and people who can't afford to feed another mouth have, according to legend, taken their children into the Darkwoods and abandoned them there. At Claire's hinting, she, as well as the other women in the inn, indicate that a tiefling baby is a terrible omen of disaster to a community. After doing some brief asking around, Claire is unable to find anyone who wants to adopt a baby. She buys a small jug of milk and heads back to her friends.
Kaiess decides to run some experiments on the child. He and Conor take it to the very edge of the settlement, so Diego will stay out of their way. As he fed it the Goodberry mash with an iron spoon, he knows it isn't hurt by contact with iron. He places a silver piece on its forehead, and it is unharmed. Likewise, exposure to direct sunlight has no effect on it other than to make it squint its eyes and cry more. Touching the unbaby doesn't cause him pain. He lets it hold his finger, and even put his finger in its mouth. It gums his fingers, and he feels no pain. Leaving the unbaby with Conor, he walks to a nearby farm and buys a female goose.
As she leaves the inn, Claire sees her friends standing much farther away than she left them, on the side of the road near the edge of the forest. Kaiess is walking towards Conor and the unbaby, carrying a struggling live goose. Claire hurries up to figure out what is going on. Before she makes it to them, she sees Kaiess tie the goose down into the basket on top of the unbaby, then squeeze its neck until it goes unconscious.

Claire approaches and hears her friends marveling that the unbaby doesn't appear to be eating from the goose. It can't lift its head up on its own, and Conor fears if they hold it against the goose, it could suffocate. Kaiess suggests they bleed the goose to feed it. He pricks the goose (dealing 1 HP damage) and fills Conor's water skin with blood. They tip some of the blood into the unbaby's mouth and it drinks. Claire offers it some of the milk she got from the inn, and it spits it out. They question how it was able to eat the Goodberry mash earlier, but they soon notice a spot of berry spit-up on the back of Claire's shirt.
The trio wonders aloud if they are now parents to this creature, and worry about how they will feed it with its blood-only diet. They decide to take it to Crowhill to find answers there. They decide to name the child. Conor says they should go with something gender neutral, possibly Elvish, and tied to its origins. She suggests the name "Forrest." Claire, having seen the movie recently back in her own time, thinks of Forrest Gump. She goes into town and buys ten cloth diapers for the child. Upon her return, they notice the baby hasn’t pooped yet. Kaiess speculates that this might mean Forrest is utilizing all of the nutrients from the blood they drink.

Kaiess returns to the outpost office and checks on the status of the book he was looking for. Diego, surrounded by piles of books and his only two literate employees, asks what he's done with the child. Kaiess responds "I'm a father now." Diego is horrified, but Kaiess presses on. Diego informs him that he wasn't able to find a book on magic, per se, but he was able to find something that might work for Kaiess's purposes: “Ledger of Strange Happenings, Crowhill, 1298”. Kaiess buys the book, and Diego's silence, for 50 GP. On his way out of town, he picks up a mortar and pestle.

He meets up with his group and they discuss their plans going forward. They want to go to Crowhill, and Kaiess wants to gather up all of the Owlbear heads and take them with them for the bounty. He estimates it will take him 5 hours to go in to the woods to retrieve all nine heads. They plan to meet up two hours up the road. Conor buys a cart and a mule, which she names Murphey, from the stockyard. She and Claire load up Forrest (who Claire isn't allowed to touch), and the still-unconscious, now leashed goose Kaiess named Jeremy into the wagon and set off down the road.
Kaiess makes his trek into the Darkwood and quickly comes across the slain Owlbear. He severs its head, stores it in one of the sacks, and heads on to the rook. After loading himself down with all nine heads, he slowly creeps through the brush back towards the road. When he's almost to the end of the forest, he hears breathing behind him. He drops the heads and draws his crossbows. The breathing stops. Then, a thick, hairy tentacle wraps around him and lifts him off the ground.
He twists around to see a great hairy ape with long, flexible arms is carrying him high into the treetops. He fires his crossbows at it until he is able to break free. It starts to grunt loudly. He kills it and climbs down from the tree as he hears more rustling overhead. He hacks off its head and adds it to the collection just as three more apes begin climbing down after him. He makes a run for it, but is burdened with the heavy heads. The apes are fast, swinging in the treetops above him and gaining on him. He drops the heads, draws the crossbows, and turns to face the beasts.

He hears a howl from the woods behind the apes. The Dog, a polar-bear sized beast with shaggy blond fur like a golden retriever, bounds out from the trees. It looks deformed, like it was created by someone who had only heard of dogs but never seen one. A thick chain is wrapped around its neck and its forelegs are covered with thick scabs and bite marks. The Dog jumps and its teeth find purchase on the tentacle arm of one of the apes. It rips it from the trees and begins to shake it in its mouth like a chew toy. The other apes quickly climb back up into the canopy. While The Dog is busy, Kaiess summon's Rudy's chest and throws the heads and his other gear inside. He sends it back into the Ethereal plane, then sprints out of the forest screaming for help, hideous sounds of carnage behind him.
Kaiess breaks from the tree line and sprints towards the waiting cart in the road. He leaps into the back and yells for Claire to drive away, fast. Once he catches his breath, Kaiess explains what happened to him in the Darkwood. Conor recognizes his description of the apes as Arboreal Grapplers, the monsters that ate the dogmoles that traveled with her family group. Kaiess dumps the nine Owlbear heads and the single Grappler head out into the back of the cart and send the large chest back into the Ethereal Plane. They find a letter among the heads. It reads:
“Dear Rudy,
Thank you so much for your shipment. I will be making my payment in person when I visit at the end of this month.
The best,
The Greenlake Wizard.”

Kaisse asks if "Rudy" is the person Claire and Conor killed, and they tell him yes, and that they might be about to have some trouble because of it.

Rewards Granted

Group: 200 GP each, a child
Claire: 14 points of necrotic damage in one go from the unbaby, a powerful motherly drive
Kaiess: bear trap, human arm (salted, in a sack- left in the abandoned Owlbear rook), dozen Owlbear flight feathers (11 given to Diego Donahue), mystery quill, bag of Owlbear eggshells, 10 burlap sacks, a girl goose named Jeremy, book, Diego's silence, a mortar and pestle, 9 Owlbear heads, an Arboreal Grappler head
Conor: cart, mule named Murphey

Missions/Quests Completed

Kill the Owlbear (For Fun and Profit)
Realize There's Always a Bigger Fish
Have a Conversation with an Unpleasant Owl
Become Parents
Kaiess: Split the Party and Almost Die

Character(s) interacted with

PCs

Conor Oakenriver
Claire Blackwell
Kaiess Knolltun

NPCs

The Owl With The Human Mouth
Forrest the Unbaby
Diego Donaghue, head of the Lost Pine Outpost

Notes

Kaiess's actual quote was "Stick a key in the donkey’s ass or whatever you need to do to get this cart going!”

Happy late Halloween, guys!

Report Date

05 Nov 2018

Primary Location

The Darkwoods

Secondary Location

Lost Pine Outpost