How many kobolds does it take...
Jun. 18th, 2003 12:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terrycloth...to get to the chewy center of a Juggernaut? The answer is 'more than 200', apparently.
Tonight was my not-very-underdark themed D+D game. After lots of shopping, the party did some more fighting for the chaos cult, then ventured into the ruined city of Ephae in search of... well, of something. And found it.
The party returned Vashti's corpse to Sophie's cult and asked to get her raised. The sylphs agreed to do so, and reincarnated her as a black bear. The party was very angry, particularly May, who'd never really liked the chaos cultists in the first place and felt betrayed.
Sophie explained that she hadn't been sure a normal 'raise dead' would work, since Vashti was an outsider and not native to her plane. So she'd used a divination, which had told her to have the druids reincarnate Vashti. And it had more or less worked -- wasn't a bear a perfectly good form for a fighter? The kobolds never seemed to mind when they ended up as one.
Vashti herself was at least prepared to try her new form out, and if she decided she hated it she could perhaps eventually find someone to cast 'wish' or 'miracle'. Better than staying in Limbo (literally) until the party could find some other way to bring her back.
May was unsatisfied, and asked for the potions the party had (not really) been promised in return for the attack. Sophie said she could give them to them, but it would take a few days to finish making them, and meanwhile the task was not finished -- the device they'd actually hoped to find and destroy hadn't been installed at the temple the party had raided. It was still in transit, which was both annoying and a great opportunity. If the party could somehow retrieve it from the caravan...
No. No no no no no no no. So Sophie snarled, told the party they'd have their potions, and started assembling a task force to take out the caravan on her own (even though the sylphs had never even been able to get close to it without getting glitterdusted and forced to flee). Of course, once it was assembled, the party insisted on going along. Although only Vashti intended to fight.
Two hundred kobolds waited in ambush for the caravan. The two lead scouts were pincushioned before they could raise the alarm, and it looked like the ambush would work as planned... but no, Abbey would have none of that. She snuck out of the chaos camp and alerted the order forces of the ambush. Then snuck back and said she'd been scouting ahead and the caravan had seen the ambush coming.
But, surprisingly, even knowing about the ambush, the caravan continued forwards into the trap -- at least, the lead element, consisting of a strange stone wagon carved like a Tximisti with 6 arms and 12 eyes, rolling forwards without a horse to draw it or anything. There were also some humans following closely behind it, looking a bit nervous.
The kobolds fired! 200 arrows bounced off... something, harmlessly. They fired again, with the same results! Sophie tried a fireball, which in its fiery flash revealed a 10-foot square cross-section corridor framed by walls of force, through which the stone wagon and the people with it were travelling, right past the ambush.
Sophie followed along until she found the end, and was immediately glitterdusted, and backed off, ordering her kobolds and bears (including Vashti) to circle around to the far end of the tunnel and chase the priests and their magic wagon down.
Several kobolds and bears were killed by magic missiles and monks, but they were winning, forcing their way down the corridor despite their losses. Sophie webbed the far end of the wall of force tunnel to trap the carvan in its bottle...
...it didn't exactly work, though. The Juggernaut dispelled one of its own walls of force and charged out into the milling reserves, trampling kobolds by the dozen! Sophie's lieutenants, Lox and someone who shall forever remain nameless, tried magic against it directly, to no effect, and were paralyzed and crushed. The kobolds tried to run away, but were hedged in by walls of force and crushed.
Crushing them took a while, though, and meanwhile the surviving human escorts were hounded down the tunnel and killed by Vashti and the kobolds, although all the other bears were slaughtered by the monks before they were taken down by kobold arrows.
While the party backed off to watch, Sophie assembled the surviving kobolds from the tunnel and passed out magic arrows created with a greater magic weapon spell. On the count of three, a hundred kobolds fired a hundred magic arrows at the Juggernaut... taking it down nearly halfway. Then it protected itself from them with a wall of force (not that they had another set of magic arrows to fire) and gradually regenerated while finishing its slaughter.
