Man overboard! Under-dragon! Whatever!
Dec. 17th, 2005 01:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothHad a session of Lazar's game tonight. For some reason, we took a newborn dragon out onto the surface of the island, where he was promptly captured by pirates. One of the party was killed in the process. Or was he?!
Lazar unveiled a new combat mechanism to make melee combat more complicated... since it would also make melee combat take about four times as long, he significantly reduced ranged damage and increased melee damage. After DR, to make things simpler. The worry is that it'll take too long to play a combat out... we didn't really figure that out one way or another tonight, since we only had one combat where it came up, and it was small.
The dragon was friendly, but very, very sharp, in the literal sense of 'touching him would cut you up badly and probably kill you'. The dragon was able to communicate telepathically, but only understood things it had personally experienced or could recognize from the mental image it read from your mind. The dragon wanted fish. The dragon wanted to fly. The dragon wanted to cuddle with Perrel...
The latter it got, after Perrel was painted with the silver armor paint -- it proved strong enough to keep him from being cut up. For the second... well, they decided to take it outside, after being told that no, there was nowhere in the scavengers' tunnels to keep it. Maybe they could hide it in an old ship? They painted it green, so that its silver scales wouldn't be a dead giveaway...
But no, hiding was not to be. As soon as it got outdoors, the dragon leapt up into the air, and tried to play with the three skymantas circling overhead. Fortunately for them, they were faster than it...
On the ground, Wayne saw an injured or dead skymanta and flew over to check which. The manta was indeed dead... but one of the pirates on the battlefield there was alive enough to put out his hand-held ballista and shoot a log at Wayne. Having experienced being shot with a ballista before, Wayne was not about to stick around to see if the handheld version (whose bolts expanded to full size in transit) was any less painful -- he flew straight down through the floating island's vegetation, eventually getting out of range of the pirate's wild shots.
Ka'sa and Perrel saw (and mostly, heard) the pirate shooting his ballista into the ground, and flew over to stop him. Ka'sa backstabbed him, but didn't manage to take him down because he had some sort of armor. Perrel, still coated in the silver armor paint, got the pirate's attention, and absorbed a shot (which bounced off harmlessly) that otherwise might have hurt Ka'sa... and then Ka'sa was meleeing with the pirate for real, and the pirate was forced to use his crossbow as a club to defend himself with. This strategy did not succeed, and he was stabbed a couple more times and went down.
Ka'sa and Perrel looted the body (or, well, the pirate, since he wasn't quite dead yet this time either) and found some magic stuff (including the crossbow and the armor, of course), then Ka'sa went to help the dragon, while Perrel looked for Wayne.
The dragon needed help because the party's airship had suddenly fired off one of its anchors and snagged it, and it was being dragged down against its will! Ka'sa tried to cut the rope, but failed repeatedly -- it was charmed or enchanted or something, and was almost impossible to actually strike with a knife. He tried to run away at the last second to avoid being crushed between the dragon and the deck of the ship... but didn't get away in time, and was horribly mutilated by the dragon's scales as it sandwiched him between them.
Wayne didn't really need help... he'd run into another will-o-wisp, which hadn't immediately been fully charmed by his cloak, but eventually it failed its willpower roll too, and flew into the cloak's pocket, where it could be trapped for later use. Perrel arrived just in time to see him do that, and told him about what was happening on the surface. They retured to the surface just in time to see Ka'sa crushed under the dragon, as it was dragged to the pirate ship's deck.
They wanted to rescue him, but didn't have any weapons with them, so immediate action was contraindicated. Besides, they barely knew Ka'sa, and he was probably dead anyway. So, instead, they headed back to the forge to prepare.
Jardin was happy to make weapons for everyone! Except Balthazaar, who took a replacement gun looted from the most recent pirate fight. And Chochang, who built her own. And Wayne, who asked for really *really* good tools and large amounts of steel wire, which he wove into grapple-enhancing armbands and a poison-enhancing tail-wrap, with a reinforced stinger on the end. He also got a replacement eye, from Balthazaar, which worked really well, but looked awfully creepy.
The scavengers were worried about Garth (not Bart) and mentioned that they were planning to raid 'Maat's Pirates' while they were fighting the pirates from the red ship over a third ship whose crew had perished in strange green fire. The red ship, which was still next to their ship, would still have some crew, but its Grovargs (giant weasels) would be elsewhere, at least...
So the plan was to check on and if necessary rescue the dragon -- it had escaped from its captors, but got hurt fighting a different pirate up in the air over a skymanta. After that, they'd go to their ship, fight off any pirates squatting inside, use the anchors to attach the hull to the canopy, and use the canopy's engine to drag the ship off the side of the island... where it would quickly plummet, as being marooned on the island would have likely kept the floatvine canopy from knowing it needed to heal quickly. With the ship marooned, they could exile themselves again at any time, and easily coordinate with Maat to leave the island. Besides, that way there was less chance the pirates would see the opportunity to leave for what it was.
Of course, they couldn't leave without their crew, and several of the noncombatants had been sold into slavery. The slaver pirates were powerful and scary, but they decided they'd try to parley with them and find something to trade for Rudy, Klazko, and Hodges. Perhaps by exchanging the prisoners from that pirate clan that they hadn't exactly captured yet?
