More Exploring - and many new things are learned

Having made short work of the smith and his assistants, the adventurers turned their attention to a side door in the smithy. Gil heard the sound of something moving around on the other side, possibly the sound of something dragging on stone. He entered the room and seeing an orcish woman dragging a chest, he sneaked up on her and slew her with a couple of quick blows. She tumbled over onto a dustpan. It seems she was cleaning the room and moving furniture aside.
In the room they found a silver thimble of small value and, searching a loft where the smith’s assistants apparently lived, found some model polearm heads they were carving out of wood. Little else of value was found.
Continuing on, they found more storage, more empty barracks, a scattering of minor valuables, and then, finally, some more people. They stumbled onto the room of a merchant or bookkeeper of sorts. Gil successfully bluffed that he was there on real business, checking in about other problems around the keep. The merchant cared little for such things, but Gil persisted. In the room with them were a pair of ugly humanoids of particularly disturbing appearance. It’s hard to describe them somewhat as they had odd tufts of fur and faces that were part muzzle/part normal. Even their laughter had an odd cantor about it. Gil gave a signal and the attack was on. The merchant was badly injured with a single pass by Gil and never put up a fight while Tesrae made short work of the humanoids.
As Gil and Tesrae tried to interrogate the merchant, Bob Arby closed the door. As Kendrick and Bob were out in the hall, Kendrick heard a door close behind them. Setting up to open it and toss in a fireball, they were a bit startled to have the door suddenly burst open and a bunch of kobolds pour out. The pair made short work of the kobolds and found that they had apparently been entertaining themselves by tying a badger to a halfling when they overheard the commotion in the other room with the merchant.
Gil and Tesrae took the merchant to the forge where they managed to intimidate him into telling them where he was going (Suderham), where Dame Gold was likely taken (Suderham again), and how to get there. They also pocketed his money. Gil clobbered him and left him unconscious and tied up in the smith’s loft.
Eventually, the party found its way to the main kitchen/mess hall where Gil tried to bluff the cook into divulging more information, which he did. The cook eventually did become suspicious and ditched the party by heading downstairs.
After giving up a bit of a lead, Gil and Kendrick gave chase only to find their route taking them through the laboratory again. This time, they saw a figure dart out the other side. As they crossed the room, the cloaker (stationed here from upstairs) attacked Gil. Gil fought off the effects of the cloaker’s powers and fought back. Kendrick joined the battle. After fighting a little while, as the cloaker tried to back off, Kendrick nailed it with a well-placed arrow from his mighty composite longbow (which he isn’t actually proficient with… lucky shot). They decided to return to the upper floor.
Meanwhile Bob and Tesrae were searching around and found filthy quarters on one side, nicely kept (if spartan) quarters on the other. They had found Icar’s room. There was a chess set designed for a blind player and all the furniture was bolted to the floor. And as they searched, they heard a voice behind a locked door, cursing out Icar. Tesrae was a bit demanding and brusque in her inquiries and got little information before Kendrick and Gil returned.
Gil managed to pick the lock and nearly turned to stone when he found that the woman chained up in the closet was a medusa! After some difficult and awkward negotiations, in which Bob Arby was the strongest voice of mercy and compassion, the medusa agreed to let the party have most of the contends of the chest Icar had put in the closet in return for freedom and enough cash to make it back to her homeland in Ahlissa.
Gil managed to give his lockpicking skills a workout some more by opening the chest (difficult lock). Inside were many coins, pieces of jet, and bracelets. There was also a smaller coffer whose lock confounded Gil’s best efforts.

