[Jack Simth]

Server closed.

A bunch of unusually bright skeletons and zombies defeated (I lost count - there were a large number of them). Made peace with the rest at the point of a claw on their leader. Four encounters, essentially. No rest yet. 600 gp found in a house. I'm fairly sure we would have won a stright-up fight at the end; but I wanted the information; got most of it, too. I was also basically out of spells - had my Extended Rope Trick, one more Shield spell, Speak With Animals, Faeire Fire, and a bunch of cantrips. That, and having the leader order everyone stand down is usually going to work out better than hoping you got them all. Especially if they have a natural desire to feed on intelligent living things. This might eventually come back to bite us, but it'll do well for the moment.

Hmm... should be a reasonable amount of XP, even though they were probably in the range of 1/2 to 2 on the CR (except for the priestess - I don't have any benchmark to judge her CR, as she didn't get to act, but it was probably higher). Thankfully, rolled well where it mattered. How much XP, anyway?

Very good session, by the way.

As to the reason for the three things I'm checking; two incidents don't make a pattern - pretty much ever. At least, not as far as locating the next is concerned. Three points will be easier to work with, but it's like a mass murderer - on the one hand, you want it to stop, so you don't want it to happen again; on the other, you want to find the next victim so you can have more in the way of clues to track down the perpetrator.

I'm checking three things:
1) Straight-line location. Large natural phenomina tend to follow this type of pattern over the short run (a hundred miles or so) - storms, for example. If there's a likely spot that follows the straight-line (or close to it), that's my next choice of destination (although I will consult with Amaki first)
2) Circular distribution. People usually have a base of operations of some kind, and do stuff in a radius from there. Going with the mass-murderer example, above, murders will usually not think about it too much, and go a random distance in a random direction from their home to commit their murder. The more they do so, though, the more you can find the center of it, and get a good idea where it's coming from. The same thing happens with certain types of natural events - huge gobs of lava belched from the mouth of a volcano land in essentially random points in a radius; but when there's a lot of them, you can get a pretty good idea where the volcano is located from where the huge gobs of lava landed. Failing a settlement that is a close fit to a straight line, the next thing to check is inside a circular distribution, using either known incident as a center point. I'm hoping it won't come to this type of progressively narrowing down the location, especially as it is possible to fake out by someone who knows about it, but I'm going to continue to track it.
3) Nearest town distribution: this is for the traveling villian who isn't yet aware someone's on his tail, who is "simply" looking for the next suitable set of experimental subjects. Failing any settlements that fall into 1 or 2, this is the next best bet.

Of course, if I find a settlement on the map that fits two or more of those, that's my next stop (well, after a rest - exhausted, you know).