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Dramatis Personae
Viepuck, quiet due to player absence
Izgil, unfortunately the only one who can see in the dark
Celyn, who did a lot of rogueing
Robin, prepared to do a great deal of dragon-thumping
When we concluded last session, we were about to be attacked by a dragon.
We had a number of plans, including 'spell protections vs. dragon fear' and 'ballista specifically tuned to crash the dragon' and stuff like that. We set up the combat map with several clusters of people, with the decoy (Viepuck pretending to be one of the kobolds) and the ballista and Celyn in one area, the rest of the party in another, and the friendly kobolds in a third, far away from the immediate dragon zone.
(I miscalculated where I put Celyn in a way that did not lead to an actual change in anything that happened, honestly, but whatever.)
The plan: take hour-duration boosts when the dragon leaves the base, do minute-direction boosts when the dragon is sighted, ground the dragon, cause mayhem.
The initial sweep of the dragon involved flaming Viepuck, who was prepped to dodge, and Celyn, whose fire-resistance item exploded instead of him taking damage. Izgil tried to freeze it in ice, and it flared the spell off; the ballista did not work. THe dragon landed next to Izgil, Robin defended him, Celyn (invisibly) slipped around and stabbed the dragon (critically) and got hit for his troubles. Viepuck brainscanned the dragon. The NPC archer we had with us hit the dragon with something that did damage to it when it moved.
Then the dragon flamed again (Celyn and the ballista crew; the crew went down). A great deal of flailing happened. The dragon again resisted one of Izgil's boosted spells. Celyn decided that the better part of valor and confusion unto our enemies was to stab the dragon and teleport out of its blindsense range using the 'you are flustered by hitting anyone other than me' power and being undetectable after he landed. Viepuck did more damage.
The dragon figured out that Viepuck was not the kobold, and demanded he reveal himself, and Viepuck failed the save and dropped the illusion, which was of course a completely useless action on the dragon's part so nobody thought it was worth preventing. Robin hit the dragon again, and it appeared alarmed and launched into the air.
A couple of hostile kobolds put in an appearance around the edges of the map; one of them went down (over the course of a round or three) in a hail of chucked javelins from our kobolds.
Robin's Greymalkin took the fly potion and the two of them went up to intercept the dragon; Celyn shot it with an arrow; Viepuck blasted it; aerial chaos ensued a bit. The dragon realized it was not going to escape and tried to take Robin with it, doing a substantial amount of damage but not enough before the rest of the missile fire took it down.
Me: WE FINALLY CRASHED THE DRAGON.
One of the surviving enemy kobolds went into a rage and tried to attack one of the party members, which went poorly for it; the kobold leader surrendered at the encouragement of our kobolds. Robin went to confirm that the dragon was properly dead, with Celyn's invisible help. (Celyn also could not resist the impulse to heal Robin.)
The 'leader' of our kobolds approached Greymalkin, declared that he was clearly the party leader because he could fly, and gave him a shiny belt buckle before asking him to put the fear of something into the captive kobold. Greymalkin strutted over there, showed the belt buckle to the enemy, and said, "She gave me this. What've you got?" at which point the rest of the friendly kobolds enthusiastically provided tribute, much to Robin's moderate mortification.
After getting some more intel, we hurried up to the lair to deal with the remaining situation, where we were told there was a backdoor tunnel we could wiggle through. So Celyn, as best detector of traps (kobolds being known for traps) led off, to discover that the room on the other side was pitch black. He used an illusion spell to decoy some of the kobolds away from the tunnel entry and wriggled out of the tunnel, carefully not touching any of the kobolds by a combination of luck and dexterity, and then hucked the pebble with a light spell on it that was in his pocket, wrapped in a hanky that it would spill out of, up the tunnel where he had put the illusion sound.
Everyone else was stuck in the tunnel (including an unarmored Robin), which was solved by Izgil using dimension door to unstick himself and Robin into the cave, where they went miraculously undetected. One of the kobolds climbed up into the tunnel, separating Viepuck, and Izgil gave up on this nonsense and cast a hypnotic pattern which stunned several kobolds (including the leader and the one in the tunnel), so Celyn could slip up to join them and help Robin get some armor on. Viepuck used his misty step to join the party.
The two who had gone up the tunnel to investigate the illusory sounds came back, one of them woke up the leader of the kobolds, and combat proper ensued, which was pretty anticlimactic in part because a) kobolds are substantially less scary than a dragon and b) Celyn unloaded a 45-point crit on the kobold leader before she got a turn and then Viepuck finished her off, so we never learned what scary spells she knew (according to the friendly kobolds).
That being sorted, we tossed the kobold barracks for useful things and worked on getting up the tunnel. There was a trap there, which could be jumped over, and Celyn was pretty much at "I do not care what this is, I can avoid it" while Izgil poked it for a bit. Eventually we decided it was not worth the extended poking, Celyn leaped it, spotted a tripwire on the far side, and did an acrobatic roll to avoid the tripwire. After prying some fake wall off to investigate the mechanism, that bit of trap was disabled by shape-earthing to make a ramp around the tripwire so nothing would move it.
We rounded the corner, found a bunch of spikes at the bottom of a steep slope (aimed so anything that slipped down the slope would land on them), pulled them out of the floor, climbed the slope, and Celyn missed the last tripwire and set off the grease trap. But of course we'd already removed the spikes so it was just silly and a little embarrassing.
We observed the Dragon Loot, disarmed the front door trap after some effort, and spent the rest of the discussion trying to figure out what to do with a dead dragon.
(Combat sessions are easy to summarize.)
