We have met the enemy, and he is us.

Yesterday, we had our third session of Brian's Pathfinder game.

To recap, I'm playing Elwood, a Human Paladin.  Jeremy's playing Oxide the Warforged Fighter.  Greg's playing Plato the Half-Elf Rogue.  Robbie's playing Toki the Human Sorcerer.  Jesse rolled up a new PC, Zesser, a Half-Orc Alchemist.  Marc is vacationing back in Spain, so his Dwarf Cleric sat this session out.

We're going through Paizo's "Age of Wyrms" adventure path.  Spoilers await.

So last session, we ended it right after the necromancer Filch surrendered to us.  We manacled him (luckily I'd bought a few pairs!) and interrogated him.  He was a slimy, crafty bugger who evaded as much as possible.  Just as you'd expect.  And we had a quandary.  Cullen the Half-Orc brute wanted Filch's eyes as proof that we'd defeated him.  Well, Plato and Elwood had a problem.  The other two (Zesser hadn't made his appearance yet) were all for ripping his eyes out to take back.  For some reason, though, since he'd surrendered to me, it was assumed that Filch was MY prisoner, so I had final say.  After dragging as much info out of him as I thought we were gonna get, I gave him an ultimatum.  We take him back to town and dispose of him as we like, or we set him free as he desired - but minus his eyes.  He chose to go back to town.

We bundled up all the loot we could gather, the dead bodies (the family of the ghost we'd promised to help and Tagolad the Alchemist - remembered his name this time, now that he's gone!), and marched our captured wizard back to town.

When we got there, Plato was begged to head off to the Imporium by a messenger boy, and off he went to meet his lady.  Turns out the wizard of the rival adventuring party discovered some evil book and then turned on his former colleagues, killing the fighter and severely wounding the elf chick (not sure what class she is...).  She was dying and only trusted him, being a fellow outsider.  He then spent most of the rest of the evening searching for the town's doctor to save her (which he did, and she told him she was leaving for Greyhawk City in the morning, never to return, and he should find her there if he ever got out of the stinking pit of Diamond Lake).  She should have known better.  The turncoat wizard's name was Kelek. 

I've GOT this action figure!  If I'd known the NPC's name, maybe I could have prevented that bloodshed...

The rest of us took the necromancer to Cullen, and when he tried to shake us down I luckily managed to use Diplomacy to get him to let us leave after just turning over the necromancer.  After a brief interlude of Toki the weakling sorcerer trying to muscle his way past the butler of Alistan the Sage (our employer), we turned in for the night.  In the morning we got a bit of help from Alistan, met our new Alchemist Zesser, and then set out to bury the bodies in the graveyard and proceed to the Whispering Cairn.

This time, we managed to explore the remainder of the cairn, fought one more battle (Plato got taken down to negatives, but I was right by him to heal him up), and found some interesting artifacts - two of them were evil.  Oxide had one of the evil artifacts, and I'm not sure if there was an influence from that (notes from the DM were passed), or if it was just the alcohol Jeremy was drinking, but from about this point in Oxide was getting really nasty and bloodthirsty.

We were all getting a bit suspicious of Alistan the Sage, however.  He kept the necromancer's spellbook, and got snippy about paying us when we brought back the obviously powerful artifacts from the Cairn.  Oxide went so far as to attack, but luckily the priestess of Wee Jas (yeah, my Paladin's not hanging out with the correct circles, but luckily Brian's being really cool with my cowboy Pally's code of ethics) who was still in the room used Hold Person on him.  I got the baby owlbear out of his pack (remember that?) and Plato took out the evil artifact and tossed it to Alistan, who took pains NOT to catch it!

Anyway, Ruby Sorceress of Wee Jas has undead trouble, possibly related to the mine troubles, and what do you know, they think we need the necromancer as he's a specialist about undead.  Now, Cullen's had him for a full 24 hours.  He may very well be dead.  But we get a few healing potions to ease our suffering, then head back to the Feral Dog. 

This time, I'm thinking we're definitely going to throw down with Cullen and his boys, so I suggest we get the half-ogre bouncer out first, since he's upstairs, and get him out of the way.  I bluff him (yes, my Paladin lied to sucker him into an ambush - I am planning to spend some time in prayer and contemplation once the undead threat is stemmed) outside, where Zesser used his poisoned greataxe (he's a melee alchemist) to paralyze him.  We tied him up and drug him into an alley, then Oxide decided to just slay him.  He got initiative, so before we could stop him, bam!, short sword in the head.  Half-ogre dead, we proceed back inside to face Cullen...

And that's the cliffhanger ending for this session.

We had a lot of in-character bickering and tension, which was really really cool, actually.  And very little combat.  The fight with the half-ogre barely counts.  We're having a good time in this game, and we've all really come into our characters.  Even Jesse was really into his new PC, who was the apprentice of his first PC.  It's a shame that Brian's leaving at the end of February.  We've only got a couple more sessions to see how this all plays out.