Chapter 2 - The Raiders’ Camp

"He’s a half-elf, medium short dark hair with a dark goatee. When I left him he was wearing a white and blue tunic.". Nesim hands you the remnants of Leosin’s choker to give him if you see him, and you say your goodbyes at the keep before making your way through the town.

The destruction that the raiders were able to rain down upon these people in just a span of a few hours is astonishing. You walk by the temple and peeking inside as you do, you can see that the raiders looted the place after you left and the altar has been desecrated.

You eventually make it to the outskirts to the south-east and you can indeed see tracks in the grass where it’s been trampled flat. It’s impossible to tell exactly how many they were, but they were many. The tracks lead into the hills of Greenfields.

You walk for about 4 hours, continuing your conversation on how best to proceed as you’re walking. As you move along, smaller tracks splinter off from the main one here and there, but it’s still easy to follow the trail of the main raiding force. The environment changes slowly over time from gently rolling green hills to a more rugged, stony landscape. The trail leads you in between two steep, rocky plateaus, but it remains mostly flat in between. The sides of the plateaus look extremely difficult to climb, but intermittently there are spots where rock falls and subsidence have created sort of natural ramps that leads up.

It’s just after noon when you see smoke rising in a single column a mile or so ahead. You proceed with caution and as you get closer you hear voices arguing and smell the scent of roasted meat. "I’m telling you, the fire shouldn’t be that big! You’re burning the outside of it and it’ll still be raw in the middle! Now you might be okay with eating raw hens like these despicable creatures, but I’m not!". A voice you now instantly recognise as that of a kobold’s responds in anger. "Who are you calling despicable, human!? At least we can actually cook food!".

You inch closer onto a hill, in cover of a rock and peak ahead. The hills lead down into a lower area dotted with rocks and boulders. In the middle is 4 cultists and 8 kobolds, squabbling by a campfire. You see that they’re roasting fowl but it seems that there’s a disagreement going about how best to cook it.

As you contemplate over how to beat proceed, the discussion between the humans and the kobolds seem to come to a conclusion with the kobolds grabbing half the roasted hens off the cooking fire and moving about 50 feet away from the humans and further away from you. They settle over by the southern plateau and start to eat their food. You hear two of the cultist laugh about how useless kobolds are before reigniting the debate about how best to cook a bird on a fire.