(Warlock!) The Sleep of the Sword, part 2

The bloody Unmen

Alphonse, human noble

Jonas, human militiaman

Ogden, human bodyguard

Having captured the Miller they intimidated him in to revealing that he was indeed trading weapons for unusual silver but he didn’t know who the buyers were. He met them in the forest at night and they were cloaked and hooded. The characters arranged to hold him until his next trade and then follow him into the woods to observe it. 

Sure enough in a moonlit the Miller trade his boxes of weapons and bags of arrows with figures in voluminous, brown, hooded robes. The characters elected to follow these guys and discovered they were in fact the foul Unmen. Sorcerous hybrids of animal and man, cast off by whatever treacherous magician had engineered their creation. 

The Unmen had seemingly camped around a huge standing stone that they had defaced with obscene writings and abhorrent illustrations. The characters elected to try and pick off the Unmen sentries with missile fire but were unsuccessful. With the entire camp now roused to search for them a curious thing occurred. Another group of Unmen, white of face and daubed with red paints broke cover from a nearby hiding place and also began to flee. 

The PCs cleverly pitted these against a group of their pursuers and then followed the victorious White Faced Unmen back to their camp. All signs of pursuit had died away as the characters observed the White Faced Unmen feasting on roasted meats and drinking sloppily from horns of mead and wine. Also they had captured a weather-beaten looking man and strung him up from a tree in a cage made of wooden branches. Ogden was spotted by a revelling Unman but promptly shot him with his crossbow and luckily it seemed as if he had collapsed in a drunken stupor. This gave the characters an idea and they waited until the Unmen had revelled themselves to exhaustion before attempting to rescue the prisoner. 

They still engaged in a brief fight with the soberest of the white faced Unmen, whilst the others lay stultified with drink. Alphonse the disgraced nobleman was cut several times but the characters triumphed. They liberated the man who identified himself as Kaelin, the missing ranger from Back’s Ford, and the character’s made their way back to the village just as the Sun rose red in the east. An omen perhaps, the times of blood were upon them.