A Forest Full of Foul Fiends

Walking along paths is always fun, so we begin with that. The party marches on, and on and on, attempting to catch up with the "king" and his rupees. This plan goes alright, except for the little problems of the animals. As they continue going south they see more and more people traveling north, indicating perhaps that something is wrong. Turns out there are some crazy animals on the loose, and the destruction of everything they know has in fact driven them away.

The first  beast we encounter is an enormous boar, something like that there on the side. This thing attempts to impale one of them, but the zerg rush does enormous damage to him, and the pile is victorious. Unfortunately this is not very long lived, as four smaller boars slowly approach, not looking too happy This would actually not be too much of an issue if the party had any decent source of healing. So the boars all deal decent damage, about 30 or 40 to the party all round, but this is just a taster compared to what happens next. Soon they face what can only be described as the most fearsome creature in D&D.

But before we do that, we start with the carving of weapons, shoulder pads, and codpieces. A boar's tusk is nothing to be sneezed at, and  a weapon made out of that could be fairly deadly, so they begin with that. The warlock wants pauldrons made of the smaller boars skulls, unfortunately one botched craft check later and he has silly looking doodads sticking to his shoulders. The totemist then declares he needs a fierce codpiece made of one of the big boars tusk's, and one of the smaller's skulls. This is in fact a sucess, and it is given the affectionate name 'thrusty'. The other tusk is made into a decent sized club for the engineer.

The next fight was against the most terrifying beasts in all the land. Owlbears. Just two of them, but still a fairly difficult encounter with everyone already damaged. The fight didn't start off to well, with the totemist knocked out fairly early on, losing the primary source of damage. The warlock is again up a tree, firing eldritch blasts down, and missing a huge amount, a new feeling for him. Before any damage is dealt to the actual owlbears everyone but the engineer and the warlock are out, and the engineer is not doing too well. Surprisingly they do manage to win the battle, with only minimal assistance from a passing family. So with that encounter done everyone levels up and we end the session.