![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Meme reference for the title.
Dramatis Personae:
Izgil, doing bomber runs
Viepuck, more of a sniper really
Celyn, combat medic
Robin, heavy cavalry
When we left off we were travelling to the fortress of the person who took, among other things of less importance to the party, Greymalkin's wings as a trophy.
We took a day of travel through the eerily shifting landscape towards the black stone peak that housed the giant redcap (Ianto the Red), his minions, and a crew of terrified goblins who had previously included the half-goat half-boy we purchased from the Judgementally Hospitable Fey Lady and currently included the goat-boy's brother. After sleeping in the eerie eternal late afternoon, we ate the special meal the lady had given us and tried to get more information about the innards of the fortress from the steadily degenerating mind of the goat-boy, which didn't get us a lot beyond a vague sense of rough map and knowledge that one of the tunnels the goblins feared tremendously.
We made our way closer along the ridge, and eventually encountered a dragged blood trail coming up and making its way towards the fortress, a couple of days old. As we followed the trail, we saw a few bits of white fur scraped off whatever it was. Eventually we found ourselves in the shallow valley just beneath the hollow peak that was the fortress.
After some discussion, Celyn had a conversation with the goat and left him in a thicket, because attacking a fortress with most of a goat is logistically complex. We spotted two redcaps keeping watch, and Viepuck disguised himself as his best guess as to what the goblin had looked like before he was turned into a goat and trudged his way up to decoy the guards. The guards looked at him fangily, and suggested that perhaps if he were One-Leg and also One-Finger perhaps he would be allowed back into the servants' quarters.
"Can't serve with one finger," Viepuck notes, flinging his hands up to demonstrate that he can in fact eldritch blast, knocking one of them down the slope towards the rest of the party. After a quick flurry of activity, both redcap guards are dead, but not before one of them manages to clang his iron boots together to alert the fortress to trouble. We leave the one at the top of the slope where it is, Viepuck casts an illusory boulder over the other corpse, and the party re-hides.
A troop of a half-dozen more redcaps come out and inspect the corpse, making much to-do over Celyn's arrow stuck in its leg, and then most of them carry the body inside, leaving two to canvas the area, including climbing up the side of the black rock of the fortress a bit to get a better vantage, which conveniently lets us know where the path up is. As they search, they approach the illusory boulder, and Viepuck zaps one of them in an experimental way, leading to a second combat in which we also quickly kill a pair of redcaps despite an alarm being raised.
Celyn heals Viepuck and then casts a spell to conceal their tracks and help them hide, so that they can climb up the slope with minimal chance of being spotted by whatever search party comes out next. We do so. The next search party is a couple of goblins, who see nothing and go back in.
Eventually we reach the top of the rock and peer down into the central caldera-like opening. At the bottom, just out of the reach of easy spellcasting, the giant (some twelve foot tall) redcap is delivering a drill sergeant lecture to an uneasy crew of redcaps. Izgil listens to the rock beneath us to figure out where some of the tunnels are.
The bombing run is planned as follows:
Izgil and Viepuck jump off the cliff edge, effectively hand-in-hand. Viepuck casts feather fall. Izgil fireball-equivalents the squad of redcaps. Viepuck blasts surviving redcaps. On the following round, Viepuck drops Hunger of Hadar (angry darkness) on the survivors, and Izgil dimension-doors them both back up while the bad guys are in the dark cloud and can't see what happened. Then we wait to see what chaos, if any, results from this, with Es*tiaslos scouting around and reporting.
This plan went off almost perfectly, with a few caveats: even with disadvantage imposed on their saves, there was not quite enough fireball damage to drop any redcaps. Viepuck took one out before they went away, and they scattered, with a crew of them going into the tunnel flagged as Scary by the goblins, while the others and Ianto headed for the throne room. The darkness covered the retreat but did not finish anything else off.
Result: seven mostly extremely injured but not dead redcaps, one giant redcap, the courtyard is cleared.
Es*tiaslos peeks into the Scary Tunnel and discovers basically the abbatoir, in which the surviving redcaps are not only drinking the blood of a giant boar but have caught and vivisected one of the goblins. Rather than allow them space to recover their health through gruesome cannibalism, Izgil and Robin dimension-doored into the abbatoir to deliver special-ordered violence while Viepuck, Celyn, and Greymalkin dropped off the cliff and Viepuck once again feather-falled people, this time going all the way down. Robin defends Izgil from violence ("That's my dwarf, you can't hit it") and the two of them eliminate the lunch crowd.
New situation: half the party is in the abbatoir tunnels (right side), half the party has landed in the courtyard (left side), there is a barred gate in the center to the throne room into which surviving bad guys have retreated to regroup.
Celyn and Greymalkin both head up towards the gate and teleport to the far side so never risking line of sight to the inside. Celyn hides up against the wall while Greymalkin continues to the tunnel exit so when Robin comes out he can mount immediately. Viepuck, meanwhile, plops another Angry Darkness inside the throne room covering the door as soon as he has line of sight to do so.
