Springing Traps
Apr. 27th, 2009 10:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothSaturday, after an argument on the net where Tom and I complained about people complaining about D+D, or about people complaining about people complaining about D+D, I went over to his house for a one-off boardgame night. We played 'Small World', which I WANT. It's basically a more complicated version of 'History of the World' (it's a game where you take on a series of empires and conquer with them, then they go into decline and become the loser oldbies that the next round's new empires conquer), which was my favorite game that I only got to play twice and could never find in stores.
Of course, Small World isn't actually available in stores yet. Tom said it might never be since it's by some obscure publisher. Sigh.
Sunday, we played D+D.
The party took the slaves back to the seven-pillared hall, and somewhat to their surprise, neither the Duergar trading delegation or the evil-aligned peacekeepers of the hall gave them any trouble. The Duergar at least it made sense -- if the party was able to raid their fortress, were they really going to stop them? For the rest, well, possession is 9/10ths of the law. If they'd tried to sell the slaves they would have had to pay taxes, but they were just taking them through on the way to the surface world to freedom.
Shanarea was sick of adventuring, and volunteered to guard the slaves on their way back to the homeland. While she did that, the party spent a week researching the Well of Demons or the Blackfang Gnolls, which the information recovered from the evil paladin (there had been a clue, after all) had pointed them to in order to find the last of the slaves.
They didn't find out anything, except that if they waited long enough, an itenerant scholar who was the expert on the labyrinth would eventually return and they could ask him where the well was.
But before they got to that point, two things happened. The first was that Riya arrived -- a dragonborn sorceror with a letter of introduction from Shanarea, who'd thought that the party might need reinforcements without her services, and hey she knew a friend who might do, and who'd been looking for adventure herself. [in other words, Tom's replacement character since he was bored of the ranger]
The second was that a goblin ran up and delivered a message. "Hi! I set a trap for you, because you killed my underlings. Please come fall into it, k?"
Okay, okay, technically it said "I was impressed with how you dealt with the duergar; I work with the people who control them, but I want out -- please come meet me so that I can get your help extracting myself from this evil organization." But everyone knew it was a trap. Except Bore, who rolled a 1 on his insight check. He thought it sounded like a trap on the face of it, but the guy sounded sincere -- they should give him a chance.
The rest of the party just wanted to go kill something after a week of boredom in the 7-pillared hall and an unknown amount of time ahead of them waiting for the sage, so they headed off to the trap, resolving to be cautious and as well-prepared as possible, which really wasn't very well-prepared since without Shanarea none of them were very good at scouting (Riya was not a replacement on that front) and none of Sam's rituals were really appropriate. There wasn't even a back entrance to the damn ambush site.
However, their caution paid off. The room the ambush -- sorry, the meeting -- was supposed to happen in had a raised ledge around the edge, and several large boulders lying around. Riya climbed up on top of the ledge right next to the door to get a look around, and saw the ambushers obviously lying in ambush in time to stop Bore before he walked in front of the boulder which a giant bronze statue was lurking behind, ready to roll it over on top of him.
Aside from the golem, the enemies were a pair of tiefling warlock-like things. Vexx, Sam, and Riya climbed up onto the ledge to engage the tieflings, while Bore and Morgan occupied the golem's attention. The first half of that plan worked much better than the second -- by the time the three on top had taken down both tieflings, Bore and Morgan were both fairly hurt (Bore had actually taken more damage than he had hit points, between the golem and the tieflings trying to shoot him in the back, but his assortment of self-heals had kept him alive) and hadn't really managed to do more than a scratch to the golem, which kept pounding them with massive fists, and occasionally whirling around like a top, knocking them to the ground.
Once the whole party was focused on the golem... man, that thing was *tough*. Luckily, Vexx got lucky and managed to Lead the Attack against it, inspiring everyone else to hit it much more easily, so they managed to eventually batter it to pieces before it killed anyone.
But it turned out that the tieflings were allied with the gnolls, and had a map to the well of demons, where they were supposed to take the adventurers' bodies for sacrifice after slaughtering them all. The party decided to pretend that the tiefling bodies were the ones mentioned in the note (which wasn't even specific enough to say 'adventurers') and use the letter to get through the gnolls' front door at least.
So they hid the bodies and limped back to the 7-pillared hall to rest up before tackling the gnolls, since they could use a rest despite having done only one fight, and the gnolls were close. When they arrived, they found that the sage had actually made it back to town that day, so they hadn't actually needed to spring the trap. Sigh.
The sage had a little information about the Well of Demons, though -- it was an old temple to the god of demons (Baphomet?), which had been overthrown by followers of another evil god (Demogorgon?). It was set up as a test for new acolytes of Baphomet, with lots of magical traps. And the ancient treasures of the cult had never been found... so there was more there to find than just the slaves!
