Draft Story

.:TheGerkuman:. It's time for....
.:TheGerkuman:. Storytime with Gerkuman!
.:TheGerkuman:. To begin the story I have to lay down some background info. The system is pathfinder and the campaign is from Paizo's official gamebooks. This particular one was from Rise of the Runelords
.:TheGerkuman:. There are currently 5 of us in the party. Drax, my character is a True Neutral Druid and a bit of a opportunist. He also nearly dies a lot and has a dog named Rex. Next is Zandu, an everyman villager who happens to be a dragon-blooded sorceror. He has... an interesting and in my opinion sociopathic view on the world and is Chaotic Neutral.
.:TheGerkuman:. With him is his personal stuff-carrier Hob, a former soldier who Zandu pays to hold his gear and loot for him. Hob seems to be a fairly sensible civilian, with a liking towards alcohol. (Though he's currently been sober for a while)
.:TheGerkuman:. Then there's Keeper Keyforge, a dwarven cleric of the Lawful Good variety. And yes, he is as opinionated, enthusiastic and domineering as you might expect.
.:TheGerkuman:. Also, we have Hruk the half-orc chaotic good barbarian. So long as he has goblin skulls to crack, he's happy and gets along with everyone. During the current campaign he adopted a cougar which he named Fluffy.
:TheGerkuman:. Finally, there's a human chaotic neutral fighter named Ralgorn. He is seriously laid back, almost to stoner levels occasionally.
.:TheGerkuman:. So that's everyone, and you can see right from the start we're a powder keg ready and waiting to go off. And at times before we had. At least once after a near-death experience Drax wanted to leave until Keeper suggested that he would gain the respect he wanted by saving the town and Zandu had tried to leave a couple of times.
.:TheGerkuman:. It didn't help that Keeper was always getting up into other people's grills with overenthusiastic-ness, never conceding any ground to anyone else's opinions and taking some of the best loot for the church without asking others.
.:TheGerkuman:. Anyway, we join the party in the middle of an adventure. They had been tasked to go and fight some goblins, and find a particular person. This was the big climactic part of the current campaign.
.:TheGerkuman:. During the previous session we'd killed a goblin chieftan and his giant gecko and a large portion of his army. (And as usual, Drax nearly died due to stupidity on my part; apparently the king asking one of you to come up to his throne alone turned out to be a trap) So we just needed to move further on into the base, and maybe find the major villain.
.:TheGerkuman:. So as the session began, Drax and Keeper go to recharge their spells, while the others go to do some looting. We find a harem and a bugbear, and deal with him. So far, so good.
.:TheGerkuman:. But it was too good to last, since we found one of the banes of roleplayers everywhere... baby goblins. I don't know if any one of you have seen Spoony's Counter Monkey episode on the subject, but he makes the point that whenever you mix babies (adorable innocent things) with an 'Always Chaotic Evil' race of creatures you invariably create a conflict within the party.
.:TheGerkuman:. For those not so acquainted with the subject matter, people are generally in two camps on the idea. Some see certain monsters as irredeemably evil and the DnD and Pathfinder books seem to agree with those people. Eventually goblin babies will grow up to harrass others, so they should be dealt with.
.:TheGerkuman:. But roleplaying is rarely that simple and a lot of people (especially in real life) would at least hesitating before using the lethal option.
.:TheGerkuman:. DS9 fans might remember the episode where Odo finds a baby Jem'hadar and tries to raise it to fight its genetic programming towards mindless obedience to Odo's people and a love of fighting. As you might have guessed, it didn't work but it didn't portray Odo as being deluded either, it was a honest attempt to break the system.
.:TheGerkuman:. So, as expected, the party split on what to do. The ideological battle lines have been drawn, with Ralgorn, Hruk and Keeper on one side, and Zandu and Drax on the other. Hob of course believes what the person paying him wants him to believe.
.:TheGerkuman:. Hruk and Keeper manage to smash two of the cages with a goblin baby inside, but Zandu manages to snatch the goblin baby out of the third cage and pass it to Hob to put in his backpack without being noticed. Hruk goes to Hob to try and intimidate him into spilling the beans.
.:TheGerkuman:. And then... things really start to go wrong. Looking back on the situation leads me to believe that if the situation had not escalated Hob would have been forced to hand the goblin baby over, it would have been smushed and while an amount of resentment would have been felt by Drax and Zandu we could have gone on with our mission.
.:TheGerkuman:. Instead, Drax decides to act, but as usual he doesn't just go out and do it. No, that would get in the way of trying to appease everyone in the hope of getting stuff out of it. So he casts the spell 'Flare' on Hruk while trying to cover up the fact by pretending to have tripped over and missfired.
.:TheGerkuman:. No-one bought that though, since Drax does not have the ability to silently spell-cast and everyone noticed him muttering to himself. The spell was non-lethal, just a flash of light aimed at Hruk to mess up his vision temporarily, and so Hob and Zandu begin to leg it out of the enemy base. Hruk sends out Fluffy to track them, while the other two and he follow Fluffy until they reach the bridge.