Violence commences once more. The big bad charges out of the throne room and hits Viepuck hard enough he loses concentration on his spell, then takes an arrow to the neck from Celyn. As Viepuck flees towards the abbatoir tunnel, Robin comes out and charges, challenging the big bad to a one-on-one fight. Celyn disrupts a critical hit on Robin with fey magic. Three other redcaps come out of the throne room, one of them going to join the fight with Robin, the other two pursuing other people. Viepuck turns and blasts the one that was fighting Robin back, Izgil drops another fireball on the three of them to finish them up, Celyn steps in to heal Viepuck then goes to back up Robin with healing (which he can do without disrupting the duel) just in time for the bad guy to knock Robin out.
Celyn hates it when that happens. He drops a healing spell on Robin and closes to combat with the big bad, who is extremely disturbed when Robin stands up and promptly heals himself fully, with the declaration "We're not finished here." ("Robin has shown his second health bar.") The redcap looks at the fully healed paladin and basically says, "Fine!" and turns to whale on Celyn instead, with Robin deflecting the attacks enough to return Celyn's crit-disrupting favor. After blasting through the bad guy's temporary hit points (which he gains when he seriously hurts one of the party members) once more, and missing a few times, Robin finishes the guy off. Celyn, as is traditional in fights where Robin gets knocked out, stabs the corpse a few times to be sure. Izgil removes the big redcap's red cap and incinerates it quietly in the corner.
Having defeated the bad guys we proceed to case the joint. The trophy room contains an assortment of small body parts, a lot of armor including a magic helm, Greymalkin's wings, a unicorn horn, the top half of some sort of entlike creature and the head of a white stag with wooden horns laced with silver, and some other Stuff. The goblin tunnels contain not much.
As we are clearing out we encounter a group of four goblins, call the brother's name, and one of them responds. We tell him that we were asked to see him safely out, and hey, Ianto is dead so he's free. The goblins collectively look at the giant corpse and go, "... yeah we noticed."
Brother goblin is surprised his brother is alive. He is also delighted his brother is a goat. Because goats are useful, they give milk! You can ride them! (Celyn refrains from commenting on the problem of milking male goats but he thinks it very hard.) Robin is not willing to hand over the goat to his brother because clearly the goat-boy cared more about his brother's well-being than the brother cares about the goat-boy and this is not good custody. The goblins say they will go east or maybe south or maybe hang out here they're not sure; we float the idea they might come with us as we attempt to find our way somewhere safe.
Around here we stopped because clearly this conversation was getting complicated.
Combat sessions continue pretty fast to summarize.
Dramatis Personae:
Izgil, doing bomber runs
Viepuck, more of a sniper really
Celyn, combat medic
Robin, heavy cavalry
When we left off we were travelling to the fortress of the person who took, among other things of less importance to the party, Greymalkin's wings as a trophy.
We took a day of travel through the eerily shifting landscape towards the black stone peak that housed the giant redcap (Ianto the Red), his minions, and a crew of terrified goblins who had previously included the half-goat half-boy we purchased from the Judgementally Hospitable Fey Lady and currently included the goat-boy's brother. After sleeping in the eerie eternal late afternoon, we ate the special meal the lady had given us and tried to get more information about the innards of the fortress from the steadily degenerating mind of the goat-boy, which didn't get us a lot beyond a vague sense of rough map and knowledge that one of the tunnels the goblins feared tremendously.
We made our way closer along the ridge, and eventually encountered a dragged blood trail coming up and making its way towards the fortress, a couple of days old. As we followed the trail, we saw a few bits of white fur scraped off whatever it was. Eventually we found ourselves in the shallow valley just beneath the hollow peak that was the fortress.
After some discussion, Celyn had a conversation with the goat and left him in a thicket, because attacking a fortress with most of a goat is logistically complex. We spotted two redcaps keeping watch, and Viepuck disguised himself as his best guess as to what the goblin had looked like before he was turned into a goat and trudged his way up to decoy the guards. The guards looked at him fangily, and suggested that perhaps if he were One-Leg and also One-Finger perhaps he would be allowed back into the servants' quarters.
"Can't serve with one finger," Viepuck notes, flinging his hands up to demonstrate that he can in fact eldritch blast, knocking one of them down the slope towards the rest of the party. After a quick flurry of activity, both redcap guards are dead, but not before one of them manages to clang his iron boots together to alert the fortress to trouble. We leave the one at the top of the slope where it is, Viepuck casts an illusory boulder over the other corpse, and the party re-hides.
A troop of a half-dozen more redcaps come out and inspect the corpse, making much to-do over Celyn's arrow stuck in its leg, and then most of them carry the body inside, leaving two to canvas the area, including climbing up the side of the black rock of the fortress a bit to get a better vantage, which conveniently lets us know where the path up is. As they search, they approach the illusory boulder, and Viepuck zaps one of them in an experimental way, leading to a second combat in which we also quickly kill a pair of redcaps despite an alarm being raised.
Celyn heals Viepuck and then casts a spell to conceal their tracks and help them hide, so that they can climb up the slope with minimal chance of being spotted by whatever search party comes out next. We do so. The next search party is a couple of goblins, who see nothing and go back in.