At any rate, the next day they retrieved the bodies, which were only a little nibbled on by scavengers, and headed to the well. As they arrived in the first room, they saw no sign of gnolls -- instead, they heard a booming voice welcoming them to the temple, where they'd be tested to see if they were worthy! Then a bunch of random underdark predators popped out of the walls and attacked them.
The main annoyance was a giant tentacle monster that engulfed the entire party in his Hentai attack, grabbing them and holding them (or at least, their legs) immobile while it slowly dissolved them with acid. Riya (thanks to a Cloak of the Mountebank) and Bore (thanks to the GM not noticing that the enemy had threatening reach until several initiative counts later) managed to escape the tentacles into the room, but in the room were more enemies -- a ghoul and a pair of smoker zombies. Sorry, Cavern Chokers.
Riya got immobilized in a position where her close blasts (she was a dragonborn sorceror who used lots of dragon-breath attacks) could only hit one target at a time, while multiple enemies molested her. Bore stayed back to help with the tentacle beast (that most of the party had no choice but to pound on since it had them grabbed in the hallway and they couldn't even *see* the other enemies) until (a) it was dead, and (b) Riya called for help, at which point he charged over to try to help her. Vexx and Morgan were close behind, while Sam stayed back to fight the choker that Morgan had warded.
One of the chokers tried to turn invisible and flee, but it had to flee slowly while invisible, and happened to stay inside the area that Riya had already designated as her breath-spot as soon as she broke the ghoul's immoblize, which happened soon because the defenders forced it to switch targets. Her breaths didn't manage to kill it, though, and it got away. The other choker turned invisible once Morgan headed back to help out Sam, but a final Booming Blade hit killed it off as it tried to run.
Still, since these were monsters and not civilized opponents, one choker getting away probably didn't mean that the gnolls were alerted. The massive earthquake from the tentacle-beast, on the other hand...
And the dead bodies were gone, dragged underground and eaten by the tentacle beast. Sigh.
last session | next session
That night, I went over to Jurann's place to play board games -- not having especially high hopes since he'd been talking about playing D+D that week with the second group that was interested in running through a delve. But most of them flaked, so we played board games instead -- a couple games of Race for the Galaxy (that most of them liked but one person couldn't get the hang of at all and hated) and then one game of... I don't know, it was weird-looking. Hex grid with an obelisk in the center, and multicolored transparent army pieces? Sort of like Risk, or Axis and Allies. The goal was to get 12 victory points by winning battles and/or fulfilling your Secret Missions. I was losing for most of the game because I was too cautious, but I built up my forces to get a huge pile of dragons on the obelisk, then swarmed out over the board to score the 9 points I needed to win in a single turn.
Of course, Small World isn't actually available in stores yet. Tom said it might never be since it's by some obscure publisher. Sigh.
Sunday, we played D+D.
The party took the slaves back to the seven-pillared hall, and somewhat to their surprise, neither the Duergar trading delegation or the evil-aligned peacekeepers of the hall gave them any trouble. The Duergar at least it made sense -- if the party was able to raid their fortress, were they really going to stop them? For the rest, well, possession is 9/10ths of the law. If they'd tried to sell the slaves they would have had to pay taxes, but they were just taking them through on the way to the surface world to freedom.
Shanarea was sick of adventuring, and volunteered to guard the slaves on their way back to the homeland. While she did that, the party spent a week researching the Well of Demons or the Blackfang Gnolls, which the information recovered from the evil paladin (there had been a clue, after all) had pointed them to in order to find the last of the slaves.
They didn't find out anything, except that if they waited long enough, an itenerant scholar who was the expert on the labyrinth would eventually return and they could ask him where the well was.
But before they got to that point, two things happened. The first was that Riya arrived -- a dragonborn sorceror with a letter of introduction from Shanarea, who'd thought that the party might need reinforcements without her services, and hey she knew a friend who might do, and who'd been looking for adventure herself. [in other words, Tom's replacement character since he was bored of the ranger]
The second was that a goblin ran up and delivered a message. "Hi! I set a trap for you, because you killed my underlings. Please come fall into it, k?"
Okay, okay, technically it said "I was impressed with how you dealt with the duergar; I work with the people who control them, but I want out -- please come meet me so that I can get your help extracting myself from this evil organization." But everyone knew it was a trap. Except Bore, who rolled a 1 on his insight check. He thought it sounded like a trap on the face of it, but the guy sounded sincere -- they should give him a chance.
The rest of the party just wanted to go kill something after a week of boredom in the 7-pillared hall and an unknown amount of time ahead of them waiting for the sage, so they headed off to the trap, resolving to be cautious and as well-prepared as possible, which really wasn't very well-prepared since without Shanarea none of them were very good at scouting (Riya was not a replacement on that front) and none of Sam's rituals were really appropriate. There wasn't even a back entrance to the damn ambush site.
