Heh... gets 'em every time

After a bit more debatin' about what to do next, we decided to try to draw some orcs outta the cabins and towards the horse corral where we could ambush them quietly without arousing suspicion in the lodge. The party waited behind some o' the wagons and I headed forth, in my best imitation of Agrawal, shouting to the orcs in the cabins to come help get the horses which had all run away. One of the orcs called back "They're not our horses anyway! They are the shifters' horses, make them go get 'em!" to which I replied "Everyone knows the shifters are lazy, incompetent bastards," and after a string of cursing, one of the guys sent the other 8 from the cabins out to investigate the corral.

Our ambush worked perfectly, and all eight were quickly dispatched before they could shout an alarm. It helped that they had been ready for bed, so none of 'em had armor on. After that, Treble went to scout out the last cabin. We saw 'im waiting outside for a few minutes, and then we heard the orc captain in there screamin'. Brogar and Morangan finished 'im off, and we took a short rest to decide what to do next.

After weighing all the options, we docked our airship, left the crew on the boat, and I marched confidently up to the lodge and knocked on the door. I told 'em I was here with the slaves ("Who are you?" "Agrawal! What, Thorn didn't tell you I was coming?" "What took you so long?" "Eh, had trouble with the crew, a bunch of those idiots got themselves killed and I had to hire a bunch of new guys"), and that we needed a hand unloading the slaves from the ship. He sent out three guys: one to find the dockmaster, and two to help with the slaves. I led the two back to the boat (or should I say, to their demise), as Treble (who had been waiting in the bushes) took out the third.

So far, so good, but we needed to draw more guys out of the lodge. Aurora and Brogar disembarked and stripped down the two orcs that we'd just killed, and put them face down behind them, so that from a distance it would appear that Aurora & Brogar were my crew, dragging resisting slaves. Morangan waited on the docks, and Colvin and Phelaia went onto the ship. Treble went off into the bushes somewhere, and I went about halfway back to the lodge, shouting at the top of my lungs in my best impression of Agrawal, "We need more guys! The slaves are revolting!!"

Out from the lodge stormed another 4 or 5 guys, plus two burlier ones, as I again led the way to the ship, and when they were almost to the ship, Colvin hit a bunch of 'em. The jig was up and although they put up a feeble resistance, they were quite overwhelmed. We did overhear the burly types coercing the minions to fight, threatening to feed them to the ogre and toss them into the pit of the snake gods. Gulp.

We looked back at the lodge, and the door had been shut. Now they all knew it was an ambush, but the hope was that by this time we'd divided their forces enough that we could more easily take the lodge by force. We headed up, and saw two scouts in the windows. Aurora shot one of the windows out and thus began the fray. She's also the one who finally went and re-opened the doors so that we could see in. Inside, they had created makeshift barricades out of their sofas and tables. We were facing maybe 6 or 8 guys up in the arrow slit wall, another maybe 4 wimpy ones on the ground, two burly ones, and one even more heavily-armed one wielding a greataxe. Not much of a deterrent, as most of us just picked them off from afar. Brogar spat some dragon breath in there and killed several of 'em. They realized they weren't much use against us in their tactical situation, and came forth and re-shut the doors, until Morangan opened 'em back up again and back in we went. The eye that I conjured aided our allies to land more devastating blows; Morangan in particular landed two devastating sets of dual-blows, all four blows of which were aided by the eye, against their lead captain. It probably helped that Phelaia had knocked down his defenses. Quickly the orcs were outmatched, and we cleared the room of our foes. Was nice to see that our tactics had worked in our favor this time; we must be getting better at it... had we tried to storm the lodge to begin with, we'd probably have found ourselves in trouble.

Treble teleported into the arrow-slit to make sure it was clear up there, and found a door leading back into the mountain, but not forth into the main room we were occupying, so he began hacking at the slit with a short sword until Brogar upended a sofa, climbed atop, and used the dead bloodrager orc's greataxe to wallop a huge hole within.

Today, after having searched the lodge and the cabins, we found that the riches we found did not even near those we had discovered on the first wave of shifters near the horse corral. Rather, all told, we found 40 gold around the campfire, 40 silver on the guard captain in the cabin, a mundane glaive, chainmail, club, and hide armor; then in the lodge, 8 copper pence in the sofa cushions, 30 silver and 40 copper on one of the minions (I bet he thought it was his lucky day when he won the night's gambling winnings earlier... but not so much, I guess), and another 5 gold along with slave gear in the cabinets.

Meanwhile, we are tryin' to figure out where to rest for the night. Some of us want to go back, move the airship, and sleep on it before returning to the lodge in the morning; others are hoping to use the furniture to barricade the three sets of doors to this room and to sleep here. At any rate, hopefully when we enter the next area, the slaves will be within and we can free them on the morrow.