.:TheGerkuman:. The party had crossed this bridge earlier on, one at a time and at this point both Zandu and Hob were on the bridge. Ralgorn and Hruk also got onto the bridge, not noticing the Fluffy had not. And for good reason.
.:TheGerkuman:. The goblins had gimmicked the bridge to collapse if there was too much weight onto it. Everyone but Zandu had failed the reflex roll to get off the bridge before that happened, and they plummeted down into the sea. Luckily for the party, Hob wasn't knocked unconcious by the fall and began to work on getting Ralgorn and Hruk out of the water. Unluckily for the goblin baby, it had got smushed in the fall. Putting it in a backpack was just asking for trouble
.:TheGerkuman:. Meanwhile, up top Zandu began to run. In hindsight, he was actually running to get down to where Hob was and help the others, but it wasn't like he hadn't run before so Drax cast 'Entangle'. Entangle uses weeds (or thorns, if they're near brambles) to entangle the person.
.:TheGerkuman:. Zandu was too quick for the vines though, and he decided to fight fire with fire. The fire being literal in fact. And I don't blame him either. Drax and Zandu had some run-ins before. In the session before last Drax had used Entangle in the middle of a thorny maze while everyone was within the 30ft radius.
.:TheGerkuman:. On an aside note, the only ones not caught in it was the giant half-orc and the surprisingly swift dwarf. Go-figure.
.:TheGerkuman:. Then there was also the time where Zandu had left to go to Magnamar without telling anyone where he was, so Drax went to the Watch and dobbed Zandu in for a crime that Drax'd purposefully overlooked just so that Zandu would be dragged back to the town (named Sandpoint).
.:TheGerkuman:. As I said earlier, Drax is not the nicest or most well-intentioned of people; a shade of grey in the morality spectrum of Pathfinder but a pretty dark shade nonetheless.
.:TheGerkuman:. Anyway, the net result was two fireballs to the face and Drax's fourth near-death experience in this campaign as Keeper was too noble to let him die despite being really pissed off with him.
.:TheGerkuman:. While Keeper was healing Drax, Hob had managed to save the two water-logged party members and Zandu had reached them and used two healing potions to bring them back to the world of the healthy. They got back to the top of the cliff and we all worked together to get the bridge back together without any sign of disharmony.
.:TheGerkuman:. This was a bit too naive though. Zandu stayed on his side of the bridge while Ralgorn, Hruk and Hob walked over. Hob went over to some bushes and began to dig; he was retrieving Zandu's cache of stuff and it was clear that Zandu planned to leave.
.:TheGerkuman:. Keeper, Zandu and Ralgorn have a shouting match across the chasm, with Keeper telling him that he needs to do the right thing and complete the quest, Ralgorn asking for a trial to ascertain guilt and Zandu wanting to go home. And I don't really blame Zandu for that either.
.:TheGerkuman:. Zandu is clearly fed up with the whole situation. He believes that although he's done good things for the party they mistrust him and do horrible things. And in some ways he had a point, if only partially. As I said before, Drax had been in a similar position after considering his mortality.
.:TheGerkuman:. When I said earlier that Zandu seemed a bit sociopathic I was more referring to the way the character seems to view morality. In particular He seems to think that morality worked on a scale, like in a Bioware RPG. He'd considered killing Drax because in his mind Drax was being a liability to the party and yet believed that stopping Ralgorn and Hruk from dying would absolve him of taking the baby goblin and running.
.:TheGerkuman:. The debate was not helped by Hruk throwing a spear at Zandu, although he was aiming to miss and the spear hit the ground right in front of him. (That is, in front of Zandu, not Hruk). The upshot was that Zandu was about to run again but Hruk ran across the bridge and spear-tackled Zandu, knocking him out.
.:TheGerkuman:. Once that was done, Hob also tried to run and Hruk tackled him too. It devolved into a fist-fight, with Keeper and Ralgorn trying to calm it down. Then Hruk became enraged, and tried to kill Hob with his spiked Gauntlet, though Keeper had managed to get to him in time to stop him from dying.
.:TheGerkuman:. At the same time a bunch of goblins came onto the scene near the base, having gotten bored of tying ropes to seagulls and flying them about. (Clearly seagulls are the new kites, *ba-dum, tish*). Everyone just turned around to them, rolled high for intimidation and told them to go the eff away. And they did. Clearly the goblins were less important than the inter-party punchup.
.:TheGerkuman:. Anyway, while Keeper and Ralgorn were stabalising Hob they asked Drax to keep an eye on Hruk while he calmed down. Well, you can guess what happened; Drax tried to calm him down and Hruk saw him as being threatening. One punch and Drax hit the hypothetical mat again, knocked unconscious.
.:TheGerkuman:. So the session ended with the whole party sitting in the now-empty goblin harem trying to get some rest and licking their wounded pride. On the one hand, we hadn't really gotten further than when we started. On the other, at least we managed to get some of that bottled pressure out in the open and dealt with it without dying.
.:TheGerkuman:. That's more than some player parties can manage, at least.