>>5343168“You took none alive?” you ask.
The leader of the Bogbarri looks at you with confusion.
“Why should I?” he asks. “Harder to transport live meat. Can just dry out, preserve.”
His eyes settle on his dead subordinates, laid out upon the ground in a row, alongside the elves and Paeris, and separate from the dwarven dead.
“See?” he says, quietly, in his croakingly-accented elven. “They do not take US alive.”
He leans down over one of the Bogbarri, and for a moment you recall a hazy, drunken memory of this brutal, man-eating creature weeping into his wine over the loss of a mate and several ‘cubs’. You think you see the shadow of that same expression now, albeit held in check by practice and sobriety. What was this bugbear to him?
The Bugbear Boss stands, and wheels around on the dwarves. He loosens his chain and lets it clatter to the stone, and drags it and he hunches forward and advances towards them, spitting curses in his unknown savage dialect. He begins to twirl the chain, and you can see he means to begin a slaughter. For all his bravado, he is not so cold as you and your race—his blood and passions run hot. He means to slaughter the lot of them, most brutally, in retaliation for his race’s heavy losses.
You can see the dwarves recognize this, too. The females move to shield the children, mothers turning the back and wrapping their arms around their young in a final, instinctive act of love—or merely mercy, to shield them from seeing their death’s approach.
What do you do?
>Allow this massacre, though insist he leave one or two adults alive for questioning>Command the Bugbear Boss to halt—the dwarves already dead are more than enough to make up his share of the ‘dwarf meat’ that you negotiated, but these survivors are yours to question and enslave as you see fit>Facilitate this execution, but in a more… HUMANE manner, for something about the sight before you turns your stomach in spite of your cold heart >Write-in 