This week's adventure began in the wreckage of Highbay after the devastating Derpy-Kaiju attack of last session. Leandra, the leader of the Azure Wizards, died in the battle, and the PCs had the sense that it might be time to find new pastures instead of the Azure Tower, unsure if whoever is chosen as her successor would be as friendly to them. The plan emerged to try to figure out a way to stick around Highbay and stake some of the new territory created by the kilometer-long Petrification spell. A plot was hatched to possibly build and run some kind of "Adventurer's Guild".
In the events that followed, the PCs:
-learned that pretty well everyone in Highbay sells drugs. The old woman who sells eggs, the blacksmith, even the city guard all tried to sell them 'special brownies'. The leatherworker sells LSD on the side.
-found that Chief City Officer Swanlee is willing to grant them some land, if they go rescue Bolt-O from the Orc Chief Omnblarg.
-agreed, even though Sandy the Bikini-Chainmail Barbarian felt that Bolt-O sounds like "one of those wuss robots".
-quickly found their initial "adventurer's guild" plans spiralling into a nascent plot to become key players in Highbay's criminal underworld.
-started to suspect that staying too long in Highbay might actually be a really bad idea.
-realized that, in a town where all drugs and prostitution are completely legal, local crime lords have to be really creative when it comes to finding stuff to illegally trade in. Stuff like illicit smuggled War-Elephants.
-realized they'd actually stumbled into a turf war between two different bands of something called the "Bharata mafia", fighting over control of the Elephant-smuggling trade of Highbay.
-learned the aforementioned after Ack'Basha the Cleric made a very cool and true-to-type use of the Word of Command spell on a hapless fletcher, commanding him with the word "Confess!"
-proceeded to accidentally sell out said fletcher, after having given him assurances they would keep his secret, to yet another mafia, this one working for unknown bosses but led by a guy named "shady Ahmed".
-made a deal with Ahmed where they would work together to take over the city of Highbay. You know, for the sake of the children.
-got in over their heads quickly, while doing no more than healing up waiting to go rescue Bolt-O. First, they accidentally cause a mob war; then they get the impractical and problematic gift of an illegal War Elephant, and then Highbay's enormous hippie community finds out that Ack'Basha the Cleric has a magic staff that makes you trip balls.
-wake up to a mob of a thousand dirty hippies at the entrance to their tavern, much to the chagrin of the highly eccentric innkeeper.
-decide to harness the hippies to get free lumber for their building plans, charging a beam of wood as the price for a ticket to get to have a 'religious experience' with the Primo Staff.
-discover that their scheme has led to a crime-wave of hippie stick-ups and hippie break-ins all through the city, which gets them in serious trouble with Chief City Officer Swanlee.
-decide to take the hippies with them, as an army to oppose Omnblarg's orcish horde and liberate the town of Badbreath. Of course, their army is nearly without weapons, food, sometime shirts or shoes, and entirely bereft of common sense, counting that with marching while signing "we shall overcome" they'll get what is 'meant to be'.
-watch as their Hippie Army starts to drop like flies en route, still days from the nearest orc, from desertion, starvation, boredom, distraction, getting lost and/or eaten in the forest, or the creation of drumming circles.
-struck an evil deal with the evil Lord Dread, selling out their hippies into serfdom in exchange for safe passage, and the possibility that Dread might join Ack'Basha the cleric's crusade against Sezrekhan.
-got a hint that being an Evil Overlord is not an easy job.
-got to hear Lord Dread tell Ack'Basha that "we're not so different, you and I..."
-arranged a potentially lucrative side-deal with Dread to sell him War-elephants.
-posed as criminal War-Elephant salesmen to get inside Badbreath and win the trust of the Orcs.
-were feted with a feast of dog-meat, followed by the promise of brown-mutant sex-slaves.
-heroically left the sex-slaves unmolested, except for Sandy who made two of the male slaves make out with each other.
-find that their carefully crafted plan to sneakily rescue Bolt-O and assassinate the Orcish chief falls to pieces when they forget that Bolt-O is totally incapable of modulating the volume of his voice.
-find themselves in the unfortunate situation of facing off against 300+ orcs all at once.
-watch Sandy turn into a killing machine, yet again.
-cheered as Schul the Rogue gets to the War-elephant with the plan to set it loose against the Orcs.
-groan as it becomes obvious that Schul has no idea whatsoever how to actually get the Elephant to charge at the orcs.
-confront Chief Omnblarg and his champions.
-see Sandy outdo herself, as she enters a Battle Rage and does 50hp in one hit against the chief, blowing his head open like a watermelon.
-hear the sound of at least a hundred orcs shitting themselves simultaneously.
-witness Sandy becoming the new Chief, as by Orcish law "whoever kills the chief becomes the chief".
-think Sandy is clearly enjoying her new status a little too much.
-note that just after your former chief was brutally murdered by a lance-throw from a barbarian warrior-woman is a really stupid time for an orc sub-chief to talk about someone 'throwing like a girl'.
-make a sudden change of plans: now instead of handing Badbreath over to Lord Dread and his approaching cavalry, the new plan is to ambush Dread, murder him, and have Sandy take over the whole region.
-set up a fire trap for Dread's horsemen and then butcher Lord Dread; first with a well-placed backstab by Schul the Rogue, then by Sandy charging in with the War-Elephant and impaling Dread on an orcish longspear.
-observe that Sandy seems to have taken "Orcish Law" to heart, as she now declares herself to be not just the new Orc Chief but also the new "Lady Dread".
Most of Dread's horsemen got away, presumably to hunker down in Castle Dread. The plan is now to march the Orcish army there and lay siege to the castle so Sandy can complete her transformation from Barbarian Warrior to Barbarian Queen.
Meanwhile the poor Highbay Hippies aren't going to get any breaks, as Sandy, drunk with power, makes it clear that she plans to carry through with Dread's original scheme of condemning them to a life of serfdom tilling the fields for her in Badbreath.
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