Eventually we reach the top of the rock and peer down into the central caldera-like opening. At the bottom, just out of the reach of easy spellcasting, the giant (some twelve foot tall) redcap is delivering a drill sergeant lecture to an uneasy crew of redcaps. Izgil listens to the rock beneath us to figure out where some of the tunnels are.
The bombing run is planned as follows:
Izgil and Viepuck jump off the cliff edge, effectively hand-in-hand. Viepuck casts feather fall. Izgil fireball-equivalents the squad of redcaps. Viepuck blasts surviving redcaps. On the following round, Viepuck drops Hunger of Hadar (angry darkness) on the survivors, and Izgil dimension-doors them both back up while the bad guys are in the dark cloud and can't see what happened. Then we wait to see what chaos, if any, results from this, with Es*tiaslos scouting around and reporting.
This plan went off almost perfectly, with a few caveats: even with disadvantage imposed on their saves, there was not quite enough fireball damage to drop any redcaps. Viepuck took one out before they went away, and they scattered, with a crew of them going into the tunnel flagged as Scary by the goblins, while the others and Ianto headed for the throne room. The darkness covered the retreat but did not finish anything else off.
Result: seven mostly extremely injured but not dead redcaps, one giant redcap, the courtyard is cleared.
Es*tiaslos peeks into the Scary Tunnel and discovers basically the abbatoir, in which the surviving redcaps are not only drinking the blood of a giant boar but have caught and vivisected one of the goblins. Rather than allow them space to recover their health through gruesome cannibalism, Izgil and Robin dimension-doored into the abbatoir to deliver special-ordered violence while Viepuck, Celyn, and Greymalkin dropped off the cliff and Viepuck once again feather-falled people, this time going all the way down. Robin defends Izgil from violence ("That's my dwarf, you can't hit it") and the two of them eliminate the lunch crowd.
New situation: half the party is in the abbatoir tunnels (right side), half the party has landed in the courtyard (left side), there is a barred gate in the center to the throne room into which surviving bad guys have retreated to regroup.
Celyn and Greymalkin both head up towards the gate and teleport to the far side so never risking line of sight to the inside. Celyn hides up against the wall while Greymalkin continues to the tunnel exit so when Robin comes out he can mount immediately. Viepuck, meanwhile, plops another Angry Darkness inside the throne room covering the door as soon as he has line of sight to do so.
Violence commences once more. The big bad charges out of the throne room and hits Viepuck hard enough he loses concentration on his spell, then takes an arrow to the neck from Celyn. As Viepuck flees towards the abbatoir tunnel, Robin comes out and charges, challenging the big bad to a one-on-one fight. Celyn disrupts a critical hit on Robin with fey magic. Three other redcaps come out of the throne room, one of them going to join the fight with Robin, the other two pursuing other people. Viepuck turns and blasts the one that was fighting Robin back, Izgil drops another fireball on the three of them to finish them up, Celyn steps in to heal Viepuck then goes to back up Robin with healing (which he can do without disrupting the duel) just in time for the bad guy to knock Robin out.
Celyn hates it when that happens. He drops a healing spell on Robin and closes to combat with the big bad, who is extremely disturbed when Robin stands up and promptly heals himself fully, with the declaration "We're not finished here." ("Robin has shown his second health bar.") The redcap looks at the fully healed paladin and basically says, "Fine!" and turns to whale on Celyn instead, with Robin deflecting the attacks enough to return Celyn's crit-disrupting favor. After blasting through the bad guy's temporary hit points (which he gains when he seriously hurts one of the party members) once more, and missing a few times, Robin finishes the guy off. Celyn, as is traditional in fights where Robin gets knocked out, stabs the corpse a few times to be sure. Izgil removes the big redcap's red cap and incinerates it quietly in the corner.
Having defeated the bad guys we proceed to case the joint. The trophy room contains an assortment of small body parts, a lot of armor including a magic helm, Greymalkin's wings, a unicorn horn, the top half of some sort of entlike creature and the head of a white stag with wooden horns laced with silver, and some other Stuff. The goblin tunnels contain not much.
As we are clearing out we encounter a group of four goblins, call the brother's name, and one of them responds. We tell him that we were asked to see him safely out, and hey, Ianto is dead so he's free. The goblins collectively look at the giant corpse and go, "... yeah we noticed."
Brother goblin is surprised his brother is alive. He is also delighted his brother is a goat. Because goats are useful, they give milk! You can ride them! (Celyn refrains from commenting on the problem of milking male goats but he thinks it very hard.) Robin is not willing to hand over the goat to his brother because clearly the goat-boy cared more about his brother's well-being than the brother cares about the goat-boy and this is not good custody. The goblins say they will go east or maybe south or maybe hang out here they're not sure; we float the idea they might come with us as we attempt to find our way somewhere safe.
Around here we stopped because clearly this conversation was getting complicated.
Combat sessions continue pretty fast to summarize.
From:
no subject
Subtlety and red caps don't go together that well.
From:
no subject