The Case of the Mushroom Dealer

by Jennifer R. Povey

There’s places you want to be, there’s places you don’t want to be, and then there’s places everyone kind of passes through.

The Forum at Deepgate falls, for the most part, into the last category. Oh, true, there are people who live there and work there. Most of those are merchants. They buy from the mountain dwarves to sell to surface folks and vice versa, always kind of in the middle between those two worlds. That’s probably why half of them seem to be hill dwarves and the other half goblins. And no, it’s not true that the goblins are always the disreputable ones. Goblins aren’t what people think they are, really.

Snag is, too many people really do think they know what goblins are, and when one shows up murdered, it’s obvious, to those too many people, that he or she must have asked for it.