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It's time for another edition of Three Lunatics and a Paladin!
Our party is:
Celyn Bettws, whose most relevant hat this session is "trained at dealing with the fey in a region of the world where there are a lot of fairies, but mostly friendly ones"
Viepuck the eldritch tween (and Es*tiaslos, his purple flying octopus)
Izgil Moonseeker, who would like the moon and also everything going on to start making some fucking sense any day now
and of course Robin of Abenford, paladin of the Wanderer.
Previously we had dealt with a spot of mayhem, after which we as a party levelled up and are now level 6. This produced several substantial effects: Robin has his Aura of Protection power; Viepuck has third list spells and took 'Sending', converting him into a very potent telegraph machine; Celyn hit fourth level rogue, and took the feat Observant, about which I have been making Magenta-from-RHPS jokes since, given also his stealth skills. ("Well-secluded, I see all!") (Izgil also picked up something but I am so cheerfully baffled by his character mechanics that I don't know what it is and also I am not 100% sure it was relevant today unless it was the lunar spellpoints thing.)
In our interstitial stuff Viepuck did a whole hell of a lot of being a telegraph machine, collecting information and moving data around in 25-word segments to enable us to keep track of various people we have met over the course of our adventures and try to collate the problems we're dealing with. This included groups of people asking for help (and us figuring out what of them we could help with and how) and tracking down our friend Odo's teenaged brother, previously presumed dead, but now hiding in the local hills and afraid to come out because he fled there from zombies and zombies are alarming. We successfully coaxed him out of the hills and sent Es*tiaslos to escort him to his brother.
The bandit we captured got his interrogation in before his execution, and proceeded to tell a story in which he was being a horrible person in a particular village, and an older woman in a tattered wolfskin cloak showed up and offered to tell him a secret, which he used to be even more terrible. This loops for a bit. And he heard her making deals with other people with results like "the kid she cured has made no sounds since" or "the cow she healed gives sour milk now", and so on, meanwhile the bandit did not consider the implications about what was going on with the secrets she was giving him to better fuck people over. Eventually, there was a zombie uprising, at which point he asked her for help and things got weird and bad, and then she sent him off on the tax collection mission.
Celyn, in the midst of this story, managed to suppress his urge to mutter about the way Sembarans are fucking clueless about dealing with fairies, but it appeared to be at least half by shooting Robin a look and deciding not to make Robin have to talk him down from this particular rant again, which has happened at least three times on camera and gods know how many times beyond that. Given Robin was already grumpy about the existence of this particular bandit, it would have been unkind.
Celyn, afterwards: Okay, so we have a description of a troublemaking fairy to look out for.
Robin, quite cross: Unwise dealings with the fey were among the least of this man's faults.
Celyn, paraphrased: Yeah but he'll be dead tomorrow and she's still a problem.
So, we collated the information that Viepuck collected and that we got from the bandit and came up with a set of problems that we needed to deal with in some order:
* find the baroness and figure out why the fuck she hasn't done Thing One (ride the bounds to check on the state of the demesne, or at least send a letter asking for information) since she got the position
* figure out what is fucking up the mail on the north-south route between the baronial capital and the river (as we previously unfucked the east-west mail route along the river)
* generally do the politicking thing with the baroness actually (possibly including getting Robin appointed to replace Lord Punchable Face in Asineau in the long run)
* deal with the fairy making trouble as reported by the bandit somehow
* track down a centaur with prophetic knowledge someone told us about
* deal with still more rampaging undead in some old guerilla caves in the north
Regardless of the personal neuroses of any of the party (I'm looking at Celyn, I am absolutely looking at Celyn, he has priorities rotated into the complex plane, I am greatly enjoying having the noisy boy living in my head most of the time but he does run tangent to consensual reality at times), the facts on the ground are that the party's collective priority is local political stability and defense, and that meant that our priority is "figure out wtf the baroness's fucking deal is" and "fix the damn mail", and thus our goal is to leave our base of operations in Cleenseau and make for Veltor more or less directly, and then clear out the other things as makes sense with what we learn from there. (link is to map)
Thus our plan is to take a dozen light cavalry for military help, head down the river, turning north at Essenmer, and proceed up to Aslain to collect intel on the baroness (who is from there) on the way to Veltor, skipping cursed and fey-infested Peydon for now where the hag reported by the bandit may still be operating. The plan did not, of course, survive contact with the plot, but we had one.
