Todays intrepid adventurers are:
Me, currently a Rogue/Sorcerer (7/2)
Tarn, The Barbarian Cleric and now Templar of Kord (4/6/2)
Ragnar, Paladin/Templar of Heronious (6/1)
Iceal, a Monk with temperament problems (7th)
Coletan's player is absent today, so we have his character doing what he does best: binging below decks.

Marsember. I no longer like this city. It seems we have inadvertently sold our souls to Lord Idool in exchange for some free beer. Now I know the real reason for his "friendly checkup" the other day. It was to make sure that all of the party members were wearing his cursed rings. They give him some kind of power over us. Here's what happened.

We were summoned once again to his chambers and he told us he would like us to help him impress Lady Lhal of Arabel up north. We were to go there and receive some mission from her. Fine. So we go there, meet this wench, and try to impress her. Things seemed to be going well until we got to the matter of our fee. She became offended and the mention of money (must be some kind of communist) and told us to leave. The mission was something about finding her dead son and/or his jewelry. He sank in a boat to the south, but a piece of his jewelry was found in the mountains to the north. Therein lied the "mystery".

Well, we figured that even though this wench wasn't going to pay us, we might kill some time and see where this story leads. We stated heading north, but were overcome by pains that seemed to say "Go back to Marsember!" Now that's damn annoying, but we hadn't put two and two together yet. We headed back.

We were summoned to lord I-fools chamber once again, this time he was wearing some kind of parade costume. He seemed pissed. We ranted about how we screwed up, yada yada. I was thinking - Right, we should be getting payment from you, not her... But every time we tried to explain we got these pains and shit. He was beyond paying us. We were commanded, not asked, to go back and patch things up and get going on this mission. How rude. On the way out, we all tried to remove our rings of screw-you, but to no avail. We figured with I-fool's hands so tightly gripped around our collective scrotum we better do as he says. I'll have to find a way out of this latter.

We went back to that bitches castle, and as usual Tarn was our effective diplomat. "Give us the info we need to go get yer son, wench! And there's no need to pay, dammit!" Strangely, that worked. We headed out to a boarder keep called Fort Silas where her son's necklace was recovered.

The keep seemed to be fortifying against invaders or something. Things are getting hot in these areas lately, we're told. The necklace was brought to the keep by some deep gnomes. They found it on some half-dead guy. We decided to sail our boat around "The Loop" which is the patrol path that goes up through the mountains and back to a different boarder keep.

Not too far into the mountains we were assaulted by 10 ogers and one ogre-mage. It wasn't that pansy from Thunderstone, this one had balls. They put up a good fight, but we took them out.

As night was falling and we were looking for a place to camp, we heard some music. We discovered a lady with a flute with a BIG dog. Tarn chatted with her a bit and then she tried to suggest to Tarn that he hand over the keys to the boat. He handed over an ass-whoopin' instead. A bunch more of these BIG dogs burst out from hiding and attacked. The chick cast mirror image and some other crap and kept playing her music which seemed to be encouraging the dogs. The dogs turned out to be winter wolves, but that didn't help them any and they all died. The bard lady was able to escape. Then we got some sleep.