Leudigar steps forward and nods at the dwarf, "That's Zem there. His most brief summary is the truth of it. The other two there are Fried and Karl. I guess we were just the luckiest of the lot. We did come from Manfred's Bastion, though not because of any orders from Manfred, to be sure. None of us was soldiers in his army, mind you. Most of us were displaced from the countryside when the goblins took control of Ket. Though he used some of us for scouting, we weren't 'scripted soldiers, which was his way of keeping us short on food and low on pay."
"I don't know what Manfred plans on doing about the gobbies, but it seemed to us that he wasn't doing enough. We had friends and family dead or lost or imprisoned in Ket and his lot just sits around, planning and scouting and... and emptying the countryside of supplies to feed his army. We wanted to do sommit about it, but we knew we couldn't do anything about Ket - there's just too many snorks there. So some of us starts thinking that maybe with all the snorks in Ket, maybe there's less of them at... well, wherever they came from."
"We heard some rumors about a goblin fortress in a valley some three days travel from Manfred's camp, so we packed up what little supplies we could scrounge up and headed out. Took us a little longer, but sure enough we found their fortress, cut into the walls of the mountain facing a valley rimmed by jagged cliffs. We found an old path down, though, and sneaked in."
"Caught them by surprise, to be sure. They didn't expect anyone showing up in their home, in any case. We were able to take a group of them by surprise, but one escaped and he warned others. We... well, there was lots of fighting after that. We got split up at one point, but regrouped when we found one particularly large and ugly goblin. We put him down, along with the rest. That's where the dirk there come from." He points at the quality dirk in his pile of possessions.
"After that..." Leudigar pauses as he tries to remember. "Hags and their animated skeletons... a hydra... worshipers of some cult... and then two snake-women what could turn a man to stone with a look from their hideous faces. We left several good fighters there, in a hall of statues... of men turned to stone. And that's where we got most of this gold from."
"But we were down to just four, and we were pretty beat up, so we tried to make our way back to Manfred's camp. We thought maybe we could convince him trying to fight the goblins in Ket wasn't the only option, that we could hit them hard where THEY live, maybe disrupt their supply lines. We do that enough, get enough of them to leave Ket, and then maybe we can take our town back."
He stops and looks at the others, raising his eye brows to ask if there is anything important he'd missed...
[f=47]
Dougal Blackfoot (MV 9", AC 6, Lvl 4, HP 10/10) [/f]
[f=59]
Goldwen (
Sagacious* Abbess, MV 9′′, AC 6, HD 2+1, HP 9, FC 2 men, SV C3, L][/f]