We reached Madour (I think) and attracted a lot of attention as, you know, a reasonably heavily armed military group headed up by the paladin in plate on the wingless gryphon. They want to know what's going on, they haven't heard any news of substance (so we know the mail fuckery is further north), and oh, yeah, they've heard about undead, but that wasn't a problem here. (There is no war in Ba Sing Se.) Celyn settles in for aggressive peoplewatching next to Robin while Viepuck starts telling stories of the heroic exploits of the Duke of Wisford.
GM: Are you telling anything about the party's exploits?
Viepuck: I have no need to embarrass Robin at this time.
Nope, another ETA: Izgil connects with the administrator of the Sybil temple there because that guy was another moon nerd and they proceeded to moon nerd extensively. Izgil had been there before but the previous administrator was not a moon fan and thus had downplayed all the moon stuff which meant that moon obsessive dwarf came away disappointed on previous visit. This one was much more fun for him.
Though someone did twig to us being the people who dealt with the giant eel, and we wound up invited to dine with the local lord, which time we spent collecting more information about the problems in the area (missing people in the timbering area to the northwest) and then let the lord wine and dine us because we are an unfortunately political entity. We sent our cavalry detachment ahead on the road to the town we were planning on reaching next, then headed off to find the lumber village to figure out wtf the current situation actually is.
Along the way we hear some singing off the side of the track, which bears investigation; it does not sound to Celyn like it's fey music. However, that theory does not hold up against rolling a three on the will save, even with the various advantages I might theoretically have on the check. (Having the highest wisdom in the party only goes so far with a three, just saying.)
Everyone else made their saves, though, which meant dealing with the resulting charm effect involved Robin grabbing Celyn and holding him still and Izgil dispelling the magic. Celyn came back to his senses with a two minute memory gap and a very protective paladin and the latter rather compensated for the alarming nature of the former. (The part where Celyn is actually the second-strongest member of the party is very, very not relevant to most situations given that his strength is 10. Robin has a strength score greater than or equal to any two other party members combined actually. This just got funnier to me.)
(To be fair on the strength rating front, Viepuck is twelve.)
Then everything changed when theFire Nationharpies attacked. One large (and rather cranky due to its charm failing) one and four small ones, which promptly got blasted by Izgil and then faerie-fired by Celyn, enabling the survivors to be gently obliterated by Viepuck. Various of them took fly-by attacks, doing various minor injuries; eventually they were joined by a giant vulture (which proceeded to try to provide cover to the main harpy from ranged attacks, but Viepuck had ducked to the side so this wasn't effective against him) and two slightly odd-looking bears.
(Over the course of the combat, the harpies made various attempts to get off their charm effects and other magical powers, and I think 90% of them were targeted at Robin, who has with the Aura of Protection kicking in started to step into the advancing paladin power of 'you're seriously wanting me to make a saving throw? You think that's a reasonable use of your time and energy? How's that working out for you, then?')
One of the bears mauled Izgil and knocked him down, which he solved with a misty step. He also wound up hitting the flyers with an ice effect that - when they failed their saves - made them plummet out of the sky, which was very useful. Generalized combat happened so much. One of the bears knocked Celyn down, and he misty stepped out of it. (Mike: "I forgot how effective you all are at solving 'prone'.") One of the bears tried to take out Robin's throat and Celyn got a solid opportunity to use his brand new channel divine power and said 'No'. (God of luck and fate: reverse die roll. Turn a crit into a fumble in this case, not that we run with fumbles much, but it's the principle of the thing.) (I was honestly not expecting that to come up so immediately, we only finalized the power yesterday, but it was a perfect character moment. Noisy boy has opinions about events.)