Sophie ordered a retreat, but the party stayed behind to capture the mundane supply wagons that followed a little later -- Vashti improved-invisible and hasted cut through the guards like a hot knife through butter. There was some gold in the wagons, but not much else. They tried to take the wagons back to kobold central anyway, but while they rested one night in their rope trick the wagons were recovered by a large patrol from a Lantham outpost.
So, chaos was defeated. While waiting for various items to be enchanted back at Sophie's (much emptier) base, they heard reports of how the temple they'd sacked had been repaired and activated almost on schedule, and had driven back the chaos mists from a hundred miles of previously taken territory, exposing hundreds of chaos beasts to the light, where they were hunted down and killed.
After a little more shopping, and three weeks waiting for enchantments, they received Sophie's promised potions of Restoration, along with a charm to tell when a 'chaos storm' was coming. They were warned to get indoors whenever a storm threatened, because staying out in one was likely to be fatal... although not for Vashti, who was a creature of chaos now.
So, to Ephae! The countryside was slowly disintegrating, sure, but the city itself was in truly sad shape. The center of the city had been claimed by the chaos mists. Vultures circled overhead. Demons stalked the streets. The party avoided the former and ended up fighting the latter, for a round, in which the demon couldn't hit Vashti and Vashti couldn't penetrate the demon's damage resistance, at which point May polymorphed it into a slug, and it plane shifted away to find someone to dispel it.
At last, they reached the edge of the mists. The solid, opaque edge of the mists. They summoned a formian worker, and ordered it to charge in, charge back out, then report. Horrible screams and crunching noises were heard from within the mist.
Slee turned into a bat and flew around with blindsight, and saw that while the opaque mists thinned out a bit after 60 feet, at the same point the ground started swarming with chaos beasts -- dozens within range of his blindsight. They gradually started trailing off in density after a few hundred feet, but never really stopped being there. He flew back to report, and the party decided to fly in with magic rather than risk fighting the chaos beast army.
So they flew through the mist, down what looked like the main street, looking for the 'tower of magic' they'd been told was located somewhere inside the city. They passed a bank, having learned their lesson, mostly (they resolved to loot the bank on the way out). And then... there was the tower.
Of course, they decided to investigate the tower starting from the roof... and so the first thing they saw was the glowing anti-chaos-sphere. Since the charm indicated a storm was coming, they rushed over to it and begged to be let inside. And were. Slee's new companion (a dire boar polymorphed into a dire eagle to be able to follow the party into the mist) was trapped outside in the storm, as it was a little slow following its master into the scary shiny sphere, but Vashti drove everyone else out of the airlock and let it inside before it was actually killed, although it was a close thing (it was harmed and enervated).
Inside the sphere, four wizards and a priest had been living on created gruel for a year, wondering when the hell the chaos storms outside would go away. They told the party that they'd been working on the device when the city had been taken by the mists, and that the priest with them had fled from the party in the magic school below, looking for somewhere to hide from the coming terror... and hadn't spoken since.
They said that the sphere was *supposed* to be mobile, but they didn't have the key which allowed it to be altered, or the components to do the enchantment, although both were (or had been) kept inside the tower. There were locked doors in the way, though, and monsters, and the occasional storm -- after two botched attempts they'd given up on it.
But now adventurers were here... a fetch quest you say? And a trip to the Shimmering Isles? Yes, that's where they'd been planning to take it...
last week next session
Snags this week were, first of all, the bait-and-switch on the caravan raid. I hadn't intended to ACT OUT 200 kobolds trying to kill a Juggernaut, I'd just sort of assumed it was going to be a horrible slaughter. The idea was that the party would either agree to do it, or the chaos cult would try and fail. Having the party refuse, and then go along with the army anyway, was the worst of both worlds as I had to ACT OUT the entire fricking battle. That took half the night, with most of the party just watching since they had no intention of helping.
Also, I said the party could barter for magic items with the cultists. The party had a *lot* of magic items saved up. Hundreds of thousands of gold worth (thankfully not 'each', at least). They managed to move most of it, even if not everything they were looking for was available. That also took a long, long, long time.
