The Enemy
Nualia Tobyn
Aasimar. Adopted daughter of the late Father Tobyn. Believed dead for five years, and
not. Killed by Stone in the market square with a critical divine smite. The town's
version of the Late Unpleasantness has her dying in the fire that took her father and the
old chapel — the fire that supposedly took the whole family. What actually happened is
that she survived it, and was pregnant at the time.
What she looked like
Seen for the first time at the North Gate, fifty or sixty feet behind her own front line, through a break in the smoke:
A young woman in half plate. Long fair hair. A greatsword on her back. And her left arm completely red and scaled, ending in claws.
She raised the claw, spoke something "guttural and nasty," and laid a bane over the party's breakthrough.
What she was actually doing
Not revenge. A ritual, and the party did not know that until after she was dead.
Her rooms at Thistletop gave up a large leather-bound tome, wrapped and bound in a hide nobody could identify — "you think for a second it might be human, but no, it's a little too thick for that" — with the symbol of Lamashtu on the front, containing several rituals.
One was bookmarked. Lucian worked through it.
The Blessing of Lamashtu — a multi-step ritual to transform a person into a fiend.
Two of the steps are written down:
| Step | What it was in practice |
|---|---|
| The burnt offering of the body of a good-aligned priest | Father Tobyn. The fire, five years ago |
| The burnt offering of a significant number of sentient creatures | Sandpoint. The whole town |
And in the margins of that page, in her own hand, notes about Sandpoint as a burnt offering.
Her one transformed arm is the ritual caught partway through. She died with it unfinished.
The book is now in the party's hands, and it contains other rituals nobody has read. Lucian's stated intention is to get it somewhere with a vault and a temple — Magnimar, not Sandpoint.
What Orik told us, five sessions before we read any of it
Under interrogation in a boat, from a bodyguard repeating things he had half-overheard. Every part of it turned out to be true.
- She wants to be turned into some kind of monster, and has already started
- The earlier attack on Sandpoint was not a raid — it was to get a priest's body out of his mausoleum, which she burned and sacrificed on an altar to her goddess. One of her arms changed
- She believed sacrificing the whole town would finish it
- She was hunting a sealed door in the Thistletop ruins with a trapped fiend behind it, and had not found it yet
- She was waiting until she had the fiend out before attacking
- She had been sending Ripnugget out to rally the other goblin tribes
- She treats goblins as expendable
- Platinum blonde. And — asked directly about a child — "There's no child." She has a lot of scars on her belly
The undead were hers
The drowned things that pushed the goblins' reed floats across the river, and then came ashore to fight at the southern bridge, she raised, from people she had killed. The goblins did not bring them. She supplied them.
The fiend on the road
Stone's divine sense picked up a fiend of some sort to the east at the North Gate, before anybody had laid eyes on anything.
That was her. A half-finished Blessing of Lamashtu reads as a fiend to divine sense. The party detected the enemy commander personally, through the smoke, and had no idea what the ping meant.
Lamashtu
A name we have from the cover of a book, and effectively nothing else.
The ritual is called the Blessing of Lamashtu. The symbol on the tome is hers. That is the entire extent of what anyone in the party has been told.
The obvious candidate for whose shrine we walked into at Thistletop — the crimson room, the black marble altar with bones on it, and the ten-foot statue of a heavily pregnant woman with a kukri in each taloned hand, a reptilian tail, bird's talons for feet and the snarling three-eyed head of a jackal — is her. Nobody has confirmed it. Nobody in the party has ever named her out loud.
Someone should probably ask Father Zantus.
Her people
| Who | What they were | Where they are now |
|---|---|---|
| Nualia Tobyn | The reason for all of it | Dead — market square |
| Lyrie Akenja | The mage. The scholar of the group | Dead — North Gate, second wave |
| The goblin druid | Staff, thunderwave, spike growth, healing | Dead — North Gate, second wave |
| Chief Ripnugget | Warchief of the Thistletop goblins | Dead — North Gate, second wave |
| The bugbear | Their champion | Dead — Thistletop, in the corridor |
| Orik Vancaskerkin | Hired muscle | Changed sides. Alive, on our payroll |
| Tsuto Kaijitsu | The inside man | Alive, in the town jail |
Of seven, four are dead, one is in a cell, one took the party's money, and the only one who ever believed in it fought it to the end alone.