We took a rest, Robin healed people up, and then we heard murmuring in Sylvan in the distance as the sun set. (GM: "What's your passive perception?" Me: "22." GM: "... right, yes, you hear....") Also I rolled a 20 on trying to hear them, and it was an older and younger voice talking about things like "How's the hunt going?" and "Are we going to win?" and, after some discussion, we decided to follow the sound as quietly and reasonably as possible. Celyn removed Robin's stealth check penalty, and we proceeded to have a low roll of 17 on stealth, and thus tailed the voices all the way back to their lair, where we were promptly confronted with "Come out or we'll kill you" along the way.
Viepuck attempted a deception which failed, and eventually the party came out, running on Celyn's evaluation of the situation. At which point the party got to see Celyn 100% focused on something, which is ... not a normal mode for him. Generally upbeat, easygoing doesn't-playact-being-an-airhead-he-just-kind-of-comes-across-that-way Celyn got all laser focused on the fact that we were dealing with a Large Bear Fey and his Duskhound* Minion (plus all the other fey and bears and harpies and such).
* wild huntsman vibe, unpleasant manner, work for the Gloomshaper, the fey lord who has a long-running feud with the fey queen of Tyrwingha, Celyn's home nation. We ran into one of these guys before, he flattened the party and told them to fuck off from his master's territory vigorously. This one was not best pleased to see us but the bear guy kept him in check.
I don't remember all of the exchanges here but Celyn was absolutely using his actual formal training as a mortal/fey borderguard, basically, even though much of this stuff wasn't actually in his training because where he comes from the fey are much more pleasant. But offering a gift of honey for parley, and general treating customs with respect and familiarity, and the guy figured he could use the party and so it was a matter of coming to terms rather than just going for killing us outright. (Which was one of those things that we probably couldn't have survived but we could've cost him more than he wanted to spend, in his evaluation, sooo....) Also encountering someone who was comparatively fluent in the appropriate etiquette got the guy's curiosity, which was a benefit. (Celyn's background mostly is effective on friendly fey, but as I explained it afterwards, fey tend to treat him like a damaged elementary school fairy rather than a mortal.)
We were initially going to go into his valley to negotiate, but he wouldn't let Greymalkin in (Greymalkin being a fey of opposed affiliation, and there was clearly some sort of personal animosity in play). Greymalkin was not okay with that. Then they offered to let him in if he was muzzled. Neither Greymalkin nor Robin was okay with that. Celyn pointed out that these things run on exchanges, and Greymalkin departed to other climes (as a technically summoned mount he can just do that), which nearly got us progress until they decided to try also disarming Robin, which was A Bridge Too Fucking Far. (The spellcasters were deemed to not have dangerous weapons and Celyn's sword defaults to invisible.) When Celyn pointed out that they couldn't add terms without making concessions, this is a matter of trade, the fey lord basically went "Fine, up there," pointed to the top of a Very Large Rock, and teleported there (with the duskhound).
Celyn went "fine" and also teleported there, because there is a really complicated negotiation and posturing protocol to be had here (and I am going to wind up writing some more backstory somewhere along here because he's got some fascinating stuff going on here and I wanna dig in it). (But some of it has to do with the thing where the fey treat him like a low-grade fey and maintaining that is actually an important play here.) Robin, not interested in dickmeasuring of this sort, climbed the damn rock, as did Viepuck; Izgil teleported because he's crap at climbing rocks.
ETA: I forgot this bit, so I'm fixing that. While waiting for the rock-climbing half of the party to get up, Celyn commented to Bear Guy something to the effect of, "It must be hard raising children in a strange land." Because just because the guy is evil doesn't mean that Celyn doesn't genuinely have sympathy for this part, and it was an interesting angle to keep things complicated for the fey. The whole 'we're not from here but we're making a home here' angle thus discussed set up something for a second ETA.
