30th day of Trasakh

Having finished searching the hobgoblin quarters, we return to the store room and then quietly open the door on the other side.  It opens out into a chapel of some sort.  Three goblin priests are praying at an altar draped in black cloth, while two more watch out of arrow slits in the wall.  There are two curtained doorways on the right hand side.

Wanting to prevent the goblins from fleeing and raising the alarm, I am first to enter and run to the far doorway before the goblins can react.  The others block the other doorway, and the combat is short and bloody.  We examine the altar, and see three golden sacramental vessels on it.  It looks like this is the defiled shrine to Oghma!  I strip the black and bloody cloth off the altar, and keep the sacred ornaments.

Going through the curtains, we enter a high and ornately carved ante-chapel.  There is a font with a pile of charcoal in it – searching though it reveals ???something???.  However, our searching is interrupted when a strange beaked snake drops from the ceiling where it had been hiding.  The fight against this is hard work, and my blows don’t seem to have much effect, but in the end some mighty blows from Elaina finish it off.

Stealthily opening the far door, we see it opens out into the small courtyard we had previously observed from the secret door entrance.  We can see a single goblin dozing in there but are concerned there might be many more, so decide to lure it into the chapel to kill it subtly.  Garrett casts an illusion of a beckoning goblin and I try to imitate its voice to ask it to come and help me.  It wakes and comes over to us; we shut the door behind it and I dispatch it with a single blow.  We hear another goblin voice from the courtyard asking where it is though, so entice another goblin in and dispatch that as well.

Entering the courtyard, we peer through the curtain into the guardpost for the secret back door beyond.  There are only two goblins in there, so Garrett and I leap in on them and dispatch them before they can raise the alarm.  We then proceed to the king’s quarters, where we listen and hear various voices.  We decide to burst in, and confront a bugbear, a hobgoblin and a goblin – not the start of a bad dwarven joke but instead obviously the latest set of leaders.  The fight is again bloody, but we are getting good at honing our tactics with these humanoids now, attacking their weaknesses, so we quickly kill them, but not before sustaining significant damage ourselves.  We finish the last of our healing spells and are contemplating a rest, when there is a loud knocking at the door, and some hobgoblins demanding to know what is going on.  Our attempts to stall them and dismiss them fail, and they burst into the room.  There are four of them, and once again there is a bloody fight.  At the end of it, I am forced to drink my last two healing potions to get myself back into fighting form again.

We proceed through the curtain we never investigated before and find a hobgoblin barrack rather than the kitchen we expected.  Beyond this we find the room that they had obviously been keeping the owl bear in – on a fragment of floor high up we find some treasure.

At this point we are weary and bloodied but anxious to finish emptying the castle.  We decide to try and intimidate the remaining goblins, so gather up the heads of the chiefs we have just killed and take them with us.  The next room is a kitchen/refectory with a handful of goblins – we brandish the heads and tell them to leave and never return if they want to survive.  All of them do apart from the cook, and we rapidly reduce him to julienne strips.

Leaving the kitchen, we see that the main hall and gate has a number of goblins fleeing the castle – we do a final sweep and then rest on our swords, our labours here seemingly finished.  And all in time for the Greengrass festival as well.