Age of Ice and Blood: A Pathfinder System Heroic Fantasy Quest

The Forty-First of Elnu-hamba [Elnu Descendent] Year 1348 A. L. (After Landfall)

Perhaps it is just the elan of a knight raised since boyhood with the dream of the charge, but you would rather take a gamble and end things quickly than wait four days while your armsmen stew in resentment or cause who knows what mischief abroad in a strange city, and so you debark in the company of Doctor Zaia and followed by such guard as you can gather about you. Fourteen sons of Verley are left with Tam's passing and of these seven follow in your wake, the steel of their arms and the iron of their shirts of scale glittering in the evening light. Unlike in Lirman none bar your way at the harbor, you speak the tongue of the land and know what vows to make to be allowed ashore, but you do not get far until you are accosted and not in any formal guise.

At first you think the group of youths might be the usual run of longshoremen and sailors on leave that are common near every waterway in every port you have seen, rowdy but not so much as to cause you trouble. It takes more liquid courage than most men can drink and stand upright to challenge so many armed and armored men. Alas that you had guessed wrong.

"Who are ye then, strutting about like you own the Stoneway?" their leader, a scraggly bearded fellow with a scar running from his lip to just under the corner of his eye challenges.

You stop dead in your tracks, it is hard to miss the tone of a man spoiling for a fight. "Who wants to know?"

"Fioke," he says the name as though it is supposed to mean something, perhaps to someone who knew these lands better it would, but you keep your face impassive and so at last he adds. "Dagger-teeth you son of a whore. We got a contract here and we ain't need the likes of..." You are reasonably sure what follows is a long and somewhat convoluted set of insults that presupposes goats, pigs and other animals you cannot recognize as part of your lineage. That is when you start counting the men behind him. Six, no, eight others.

"I believe these are the local pirates for hire, Sir knight, and I suspect they are looking for a confrontation, fearful perhaps that we are here to take their place in the favor of the king." Doctor Zaia comments.

"So they decide give challenge looking like that..." Fioke himself is wearing a coat of bronze scales but most of those behind him are in boiled leather at the most and some time not even that. They certainly hold the various axes, cudgels and maces like they know their way around them, but all things being equal...

"There's more of the bastards behind us," Tom hisses from your other side and turning your head slightly you see that it is so, sneaking up like footpads in the night clearly being a skill they have honed well. Another half dozen of them, almost two to one and the way is too narrow to really make use of spears.

Not all the noise and shuffling is coming from behind you. The street was growing markedly less busy with people going about their way faster or retreating beneath the carved stone arches of doorways.

"Seems to me that if you are in such a hurry to make it up to the Caves you aught to pay right of way," the brigand in front of you proclaims, taking your lack of reply to him as hesitation. "Ten gold pieces a head aught to do it, and then you can say your part to his Highness if he'll listen. Maybe you can even sell him some of that tin-work hanging off you like bells on a wicker man."

What do you do?

[] Pay (Lose 90 gp and likely quite a bit of face)

[] Try to resolve this peacefully, you have a message to deliver, nothing more, and went nothing with their sort of work
-[] Talk them down (Diplomacy)
-[] Threaten them (Intimidate)

[] If it is a fight these bastards want it is a fight they will get
-[] Write in plan

[] Write in

OOC: Welp you did find the pirates eventually, just not at sea.