And then we get into negotiations, and Celyn juggling flaming implications, including using the information we had gleaned over time and what he'd overheard while they were tailing this guy back home. The guy was not very informative about what competition he wanted our help winning; Celyn commented that we had already helped undermine his enemies, which took him aback slightly. (ETA extra: Somewhere in here Robin lost track of the flaming implications Celyn was juggling, laid out the like six mutually contradictory scenarios that were in the air, and Celyn was, "Would it help for me to say that this is perfectly normal?" about it, which got an "I trust you" response but probably was not entirely helpful regardless.)
Bear guy: "What do you mean?"
Celyn, quoting the bear guy, not that bear guy knows that: "The Midnight Lady is doing poorly."
Bear guy: "How did you know about her?"
Celyn (I can't remember what I actually said but this is the gist, the thing I said was vastly better), with a smirk: "Didn't I already tell you that?"
We can all play at answering questions with uninformative questions, but honestly, I had told him we'd messed with her play already. He just needed to take a moment to put it together...
Mostly Celyn held the conversation; most of the kibitzing from the rest of the party was useful or at least not interfering, which meant that I didn't have to figure out if he was going to get cranky about people doing silly things! They mostly didn't! In a fussy bit of negotiation about Bear Guy not wanting us to do harm to his assets (the harpies, mostly) I pointed out that I couldn't promise not to harm them if they were going to harm us, and tried to make a play for "they can't harm my people", which was a long shot that didn't work out, the guy went for "the people on this rock". Robin pointed out that didn't include Greymalkin, so I managed to get neutrality for the party and mounts out of it rather than just the two-leggers.
ETA #2: and this was why I specified Robin was of the Wanderer in the cast list damnit and then I went and forgot it. There was a whole bit about this guy calling this valley his home that got Robin questioning him very sharply about how he had said he wasn't from here so how could he claim that here was his home. Which looped into an exchange that went something like "Haven't you ever gone somewhere strange and made a home there?" "[Robin is very flat and furious by default here] No." "You must not travel much." "I travel constantly. None of it has been home."
In the end we promised not to harm specifically the harpies in the official oathing, until we had gone and fucked up his relevant opponent, who was not the one we knew about (the hag that was in league with the bandit). He then insisted we needed to leave to the north, Izgil tried to get more information about that, the duskhound drew a sword, we agreed to go north.
ETA #3: Bear Guy was very intrigued by Celyn's general state of etiquette, really, and said something to the effect of it being good to encounter someone who knew how to properly behave in a foreign place, to which Celyn agreed vehemently, "It is a strange land."
In exchange for this we got:
* out of the situation without injury or further fighting, and truce with this guy for now
* the information there are three fey lords competing to fuck up this area
* the location, alias, AND (probably use)NAME of the third competitor
* who was who we particularly wanted to go fuck up anyway because she's clearly suborned the baronial court, so I wasn't committing to anything we weren't already planning on doing other than a timeframe
* sufficient observation on this guy to have a sense of his interests and limitations
* misc other data
* ETA #4 : Viepuck determined the duskhound is not this guy's watchdog and thus there may be others chief minioning for the other competing fey
The guy escorted us out of his territory, the guards left, and we promptly turned around, went to the village we were trying to get to originally, and convinced them to fucking evacuate because there were hostile fey kidnapping people and we couldn't do anything about that right now and anyone who stayed was going to become a victim. The party, usually fairly gentle about this sort of thing, was intensely blunt, especially Robin, who is extremely unhappy about the entire situation. We overnighted there and got the villagers all out of the dangerous territory.
Yet another ETA:
Village lord: None of this would have happened if Queen Cece was still alive.
Viepuck: Yeah, you're probably right.
Village lord: ... why ... why do you say that....
Robin is doing his best to do his usual support and morale thing in public spaces and is clearly profoundly withdrawn outside of the public face situation. Celyn is sort of helplessly at, "I did the best I could" about it all, to which Robin responds, "I know you did," but there are no good answers available here and nobody is happy.
When we reached Aslain to regroup with the cavalry, the local innkeep brought us a letter saying "I was told to give it to a party of your description", more or less. It's written in Sylvan.