Infiltrating the Stockade

On the 2nd day of Goodmonth, during a driving thunderstorm, the adventurers present (Gil, Kendrick, and Tesrae) made their move. Under the cover of invisibility, Gil scouted around the stockade wall, looking for a point reasonably vulnerable to a narrow stone-shaped tunnel. Trying to avoid the hobgoblins on the wall and the roving patrol, Gil selected a location and hit the jackpot. The narrow tunnel led to a storage room filled with tuns of water and with a set of stairs leading to a deep well. The room was otherwise unoccupied.
Gil returned to the rest of the party and they set out, taking advantage of what cover they could and the driving rain to close without being observed. They squeezed through the tunnel, Kendrick briefly getting stuck.
From this point, they began a cautious exploration of the stockade, trying to reach the center of the structure. Their path took them northward first, encountering storerooms and a few other curiosities but no defenders. Of the odd things they found were various defensive structures and pitfalls including a bent hallway with a mirror at the turn, designed to delay attackers as defenders maneuvered around to the rear, and a mounted bear placed on a cart and set up on a ramp. With a thorough search, they managed to find a pendant in the bear's eye socket, behind a poorly placed glass eye.
They also found recently used barracks and other storage, including some jerky that they stowed for later and some element of a payroll as well as a few sundries. But they still found no defenders. Finding the main door of the building, they decided to backtrack rather than force a confrontation with whatever guarded outside (they could still hear, through the wooden roofing, the hobgoblins on the parapet and the roving patrol).
Returning to their original infiltration point, they set out in another direction and found a very odd room. The room was terraced and had numerous slaves, chained to the walls, sitting and staring off into space. They would not react to stimuli tried by the heroes, leaving the party quite unnerved. But there seemed to be no defenders in that room either, so they passed on, wondering what they could do for the poor souls.
Not far from that room, they heard the ringing of metal on metal and could smell burning charcoal. They had found a smith's workshop. Gil entered but was spied by the smith (a human) and one of his orcish assistants working the bellows. The smith seemed to assume that Gil was a hired mercenary but Gil went for a more authoritative bluff, claiming to be a replacement sent to run the stockade after Markessa's death. The smith responded, "Dead? What are you talking about? Markessa's up on the parapets," and figured out that perhaps Gil wasn't supposed to be there at all and weapons were raised in anger.
Gil was swiftly joined by Tesrae and Kendrick and the three made short work of the smith and his two assistants, though not without some blood being spilled on both sides.
The session left off there. The heroes are coming to the conclusion that the defenders of the stockade have been noticeably depleted by their earlier forays but are also now grappling with the riddle of Markessa and whether she is alive... or not.

Note to anybody just jumping in: The heroes had captured Markessa, but when the hillmen brought the slaves into their village, along with the captive slaver (a bit worse for wear due to the slaves kicking at her), they summarily cut off her head. It now hangs on the witchdoctor's hut where it will add to his powers. Or so they thought...

Campaign background so far

I admit that the impetus for the whole campaign has largely been mine. Thinking back on many of the modules I had played (and run) in the past, I was thinking of how much I enjoyed them but could and would run them differently now. That got me thinking I'd like to run a Classic Modules campaign. Unfortunately, other priorities in gaming came up and it had to sit on the back burner for years.
Shift to 2000 and 3E comes out. Well, now I have even more reason to try running the Classic Module campaign, trying out the new system. Finally, after a year or so, I got the time and players together to give it a whirl. Getting the players together actually wasn't hard because we were already meeting on Thursday nights. It was finding the time to get into the game schedule that was hard. But into the schedule I got and the game started.
We started out with Return to Keep on the Borderlands, a very nice update of the original, even if there are some encounters that are fairly brutal to 2nd edition characters in it (which is what the module was written for). Converting to 3E ended up being pretty easy, and there were few cases in which I actually had to change the number of creatures encountered.
I set the Keep along the Lortmil Mountains in western Veluna and the year is about 580 CY but with a few modifications to the timeline. I like the 580 time period, but the adventures listed in the timeline (ToEE, Slavers, Giants, etc) have not been played out yet. The characters did pretty well for themselves. The initial party breakdown went like this:

Gorin - elven barbarian from deep within the Vesve forest
Jie-An - half-elven bard from Celene
Kendrick - human monk from Greyhawk
Ilsa - human cleric of Boccob from Greyhawk
Bob Arby - human sorcerer from Greyhawk
Sargen - halfling ranger from Geoff
Alton - human rogue from Greyhawk

They added the fighter Raven, an ex-slave from Amedio jungle, soon after. Unfortunately, both Gorin and Raven fell in the Caves of Chaos. Gorin was killed by a scythe wielding priestess, and Raven was slain by a minotaur's axe. Soon after that, they were joined by two new characters:
Larren - human wizard from Greyhawk
Pale - human druid from the local area around Kendall Keep (and his companion mountain lion).

