Call me Daddy - Some Dragon, Probably

[Jonathan]

Generated from full session audio by GMAssistant.

The party departed the keep at first light, their spirits high and their packs full, as the folk of the keep nodded and waved them off into the morning. They marched north through the Valley of the Oracle under clear skies and beautiful weather, the river kept faithfully to their left as they had been instructed. Ko and Pat ranged ahead of the group by a good distance, scouting the trail while the rest of the party followed in careful formation. The first night passed without incident, and come morning, Snusha foraged the surrounding land, returning with enough berries and mushrooms to keep the whole party nourished for the day ahead.

By midday of the second day, the road had dwindled to little more than a faint trail when the party came upon an abandoned wagon sitting motionless in the open. It was loaded with sacks of flour, animal feed, and bales of hay, but there was no driver, no horses, and no sign of life anywhere nearby. Snusha heaved one of the heavy sacks aside and discovered a small purse hidden within, containing twelve gold pieces. A careful examination of the surrounding ground revealed boot prints, one of which bore a monogrammed letter "P" pressed into the heel, and the unmistakable signs of a bandit ambush. The supplies appeared fresh — nothing had rotted or weathered — suggesting the attack had not happened long ago.

A debate broke out among the companions over what to do with the wagon. Snusha argued that someone might be going hungry back at the keep, and that the honorable thing was to send word or return the supplies. The rest of the party, however, reasoned that the keep was in no immediate danger of starving and that their mission to the Caves of Chaos could not afford the delay. Snusha made their disappointment plain, dragging a foot through the dirt in quiet protest as the others pushed the wagon off the road and covered it with leaves and branches, intending to retrieve it on the way back. If one knew how to read the subtle expressions of a Dragonborn, they would have seen the disapproval etched clearly across Snusha's face.

The party had not traveled much farther before they were confronted on the road by a man named Prawl — a bandit leader wearing suspiciously fine boots with his own name embroidered along the side. He stepped out from behind a rock with a drawn sword and demanded their money and their gear, and his posse of armed cutthroats fanned out around him to make the point. Pat wasted no time, hurling a dagger that found its mark, and the fight was on. The bandits fought back with crossbows and scimitars, but the party pressed them hard, with Snusha snarling in Prawl's face and Ko wreathing his battle axe in crackling thunderous energy. Oswalt proved particularly deadly with his light crossbow, cutting down one bandit and then another in quick succession before Prawl himself was brought low.

The last surviving bandit, a woman with an eye patch, broke and ran the moment she saw her companions fall. The party gave chase without hesitation, running her down before she could escape into the wilderness. When the dust settled, the companions stripped the fallen of their weapons — scimitars, crossbows, and a rapier — along with twenty gold pieces split among the group. Curiously, the rapier bore Oswalt's own name inscribed on the blade, a detail that raised eyebrows and earned a few baffled looks, though no one could explain it. It felt like the kind of thing that would matter someday, even if no one knew why yet.

The trail grew rougher as the party pressed on, eventually giving way to swampy fenland thick with tall reeds and the smell of standing water. As they pushed through into a small clearing, they came face to face with two enormous lizardfolk warriors standing guard over an elderly shaman draped in robes and leaning on a staff hung with tokens and charms. The warriors immediately assumed defensive positions, and one of them warned the party in rough, halting Common to go about their business and forget they had ever seen them. The party might have done exactly that — until the shaman looked up and fixed his gaze directly on Snusha.

He called Snusha "scaleskin" and questioned whether they walked among the others by choice or had been enslaved, noting that humans had a long habit of subjugating those with scales. When Snusha pushed back, the old shaman spoke of ancient nobility and of a world that existed long before humans had left their holes and trees — a world with real history, pioneered by his people and others like them. Then, with blunt astonishment, he told Snusha the truth: their sire had been a dragon. An actual dragon. Snusha, who had been left as a babe in the keep of Poseidon and had never known their own origins, stood in stunned silence as the shaman expressed disbelief that they did not already know this about themselves.

The shaman began to slip into a trance, his voice dropping into a soft, melodic chant in a language none of the party could identify. Before he fully lost himself to it, he uttered something that hung in the air like smoke: that through strange eons to come, something did not die — that it lay in its chrysalis, dreaming. The words were cryptic and unsettling, and the wardens grew increasingly hostile, leveling their barbed spears and demanding the party leave. Snusha, driven by a desperate hunger for answers, pushed forward between the two armed warriors anyway, refusing to be turned away. The shaman snapped out of his trance long enough to tell Snusha that their path was not yet finished in this place — and that was all he had left to say. The party withdrew slowly, Snusha casting one long look back over their shoulder as the fens swallowed the lizardfolk from view.

The companions made camp that night in a dense forest of gnarled trees and grasping roots, lighting a fire and brewing tea as they talked through the strange events of the day. Snusha had little to say, lost in thought about dragons and lineage and a shaman who had known more about them in five minutes than anyone ever had. The night passed quietly, and come morning the party foraged what lean pickings the strange forest offered before pressing on toward their destination. By the time the Caves of Chaos came into view — a ravine pocked with dark openings, some marked with crude paintings, one lit from within by the warm flicker of torches — the group was as ready as first-level adventurers could reasonably be.

They chose the torch-lit cave on the lower left, reasoning that an occupied cave was better to clear now than to leave at their backs. The exterior walls bore rough paintings that looked like territorial markings, possibly depicting goblins, and the interior was lined with wall sconces burning steadily — someone had been here recently, or was still here now. Oswalt and Pat led the way inside, moving carefully through the ten-foot-high passages. Pat spotted a goblin crouched in the shadows further in, but his crossbow bolt went wide, and the goblin screamed an alarm — "Briark!" — that echoed through the stone corridors. Within moments, arrows were flying from multiple directions as hidden goblins opened fire, striking both Pat and Oswalt before the party could fully react.

The situation deteriorated quickly. A goblin warrior rushed forward and slashed Pat with a scimitar, leaving him barely standing, and a follow-up arrow dropped him to the cave floor unconscious. Aelric conjured a thick bank of fog that swallowed a large section of the cave, cutting off the goblins' line of sight and buying the party precious seconds. Snusha charged into the blinding cloud to reach Pat, while Ko navigated the darkness and managed to locate the fallen monk. Pat stirred back to consciousness just long enough to resist Ko's grip, mistaking the large figure looming over him in the dark for a goblin, before Ko called out and the confusion resolved itself. Pat used what reserves he had left to pull himself upright, battered but breathing.

Snusha unleashed a concussive burst of force from within the fog that staggered one of the goblins, and Aelric stood ready at the edge of the cloud with a freezing cantrip prepared to strike the first creature that emerged. The party began pulling back toward the cave entrance, battered and bloodied but still on their feet. The goblins, blinded by the fog and wary of what had already hit them, did not press the pursuit immediately. The companions regrouped at the mouth of the cave, catching their breath in the flickering torchlight, the darkness of the Caves of Chaos yawning behind them — and the knowledge that they had only just scratched the surface of what lay within.

[Dave]

It’s important to note that Enik did not single out humans in anything that he said.

He used the terms “hirsute” and “hairy.”

He also used the terms “bantlings” and “whelps.”