The slight hiatus resulted in a gaff on my part which required a bit of rewriting a tiny bit of history. During the September session, the characters did indeed return to the Slag Heap briefly and clean out the ghouls…

…the rewrite will be that they cleaned them out previously and we started again from Botkinburg.

This time, in their travels they came upon Benjamin investigating some movements of goblins and unusal activity of animal movement south of Dreddstan. There had been rumors of a war band of goblins, orcs, and something big in the area. There were also a noticeable increase in movement of animals heading that seemed to indicate they were fleeing something from the south.

While discussing this, they were attacked by a group of weary eyed red-cap goblins. What they didn’t realize was that the goblin attack was a diversion by a number of orcs and a couple of ogres to soften up the party. It almost worked! Their hired rogues were dispatched by the goblin arrows, and their hired fighter proved incompetent. After a bit, even Erin Leafchaser fell to goblin arrows. Their grumpy dwarf companion, Morandir Orc-crusher, expressed a bout of fear and had to be bolstered by their new friend and ally, the ranger Benjamin.

They overcame the warband and set up camp to heal up. Benjamin did some more scouting and found that the animals were indeed fleeing something and whatever it was, it was headed their way. They were injured enough, they decided to spend a couple of days at their camp before heading out to confront this new threat…whatever could it be?