Celyn intends to handle it like it's a goddamn bomb. (We will be doing this bit in email.) He is the only party member who can read Sylvan script (unless Robin picked it up somewhere); it's usually written in Elvish letters....
Our party is:
Celyn Bettws, whose most relevant hat this session is "trained at dealing with the fey in a region of the world where there are a lot of fairies, but mostly friendly ones"
Viepuck the eldritch tween (and Es*tiaslos, his purple flying octopus)
Izgil Moonseeker, who would like the moon and also everything going on to start making some fucking sense any day now
and of course Robin of Abenford, paladin of the Wanderer.
Previously we had dealt with a spot of mayhem, after which we as a party levelled up and are now level 6. This produced several substantial effects: Robin has his Aura of Protection power; Viepuck has third list spells and took 'Sending', converting him into a very potent telegraph machine; Celyn hit fourth level rogue, and took the feat Observant, about which I have been making Magenta-from-RHPS jokes since, given also his stealth skills. ("Well-secluded, I see all!") (Izgil also picked up something but I am so cheerfully baffled by his character mechanics that I don't know what it is and also I am not 100% sure it was relevant today unless it was the lunar spellpoints thing.)
In our interstitial stuff Viepuck did a whole hell of a lot of being a telegraph machine, collecting information and moving data around in 25-word segments to enable us to keep track of various people we have met over the course of our adventures and try to collate the problems we're dealing with. This included groups of people asking for help (and us figuring out what of them we could help with and how) and tracking down our friend Odo's teenaged brother, previously presumed dead, but now hiding in the local hills and afraid to come out because he fled there from zombies and zombies are alarming. We successfully coaxed him out of the hills and sent Es*tiaslos to escort him to his brother.
The bandit we captured got his interrogation in before his execution, and proceeded to tell a story in which he was being a horrible person in a particular village, and an older woman in a tattered wolfskin cloak showed up and offered to tell him a secret, which he used to be even more terrible. This loops for a bit. And he heard her making deals with other people with results like "the kid she cured has made no sounds since" or "the cow she healed gives sour milk now", and so on, meanwhile the bandit did not consider the implications about what was going on with the secrets she was giving him to better fuck people over. Eventually, there was a zombie uprising, at which point he asked her for help and things got weird and bad, and then she sent him off on the tax collection mission.
Celyn, in the midst of this story, managed to suppress his urge to mutter about the way Sembarans are fucking clueless about dealing with fairies, but it appeared to be at least half by shooting Robin a look and deciding not to make Robin have to talk him down from this particular rant again, which has happened at least three times on camera and gods know how many times beyond that. Given Robin was already grumpy about the existence of this particular bandit, it would have been unkind.
Celyn, afterwards: Okay, so we have a description of a troublemaking fairy to look out for.
Robin, quite cross: Unwise dealings with the fey were among the least of this man's faults.
Celyn, paraphrased: Yeah but he'll be dead tomorrow and she's still a problem.
So, we collated the information that Viepuck collected and that we got from the bandit and came up with a set of problems that we needed to deal with in some order:
* find the baroness and figure out why the fuck she hasn't done Thing One (ride the bounds to check on the state of the demesne, or at least send a letter asking for information) since she got the position
* figure out what is fucking up the mail on the north-south route between the baronial capital and the river (as we previously unfucked the east-west mail route along the river)
* generally do the politicking thing with the baroness actually (possibly including getting Robin appointed to replace Lord Punchable Face in Asineau in the long run)
* deal with the fairy making trouble as reported by the bandit somehow
* track down a centaur with prophetic knowledge someone told us about
* deal with still more rampaging undead in some old guerilla caves in the north
Regardless of the personal neuroses of any of the party (I'm looking at Celyn, I am absolutely looking at Celyn, he has priorities rotated into the complex plane, I am greatly enjoying having the noisy boy living in my head most of the time but he does run tangent to consensual reality at times), the facts on the ground are that the party's collective priority is local political stability and defense, and that meant that our priority is "figure out wtf the baroness's fucking deal is" and "fix the damn mail", and thus our goal is to leave our base of operations in Cleenseau and make for Veltor more or less directly, and then clear out the other things as makes sense with what we learn from there. (link is to map)
Thus our plan is to take a dozen light cavalry for military help, head down the river, turning north at Essenmer, and proceed up to Aslain to collect intel on the baroness (who is from there) on the way to Veltor, skipping cursed and fey-infested Peydon for now where the hag reported by the bandit may still be operating. The plan did not, of course, survive contact with the plot, but we had one.
