Fang asks the party to take Hemmel to Freeport, and they travel there with Orlar who is on his way back as well. They turn the elf over to the authorities there, and Orlar buys them some fancy new equipment. They get to test this new equipment when they hear reports of zombies walking around near an abandoned mine in the hills. They travel there and find a necromancer cleric who has raised a small force of undead to excavate the mine. They attack the necromancer and dispatch the undead.
They are then asked to escort Hemmel AGAIN, this time to a major coastal city, as there has been interest about the strange symbol. They do so and Hemmel is jailed, but the next day he is found dead from unknown means, seemingly natural. The party is investigated, but eventually there are no clues and the case stops, and remains unsolved.
The party spends some time traveling around to small communities and ridding them of monster problems.
Freeport is besieged by a small army of hobgoblins, striking during a major trading convention. The party, alongside other adventurers and warriors, manage to hold the city against the force. Eventually the party sneaks out during the night and finds the army leaders, and kills them. The army falls apart after that and scatter.
When a band of gnolls attack a dwarven caravan and carries off a young dwarven girl, the party goes to rescue her. They discover that she is actually a dwarven princess, about 16 (in human years). She immediately develops a crush on Keenan, who politely declines her love.
One city tells the party that there is a trio of lizardfolk plaguing the farmers. They go to take care of them, and fall into an ambush by over 20 lizardfolk, and are taken prisoner to be eaten. They manage to escape after Jamie morphs into a lizardfolk and manages to assassinate the chief lizardfolk. In the ensuing chaos they manage to escape.
They explore the first two levels of a mysterious dungeon, but turn back before the third floor.
Due to his charming personality and good looks, Justin was asked to be an noblewoman's escort to a fancy ball. The rest of the party, suspecting a trick, decided to also infiltrate the party disguised as waiters. However, Mike got drunk and picked a fight with a duke, who happened to be the father of the young woman Justin was escorting. Meanwhile, Keenan got into a heated religious debate with another cleric who was attending, and got into a fist fight with him, and Jamie was attempting to rob the treasury. Also, Ryan was peeing in the fountain. The Duke demanded Justin help the guards round up the troublemakers, so he had to pretend to fight the others. Eventually he summoned a horde of animals, which overran the ballroom and sent all the partygoers fleeing out of the palace. There is now a bounty on Mike's head and the party is banned from the city.
They then started up a trading company in Cliffside, using the captured pirate ship from their earlier adventure there. They called it ERU (Extortions R Us). It failed because they tried to sell stolen goods and goods that weren't theirs, and also Jamie started a smuggling ring and was smuggling goods in and out of the country with the shipments. It ended when Jamie tried to sell stolen goods to an undercover agent, who busted the whole smuggling operation. Jamie, who did all his smuggling while looking like Hemmel, escaped. It was all traced back to ERU, and the party had to sell the entire operation to a rich wandering bard named Juneau, just to be able to pay for their bail and the massive legal fees.
After selling the shipping company, a gnomish shipping barge docked and asked what was going on. After finding out, they asked if the party wanted to come on a cruise with them, on their new, fresh off the design table cutting edge design craft. They agreed. It turns out the ship is submersible, and goes deep underwater. However, they are attacked by a giant squid, and the ship is defenseless. In disbelief the party asks why they don't have defenses, the gnomes reply that that task was the responsiblity of the weaponry department, who haven't been seen since they were testing their anti-dragon vehicular assault crafts, which were hot air balloons. Justin summons a giant squid to attack the other giant squid, and the gnomes and party escape during the diversion into the escape pod, a giant glass bubble that slowly sinks to the bottom of the ocean. They land on the bottom and are rescued by merfolk, who take them to their underwater city, which is encased in glimmering metal/glass sphere. The merfolk can breathe both air and water, but their city is air-based, not underwater, so the party is able to breathe there. They discuss ideas of escaping, such as traveling through the underground lava passages to the surface, increasing the buoyancy of the city so the entire city rises to the surface, and just drilling a hole in the sphere and letting the ocean suck everyone out. Since the city is so deep down, the water pressure would crush them if they left the city...by the same token the merfolk can't ascend since their bodies are used to the intense pressure. Justin theorized that if they went up to the surface their skin would flop out and become unsolid, and they would be like jellyfish.
Eventually the gnomes tell them they've been working with the merfolk architects and have devised a Buoyant Ascender Flotation Craft...which was a bigger glass bubble with pumps and handles on the outside. Their plan was to have Justin summon giant squids and propel the bubble to the surface. They bob to the surface and as luck would have it, are picked up by a ship captained by the dwarven princess, who had heard Keenan was missing on a sea adventure and had come out to rescue him. They climb aboard and immediately lock up the gnomes in the brig, for everyone's safety, and for theirs, as Mike is seething and ready to kill them all. On the way back to shore, Jamie morphs into Keenan, and seduces the princess. No one else discovers this. They get back to shore and part ways.
Hoofbite, after countless adventures and loyalty, speaks up and wants to create a place to help stupid kids. He names it The Centre for Children Who Can't Read Good and Want To Do Stuff Too. Their motto is "Take a bite out of dumb!" Amazingly, it succeeds because they hire someone else to run the entire operation. However, Jamie starts a smuggling ring operating out of the same building. The center's symbol is a horseshow with a bite taken out of it.
Somehow the party ends up with a broken scepter handle that radiates evil and is constantly compelling monsters to attack the party. The party can't seem to be rid of it, as it keeps re-appearing in their possession. They find out that it is one of three pieces of a very evil artifact, so they go on a big quest and find the other two pieces. One is in the ownership of a insane frost giant with a pet white dragon in the north, and the other is hidden deep underground in hands of a xorn hermit. They retrieve the pieces and then travel to a famous floating library, where a single sage lives with all the answers of the world. He tells them that each piece must be destroyed in a different fashion. One must be thrown into the heart of an active volcano, the other needs to be buried at the bottom of the sea (they travel to the gnomes and get them to make them ANOTHER bubble, but this time with whirling blades and protruding spikes and other assorted weapons, and an electric charge), and the head of the scepter has to be taken onto the shadow plane and thrown into the chest of a nightwalker.
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