High Noon

The elf had three groups of five people with him. We seemed to be outnumbered. We tried to escape through the kitchen, but they poured in, and the tavern became a madhouse.

A Hill Giant appeared, waving around a giant iron wand and wearing a sheriff's badge on his chest. "Everybody calm down now. There will be no trouble in this town."

He brought us all outside and spoke with the elf and our party. "Choose a man and square off," he said. "The first one to be bloodied by the attack loses."

It was decided that I should face off against the elf with the iron wand. He drew the wand quickly. I was able to fire an arrow in my defense in an attempt to disrupt his attack. But he was far too precise in his shots and he took me down quickly with two metal balls.

"The battle is over," the Hill Giant declared. The penalties for losing the battle were harsh. We were run out of town for a year, and the elf could take any possession of mine. He decided to take my breaching armor. (Fortunately, we had a spare suit of deathcut leather armor that could protect me.)

Caleb looked at us skeptically, as if trying to determine if we were really as experienced as we claimed to be. We told him about the pokeout that we had cleared out earlier. "Well," he said, "now that it's cleared out, someone could start a new mining operation there. That's worth something."

"I could take book, verify the place, then go back into town and sell the claim," he offered. "I'd need to convince everyone that you were staying, though. that would drive the price of the claim up. I could get maybe 1000 gp for the mine." Tiny, our insightful Dwarven Cleric, thought that Caleb would be able to get more.

Kale, our Human Mage, noted that the "blip" was probably us when we were fiddling with the symbol. This meant that we could use the scarab to hide book. This could be useful if we wanted to sit on a claim and didn't want anyone to notice.

We declined Caleb's offer. Tiny sensed that Caleb respected us for not giving book. Caleb believed that you should keep book to yourself.

We asked Caleb about the other cities and towns in this world. The big cities were far away from here. In those cities, people charge a lot for pokeouts. There are guilds in the cities. You need to pay to enter pokeouts, and most of the pokeouts have alredy been picked through.

People tend to pay more in smaller towns because they don't know what it's worth.