After last week our characters got some much needed rest once they returned to the keep. This time around consisted of my qunari fighter, the human cleric, a tabaxi rogue, and two human sorcerers though the one was raised by dwarves, was convinced he was a dwarf and gets mad when people call him human, and has severe schizophrenia so he often sees things that aren't there and can't tell the difference.
Our characters woke early in the morning to find a half dragon standing outside the keep walls with some prisoners as the raid was coming to an end. He demanded to fight our strongest party member in exchange for the release of the prisoners, who turned out to be the wife and three children of the man in charge of the city's armies.
Of course the group thought that I should go since I am the only tank of any kind in the party. It wasn't until I got my butt handed to me on account of some bad dice rolls that the DM informed us that we weren't meant to win anyway and the captives were killed.
My poor character tried to make apologies to the husband, but he was too drunk to care. She dragged the party along to help dig their graves and put up some flowers because she felt really terrible that she wasn't able to save them.
As we were debriefed about the city and everything else, a monk came up to us and asked for our help. His master had been captured in the raid and was an important person as he knew much about the cultists and Tiamat herself and the monk felt he'd be instrumental in helping figure out things like where their ritual site would be and how to stop them.
As such, we agreed to infiltrate the main camp and figure out what was going on. Along the way we defeated some cultists in an ambush and stole their robes, as we were informed the cultists basically come in five types; the lowest tier are not actually cultists but just the raiders and bandits looking for their share of the profit, those in black robes that are not fully initiated into the cult but have shown interest in it, those in red robes that are full initiates, those in purple robes that are initiated and have risen to the higher ranks, and the cult leadership that don't wear robes but there are only 3 of them and everyone knows who they are.
So we managed to get two red robes and six black robes out of the deal, and used those to get into the camp. Red robes on myself and the crazy dwarf sorcerer, black robes on the others. We basically told them we were the rear patrol that we killed and we lost two people in the fight but the enemies had been defeated so it was fine and we managed to pass the needed checks to make them believe it.
We found the master monk in question and debated on what to do. The way the camp was set up if they wanted to close it off they easily could and we would have no chance of escaping, so while the cleric of course wanted to free the other prisoners we couldn't smuggle them all out without being noticed and if we tried to arm them and fight our way out we'd be overwhelmed and killed. So we had to leave the other prisoners to their fate of being used for manual labor and fed to the drakes, rigged up a dummy with some straw, cloth and magic (having two sorcerers in the party was a good thing!) and used one of our extra black robes to smuggle the guy we came in for out of the camp despite his objections.
On the way back the monk informed us of a few things. Firstly that there were many kobolds in the ranks of the cultists, but they were barely tolerated by the other races. Mostly the kobolds were there because it's easy to manipulate them into worship and they are for number bolstering more than anything else. Second was that the cultists did have a clutch of dragon eggs at the place they were storing the treasure and that was thus their primary base of operations as opposed to a big raiding camp like the one we'd rescued him from and yes, they did intend to hatch those eggs. And thirdly, which we already knew, they were collecting treasure to build a giant hoard to summon/release Tiamat.
He also asked us to return the the camp to see if we could gain further information such as where their primary base of operations is or how close they are to summoning Tiamat. So we donned the stolen robes and returned a few days later to let the whole business of his escape die down, but we found the camp mostly empty. The treasure and prisoners had been moved, and it looked like the remainder of the people were there to pack up the camps and such before moving on.
Sadly we didn't find much among the remaining people, so we ventured into the cave system that was connected to the camp and was where they had been storing the treasure and supplies. After convincing some guards we were supposed to be in there as we were checking to make sure nothing had been left behind we ran across some violet fungi, took some Googling to figure out they were monsters and not just story stuff that was placed in the module we were playing with for flavor text or whatever, fought them and won.
Jokes of the week included comparing how near death enemies were with KFC chicken because both of our sorcerers had fireball. For example "How close is that one to dying?" "He's more original recipe than extra crispy at this point."
Also jokes about the cultists having hats or something else with the written inscription of "Make Tiamat Great Again", and of course the obligatory "Well that one seems like a fun guy" jokes when fighting the violet fungi.
And finally, our GM from the past few weeks had been standing in for one that had apparently just up and vanished. Said vanished GM returned, but was content to sit on the sidelines and allow the current game to run its course which made us all pretty happy. Looks like unless the fill in GM up and vanishes too this will be a pretty regular thing and I'm happy about that :)