Land of One Thousand Towers Session 2

 What follows is a session of a B/X hexcrawl I'm running with friends. 

Session 2 

Cast: 

Kishar the Hollow Agate, Magic-User 1 

Marko, Thief 2 

Guardsman Vanon, Fighter 2

Loot and kills:

Steel gladius

Two-headed mutant python (25 xp)

One bandit (shamed into submission 20 xp)

Back in the tor village:

While carousing, Vanon carried a tray of drinks and faceplanted, getting a prominent chin scar. (+1 CHA) He says it was games of skill in the barracks, where one other initiate tried to do a cartwheel and hit him in the face with a boot

While carousing, Marko saw too much. He is disgusted with the world and himself, and vows to fix what went wrong. (+1 to all healing rolls (amount healed and skill checks) for the session.)

Flush with cash and favor to the various factions around the settlement, the party decides what to do next. Based on the rumors that they know and what has happened, the following leads are:

1. Some cursed ruins to the southwest exist, perhaps cursed to hide some great wealth.
2. The grasshopper-men on the hills and plains seem to be preparing something, and the party wants to begin diplomacy with some material wealth as an offering (they used the value of the ruby eyes for carousing and have nothing to give)
3. Marko was bitten by a were-jackal, what's the Circle's policy on lycanthropes? The party may have to put Marko down when he starts getting weird.
4. The lake spirit was promised a shrine. 

Quickly coming to their senses as unrepentant tomb looters, they decide on the ruins and pool wealth to buy the last mule from the Circle as a future investment to carry more coin weight.

To the southwest there is wasteland and more wasteland, and the hills days into travel are best described as 'rumpled blanket country,' rough and barren terrain. The party comes across an abandoned hovel—with careful use of throwing lighted stones they shake a two-headed python from it's nest inside, and it's a hostile one.

A short combat later Vanon has cracked ribs, Kishar has learned a talent for throwing stones at heads, and the party has more food in the form of preserved snake. Under the flagstone of the hovel they also find a steel gladius wrapped in rotting cloth, but the ruin itself has been cleared out long ago.

Another day of travel into the hilly country and the party comes across a singular figure fleeing to the east. Their calls manage to convince him to slow down and come back for parley; it's a bandit in ragged pelts with axe and knife. Alone, hungry, and defensive, he lets the party know that if they were outnumbered the bandits would be doing a shakedown.

The party offers him food and a journey back to the village in exchange for disarming him (they also plan to throw him in jail for being a predatory bandit in such desolate lands). They call him "Shaggy" without getting his real name, and learn that his band (his 'boys') found a likely-looking village for plunder in the area. However, this village was abandoned and filled with invisible spirits that tore up the air and earth—worse, when the bandits fled they were fell upon by the restless dead. Shaggy was the only survivor.

Majority rules votes on camping in the hills instead of pushing out overnight, and Kishar takes a page from The Sorcerer's book in subtly shaming Shaggy for his lifestyle of robbery, torture (taking people's supplies and leaving them to die out on the grasslands is torture she argues), and depredation. Also his rampant cowardice for running when his band suffered in its last moments being torn apart by zombies.

She offers a path of redemption by joining the Circle and acting to better a community. He gets pretty depressed but follows the party back home without fighting. 

Another stop at the Shrinekeeper has the party trying out monkey booze made in a small tree trunk: it is redolent of rotting fruit and dew, and extremely alcoholic. Great potency. The party all gets a little buzzed.

Back at the village, Kishar lays out the situation to Captain Annankim: a village even if ruins would be easier to rebuild than build from scratch, the cleansing of one threat to the community is always positive, the potential of wealth to empower the Circle, and the rehabilitation of a bandit into a cooperative member of the community. She gets the go-ahead, and Shaggy is willing to join to revenge upon the restless dead.

They head out once more, and come to the cursed village: a dilapidated ruin set around the long-dried bed of a wide river. Closest to the center of this village, built over an original structure with wreckage, ruin, and salvage is a ramshackle temple three stories high.