Tonight was my not-very-underdark themed D+D game. After lots of shopping, the party did some more fighting for the chaos cult, then ventured into the ruined city of Ephae in search of... well, of something. And found it.
The party returned Vashti's corpse to Sophie's cult and asked to get her raised. The sylphs agreed to do so, and reincarnated her as a black bear. The party was very angry, particularly May, who'd never really liked the chaos cultists in the first place and felt betrayed.
Sophie explained that she hadn't been sure a normal 'raise dead' would work, since Vashti was an outsider and not native to her plane. So she'd used a divination, which had told her to have the druids reincarnate Vashti. And it had more or less worked -- wasn't a bear a perfectly good form for a fighter? The kobolds never seemed to mind when they ended up as one.
Vashti herself was at least prepared to try her new form out, and if she decided she hated it she could perhaps eventually find someone to cast 'wish' or 'miracle'. Better than staying in Limbo (literally) until the party could find some other way to bring her back.
May was unsatisfied, and asked for the potions the party had (not really) been promised in return for the attack. Sophie said she could give them to them, but it would take a few days to finish making them, and meanwhile the task was not finished -- the device they'd actually hoped to find and destroy hadn't been installed at the temple the party had raided. It was still in transit, which was both annoying and a great opportunity. If the party could somehow retrieve it from the caravan...
No. No no no no no no no. So Sophie snarled, told the party they'd have their potions, and started assembling a task force to take out the caravan on her own (even though the sylphs had never even been able to get close to it without getting glitterdusted and forced to flee). Of course, once it was assembled, the party insisted on going along. Although only Vashti intended to fight.
Two hundred kobolds waited in ambush for the caravan. The two lead scouts were pincushioned before they could raise the alarm, and it looked like the ambush would work as planned... but no, Abbey would have none of that. She snuck out of the chaos camp and alerted the order forces of the ambush. Then snuck back and said she'd been scouting ahead and the caravan had seen the ambush coming.
But, surprisingly, even knowing about the ambush, the caravan continued forwards into the trap -- at least, the lead element, consisting of a strange stone wagon carved like a Tximisti with 6 arms and 12 eyes, rolling forwards without a horse to draw it or anything. There were also some humans following closely behind it, looking a bit nervous.
The kobolds fired! 200 arrows bounced off... something, harmlessly. They fired again, with the same results! Sophie tried a fireball, which in its fiery flash revealed a 10-foot square cross-section corridor framed by walls of force, through which the stone wagon and the people with it were travelling, right past the ambush.
Sophie followed along until she found the end, and was immediately glitterdusted, and backed off, ordering her kobolds and bears (including Vashti) to circle around to the far end of the tunnel and chase the priests and their magic wagon down.
Several kobolds and bears were killed by magic missiles and monks, but they were winning, forcing their way down the corridor despite their losses. Sophie webbed the far end of the wall of force tunnel to trap the carvan in its bottle...
...it didn't exactly work, though. The Juggernaut dispelled one of its own walls of force and charged out into the milling reserves, trampling kobolds by the dozen! Sophie's lieutenants, Lox and someone who shall forever remain nameless, tried magic against it directly, to no effect, and were paralyzed and crushed. The kobolds tried to run away, but were hedged in by walls of force and crushed.
Crushing them took a while, though, and meanwhile the surviving human escorts were hounded down the tunnel and killed by Vashti and the kobolds, although all the other bears were slaughtered by the monks before they were taken down by kobold arrows.
While the party backed off to watch, Sophie assembled the surviving kobolds from the tunnel and passed out magic arrows created with a greater magic weapon spell. On the count of three, a hundred kobolds fired a hundred magic arrows at the Juggernaut... taking it down nearly halfway. Then it protected itself from them with a wall of force (not that they had another set of magic arrows to fire) and gradually regenerated while finishing its slaughter.