However, their caution paid off. The room the ambush -- sorry, the meeting -- was supposed to happen in had a raised ledge around the edge, and several large boulders lying around. Riya climbed up on top of the ledge right next to the door to get a look around, and saw the ambushers obviously lying in ambush in time to stop Bore before he walked in front of the boulder which a giant bronze statue was lurking behind, ready to roll it over on top of him.
Aside from the golem, the enemies were a pair of tiefling warlock-like things. Vexx, Sam, and Riya climbed up onto the ledge to engage the tieflings, while Bore and Morgan occupied the golem's attention. The first half of that plan worked much better than the second -- by the time the three on top had taken down both tieflings, Bore and Morgan were both fairly hurt (Bore had actually taken more damage than he had hit points, between the golem and the tieflings trying to shoot him in the back, but his assortment of self-heals had kept him alive) and hadn't really managed to do more than a scratch to the golem, which kept pounding them with massive fists, and occasionally whirling around like a top, knocking them to the ground.
Once the whole party was focused on the golem... man, that thing was *tough*. Luckily, Vexx got lucky and managed to Lead the Attack against it, inspiring everyone else to hit it much more easily, so they managed to eventually batter it to pieces before it killed anyone.
But it turned out that the tieflings were allied with the gnolls, and had a map to the well of demons, where they were supposed to take the adventurers' bodies for sacrifice after slaughtering them all. The party decided to pretend that the tiefling bodies were the ones mentioned in the note (which wasn't even specific enough to say 'adventurers') and use the letter to get through the gnolls' front door at least.
So they hid the bodies and limped back to the 7-pillared hall to rest up before tackling the gnolls, since they could use a rest despite having done only one fight, and the gnolls were close. When they arrived, they found that the sage had actually made it back to town that day, so they hadn't actually needed to spring the trap. Sigh.
The sage had a little information about the Well of Demons, though -- it was an old temple to the god of demons (Baphomet?), which had been overthrown by followers of another evil god (Demogorgon?). It was set up as a test for new acolytes of Baphomet, with lots of magical traps. And the ancient treasures of the cult had never been found... so there was more there to find than just the slaves!
At any rate, the next day they retrieved the bodies, which were only a little nibbled on by scavengers, and headed to the well. As they arrived in the first room, they saw no sign of gnolls -- instead, they heard a booming voice welcoming them to the temple, where they'd be tested to see if they were worthy! Then a bunch of random underdark predators popped out of the walls and attacked them.
The main annoyance was a giant tentacle monster that engulfed the entire party in his Hentai attack, grabbing them and holding them (or at least, their legs) immobile while it slowly dissolved them with acid. Riya (thanks to a Cloak of the Mountebank) and Bore (thanks to the GM not noticing that the enemy had threatening reach until several initiative counts later) managed to escape the tentacles into the room, but in the room were more enemies -- a ghoul and a pair of smoker zombies. Sorry, Cavern Chokers.
Riya got immobilized in a position where her close blasts (she was a dragonborn sorceror who used lots of dragon-breath attacks) could only hit one target at a time, while multiple enemies molested her. Bore stayed back to help with the tentacle beast (that most of the party had no choice but to pound on since it had them grabbed in the hallway and they couldn't even *see* the other enemies) until (a) it was dead, and (b) Riya called for help, at which point he charged over to try to help her. Vexx and Morgan were close behind, while Sam stayed back to fight the choker that Morgan had warded.
One of the chokers tried to turn invisible and flee, but it had to flee slowly while invisible, and happened to stay inside the area that Riya had already designated as her breath-spot as soon as she broke the ghoul's immoblize, which happened soon because the defenders forced it to switch targets. Her breaths didn't manage to kill it, though, and it got away. The other choker turned invisible once Morgan headed back to help out Sam, but a final Booming Blade hit killed it off as it tried to run.
Still, since these were monsters and not civilized opponents, one choker getting away probably didn't mean that the gnolls were alerted. The massive earthquake from the tentacle-beast, on the other hand...
And the dead bodies were gone, dragged underground and eaten by the tentacle beast. Sigh.
last session | next session
That night, I went over to Jurann's place to play board games -- not having especially high hopes since he'd been talking about playing D+D that week with the second group that was interested in running through a delve. But most of them flaked, so we played board games instead -- a couple games of Race for the Galaxy (that most of them liked but one person couldn't get the hang of at all and hated) and then one game of... I don't know, it was weird-looking. Hex grid with an obelisk in the center, and multicolored transparent army pieces? Sort of like Risk, or Axis and Allies. The goal was to get 12 victory points by winning battles and/or fulfilling your Secret Missions. I was losing for most of the game because I was too cautious, but I built up my forces to get a huge pile of dragons on the obelisk, then swarmed out over the board to score the 9 points I needed to win in a single turn.
