PoR: entry 9 (kobold sweat)

We decided to stick around with the nomads for a few days. Maybe our lives will turn out better for doing so. Maybe we'll all meet special nomads and turn away from a life of violence.

But whether or not kobolds are evil, there are a lot of them in the wilderness, or at least a lot of them hanging around the outskirts of the nomad camp. Will violence never cease? Alas.

Strange that I'd yearn for a stoppage of violence in a video game, but these battles are taking a lot out of me.

So anyway, the kobolds came and we and the nomadic villagers fought them off. Kobolds are easycakes, but the sheer volume still knocked out half the party. Eventually, we picked up on a really great strategy: simply hide behind the nomadic villagers. Use them as human shields. It's almost like a hostage situation.

The reward was pretty nice for getting rid of the kobold scourge. Maybe we'll have to go on a shopping spree. On our last adventure we had to stop picking things up because we were so strapped with money. Maybe a nice crossbow is in order.

So, being too rich for the nomad town, we went off into the wilderness once more. We may have actually found the kobold complex spoken of by the dragon in the form of a cave, or rather, a series of caves hidden in the hills directly east of the forbidden pyramid. The caves are guarded by what I think I remember is called a "kobold horde." The horde can be dispatched, but is voluminous enough to weaken the party extremely before entrance into the caves.

We decided to enter the "small cave."

That's pretty much how the story ends right now. Not much has happened, I know, but the flood of kobolds in the front gate tears us to shreds, disabling us from handling the horrors within. We've actually adventured deep into the cave and found some pretty sweet shiz, but because of certain losses, I might just play those parts over again, correctly. Specifically, there's a trap in the beginning of the cave that I step into every time. I know of no way around and I can't avoid it by searching for it, even though I "know" it's there (but I suppose nobody in the party would know unless they themselves possess the special "save" and "load" spells. I'll probably have to prepare myself with a stupid "detect trap" spell. Do I even have one of those? Blast!

Anyway, as a preview of what may be coming in the future, my extracurricular activities in the cave included a new hot NPC, bribery, twisted set-ups, winged creatures, giants, prisons and most of all, death (I'm hoping that next time it doesn't come to that). Here's what I mapped out of the cave:
I'm also messing with photoshop a little for this scan to make it look like I drew it right on the blog itself. I can't preview it properly before I publish, so we'll see how it goes.

I'm going to Hawaii to work a little on my zen next week, so it may be a little while before I post again. When I'm all relaxed and zenned out, we'll be just focused enough to kill a bunch more living beings that probably don't deserve it. Happy hunting all!