There were a lot of plot twists!
It was clear that our first quest wouldn't be a smooth escort mission but Cat was surprises the second thing we encountered after that cougar was a full grown dragon!
And yeah that part 2 of the goblin den was such a zerg rush of goblins and wolves. The bandits running away was also unexpected and of course Cat's duel with Ashley.

>Also that demon. I mean wtf?

Archdemons and demigods are the two vying factions that rival the gods in the material plane and other planes. Both can be thought of as level 20+ adventurers. They cannot take on a god in the god's home plane but can keep gods at bay in other planes. They also sometimes "kill" each other. This simply kicks them out of the plane they're in and into another plane, usually the ethereal plane. SheShe and the Mechathereal goddess are in the Ethereal plane currently.

So archdemons and demigods (they're equivalent) will sometimes align with interesting vessels to foster them. SheShe has aligned with Yulya, the nameless Mechathereal Demigoddess has aligned with Ashley. They sometimes don't ask for permission. If they don't, they eventually have to or they will be forcibly removed. Ashley was given the choice to accept or reject her recently.

Why him? Because he knows about the ship... along with a few dozen others and rumors are spreading.

Yes, the celebrity Alien

SheShe worked out this as an interim solution to: "Why not fast travel?" and "What's the benefit of slow travel?"

Slow travel .67 x speed will add stealth if trained, .5 x speed will add counter tracking if trained, stealth if untrained.

Fast travel 2x speed: Roll Fortitude (best of STR/CON) for each party member every hour. Critical failure adds 1 level of exhaustion, 3 failures will add 1 level of exhaustion. Exhaustion takes 8 hours of rest to remove. Fast travel is noisy and will add to the chances of an encounter.

Bear was watching another counter-tracking video because they had to escape bandits. They made it two hours before Bear rolled critical fail and made them even slower.

Oh, I forgot to mention that any travel beyond 12 hours a day also follows this rule. You risk exhaustion.

Now that said, exhaustion isn't that bad. It has a blanket -2 proficiency on everything affected by proficiency, AC is not affected, and since until higher levels, you only get +2 proficiency anyway, higher levels of exhaustion only affect speed. So even having exhaustion 2 won't stop you from traveling.

I am also allowing concurrent recovery for exhaustion so if you have exhaustion 3, 4 whatever, you can get rid of all levels on long rest, specifically sleep. For now this seems broken but it's very unlikely to get exhaustion 2 except by critical hits and as a front liner, Bear's had exhaustion 2 after a battle and requiring 16 hours of rest after an encounter seems pointlessly harsh.