A Most Excellent Update!

Going back a bit, I introduced Rufus, my character for this season's D&D Encounters.  I am having a most excellent time playing him.

Rufus has reached second level, and should soon reach third.  In this time, he has helped root out a most heinous conspiracy in Hommel Lane, helped a poor drunken villager find out about his brother's fate (without the flumphs), and got set up in a most bogus trap, all while gaining followers!

The conspiracy in Hommel Lane involves a most heinous ugly evil god, one who hates the excellent people of the land and wishes to enslave them, or worse.  While rooting out the scourge of banditry has helped the excellent village, that was merely a mere scratch into the conspiracy and the bogus cult.

In an oddity of the setting, one that I wasn't aware of when first conceptualizing Rufus, there are two main religions.  First, there's the Old Faith, one that follows the ways of nature.  A benign following, though, like nature, can be a most dangerous foe.  Second, there's the Lawgiver, the new faith, bringing order to an undisciplined land.  Naturally, given the choice, Rufus went for the lasagna.  Rufus follows the Most Excellent One, whose greatest wish is for all peoples to be excellent to each other and to party on, dudes!  However, in Hommel Lane, Rufus is seen as an harmless oddity, even by the constabulary.

A side trip to the Caves of Chaos (a most forboding name if I ever saw one) brought Rufus face to face with the villager's missing brother.  Seeing that the villager was in great peril of becoming another gateway for the most evil and ugly god trying to return to wreak havok across the land, Rufus defeated the zombie that the brother had become and returned the body to the villager for proper last rites, all while telling the villager of the good his brother had done.  And good he had indeed done, for he had located the second artifact needed to open the gateway for the heinous deity.

During the wake, which was only different from an Irish wake because the deceased wasn't propped on a bier with a beer, Rufus and his comrades continued their investigation, trying to find how deep the most heinous cult had installed themselves into the village.  The discovery that the innkeeper was in on the conspiracy came about when he asked the group to go to the party room in the basement.  Fully expecting the betrayal, the party was ready.  It was during the wait that Rufus discovered that one of the party, a dwarf by the name of Belfire Battleheart, had become a follower of the Most Excellent One.  Rufus now needs a proper church, but that can wait until after the heinous conspiracy has been removed.

What's next, you may well wonder.  I wonder, too, for after springing the trap and trouncing the most heinous brigands to attack us, we're taken their bodies and followed a cavern beyond a secret door leading to the Temple of the Lawgiver.  It appears that the Temple has a bogus infestation of cultists that needs to be cleansed.