The party is awakened by the sound of a battering ram splintering the gates. The few men well enough to fight are standing in the street next to Rard, waiting for the gate to give way. As you are watching, Harbek joins them. Another 15 men, injured and unable to participate in hand to hand line the walls firing arrows as fast as they can into a small army of goblins.
This was my first attempt at running a LARGE group of monsters. By time the encounter was over, 2 Bugbears, 2 Goblin Underbosses, 6+ Goblin Blackblades, and countless Goblin Cutters were lying dead in the street. But not without a high cost. Most of the archers on the walls were injured or killed and 3 of the men in the street fell to the onslaught.
The battle began with an excellent bow shot by Mara to open a spot for Ekeraath to leap from the second floor of the inn into the middle of the fray, where he quickly used his breath weapon to take out several Goblin minions and injure others. Rard was a killing machine as the rest of the party did their part. As expected, the Bugbears and Underbosses posed good challenges as did a second wave of monsters coming in the back door through a break in the wall.
The party fought valiantly and the day was won after 2 bugbears and 2 Goblin underbosses fell to their combat prowess. Once those leaders had fallen, the remaining Goblin forces retreated.
This was an extremely long battle. The past 2 sessions, the party had complained the encounters had not been difficult enough. So this week, I took the gloves off, first, the sahuagin and now a mob. This encounter proved to be a huge challenge for me to run, but I did leave it open ended. I did not spec the monsters early, but allowed them to keep coming until the party was challenged. However, after 2 hours of combat, and 1:30AM rolling around, it was obvious, the players had been challenged and they were more tired than their characters.
As the final Goblin fell, books, dice, and snacks were cleaned up and everyone left for home, anxiously awaiting a Wednesday, 2 weeks hence.
3 comments:
This was an awesome fight - GREAT job, Josh! Once again, Alexander went down to 5 hps. If he hadn't taken the toughness feat, he would have gone down, definitely.
I love it when there's a super-high leveled ally fighting among us. That's when a warlord definitely becomes an effective asset to a group, giving the high-leveled ally some additional attacks and movement.
We certainly made the most out of our situation. I also learned that in big fights it makes sense to burn action points quickly at the beginning and use your daily powers sooner rather than later. The advantages are that you kill the bad guys before they get a chance to hit you, AND you have effects that last the entire encounter. So the sooner you hit your dailies, the longer the effects will last.
When we next start up, we should immediately check to see if any of the allied injured or dying can be saved. I'd argue we should also see if we can knock out any of the leaders from the enemy force to (what else?) interrogate. If they came from the Citadel of Seasons, they can give information on to its layout, number of troops, who are its leaders, and how well it's guarded, and whether Demonicus is there or not and what his role is.
We'll want to see to reinforcing the city defenses, if at all possible.
Lastly, there's a lot of dead humanoids on the field of battle and that could translate into some decent treasure. We should definitely loot the baddies.
From now on, when you mispronounce Damakos' name, you take 1 point of damage.
We definitely need to focus on interrogating leaders - I don't think Josh is going to give us any info off of anybody else. :-)
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