We reached Madour (I think) and attracted a lot of attention as, you know, a reasonably heavily armed military group headed up by the paladin in plate on the wingless gryphon. They want to know what's going on, they haven't heard any news of substance (so we know the mail fuckery is further north), and oh, yeah, they've heard about undead, but that wasn't a problem here. (There is no war in Ba Sing Se.) Celyn settles in for aggressive peoplewatching next to Robin while Viepuck starts telling stories of the heroic exploits of the Duke of Wisford.
GM: Are you telling anything about the party's exploits?
Viepuck: I have no need to embarrass Robin at this time.
Nope, another ETA: Izgil connects with the administrator of the Sybil temple there because that guy was another moon nerd and they proceeded to moon nerd extensively. Izgil had been there before but the previous administrator was not a moon fan and thus had downplayed all the moon stuff which meant that moon obsessive dwarf came away disappointed on previous visit. This one was much more fun for him.
Though someone did twig to us being the people who dealt with the giant eel, and we wound up invited to dine with the local lord, which time we spent collecting more information about the problems in the area (missing people in the timbering area to the northwest) and then let the lord wine and dine us because we are an unfortunately political entity. We sent our cavalry detachment ahead on the road to the town we were planning on reaching next, then headed off to find the lumber village to figure out wtf the current situation actually is.
Along the way we hear some singing off the side of the track, which bears investigation; it does not sound to Celyn like it's fey music. However, that theory does not hold up against rolling a three on the will save, even with the various advantages I might theoretically have on the check. (Having the highest wisdom in the party only goes so far with a three, just saying.)
Everyone else made their saves, though, which meant dealing with the resulting charm effect involved Robin grabbing Celyn and holding him still and Izgil dispelling the magic. Celyn came back to his senses with a two minute memory gap and a very protective paladin and the latter rather compensated for the alarming nature of the former. (The part where Celyn is actually the second-strongest member of the party is very, very not relevant to most situations given that his strength is 10. Robin has a strength score greater than or equal to any two other party members combined actually. This just got funnier to me.)
(To be fair on the strength rating front, Viepuck is twelve.)
Then everything changed when the
(Over the course of the combat, the harpies made various attempts to get off their charm effects and other magical powers, and I think 90% of them were targeted at Robin, who has with the Aura of Protection kicking in started to step into the advancing paladin power of 'you're seriously wanting me to make a saving throw? You think that's a reasonable use of your time and energy? How's that working out for you, then?')
One of the bears mauled Izgil and knocked him down, which he solved with a misty step. He also wound up hitting the flyers with an ice effect that - when they failed their saves - made them plummet out of the sky, which was very useful. Generalized combat happened so much. One of the bears knocked Celyn down, and he misty stepped out of it. (Mike: "I forgot how effective you all are at solving 'prone'.") One of the bears tried to take out Robin's throat and Celyn got a solid opportunity to use his brand new channel divine power and said 'No'. (God of luck and fate: reverse die roll. Turn a crit into a fumble in this case, not that we run with fumbles much, but it's the principle of the thing.) (I was honestly not expecting that to come up so immediately, we only finalized the power yesterday, but it was a perfect character moment. Noisy boy has opinions about events.)
