In the previous session that I missed, the party decided to climb the mountain and fight the dragon. After getting their behinds handed to them by a behir, which is way weaker than the ancient dragon they were trying to go after, they decided that wasn't such a good idea. The human wizard decided it would be a great idea to teleport them back down the base of the mountain to get away from the behir and failed miserably, taking them to another plane of existence. In order to escape the wizard made a demon deal, but they popped out in the Underdark. Then they messed with a golem and all got pretty well blinded, leaving only the dragonborn ranger capable of seeing anything because he has a pseudo-dragon familiar that thankfully had dark vision.
Cue yesterday's session. Seven players - myself as the dwarven barbarian and others as the aforementioned dragonborn ranger and human wizard plus a kobold monk, tiefling warlock, a human warlock and a human sorcerer.
We're in the Underdark and come upon an abandoned Drow village. There's nothing there, so we find the road that leads out and head that way. Leads us to a large cavern strewn with bones, where we wake up a cave dragon. Think centipede, but the top 1/3 has a pair of wings instead of legs and it's got a dragon's face with snapping centipede jaws on the side.
The same human wizard who got us into this mess turns the tiefling warlock into a behir to save her from getting killed (the tiefling being genderfluid and able to change on a whim, but presenting as female at the moment) and spawned quite a few "Behir we go again!" jokes. But the darn dragon nearly killed both myself and the kobold, though as it tried to flee the behir killed it. We got some seriously good loot out of it, a feather token for me and a hellhound cloak for the monk which basically allows him to put it on and shapeshift into a hellhound for an hour.
In the center of the room was a vertical chimney that we found a way to get up, and it basically led into a dwarven mine at the heart of a dwarven city. We left, and poked around for information. The city is run by the Red Hand Mining Company, and the human sorcerer thought it'd be a wonderful idea to try and get some money for killing the dragon. When all we got was a runaround we gave up and found an inn for the night. The trouble-making human wizard got drunk and there was a discussion of drunk polymorph but the sober of us stopped that terrible idea before it even began.
Watch goes smoothly all night, but the kobold monk dozed off during last watch and we woke up with a message in Abyssal written on the window and a creepy lullaby echoing in the room. The message were the lyrics to the lullaby, talking about a creepy man coming up to a room and kids hiding from long claws and the like. Our poor human sorcerer took an arrow to the chest with a message written in Abyssal saying "Stay out of my business - The Black Talon".
The Black Talon is apparently wanted worldwide for hundreds of murders and bandit raiding caravans. They're also at the head of a mercenary company by the same name, but no one knows what they look like or even their real name.
My poor barbarian is done with this nonsense and tries to get them all to just leave town before they all get killed, but the kobold is pretty insistent that we stick around and try to get some more information on the Black Talon. Which leads to squat other than realizing we're now 16 years in the future because when the human wizard took us to another plane of existence and back to the material plane time warped so we've all been missing for 16 years.
So we decide on some shopping first, with our DM doing a terrible impression of a Southern accent for the Minotaur shopkeeper. I picked up a cloak that lets me put it on and cast the dimension door spell once per day (it basically lets me become Nightcrawler from X-Men, I can teleport to any location I can see, describe, or give a general direction too like 100 feet south or whatever) because I was jealous of the kobold getting the hellhound cloak.
Afterwards we hit up the job board, where we found a bounty for the Black Talon. The kobold insisted it was fate, so we took the job. The problem is everything we tried failed; any kind of locator spells on the arrow to find where it had come from were just failures of dice, and while we did try to find out where the arrow came from all we could find was that the tip was made of a very rare metal and no one seemed to know what kind of feathered beast had provided the fletching for it.
There was also intense discussion about what exactly the business was that we'd stepped in. The party was pretty divided between it was either having killed the cave dragon (which the mining company people admitted was a pain and they had to mine a wide area around its lair to keep from disturbing it which was rich with a lot of rare metals) or having gone poking at the mining company people looking for a reward for having killed it, leaving the Black Talon worried we'd uncover something we shouldn't.
In the end it became too late to plan much more, so we went back to the inn to sleep. We woke to found ourselves all with just 1HP, 100 gold missing, and our kobold monk apparently having spoken to the Black Talon on his watch but not really able to remember what the guy looked like and under a serious Dominate Person enchantment that our magic users detected. Though it was pretty obvious because despite being so eager to stay and find the Black Talon the day before now the kobold was trying very hard to get us out of the city and back on another mission.
We tried a few tactics to break the spell but failed miserably (because the dice hate us) and then the human wizard had the fun idea to try and track the gold the Black Talon stole from us. Which led him outside and triggered an exploding trap that damaged him and the kobold who was trying desperately to hold on to his legs to keep him from going.
While he recovered the tiefling sorcerer tricked the kobold into going with her to a temple, deceiving him into thinking it was a bar. Only he figured it out fast, and kicked some poor temple worker butt before getting out unscathed. But while they were out the sorcerer was telepathically speaking with us all and we devised a plan to meet back in the center of the city then split up into six different directions. Whoever the kobold tried to follow was going in the right direction to find the Black Talon, and the other five would trail them.
Which, of course, was a plan that failed miserably. The kobold tossed a fit and managed to convince everyone but me and the tiefling sorcerer to stay, and we went out to our respective sections but looked back far too late to realize the kobold wasn't following us. I was attacked and knocked unconscious with another arrow and a note that read "Nice try." and the sorcerer was led to me by some illusions, found me and carried me back to the group where thankfully our ranger had some healing spells and got me on my feet.
The session ended there, sadly. But next week we get to figure out what exactly we're doing. I'm pretty sure my dwarf is going to, once again, insist we leave town. And instead of calling her a sissy since the kobold is still under the effects of the domination he'll actually agree instead of splitting the party again and we can not get ourselves nearly killed trying to chase a dude who is clearly stronger and smarter than us in addition to having access to more resources.
Not sure what we'll do, exactly. Apparently they were chasing a meteor that fell but that was now 16 years ago so it's long gone, and we're still pretty sure taking on the ancient dragon is a bad idea. But it's an open world and we can do what we like, so hopefully we'll figure out something along the way XD