Lyrie Akenja
"The mage lady." She led the river crossing at the first stage of the siege — goblins on bundled reed floats, pushed across by Nualia's undead — and when it failed she followed it down to the bridge and fought there.
She had a wand of magic missiles and emptied six charges into Grace at once. Then she
cast sleep into the defenders and dropped both fighters, which came within one goblin
of losing the stage.
Thalanadil put sixteen points of upcast magic missile into her and gave her terms:
"Unless you want to die — call your goblins back and go home."
She surveyed the field and left, and Lucian could not close the distance to stop her.
She came back at the North Gate in the second wave, and did not leave that one. Her spellbook is now Thalanadil's.
The goblin druid
Never named. Never spoken to. A goblin with a staff who stepped out of the smoke at the North Gate, stamped once, and drove a thunderwave through the line that knocked Stone off his horse and threw Shalelu backwards — and opened the gap that cost the party the entire stage.
He came back later with spike growth across the approach to the wall, which then cost
the defenders as much movement as it cost the attackers.
Before that, at the bridge, he was somewhere in the column spending cure wounds on the goblins the party had just blown apart. He never once came within reach of anyone.
He died in the second wave at the gate, along with the rest of them.
Chief Ripnugget
Warchief of the Thistletop goblins, and a name the party only ever had from Orik.
He rides a giant lizard. Nualia had been sending him out to the other Lost Coast tribes to bring them in, which is why the force that came down the coast road was drawn from several tribes rather than one.
He was reportedly coming down from the fort above during the fight at Thistletop, and the party left before he arrived. He never appeared by name again. He died at the North Gate.
The bugbear
Their champion, in the specific sense goblins mean it — the outsider a tribe measures itself by. He came up on the party mid-fight under Thistletop with a spiked club, javelins and a shield, opened with a three-javelin volley at Grace, and worked through club–club–shield rounds that put Thalanadil on one hit point and later put him down entirely.
He drank a healing potion mid-fight, which nobody appreciated.
He died to Stone's divine smites and Grace closing it out with a manoeuvre.
Killing him is what started the war. Orik's own read, given freely: losing him would be a morale defeat serious enough that Nualia would stop waiting for her fiend and move early. That is exactly what happened.
Shalelu has been hunting him for years and does not know he is dead.
Tsuto Kaijitsu
Ameiko's half-elven brother, disowned by their father, and Nualia's man inside Sandpoint. Alive, in a cell under the garrison, and has been since before the recordings begin.
He passed the goblins the town's layout and its weak points — including that on the north
side the trees grow right up to the wall, which is exactly where the horde came from. He
used the family name to get his sister somewhere isolated.
Two of his documents are in the party's hands: his journal, and the letter he used to lure Ameiko out.
Orik was briefly put in the cell next to him and recognised him at once.
"There was this half-elf guy. The bad guy. His name was Tsuto." "Wasn't that the guy we caught, that was the son of the — the sister works at the tavern?" "Yeah, that's him. He's kind of a jerk, just saying."
Orik also noted, drily, that he had preferred Tsuto's plan to the bugbear's: come up through the tunnels under the town rather than assault the walls. "Frontal assaults didn't really do it for me."
He is the only member of Nualia's circle still alive and in anyone's custody. Nualia is dead. Lyrie is dead. Nobody is coming for him.
Nobody has decided what to do with him. He is also Ameiko's brother, and whatever happens to him is a family matter as much as a legal one.
The goblins themselves
- They hate dogs
- They are frightened of horses, which are big and step on them
- They are not enthusiastic swimmers
- They love fire and are badly distracted by it
- They do not cooperate well inside a tribe, let alone between tribes. According to Orik, "it was only the promise of being able to burn Sandpoint to the ground that appealed to them"
The force that came down the coast road was drawn from several tribes, which is Ripnugget's work. The Thistletop tribe itself is now "pretty much decimated and scattered."
How many of the other Lost Coast tribes he actually talked round, and where those ones went afterwards, nobody knows.