If possible, while doing all that, they wanted to find the ruins of the rope-trap. The gold in it had been camoflaged by Chochang, and if they could recover it -- well, it had been a good percentage of the wealth in their hold, all by itself, and could possibly tide them over until they could trade with legitimate people for supplies.
last session | next session
Lazar unveiled a new combat mechanism to make melee combat more complicated... since it would also make melee combat take about four times as long, he significantly reduced ranged damage and increased melee damage. After DR, to make things simpler. The worry is that it'll take too long to play a combat out... we didn't really figure that out one way or another tonight, since we only had one combat where it came up, and it was small.
The dragon was friendly, but very, very sharp, in the literal sense of 'touching him would cut you up badly and probably kill you'. The dragon was able to communicate telepathically, but only understood things it had personally experienced or could recognize from the mental image it read from your mind. The dragon wanted fish. The dragon wanted to fly. The dragon wanted to cuddle with Perrel...
The latter it got, after Perrel was painted with the silver armor paint -- it proved strong enough to keep him from being cut up. For the second... well, they decided to take it outside, after being told that no, there was nowhere in the scavengers' tunnels to keep it. Maybe they could hide it in an old ship? They painted it green, so that its silver scales wouldn't be a dead giveaway...
But no, hiding was not to be. As soon as it got outdoors, the dragon leapt up into the air, and tried to play with the three skymantas circling overhead. Fortunately for them, they were faster than it...
On the ground, Wayne saw an injured or dead skymanta and flew over to check which. The manta was indeed dead... but one of the pirates on the battlefield there was alive enough to put out his hand-held ballista and shoot a log at Wayne. Having experienced being shot with a ballista before, Wayne was not about to stick around to see if the handheld version (whose bolts expanded to full size in transit) was any less painful -- he flew straight down through the floating island's vegetation, eventually getting out of range of the pirate's wild shots.
Ka'sa and Perrel saw (and mostly, heard) the pirate shooting his ballista into the ground, and flew over to stop him. Ka'sa backstabbed him, but didn't manage to take him down because he had some sort of armor. Perrel, still coated in the silver armor paint, got the pirate's attention, and absorbed a shot (which bounced off harmlessly) that otherwise might have hurt Ka'sa... and then Ka'sa was meleeing with the pirate for real, and the pirate was forced to use his crossbow as a club to defend himself with. This strategy did not succeed, and he was stabbed a couple more times and went down.
Ka'sa and Perrel looted the body (or, well, the pirate, since he wasn't quite dead yet this time either) and found some magic stuff (including the crossbow and the armor, of course), then Ka'sa went to help the dragon, while Perrel looked for Wayne.
The dragon needed help because the party's airship had suddenly fired off one of its anchors and snagged it, and it was being dragged down against its will! Ka'sa tried to cut the rope, but failed repeatedly -- it was charmed or enchanted or something, and was almost impossible to actually strike with a knife. He tried to run away at the last second to avoid being crushed between the dragon and the deck of the ship... but didn't get away in time, and was horribly mutilated by the dragon's scales as it sandwiched him between them.
Wayne didn't really need help... he'd run into another will-o-wisp, which hadn't immediately been fully charmed by his cloak, but eventually it failed its willpower roll too, and flew into the cloak's pocket, where it could be trapped for later use. Perrel arrived just in time to see him do that, and told him about what was happening on the surface. They retured to the surface just in time to see Ka'sa crushed under the dragon, as it was dragged to the pirate ship's deck.
They wanted to rescue him, but didn't have any weapons with them, so immediate action was contraindicated. Besides, they barely knew Ka'sa, and he was probably dead anyway. So, instead, they headed back to the forge to prepare.
Jardin was happy to make weapons for everyone! Except Balthazaar, who took a replacement gun looted from the most recent pirate fight. And Chochang, who built her own. And Wayne, who asked for really *really* good tools and large amounts of steel wire, which he wove into grapple-enhancing armbands and a poison-enhancing tail-wrap, with a reinforced stinger on the end. He also got a replacement eye, from Balthazaar, which worked really well, but looked awfully creepy.
The scavengers were worried about Garth (not Bart) and mentioned that they were planning to raid 'Maat's Pirates' while they were fighting the pirates from the red ship over a third ship whose crew had perished in strange green fire. The red ship, which was still next to their ship, would still have some crew, but its Grovargs (giant weasels) would be elsewhere, at least...
So the plan was to check on and if necessary rescue the dragon -- it had escaped from its captors, but got hurt fighting a different pirate up in the air over a skymanta. After that, they'd go to their ship, fight off any pirates squatting inside, use the anchors to attach the hull to the canopy, and use the canopy's engine to drag the ship off the side of the island... where it would quickly plummet, as being marooned on the island would have likely kept the floatvine canopy from knowing it needed to heal quickly. With the ship marooned, they could exile themselves again at any time, and easily coordinate with Maat to leave the island. Besides, that way there was less chance the pirates would see the opportunity to leave for what it was.
Of course, they couldn't leave without their crew, and several of the noncombatants had been sold into slavery. The slaver pirates were powerful and scary, but they decided they'd try to parley with them and find something to trade for Rudy, Klazko, and Hodges. Perhaps by exchanging the prisoners from that pirate clan that they hadn't exactly captured yet?
If possible, while doing all that, they wanted to find the ruins of the rope-trap. The gold in it had been camoflaged by Chochang, and if they could recover it -- well, it had been a good percentage of the wealth in their hold, all by itself, and could possibly tide them over until they could trade with legitimate people for supplies.
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