The party made their way up towards the Pass of Dunatis, following a well-marked trail up through the tree-line on to a tussocky moor, with the vast mountain range of the Snake's Back rearing up before them. Barsh, not having recovered from his encounter with the tree*, remained unconscious and was tied across the back of Vallana's horse. The trail-markers were a string of cairns, well-built and obviously fairly regularly maintained, and though there was no track as such, the cairns were generally pretty easy to find.
* Shane couldn't make it to the game, so Barsh had to be an NPC for the evening. It was decided that the least troublesome way to deal with him would be to leave him unconscious.
As dusk fell, Pandora volunteered to fly about and find a perfect camping spot, which she duly did. The spot was a pretty little dell with a small waterfall cascading down into an extremely scenic pool surrounded by mosses and ferns. It was as picturesque as all get-out; unfortunately it was also as damp and squishy as all get-out, but nobody felt that it would be good policy to bring this to the attention of a fairy with the power to turn one into a newt. Instead they found the dryest portion of the dell and made the best of it.
Early in the night, Tallis noticed a light out on the moor — almost certainly a fire, and a big one at that. She kept an eye on it for a while to make sure that it wasn't spreading, and Sir Basil busied himself by poking sticks into the sodden earth to use as a sighting guide the next morning.
At dawn, everyone awoke semi-refreshed and damp (except Barsh, who remained stubbornly comatose), and breakfasted heartily on porridge before setting out to investigate the source of the blaze. It proved to be several kilometres away, and with the broken terrain it was after midday before they came to the place. The bonfire had been made with whole tree-trunks, and scattered about the place were many well-gnawed bones. Some of the bones were extremely large; the remains of one "drumstick" would have stood taller than Tallis, with a femur easily 25cm in diameter. Nobody could imagine what sort of creature that size would be living up here.
Aloysius (Sir Basil's untrusty steed, a young and enthusiastic but almost completely untrained puppy) made the find of his young life: a huge pile of stinking, slimy entrails, which he immediately began to roll about in. Basil made a leap for safety and managed to avoid being dragged willy-nilly into the foetor, but Aloysius was so pleased with his discovery that he ran frantically from person to person to share his good fortune. Tallis eventually picked him up by the scruff of the neck and plunged him into a nearby stream, to his great indignation and loud complaints.
Meanwhile, everyone else was diligently inspecting the site and looking for signs of who had been responsible for it, completely undeterred by the fact that nobody had any sort of Tracking skill whatsoever. Alas, they could find no meaningful sign, so Pandora once again took to the wing to see if she could see them with her eyes. Flying further up the moor, she could see a group of humanoids accompanied by what looked like burly, bear-like dogs. Or possibly, she thought on closer inspection, actual bears, which would make the people somewhere in the region of twenty or twenty-five feet tall. They were climbing up off the moor on the same path as Our Heroes; a situation that nobody found particularly comforting. Tallis cast her mind back to dreary afternoons of "Monsters of the World" classes back at the Preceptory, and to her own surprise managed to dredge up quite a bit of useful information about mountain giants, especially the bit about their particular liking for roasted human. She noted that the wind was blowing from behind them, and that although the giants weren't noted for a particularly keen sense of smell, their bears were. Bother.
After a certain amount of pusillanimous dithering, Our Heroes made their own way up into the mountains proper, all the while planning for the ambush they all felt absolutely certain would be sprung on them in the night. A plan (of sorts) evolved: they would make a fake campsite with a fire and a bunch of fairy-enhanced cloak-draped mannequins sitting around it, while everybody else would spend a cold and uncomfortable night hiding out in the darkness ready to ambush the ambushers.
For a long time, nothing happened. Then Tallis (able to see in the dark) noticed a giant walking back down towards the moors, but further up the mountainside from the trail; in fact it didn't appear to be much discomoded at all by the extremely steep and rocky slopes. She immediately drew her bow and shot an arrow at it, which missed by a mile. Then another, which lodged itself in the heavy furs covering the giant's houlders but without any obvious effect. He didn't appear to notice it at all, nor did he take any notice of the second arrow she shot into the same shoulder. Tallis found this all rather disheartening, and not only that, suddenly realized that she'd been shooting arrows into somebody without any actual provocation whatever; she didn't actually have a shred of evidence that the giant (still blissfully unaware of having been shot at) meant them any harm at all. Bad, bad Tallis! The giant disappeared around a fold in the mountainside.
Not to worry, the giant was up to no good, as everyone expected all along. It suddenly came running up the trail from below, waving its arms and bellowing for all it was worth. The horses, of course, immediately panicked and broke their halters, stampeding up the trail. The giant came to halt at the campfire, and took a puzzled kick at one of the curiously inert campers sittinga round it. Pandora attempted to reason with the panicking horses, but of course they took no notice of her and ran straight into the sacks of the other two giants waiting just around the next bend.
A hullabaloo ensued, in which the Good Guys discovered several things about giants:
And she'd probably be dead in spite of her fancy armour if the GM hadn't forgotten about falling damage BODY being Piercing until right at the end, and then thought it would just be too mean to go back and retroactively apply it. So, she's still alive. All hail the GM's lousy memory!
To summarise, the party managed to kill two of the giants, but the third (and toughest) ran away. None of the good guys were killed, but Vallana fell a long way down the mountain, and then bounced even further and is currently deeply unconscious.
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