I almost forgot to put this up today, due to a near-sleepless night due to the holiday yesterday. In any case, this story once again follows Myrleena the half-demon elf, in the Red Hand of Doom RPG campaign I was in.

Prior to the events of The Fey-Ri & the Dragon, Myrleena had already been somewhat down on her luck. I’m not going to address the encounter with a hydra, assassinating a manticore and a black dragon, or barely managing to destroy a bridge to slow down the enemy army. Suffice to say things had been eventful.

We chose to retreat toward the capital of the region when the army of hobgoblins reached the small town where we started the game, and the ogres began chucking rocks at us like living catapults. Before this point we’d thought the army was much smaller than it was. Running away in a panic seemed like a much better idea. We were ambushed on the road a couple of times, and then managed to kill some hobgoblins who’d hit a wagon train that proved to be carrying the paychest to a group of dwarves to hire as mercenaries. Now, in most games Myrleena would have promptly changed course to ensure the dwarves got paid for the reinforcements, but that wasn’t part of the adventure, and three of the five players wanted to switch characters. So those three took the chest off to the dwarves, while the last two of us continued on to the next town, and Myrleena started looking for new recruits.

The small town where she’d stopped to recruit others was perhaps the worst possible place for her to do this. See, in this town was a spy from the invading army, who was specifically trying to join any hero groups that might fight them. Myrleena was a lesbian, unsurprisingly, and on seeing a pretty female sorceress who wanted to help, she promptly invited the spy into the group, blissfully unaware the woman was a shapeshifter and had been trying to figure out how to join the group. She also recruited three other new characters for the other players. One was an acrobatic swashbuckler, another a healer, and the last a huge barbarian with a big sword. Getting on their way again, Myrleena started flirting with the spy. Fast-forwarding a bit.

Along the way, we hear from a battered army detachment that the hobgoblins put up a small fortress/barricade across one of the primary evacuation routes from the region to the north. We decided to deal with it, and there found a map mentioning what looked like a commander and lizardfolk in the nearby swamp, and that the swamp elves were going to be targets. Not wanting to lose allies, we charged in.

Unfortunately for us, we quickly learned that not only were the lizardfolk reinforced by a dragon, but they also had a full hatchery for a nasty type of monster called a greenspawn razorwing. Think of it as a horse-sized dragon, but the wings are massive razor blades that it uses in combat, and it breaths a cloud of acidic poison. Fun times. We decided that they’d break and run if we assassinated the dragon, so we grabbed some waterbreathing spells and started trying to sneak in.

You’d think we’d have thought about the fact that lizardfolk can swim and see underwater better than we could. When fighting broke out, we were most of the way into the middle of the camp and right next to the hatchery. As the razorwings started after us, the party scattered to fight different opponents, and left us to get defeated in detail. The dragon revealed itself in the building we were fighting on top of, and we were in very bad shape. Myrleena was debating what to do, and the spy was right behind her. The spy, having been somewhat swayed by Myrleena’s seduction over several days, was debating between clubbing her over the head and dragging her off, and actually helping out.

Finally the spy decided to risk a spell or two before knocking Myrleena out, and started with a spell called hideous laughter. This is a spell that causes a creature to start laughing so uncontrollably that they’re essentially defenseless, and can’t even attack. The problem with the spell is that dragons are highly resistant, and the more unlike you the target is, the easier it is for the creature to resist. There was a single chance in twenty of the dragon failing… and it did. We surrounded and killed the dragon, which made everything but the razorwings retreat, and we managed to kill them and the hatchery, saving the day, and the elves.

In all honesty, if the spy hadn’t joined Myrleena’s group in the battle, they would have all died. It was that close. And thus, her recruitment of an enemy spy and flirtatious nature actually saved the group, and in the end the entire region from hobgoblin domination.