Sophie ordered a retreat, but the party stayed behind to capture the mundane supply wagons that followed a little later -- Vashti improved-invisible and hasted cut through the guards like a hot knife through butter. There was some gold in the wagons, but not much else. They tried to take the wagons back to kobold central anyway, but while they rested one night in their rope trick the wagons were recovered by a large patrol from a Lantham outpost.
So, chaos was defeated. While waiting for various items to be enchanted back at Sophie's (much emptier) base, they heard reports of how the temple they'd sacked had been repaired and activated almost on schedule, and had driven back the chaos mists from a hundred miles of previously taken territory, exposing hundreds of chaos beasts to the light, where they were hunted down and killed.
After a little more shopping, and three weeks waiting for enchantments, they received Sophie's promised potions of Restoration, along with a charm to tell when a 'chaos storm' was coming. They were warned to get indoors whenever a storm threatened, because staying out in one was likely to be fatal... although not for Vashti, who was a creature of chaos now.
So, to Ephae! The countryside was slowly disintegrating, sure, but the city itself was in truly sad shape. The center of the city had been claimed by the chaos mists. Vultures circled overhead. Demons stalked the streets. The party avoided the former and ended up fighting the latter, for a round, in which the demon couldn't hit Vashti and Vashti couldn't penetrate the demon's damage resistance, at which point May polymorphed it into a slug, and it plane shifted away to find someone to dispel it.
At last, they reached the edge of the mists. The solid, opaque edge of the mists. They summoned a formian worker, and ordered it to charge in, charge back out, then report. Horrible screams and crunching noises were heard from within the mist.
Slee turned into a bat and flew around with blindsight, and saw that while the opaque mists thinned out a bit after 60 feet, at the same point the ground started swarming with chaos beasts -- dozens within range of his blindsight. They gradually started trailing off in density after a few hundred feet, but never really stopped being there. He flew back to report, and the party decided to fly in with magic rather than risk fighting the chaos beast army.
So they flew through the mist, down what looked like the main street, looking for the 'tower of magic' they'd been told was located somewhere inside the city. They passed a bank, having learned their lesson, mostly (they resolved to loot the bank on the way out). And then... there was the tower.
Of course, they decided to investigate the tower starting from the roof... and so the first thing they saw was the glowing anti-chaos-sphere. Since the charm indicated a storm was coming, they rushed over to it and begged to be let inside. And were. Slee's new companion (a dire boar polymorphed into a dire eagle to be able to follow the party into the mist) was trapped outside in the storm, as it was a little slow following its master into the scary shiny sphere, but Vashti drove everyone else out of the airlock and let it inside before it was actually killed, although it was a close thing (it was harmed and enervated).
Inside the sphere, four wizards and a priest had been living on created gruel for a year, wondering when the hell the chaos storms outside would go away. They told the party that they'd been working on the device when the city had been taken by the mists, and that the priest with them had fled from the party in the magic school below, looking for somewhere to hide from the coming terror... and hadn't spoken since.
They said that the sphere was *supposed* to be mobile, but they didn't have the key which allowed it to be altered, or the components to do the enchantment, although both were (or had been) kept inside the tower. There were locked doors in the way, though, and monsters, and the occasional storm -- after two botched attempts they'd given up on it.
But now adventurers were here... a fetch quest you say? And a trip to the Shimmering Isles? Yes, that's where they'd been planning to take it...
last week next session
Snags this week were, first of all, the bait-and-switch on the caravan raid. I hadn't intended to ACT OUT 200 kobolds trying to kill a Juggernaut, I'd just sort of assumed it was going to be a horrible slaughter. The idea was that the party would either agree to do it, or the chaos cult would try and fail. Having the party refuse, and then go along with the army anyway, was the worst of both worlds as I had to ACT OUT the entire fricking battle. That took half the night, with most of the party just watching since they had no intention of helping.
Also, I said the party could barter for magic items with the cultists. The party had a *lot* of magic items saved up. Hundreds of thousands of gold worth (thankfully not 'each', at least). They managed to move most of it, even if not everything they were looking for was available. That also took a long, long, long time.
