A couple of days and healing later, they are sharing a meal at the tavern, last night before hitting the road again. At some point, a young man enters in, the small crowd of farmers grows quiet a moment as they watch him pick his way through the tavern and sit in a corner chair, then conversation restarts, though more subdued. The Runt Gubbler leans across the bar and asks Willem the inn-keeper who the lad is.
"He comes through every few months. One of those with a monthly problem if ye get my meaning" replis the barkeep, wiping down the bar and keeping an eye on the brooding young man in the corner. After almost an hour, one of the boys finally goes to get the man's order. Agaric, the young man, asks about the strangers in town. At first a bit reticent, the boy warms up, talking about the dragraffe in the barn, with a hippograph, and the nice people taking care of those animals, and the boxy things that were stealing things about town, and how this group, which had more people in it before, went out and came back with this box of what looks like a living machine! He then gets the soup as requested.
Agaric, after finishing his soup, walks over to the now wide-eyes Runt Gubber. Crut is merely cleaning his knives, keeping an eye on the approaching man while not appearing to be paying any attention. Agaric cuts to the chase and asks about the ring. There is a bit of play back and forth, and running out of patience, the young man suddenly transforms into a werewolf! Half the crowd darts out the door, Runt tosses the ring on the bar before diving underneath the bar.
In the Fantasy Trip, turnung into a werewolf both doubles your strength and halves your IQ, in addtioanl to a -3 DX while in werewolf form. I let him roll 3D against his now 7 IQ (he has an IQ 14: this character is much more the scholar than the bravo) to see if he could think well enough to get the ring. He actually rolled under and managed to put that ring on. This means his IQ is no longer halved and, with an IQ 14, should be able to change in and out of werewolf form pretty much on demand.
There is a bit of feinting, and the remaining patrons and Willem approach to do combat with the werewolf, with Runt still under the bar and Crut, having backed up into a corner, watches things play out, noticing that the werewolf only defends and never attacks. Agaric manages to escape into the night, and thge Runt Gubber spends some time cleaning his cloth armor later that evening.
The next day, they do a bit of trading, then head out. Willem warns them of bandits on the road, and off they go, with Binky the Hippogryph pulling the large carts behind him, fully healed up and eager to continue the journey. They travel throughout the rest of the day, though by lunch Nova has noticed that hey have been followed since Thistlewaite by a single person as far as she can tell. While they cook some of their food, Agaric, woodsman that he is, has managed to catch a rabbit, gathered some herbs and mushrooms, and makes a gourmet meal in the woods with a near smokeless fire.
That evening, they set up camp a bit away from the road on a path that that barely fits the big carts. Runt takes the first shift, and despite his constant vigilance, does not see or hear anything. Poking Crut for his shift, the little Goblin is soon snoring in his blankets while Crut keeps an eye and ears to the surrounding forest. Nearby but hidden, the sound of marching footsteps wakens Agaric, who switches to werewolf form and starts to track the noises. Crut is entirely oblivious to the approaching skeleton horde. For the next 2 combat rounds, as they approach, he keeps missing his roll as they get into sight of the camp. Meanwhile Agaric has attacked one of the trailing skeletons. Even with the +4 from attacking from the rear, with his werewolf DX so low he manages to miss the skeleton. While the rest of the group of skeletons continues plodding to the camp, a second skeleton turns to attack Agaric while Crut finally sees them, and awakens the rest of the camp! While Wode and Belinda are armed with staffs, they hang back to keep Binky and Lollipop calm in the coming fight.
The battle ensues: Runt manages to make one skeleton shatter to pieces with a 3D lightening bolt, while Crut manages to do 7 points of damage to one. 8 points of damage will shatter a skeleton, so missing by 1 point was sad. Nova is attacking on the one hand and defending with her second blade while Agaric reconsiders his werewold form and decides to turn back to human to be able to wield his shield and knife, as well as get some DX to be able to actually hit anything! Eventually the skeletons are defeated, though Crut took 4 points of damage and Agaric took 3 points. No one else was injured in the battle, and Nova patched up Crut and gave him one of her healing elixers to finish the healing process.
They and Agaric agree to continue as a group, as Agaric wants to know where they got that missing werewolf artifact.
And that's where we closed up the session. I gave some extra experience points for the father when he riffed on me saying wherewithal to be werewithall when we were dealing with Agaric the first time (and why I even use words like that, well, hey, with a degree in philosophy I feel I should be able to use the words I learned, just as I used my skeleton minis for the 1st time after having them for almost 40 years. And I only broke out maybe 1/5 of them. Not sure why I have so many!) I also gave 50 extra points to Agaric as he was acting in character at the inn by being direct as well as running away without hurting anyone. Between that and the session experience points, he should be able to beef up his DX by a point when we get to rest a few days.
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