Finding the Spark (Pathfinder 1E Quest)

The Season of Still Stone

"I think it would be safer for all of us to kill them before they come back with friends to embolden them. Who's to say how far these dreams go?" the thought hangs like ice in your stomach. Maybe Cob aught to leave this thing here in the dark for any who might come after this lot to claim and be rid of, or if not to offer some other quarry to the servant of this 'Zura.' But on the other hand... oh on the other hand, if someone is hunting for the ring that means it's precious. It seems no less than kicking fortune aside before you know if it is good or bad, if you were in the habit of doing that you wouldn't be out here at all, but back in the caves of Zul playing scrambling for scraps

While you had been pondering the future Mina turns towards Gorok to speak, then seems to think the better of it and with a sight she turns away, but much to your surprise it's Cob who speaks up. "They don't have nothin' we want, no whoozy no shinny."The latter words translated directly from goblin means something like, no valuables and no alcohol , though a sufficiently determined goblin would imbibe far more exotic substances for the promise of a good time and a sufficiently bored one might think of an unusually shaped rock as as shinny. "If we let 'em, maybe they come back with shinny."

"You want to wait for them, here?' You ask It is not the worst idea Cob had since you met, but it is at least among the five worst.

"No, no, come to Cauldron, maybe buy ring form us," the goblin explains. "I hear Goblers have many, many shinies because they can dig in stone." He shrugs. "Thing that gives dreams already knows about ring, can send goblins right to proper place we not even know we be in now."

"It would be two fewer foes," you insist

"In whole tribe? Whole tribe, too big for us," the goblin points out splaying out his fingers to show 'big' is more than ten. "Tribe too big to go chasing after ring, but if Za... Zo... Talks in Dream Thing show them dead goblins whole tribe have red in head."

Gorok considers the matter for a long moment before putting away the axe and asking Mina outright: "Thoughts?'


"The Tender of Dreams is said to protect against fel powers," she says, more than a little hesitantly, though she seems on firmer ground the more she speaks. "And we should not spill blood without need, just because we are afraid of what might be after us."

That is how rather than an axe to the neck your most recent prisoners receive advice on how to pray to Mina's Goddess, which they mouth after her enthusiastically with Cob's help.

"Are the Cauldron folk likely to welcome them?" you ask Gorok as the two of you pack up the meager supplies you had gathered in preparation for a march at double speed to the settlement.

"They will take anyone once, then judge by how it went," comes the reply.

I guess that might have been what they did with your lot, it's not like you are a common sight in these tunnels

On the hopefully quiet way back which of your companions do you speak to?

[] Mina to learn more about the gods of the burnlands, fair and foul

[] Gorok, question him about how he left his tribe

[] Cob, keep learning goblin and learn more about him in the process

[] Write in

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Definitions:
Red in head - Goblin expression meaning riled up
Shinny - Valuables to the goblin in question, actually shining is helpful but not required
Whoozy - Substance ingested by a goblin in the hopes of recreational use

OOC: Akorian gave it a go, but he did not push so far as to count as an actual diplo roll of his own, he knows what happens when he tries that and he did not want to make the others upset, they are the only company he has in the wide world

The Season of Still Stone

Getting to know Gorok is at first an exercise in patience. He does not like chatter, or more to the point he does not see the point of it, stalking through the mud that bands the shallow nameless creak, his tail drawing sinuous patterns in his wake. One might think he does not enjoy the company... but for the fact that he is here, looking for spiral-caps and black root to add a bit of flavor to the next batch of stew. At first he had been uncomfortable with you trailing him, but when it became clear that you were decent at staying unnoticed even when your shadow wasn't coiled around you he had started to count on your eyes more to keep an ambush from your back while he is foraging.

Eventually the simple signs and short sharp words had developed into a... companionably one-sided conversation as you bring up dwarfen trade routes and market prices for your haul, tales of ghouls, moldfolk, morlocks, goblins and what they might all have to do with each other in this long twisting chase.

"There's part of me that almost wishes we had said no to that coin and not gotten tangled up in..." You catch yourself, eyes flying to the green-scaled face of your companion and expecting to see some some kind of disdain there for the fear you had admitted to. But there is nothing of the sort, so you just keep rambling in between listening for echoes and looking for any sign of peril approaching from among the patchesof blue-grey spiral-caps feasting eagerly on the mud left over in last flood season, or as the pompous duergar tongue would have it, 'The Season of Rushing Water.'

