>>5301411>19However, it is not humans who present your first danger or obstacle, but kobolds. As you march forward, you feel a spike of your mana, flooding your muscles with nervous energy. Without knowing why, you take a sudden step back, and shout an alarm. You are just in time to prevent some sort of apparatus of crude, rusted iron and sharpened wood from snapping shut on your foot an ankle, as it explodes from the leaf-litter in respond to your passage.
“A trap!” Paeris exclaims, unnecessarily.
“Kobolds,” the Cartographer says, knowingly.
You are along a worn foot-path in the forest, and you become cognizant that it the forest on either side has risen higher in relation to it as you have progressed. You are in a dip now, a small valley. A perfect ambush point. And where kobodls set traps to ambush others…
“There!” Paeris cries out.
“I see it,” you affirm.
A kobold—a small, wiry creature of scale and sinew, with fine fingers and toes, oversized head and curious eyes which seem to move independently of one another, an thin lips from which small, spike-like teeth emerge in a nervous grin. Its upper face is covered in a mask of pale, dried and carved wood, while its mostly-unclad body is painted with dyes, in elaborate patterns of red swirls and glyphs. A male, by its colouration and build. It goes to run, seeing your inhuman—and no-doubt unexpected—forces, and the failure of the trap.
What do you do?
>Chase him down and capture him for information, and to use him as a guide>Let him go, and announce your arrival—you are here for diplomacy, after all>Use your Fearsome Presence and DEMAND that the kobold halt, and obey>Kill it—you’re here for diplomacy, but you will START by making it clear what happens to slaves who strike their masters 