My group has a habit of getting caught up on dungeon dressing and minor descriptive bits. Sometimes they spend an hour chasing down a bird that I mentioned flying overhead in the forest, or poking at some strange bubbles in a river. There’s no rhyme or reason as to what might catch their attention, but in my most recent Pathfinder session I decided to roll with it. What was supposed to be a snippet from downtime turned into a full-fledged side quest as the group solved the mystery of a mossy rock and a suspicious raccoon.

The Mystery of the Rock

Transitioning between adventures, the group had a week of downtime during which they could buy equipment, retrain their abilities, or earn some income. They didn’t have anything in particular lined up, but one of them had a huldra girlfriend and wanted to check in with her between adventures.

The huldra, interested mainly in woodsy things, gave a report on what had been going on in her forest while the PCs were gone on their previous adventure. I glossed over this because it wasn’t important to the plot, and made an off-handed comment about a mossy rock that she had noticed in an area where moss didn’t typically grow. This was my mistake–while I meant to showcase how the huldra was concerned with relatively trivial wilderness matters, the PCs latched onto the rock and decided that they absolutely had to know why it was there. So a group of 12th-level characters spent their downtime looking at rocks in the woods.

The ranger tracked the rock back to a nearby stream, where some raccoons had removed it and carried it with them because the water made it look shiny. When the rock dried off and lost its shine, they abandoned it. Mystery solved, right?

No, because the group decided that they then wanted to track down the raccoons, whose trails diverged when they had abandoned the rock. I thought that I had made the situation suitably mundane, but the players were determined to make more of it than was there.

So…fine. The players had decided to make a mountain out of a molehill, so I resolved to see how big the mountain could get.

Fear the Wrath of Norberg!

The players decided to take up more of our gaming time by tracking down the raccoons. At this point I gave a quick glance at the Archives of Nethys to find a creature that could suitably challenge 12th-level characters and came up with the froghemoth–a goofy-looking aberration that I had always wanted to use somewhere.

The group found one of the raccoons performing an occult ritual. Upon being discovered, the raccoon revealed its old shape: the homunculus Norberg, their bitter foe.

Wait…who?!

Norberg had been plotting revenge against the PCs for years, but they didn’t even know who he was. As it turns out, the homunculus was once the familiar of an evil wizard the group had killed six years ago. That wizard never mentioned having a familiar, and so while Norberg had been holding a grudge for years, nobody knew who he was. But it didn’t matter…he was about to have his revenge!

Norberg completed his ritual and summoned a froghemoth to kill the adventurers. The battle ended poorly for him, because the first strike against the homunculus was a critical hit that killed him instantly. The party’s witch almost got eaten by the froghemoth, but got off a dispel magic to counteract the ritual. As the sidequest had already taken up a lot of time, I decided to bypass the combat in favor of a counteract check (making this effectively a complex hazard rather than a fight). The check succeeded, and the froghemoth inflated to the point where it exploded, leaving everyone covered in gore. A plot that Norberg had worked on in secret for six years was over in about six seconds.

The Sad Aftermath

With the mystery solved, there was just one more issue: what happened to the other raccoon?

This one had a sad ending. When they tracked down the other raccoon, they found that Norberg had killed and disemboweled her as part of an occult ritual. He had been wooing the lady raccoon with shiny rocks for some time, and the group found a whole collection of them in her nearby burrow.

One of the party almost went total supervillain on us, concocting a plan to resurrect the raccoon and wipe her memories of the trauma caused by Norberg–a plan hindered slightly by the fact that my setting doesn’t have a ton of people capable of raising the dead, let alone doing so with a raccoon. Ultimately, though, the adventurers agreed to simply give the raccoon a burial alongside her shiny rocks and be satisfied with the fact that they had avenged her.

Thus ended a side quest that only happened because of a hyper-focus on flavor text combined with my desire to teach my players a lesson about derailing a session over an insignificant piece of fluff. I think a lesson was learned, but I don’t think it was necessarily the one I intended to teach.

_{Featured Image: Freddy Dendoktoor}