Goblins and Ponygirls

-# Status: In the village

Recently, the nearby goblin tribe has become very dangerous as they are now using human-riding goblins to raid caravans, hamlets and isolated farms. The village's chief is offering a reward to anyone who can bring him information about those goblin riders and their mounts. The reward is even higher if the captured villagers can be saved and returned and becomes really high if the goblins are eradicated. The chief will pay one gold coing for every right goblin ear you bring him.

You are in the middle of the village, where you just heard about the announcement. It's probably better to gather more information before leaving. There is a tavern, the chieftain's house, and a farmer's market.

-# Status: Alone, far from the village

You are wandering alone, some distance from the village. Unknowingly, you have entered goblin territory.

-# Status: Free, alert, in the city

The city of Valdenmere sprawls across the river basin in a tangle of crooked streets, leaning timber-framed buildings, and narrow alleys that smell of woodsmoke, offal, and the river's permanent damp. It is a large city, thousands of people live here, crowded into districts separated by cobblestone lanes and low stone walls. The market quarter bustles with merchants shouting over each other. The dockside reeks of fish and tar. The upper city sits on the hill behind the walls of the old keep, where the merchant families and minor nobility live behind guarded gates.

Something has shifted over the past few weeks. The whispers started in the taverns, then spread to the market stalls, then to the kitchens and the washing lines. Women vanishing. Not one or two — at least a dozen in the past month, maybe more. Young women, mostly. Shop girls, washerwomen, a seamstress, two daughters of a chandler. Gone from their beds, gone from the streets, gone without a trace. The city watch investigated. They found no bodies but signs of struggle. At the same time, storerooms are being emptied overnight — grain stores, salt cellars, preserves. Footprints too small to belong to any normal person, leading nowhere. The watchmen shake their heads and mutter about beggars or street gangs, but no one believes that, not really.

The locks on doors have grown heavier. Women walk in groups now, avoiding alleys, hurrying home before the evening bell. The alleys behind the market are particularly bad after dark. They twist and narrow until they're barely wide enough for one person, lit by nothing but moonlight filtering through gaps in the overhanging rooftops. Rats skitter in the gutters. Shadows pool in doorways. The air smells of rot and stagnant water.

-# Status: Fallen, Dazed, Pit Trap, Surrounded

You are walking along a road you have taken countless times in the past...

The ground suddenly gives way beneath your feet, dry leaves and loose soil crumbling into nothing, and then the fall. It is not deep, perhaps two metres, but the landing is brutal: your hip strikes a root hard enough to send starbursts across your vision, and the back of your skull connects with something hard at the bottom of the pit. The world goes white, then black at the edges, then a searing, nauseating smear of colour. You are upside down in a heap at the bottom of a narrow pit, surrounded by walls of packed dirt and root matter, the opening above you a crooked circle of grey sky. The smell hits you next: damp earth, rotting bark, and something else, something acrid and animal, the unmistakable musk of goblins.

A whistle cuts the air above — short, sharp, and inhuman. Then another. The sound of small feet, dozens of them, rustling around like rats. Green shapes appear at the edge of the pit, peering down at you. The first goblin is barely sixty centimetres tall, hunched and wiry, his face a mask of stretched, leathery skin and slit eyes that gleam with a perverse, predatory delight. He wears no clothing, only a loincloth of some crude animal hide, stained and stiff with old fluids. His body smells of sweat, mud, and something like rancid oil. He chatters to the others in a guttural language of clicks and grunts, its thin lips pulling back to reveal needle-like teeth. More goblins gather at the rim now, perhaps fifteen, perhaps twenty, spreading around the pit in a loose circle. They carry weapons—bolas, slings, crude wooden clubs, and coils of rope. They are small, most of them, but their numbers are overwhelming, and the way they move — quick, coordinated, purposeful — makes it clear that this is not the first time they have done this. One of them, slightly larger, with a scarred face and a bone-bead necklace, points at you and shouts a command in their guttural tongue. The others obey instantly, some dropping ropes into the pit, others preparing nets by looped handholds. The pit is your cage, and the circle of green faces above you is closing in.

The pain in your skull is a pulsing, nauseating throb, not a sharp one — a deep ache that radiates from the base of your brain and settles behind your eyes. Your vision swims. Your body is stiff from the fall, your hip bruised where it struck the root, and your shoulders ache from the awkward angle of your landing. Above you, the goblins are already lowering ropes and nooses designed to catch limbs and tighten.