For a little while you ponder asking Gorok to learn his tongue as well, but the goblin tongue is troublesome enough with the way it chops up pieces of words and not even consistent pieces at that.


A distraction comes in the shape of twin sparks of crimson light just on the edge of seeing, eyes. As you start to motion Gorok he waves it off. "Blindhelm, no threat. They are small weak, will not defend territory."

Emboldened by the words you decide to to have a closer look. By the light of the enormous red eyes that dominate its head you spy a frog-like humanoid about as large as Cob, its tongue darting nervously in and out of its mouth.

"I mean you no harm..." you start to say, presenting your palms in the most common mark of peace, but the creature hop-shuffles off, splashing through the mud.


"They have not the wit to understand words," Gorok explains, sounding uncommonly vehement about it. Is that bitterness? You wonder.

After a few heartbeats pause you decide to chance it. "How do you know?"

"When I was a young hunter I tried to teach one of them the words of the Iruxi, my people. He did not understand, not truly, for all he wished to and followed me around. I think it may have been just because I fed him. "

"Why did you? Feed him, I mean?" While you would be willing to offer a meal to a stranger on the road once or twice, this seems to have been more of a uncommon thing.

"I had found..." He stops to dig up a root, leaving you wondering if he had thought the better of explaining before continuing. "There are overgrown stone walls almost sunk into the swamp three days walk-swim from the hatching grounds. They are carved with strange pictures of them, Iruxi in long robes with collars like onto the wings of birds..."

"Birds?" you prompt, curious to hear about another Burnland thing.

"Like bats, but in bright colors, with a beak like a squid," Gorok explains, leaving you with a very strange image in your head, one you do not get a chance to refine as he is not done explaining about the ruins.

"There were other pictures as well. Iruxi shaping waters, raising islands, and building cities upon them, and in one corner there was an Iruxi and another smaller one, a blindhelm, talking, bowing, and praying together..." This is the fastest and most you had ever heard him talk. "I was young and I thought I knew better than the elders, thought they had forgotten our tongue and we ours. Could not teach, could not speak, elders called it waste of time."

"But you think they are wrong?"

"I think that perhaps the elders of the blindhelms once thought as they did." It takes you a moment to realize what he is saying. When it does your eyes fly back to the place the creature had been hiding among the spiral-caps, horror no doubt reflected in your face. Does Gorok have as much trouble reading you as you do reading him? You wonder.

"We do not shape the waters, nor build up islands and set stones upon them. We hide from the warmbloods, drawing ever back into poorer hunting grounds, worse foraging, less and less of us, less eggs too. Maybe one day they no longer have the wit to make a spear, maybe they think claws good enough, go into the water, into the caves, away from the warmbloods. Out of sight and out of knowing."

"Is that were you saw the Xulgath forges and learned so much about them?" you guess, trying to keep your voice under control.

"No. I looked for other ruins. tablets, pots, I think road stones, to mark edge of territory. Like carving into a tree, but more solid. One of those had Xulgath on one side and Iruxi on the other, passing gifts to one another, cloth and food for iron and steel. Maybe things that were can be again. Worth the try at least."

You nod in mute agreement, not trusting your voice.


Cauldron is much as you had left it behind the spears of its guards, loud and filled with the echoes of countless sorts of folks, great and small, scaled and soft-skinned, and thankfully filled with all manner of tasks demanding your attention. From topping up on the supplies that have only grown less instead of plentiful over the past journey, to finding someone who will take your rattling sleigh full of weapons, to buying clothes and shoes that fit and aren't falling apart, but most urgent of all is getting paid for your trouble.

Lost 24 Duergar Trail Rations

"I have a lot of questions for them," Mina says, unaccustomed anger threading through her voice. "Starting with who Egriso of Augustana is and why he's trading in Russet Mold."

"They will want to know quite a bit from us," you point out. "How much are you comfortable telling them?"

"The place above is none of their business, if they do not know about it," Mina starts, to enthusiastic nodding from Cob, muttering something about 'keeping the shinnies safe', though you do not think that is quite what the sorceress has in mind.

"But what about the ghoul? The morlocks? The fruit that only grows in death's ground?" she ponders.

What do you think the party should share with the orcs who hired you and what should you ask?

[] Just that you dealt with the moldfolk and the mold that made them, and asking about the dead mercenaries

[] Explain the Black Fruit and ask if there are any places tainted with death near the mine

[] Write in

OOC: Enjoy.