Murphy had slyly set up a point pool for this extermination mission against the gnolls. He wanted to try this "more work, more reward" model and see whether it could better motivate the players by giving them a shared goal and boosting participation.
If the method worked, it would give the vampire lord another "weapon" to use.
But there were still too few players for now. Even if all 140 of his people killed 20 gnolls a day, they would only get rid of nearly 3,000 in a day. Just how many gnoll bandits and their kobold servants lived across Transia was completely unknown.
According to Triss, ever since the Fourth Calamity, 110 years ago, Transia had remained in a state where "there were more monsters than people."
The reason the gnoll bandits had yet to take over the region was, on the one hand, their beastly nature and their love of infighting, and on the other, the fact that the Blood Eagle Clan had guarded this place, keeping the gnolls from acting out of line.
But now the Blood Eagle Clan was gone, and the cunning gnolls had witnessed the destruction of Cadman City. That was enough to stir these barbarians into action.
Earlier, when the Witch Hunters were moving to Murphy's territory, they had discovered that the gnolls in the Andmar Hills had begun gathering and behaving strangely. With the wilderness' many bandit gangs merging so quickly, there was only one possibility among the gnolls!
A "warlord" had emerged among them.
The weaker gnoll gangs would naturally gravitate toward a warlord, and then their numbers would snowball. In the past, whenever a warlord looked likely to emerge, the Blood Eagle Clan would immediately send the Midnight Hunters to eliminate the threat. But Murphy had plenty of other matters