Greasy stairs can’t stop me from stealing a stuffed dire wolf!

Cast:

  • Youte Haire (he/him) - human - rogue - Ron (present)
  • Nerali (she/her) - tiefling - bard - Kae (present)
  • Vaeris (he/him) - elf - warlock - Aaron (away)
  • Dezri (he/him) - half-elf - rogue - Sammy (present)
  • Aethrex (they/them) - fire genossi - druid - Zach (away)
  • Tala (they/them) - half-elf - wizard - Nick (present)
    • Tisk - rat familiar (away)
  • Zendari - Eladrin - artificer - Joe (away)

After dealing with the Waller situation, we returned back to the Emerald Enclave and let them know. They gave us some cool magic items and a decent amount of gold!

With our rewards in hand, we went back to Trollskull (home?) to drop off our stuff and get some much-needed rest. Vaeris wanted to go look for somebody to gild his skull thing, so he went off to do that.

Back at Trollskull, we mentioned to Istrid that Meloon (with the intellect devourer) had been looking for her, but had specifically let Skeemo survive. Istrid was enraged - she immediately told us to go make Skeemo regret their decisions. So instead of going to bed, off we went!

I’m really proud with how the Skeemo thing unfolded! I think somebody was watching out for me (for a change)!

Tala cast invisibility on me and Dezri, then they and Nerali knocked on Skeemo’s door. They talked their way in - Nerali did an incredible job of getting Skeemo to open the door! When they did, we all snuck in and started searching around.

While Tala and Nerali kept Skeemo busy, I snuck upstairs. Half way up, I set off a trap! The staircase was suddenly covered in slippery goo! I nearly had a heart attack, but I got the Immovable Rod activated quickly and managed to catch myself! It was exhilarating!

I managed to get into Skeemo’s room and used my x-ray vision to find a letter confirming he’s indeed working for the Xanathar. I also found their precious stuffed dire wolf. The letter was trapped but I took the dire wolf downstairs just in time to see Tala turning into Nihilor to try and scare Skeemo. It seems like it worked! Skeemo confessed everything and promised to work with us. We gave their dire wolf to Istrid as insurance, though I think she’d prefer if we’d killed him.

There’s too much killing in adventuring, nobody prepared me for that…

The next morning, we did some shopping then went to meet Jarlaxle. He asked us for a plan, which kinda sent us into a panic - we’re supposed to plan?? We put the “Bumbling” in “Bumbling Breakthroughs”!

After reflection, I think that’s actually true: sometimes we try to plan beforehand, but it’s hard to know everything that’ll happen. I feel like we need to plan on the fly better and worry less about planning up-front. If Jarlaxle doesn’t like that, he can find other pawns. If Dezri doesn’t like that, he can deal with it. :)

Anyway, we discussed a lot of ideas and decided to besiege the Xanathar in the simplest way: put on disguises and wander in to scope things out and see what’s going on. Once we have more information, we could regroup and perhaps think of a fuller plan of attack!