We took a rest, Robin healed people up, and then we heard murmuring in Sylvan in the distance as the sun set. (GM: "What's your passive perception?" Me: "22." GM: "... right, yes, you hear....") Also I rolled a 20 on trying to hear them, and it was an older and younger voice talking about things like "How's the hunt going?" and "Are we going to win?" and, after some discussion, we decided to follow the sound as quietly and reasonably as possible. Celyn removed Robin's stealth check penalty, and we proceeded to have a low roll of 17 on stealth, and thus tailed the voices all the way back to their lair, where we were promptly confronted with "Come out or we'll kill you" along the way.
Viepuck attempted a deception which failed, and eventually the party came out, running on Celyn's evaluation of the situation. At which point the party got to see Celyn 100% focused on something, which is ... not a normal mode for him. Generally upbeat, easygoing doesn't-playact-being-an-airhead-he-just-kind-of-comes-across-that-way Celyn got all laser focused on the fact that we were dealing with a Large Bear Fey and his Duskhound* Minion (plus all the other fey and bears and harpies and such).
* wild huntsman vibe, unpleasant manner, work for the Gloomshaper, the fey lord who has a long-running feud with the fey queen of Tyrwingha, Celyn's home nation. We ran into one of these guys before, he flattened the party and told them to fuck off from his master's territory vigorously. This one was not best pleased to see us but the bear guy kept him in check.
I don't remember all of the exchanges here but Celyn was absolutely using his actual formal training as a mortal/fey borderguard, basically, even though much of this stuff wasn't actually in his training because where he comes from the fey are much more pleasant. But offering a gift of honey for parley, and general treating customs with respect and familiarity, and the guy figured he could use the party and so it was a matter of coming to terms rather than just going for killing us outright. (Which was one of those things that we probably couldn't have survived but we could've cost him more than he wanted to spend, in his evaluation, sooo....) Also encountering someone who was comparatively fluent in the appropriate etiquette got the guy's curiosity, which was a benefit. (Celyn's background mostly is effective on friendly fey, but as I explained it afterwards, fey tend to treat him like a damaged elementary school fairy rather than a mortal.)
We were initially going to go into his valley to negotiate, but he wouldn't let Greymalkin in (Greymalkin being a fey of opposed affiliation, and there was clearly some sort of personal animosity in play). Greymalkin was not okay with that. Then they offered to let him in if he was muzzled. Neither Greymalkin nor Robin was okay with that. Celyn pointed out that these things run on exchanges, and Greymalkin departed to other climes (as a technically summoned mount he can just do that), which nearly got us progress until they decided to try also disarming Robin, which was A Bridge Too Fucking Far. (The spellcasters were deemed to not have dangerous weapons and Celyn's sword defaults to invisible.) When Celyn pointed out that they couldn't add terms without making concessions, this is a matter of trade, the fey lord basically went "Fine, up there," pointed to the top of a Very Large Rock, and teleported there (with the duskhound).
Celyn went "fine" and also teleported there, because there is a really complicated negotiation and posturing protocol to be had here (and I am going to wind up writing some more backstory somewhere along here because he's got some fascinating stuff going on here and I wanna dig in it). (But some of it has to do with the thing where the fey treat him like a low-grade fey and maintaining that is actually an important play here.) Robin, not interested in dickmeasuring of this sort, climbed the damn rock, as did Viepuck; Izgil teleported because he's crap at climbing rocks.
ETA: I forgot this bit, so I'm fixing that. While waiting for the rock-climbing half of the party to get up, Celyn commented to Bear Guy something to the effect of, "It must be hard raising children in a strange land." Because just because the guy is evil doesn't mean that Celyn doesn't genuinely have sympathy for this part, and it was an interesting angle to keep things complicated for the fey. The whole 'we're not from here but we're making a home here' angle thus discussed set up something for a second ETA.
And then we get into negotiations, and Celyn juggling flaming implications, including using the information we had gleaned over time and what he'd overheard while they were tailing this guy back home. The guy was not very informative about what competition he wanted our help winning; Celyn commented that we had already helped undermine his enemies, which took him aback slightly. (ETA extra: Somewhere in here Robin lost track of the flaming implications Celyn was juggling, laid out the like six mutually contradictory scenarios that were in the air, and Celyn was, "Would it help for me to say that this is perfectly normal?" about it, which got an "I trust you" response but probably was not entirely helpful regardless.)