After doing their best to clear out the caves, they started tracking the slaver Mendel back to the east. Larren also wanted to track down his daughter who had been fostered (after a major family problem involving the death of his wife and estrangement of his in-laws) with one Dame Gold who lived in Safeton.
On the way, they encountered a few raiders, a few other miscellaneous encounters (including a reasonably friendly kobold sorcerer), and eventually arrived in Verbobonc. While in Verbobonc, they had a couple of adventures fighting a slaad spawn that made a dramatic appearance on a local stage (thanks to an adventure in Dungeon Magazine) and helped a merchant from Dyvers get back some stolen contracts for Baklunish spices from the west (also thanks to an adventure in Dungeon... good source that).
While in Verbobonc, they learned that Jie-An's father was to be married very soon. They hastened to the wedding in Celene and found that there was trouble brewing in the town. One love-struck halfling has disappeared, causing to little consternation. An investigation found that the halfing had been nabbed by a harpy. He was rescued and the wedding went off, delayed by only a day. (thanks to the adventure "Wedding Bells" in, you guessed it, Dungeon).
Wanting to get back on the trail of Mendel the slaver and see Dame Gold, the party continued to the east where they, fortuitously, picked up Mendel's trail in Safeton (where he said he had been from originally anyway).
While Larren met with his daughter's foster, the party found that Mendel actually headed south from here to the town of Elredd. As luck would have it, Dame Gold's midsummer feast of Sotillion was interrupted by raiders (while the party was back in town) and much of the household was carried off by slavers. Larren's daughter had managed to flee to safety (a surprise for the player, I think, who expected me to extened the plot hook of his daughter by having her be a captive). But the party embarked on an investigation anyway to find the Dame. This led them to sail with a local Safeton patrol vessel to Elredd and then on to just outside Highport.
They fought pirates on the way and tried to keep a relatively low profile in Highport, except for Larren who posed as a wizard from Greyhawk willing to help the Slavelords gain a foothold into the city. By this time, the party composition had changed a little. Tesrae the fighter (human) had joined them and Ilsa and Alton had moved on (bagpipe classes conflicted with game time, believe it or not).
As one group tried to bluff their way into the graces of the Slavelords in Highport, another tried to infiltrate the sewer/dungeon. In the end, it was the dungeon infiltrators, after blowing their secrecy, who managed to successfully bluff their way in as assassins by the skin of their teeth. Both groups were sent, separately as the Slavers didn't know they were connected, on to the interior and the Slaver Stockade.
Unfortunately for the players, secrecy on the road turned out to be difficult as they travelled with none other than Mendel, the man some of them had been pursuing, himself. They tried hard, but Mendel eventually pieced together enough information to rat them out to Icar and Markessa once they arrived at the stockade. On the way, however, they managed to befriend a Moondog who now owes them 1 favor and that isn't bad.
After a meeting with Markessa that went bad, a brief capture of Bob Arby, and an ambush in the hills, the party embarked on a major campaign to take down the stockade.
Larren, realizing that his plans to infiltrate the slavelords has failed and with increasing friction with members of the party a bit less morally flexible than he, decided to lead the first group of slaves they had freed back to civilization. In his place, the party recruited Ricket, an escaped slave, and a friend of his who had been scouring the area looking for him and trying to put down the slavers, Gil, an untrained 'cleric'. Both hail originally from Geoff.
The party has now made a few different forays against the stockade, concentrating mostly on the underground entrance from which Ricket escaped. Since this location was strongly fortified against them with their last attack, they are contemplating a more frontal assault against the weakening defenses. They have so far captured Markessa, killed her bodyguard, slain Icar, slain Executioner, fought a goblin shaman to an inconclusive end, chased off a wizard or something whose main attack was to blast them with a cone of cold, captured a lower-level officer of the hobgoblins, freed a larger bunch of slaves, and dealt a bloody nose to the goblin-worg cavalry.
The slaves they have freed are currently in the custody of a local hill tribe in the process of dying out. While the tribe wanted to assimilate all of the slaves into their tribe (particularly the children), the heroes offered to help find the tribe a new and safer home as a counter offer. The hill men seem to be accepting this offer, at least on a provisional basis, as a way out of their current predicament.

Stranger in a Strange Land

I've never done anything with a blog before so this is going to be an experiment as much as anything else. Inspired by a friend's example with Spike's Journal, I'm going to record some of the stuff going on in my Greyhawk campaign (run on semi-regular thursday nights opposite Call of Cthulhu and Roanen).