Viepuck, quiet due to player absence
Izgil, unfortunately the only one who can see in the dark
Celyn, who did a lot of rogueing
Robin, prepared to do a great deal of dragon-thumping
When we concluded last session, we were about to be attacked by a dragon.
We had a number of plans, including 'spell protections vs. dragon fear' and 'ballista specifically tuned to crash the dragon' and stuff like that. We set up the combat map with several clusters of people, with the decoy (Viepuck pretending to be one of the kobolds) and the ballista and Celyn in one area, the rest of the party in another, and the friendly kobolds in a third, far away from the immediate dragon zone.
(I miscalculated where I put Celyn in a way that did not lead to an actual change in anything that happened, honestly, but whatever.)
The plan: take hour-duration boosts when the dragon leaves the base, do minute-direction boosts when the dragon is sighted, ground the dragon, cause mayhem.
The initial sweep of the dragon involved flaming Viepuck, who was prepped to dodge, and Celyn, whose fire-resistance item exploded instead of him taking damage. Izgil tried to freeze it in ice, and it flared the spell off; the ballista did not work. THe dragon landed next to Izgil, Robin defended him, Celyn (invisibly) slipped around and stabbed the dragon (critically) and got hit for his troubles. Viepuck brainscanned the dragon. The NPC archer we had with us hit the dragon with something that did damage to it when it moved.
Then the dragon flamed again (Celyn and the ballista crew; the crew went down). A great deal of flailing happened. The dragon again resisted one of Izgil's boosted spells. Celyn decided that the better part of valor and confusion unto our enemies was to stab the dragon and teleport out of its blindsense range using the 'you are flustered by hitting anyone other than me' power and being undetectable after he landed. Viepuck did more damage.
The dragon figured out that Viepuck was not the kobold, and demanded he reveal himself, and Viepuck failed the save and dropped the illusion, which was of course a completely useless action on the dragon's part so nobody thought it was worth preventing. Robin hit the dragon again, and it appeared alarmed and launched into the air.
A couple of hostile kobolds put in an appearance around the edges of the map; one of them went down (over the course of a round or three) in a hail of chucked javelins from our kobolds.
Robin's Greymalkin took the fly potion and the two of them went up to intercept the dragon; Celyn shot it with an arrow; Viepuck blasted it; aerial chaos ensued a bit. The dragon realized it was not going to escape and tried to take Robin with it, doing a substantial amount of damage but not enough before the rest of the missile fire took it down.
Me: WE FINALLY CRASHED THE DRAGON.
One of the surviving enemy kobolds went into a rage and tried to attack one of the party members, which went poorly for it; the kobold leader surrendered at the encouragement of our kobolds. Robin went to confirm that the dragon was properly dead, with Celyn's invisible help. (Celyn also could not resist the impulse to heal Robin.)
The 'leader' of our kobolds approached Greymalkin, declared that he was clearly the party leader because he could fly, and gave him a shiny belt buckle before asking him to put the fear of something into the captive kobold. Greymalkin strutted over there, showed the belt buckle to the enemy, and said, "She gave me this. What've you got?" at which point the rest of the friendly kobolds enthusiastically provided tribute, much to Robin's moderate mortification.
After getting some more intel, we hurried up to the lair to deal with the remaining situation, where we were told there was a backdoor tunnel we could wiggle through. So Celyn, as best detector of traps (kobolds being known for traps) led off, to discover that the room on the other side was pitch black. He used an illusion spell to decoy some of the kobolds away from the tunnel entry and wriggled out of the tunnel, carefully not touching any of the kobolds by a combination of luck and dexterity, and then hucked the pebble with a light spell on it that was in his pocket, wrapped in a hanky that it would spill out of, up the tunnel where he had put the illusion sound.
Everyone else was stuck in the tunnel (including an unarmored Robin), which was solved by Izgil using dimension door to unstick himself and Robin into the cave, where they went miraculously undetected. One of the kobolds climbed up into the tunnel, separating Viepuck, and Izgil gave up on this nonsense and cast a hypnotic pattern which stunned several kobolds (including the leader and the one in the tunnel), so Celyn could slip up to join them and help Robin get some armor on. Viepuck used his misty step to join the party.
The two who had gone up the tunnel to investigate the illusory sounds came back, one of them woke up the leader of the kobolds, and combat proper ensued, which was pretty anticlimactic in part because a) kobolds are substantially less scary than a dragon and b) Celyn unloaded a 45-point crit on the kobold leader before she got a turn and then Viepuck finished her off, so we never learned what scary spells she knew (according to the friendly kobolds).
That being sorted, we tossed the kobold barracks for useful things and worked on getting up the tunnel. There was a trap there, which could be jumped over, and Celyn was pretty much at "I do not care what this is, I can avoid it" while Izgil poked it for a bit. Eventually we decided it was not worth the extended poking, Celyn leaped it, spotted a tripwire on the far side, and did an acrobatic roll to avoid the tripwire. After prying some fake wall off to investigate the mechanism, that bit of trap was disabled by shape-earthing to make a ramp around the tripwire so nothing would move it.
We rounded the corner, found a bunch of spikes at the bottom of a steep slope (aimed so anything that slipped down the slope would land on them), pulled them out of the floor, climbed the slope, and Celyn missed the last tripwire and set off the grease trap. But of course we'd already removed the spikes so it was just silly and a little embarrassing.
We observed the Dragon Loot, disarmed the front door trap after some effort, and spent the rest of the discussion trying to figure out what to do with a dead dragon.
(Combat sessions are easy to summarize.)