Bear guy: "What do you mean?"
Celyn, quoting the bear guy, not that bear guy knows that: "The Midnight Lady is doing poorly."
Bear guy: "How did you know about her?"
Celyn (I can't remember what I actually said but this is the gist, the thing I said was vastly better), with a smirk: "Didn't I already tell you that?"
We can all play at answering questions with uninformative questions, but honestly, I had told him we'd messed with her play already. He just needed to take a moment to put it together...
Mostly Celyn held the conversation; most of the kibitzing from the rest of the party was useful or at least not interfering, which meant that I didn't have to figure out if he was going to get cranky about people doing silly things! They mostly didn't! In a fussy bit of negotiation about Bear Guy not wanting us to do harm to his assets (the harpies, mostly) I pointed out that I couldn't promise not to harm them if they were going to harm us, and tried to make a play for "they can't harm my people", which was a long shot that didn't work out, the guy went for "the people on this rock". Robin pointed out that didn't include Greymalkin, so I managed to get neutrality for the party and mounts out of it rather than just the two-leggers.
ETA #2: and this was why I specified Robin was of the Wanderer in the cast list damnit and then I went and forgot it. There was a whole bit about this guy calling this valley his home that got Robin questioning him very sharply about how he had said he wasn't from here so how could he claim that here was his home. Which looped into an exchange that went something like "Haven't you ever gone somewhere strange and made a home there?" "[Robin is very flat and furious by default here] No." "You must not travel much." "I travel constantly. None of it has been home."
In the end we promised not to harm specifically the harpies in the official oathing, until we had gone and fucked up his relevant opponent, who was not the one we knew about (the hag that was in league with the bandit). He then insisted we needed to leave to the north, Izgil tried to get more information about that, the duskhound drew a sword, we agreed to go north.
ETA #3: Bear Guy was very intrigued by Celyn's general state of etiquette, really, and said something to the effect of it being good to encounter someone who knew how to properly behave in a foreign place, to which Celyn agreed vehemently, "It is a strange land."
In exchange for this we got:
* out of the situation without injury or further fighting, and truce with this guy for now
* the information there are three fey lords competing to fuck up this area
* the location, alias, AND (probably use)NAME of the third competitor
* who was who we particularly wanted to go fuck up anyway because she's clearly suborned the baronial court, so I wasn't committing to anything we weren't already planning on doing other than a timeframe
* sufficient observation on this guy to have a sense of his interests and limitations
* misc other data
* ETA #4 : Viepuck determined the duskhound is not this guy's watchdog and thus there may be others chief minioning for the other competing fey
The guy escorted us out of his territory, the guards left, and we promptly turned around, went to the village we were trying to get to originally, and convinced them to fucking evacuate because there were hostile fey kidnapping people and we couldn't do anything about that right now and anyone who stayed was going to become a victim. The party, usually fairly gentle about this sort of thing, was intensely blunt, especially Robin, who is extremely unhappy about the entire situation. We overnighted there and got the villagers all out of the dangerous territory.
Yet another ETA:
Village lord: None of this would have happened if Queen Cece was still alive.
Viepuck: Yeah, you're probably right.
Village lord: ... why ... why do you say that....
Robin is doing his best to do his usual support and morale thing in public spaces and is clearly profoundly withdrawn outside of the public face situation. Celyn is sort of helplessly at, "I did the best I could" about it all, to which Robin responds, "I know you did," but there are no good answers available here and nobody is happy.
When we reached Aslain to regroup with the cavalry, the local innkeep brought us a letter saying "I was told to give it to a party of your description", more or less. It's written in Sylvan.
Celyn intends to handle it like it's a goddamn bomb. (We will be doing this bit in email.) He is the only party member who can read Sylvan script (unless Robin picked it up somewhere); it's usually written in Elvish letters....