Sean's Campaign - Session #21

Well this session had a lot less screwing around, but very little in the way of role-playing. It was about 95% combat.

The big fight, which I expected to take an hour or so of time, took nearly three hours. I even simplified things and did a lot of prep-work and it still wasn’t enough. Instead of adding the temporary allies the group had gained, I didn’t include the allies and instead took out some combatants from the horde. The flight of dragons made sure that the chimeras and wyverns in the horde didn’t bother anyone. Less NPC’s on the initiative stack means quicker combat.

Or so I thought.

There will be no podcast of this session because it would be boring as hell to listen to 4 hours of dice-rolling and almost no role-playing.

Anyway, Brian skipped out on the game at the last minute because of a funeral. He won’t be around next week either. I forgot why.

Everyone else made it to the game though. To keep Justin awake we had him run Zelast, which back-fired on us. (It meant we had to wake him up twice as often.)

We started with the party unsure of what to do next. I suppose they were expecting to fast forward to the big fight, but I wasn’t about to do that.

First a wyvern, larger than the party had ever seen before, and its rider, a man covered in black full-plate armor, landed atop the tallest temple spire in Lataan. He announced himself as General Takral and told the city that it had until noon tomorrow to surrender or face destruction. They then flew off.

Lindo informed the party that Takral had tried to take over the city a couple years prior and failed. But he did have the mayor’s wife captured and assassinated (part of Caspar’s story).

The party checked around to see if anything special was being done. The city appeared to have no intention of surrender and were instead preparing for a big fight.

The party had been a thorn in the side of the enemy, so there was about to be an attempted assassination.

During the night a shadow demon snuck into Lindo’s room (randomly chosen) and tried to slit his throat. But (thanks to a d20 re-roll) the coup de grace save was made (it was a low DC thanks to the demon’s not so good damage). Lindo immediately sprang into action, yelled for help and flurried that demon hard. On the second round of full flurrying, Lindo hit the creature 4 out of 4 times even though it had the incorporeal 50% miss chance and a decent AC in the low 20’s.

But Lindo’s hit points leave something to be desired, and this thing could hit easily, just not very hard. But the cavalry arrived in time.

Artemis opened the door and convinced the demon to leave in his usual manner (magic missiles).

Afterwards the party got some rest, and Ysilia took Lindo to a sanctified temple so she could heal the demon’s vile damage or otherwise Lindo would have a maximum of 20 hit points for the big fight.

All that did was force the party to be a little more paranoid and sleep a little later to make up for lost sleep.

The next day we pretty much fast forwarded to the battle. I gave the party a chance to do something else, but they didn’t use the opportunity, so off to the big fight we went.

I gave the party the option of where they wanted to start, along the wall to fight the main force or at the docks to take a shot at the kraken when it appeared. They opted for the wall since they couldn’t guarantee anything against the kraken.

The horde of monsters, chimera, ettins, trolls, giants, juggernauts, orcs (plenty of them), ogres, athaches, and wyverns were about half a mile away. As expected, the kraken’s tentacles appeared and cast the spell to cover the area in dark clouds. At that point the horde charged.

There was no sign of red dragons anywhere. They were actually invisible and attacked a short while into the combat, further reducing the number of combatants the party would have to fight.

The party would be faced with 2 war trolls (who charged in first), 4 athaches (with 5 barbarian levels), 4 hill giants (also with 5 barbarian levels), a juggernaut (last appearing and slow moving), and 8 invisible gargoyles (with 5 rogue levels and already inside the perimeter and lurking near the party).

I also gave Ari and Artemis one-shot cards that were they NPC helpers doing something to aid (like 5 points of ranged damage, a 6d6 fire ball, give flanking for one attack, etc.) Those worked quite well might use something like that in the future.

The war-trolls charged in first to absorb the damage and regenerate.

Ari and Artemis filled the far edge of the battle map with a couple Walls of Fire to get some nice fire damage that everything charging in would have to pass through (free damage for all).

Next were the hill giants and athaches. But Artemis filled the center of the battle map with Evard’s Black Tentacles and an Ice Storm (or Sleet Storm or whatever). Amazingly the cold spell’s slipperiness took one of the athaches out of the fight entirely, and another several rounds due to extremely poor DM rolling for balance checks.

But the party didn’t have it as easy as it seems. When Ari, Artemis, and Ysilia cast a spell a gargoyle would attack them to disrupt the spell. No spell was ever disrupted by this, but it did force the party to split its attention.

Sorra moved a short distance away from the wall and did the knight’s Test of Mettle challenge, and over half of the gargoyles failed their save. This meant that they had to attack Sorra before anyone else in the fight. So within a round or two an enlarged (spell from Ari) Sorra was surrounded by all of the gargoyles who did sneak attack damage on the rare chance they hit her. This put Sorra in bad shape.

Lindo did his usual attack options (melee and run away, or shoot and stay away). At one point he decided to try to spring attack and trip a troll. That failed, and soon that troll and an athach were on him. Not much later he was at -9 hit points. But he was able to climb back up the wall so Ysilia could heal him. After that he ran away and shot his crossbow from a distance.

Ari did her usual casting while invisible. As did Artemis, but rather than deal with the gargoyles he worked on the horde charging the wall.

Trebor did his massive volleys of arrows again. He was hit by a few arrows and boulders, but otherwise he avoided melee. As usual he did a lot of damage for someone using a ranged weapon.

Zelast concentrated his efforts on the gargoyles for the early combat.

Ysilia had her attention put on healing the moment the gargoyles popped in and it didn’t end until the combat was over.

It took Sorra about 3 rounds longer than it should have, but eventually the gargoyles were taken down. After that she moved to take on the main horde face on, but only after Ysilia healed her (a lot).

Ari used a Solid Fog to virtually stop the juggernaut for several rounds. Otherwise she used her wands for damage.

Artemis kept up his usual nuking, but this time while on the battlefield. He was almost found by a hill giant, but got away after doing a sudden maximized, sudden empowered Fireburst. Afterwards he focused his spells on the juggernaut until it stopped moving.

Zelast joined in with Sorra for the melee fun.

Eventually the party took out everything, just like last time. But this time they were given a less friendly start to the fight.

They searched the bodies and found all kinds of magical armor and weapons, all large or huge in size. Heh.

Next session, the aftermath.