Session III: Zombie Dance Party

Thaeryn the cleric, played by Aldarian [257 points]

Brock the fighter, played by Siobhan [256 points]

Tobias the swashbuckler, played by Jeremiah [255 points]

Jefe "The Honest," the wizard, played by Ian [259 points]

Wan the monk, played by Scott [255]

Henchmen:

Crog, loadbearer/mapmaker

Kevyn, locksmith.

The party dithered about in town for a while¹, wasting a bunch of time shopping. Wan got a nice DR enchant on his clothing, as well as buying a cestus for his fists. Thaeryn got more armor (and enchanted it) and a bigger shield (and enchanted it) for a total DB of +4. Brock enchanted all her armor with 1 DR, and stacked more plate over chain². Even Jefe got some DR enchants.

Wan and Brock also got the services of the town locksmith to come into the dungeon with them,  to open doors and disable traps. Jefe brought Crog in again to carry their things and draw their map.

Now absurdly armored, the party ventured forth into the dungeon.

After passing through the Goblin town without incident, the party started exploring the eastern part of the first floor. The layout of that area is mostly identical 10 foot rooms, laid out in a space-efficient pattern in sets of four rooms. The party dubbed these "dworms" (Dwarven Dorms) and went about clearing them.

The first dworm set was packed to the brim with zombies. The party quickly put people in each door, and managed to divide and conquer. Without the ability to swarm, the zombies weren't really a threat. However, the zombies dodged frakking everything³. There were a few scares, where Wan or Brock got multiple zombies grabbing them, but the fight ended with no casualties and only minor injuries. They searched the rooms, and Kevyn found a hidden bag of coins, with some gold and platinum coins⁴.

Exploring onwards, the party found some empty Dworms, finding some minor loot. During their search, they heard the sounds of many footsteps. Deciding on caution, they hid in the Dworms, cracking the doors so they could see what passed. A horde of 30-40 dinomen ran past, and the party decided not to ambush. Realizing an opportunity for easy loot, the party followed the dinomen. They sent the stealthy Wan and Tobias, along with Kevyn, to scout ahead while the rest of the group followed behind. The scouts and a group of orcs, also hiding from the dinomen, ambushed each other.

The orcs were unable to hit Wan or Tobias. The shaman in the back almost hit Tobias with a big fireball, but missed. The party looted the orcs, finding a magic ring on the shaman.

The party continued scouting, finding a group of the second floor orcs fighting the dinomen in a shield wall, and winning. The party predicted the dinomen would retreat, so they set up an ambush, and had Wan (their fastest runner) keep an eye on the fight.

Sure enough, the dinomen fled right into the party's ambush. Jefe tossed a pair of Concussion blasts into the horde, killing most of them, and stunning the two heroes. Tobias and Brock finished the heroes, and then they moved in on the chief. Tobias killed the chief from behind, and the party mopped up the remaining dinomen. They looted corpses, grabbing the chief's magic helmet.

Moving on to another dworm, they found a not somehow affixed to a wall, written in Orcish. Jefe investigated. It read, "I really wish there were a door here." At this, a slorn and its handler knocked down the wall and jumped the party.

Tobias' combat reflexes sprang into action, causing him to get the first strike. Now outnumbered, the slorn simply used its breath attack on them. Much to the party's surprise, this was not a regular slorn, but a frost slorn, and the breath weapon was cold damage with a stun effect. Everyone dodged the attack, and the fight was joined. Over the course of the fight, Tobias got caught out, and was unable to dodge the breath attack, stunning him for the rest of the fight. Brock murdered the orc and beat down the slorn. Thaeryn finished the fight with a powerful sunbolt to the vitals⁵. They looted the orc, finding two magic wands, and then looted the room.

In the dworm across the hall, Wan found a box, and immediately opened it. It prompty exploded in his face, as someone had rigged a frost slorn breath gland to it, hitting Wan with a frost blast. In the box was a Fine Dwarven axe. While searching, a goblin scouting group came up to the party and talked a bit, and were sufficiently impressed with the party's capacity for violence. They went back to the goblin town.

The party heard goblin screams, and went to investigate. An acid spider had ambushed the goblins. The party rushed in to help, and the spider fled into unexplored dungeon. The party did not follow.

The went to leave the dungeon, but the goblin leaders insisted that the party pay taxes this time. They added up all the coins, and gave the goblins 10% of their coins... entirely in copper pieces. The party had a mix of about 140 copper, silver, gold, and platinum, so 14 copper satisfied the exact terms of the contract. The goblins didn't seem to mind, and let the party go on their way.

They got back to town, and identified the magic gear. The ring granted DR 3 against cold attacks. The helmet had a Resist Pain enchant on it, but since nobody in the party had a small enough head for it, they just sold it. One wand was a prod with an exclusive powerstone that dealt 3 electrical damage. The other wand was a Wand of Passive-Aggressive Door Creation⁶, an in-joke from a previous campaign.

All in all, this was a profitable venture, with everyone getting about 500sp and 5xp each.

Footnotes:

1: The party spent an hour and a half of IRL time in town.

2: Brock has 12 DR on her torso, and 7-10 everywhere else.

3: They have a dodge of 8, but kept rolling 6's and 7's. The fight lasted twice as long as it should have because of that.

4: Kevyn critted his search, and then critted his loyalty roll, so he gave the party everything.

5: Sunbolt is tight-beam burning, meaning a vitals hit is x2 wounding. Aldarian rolled stupid high damage, hitting for a total of nearly 50 damage.

6: The WoPADC works by magically attaching a note to a surface with a passive-aggressive message asking for a door. And some point in the future, fate will conspire to make an opening in that surface, if one is possible. This operates entirely by GM fiat, making it very hard for the party to abuse.

Lessons learned:

Pre-crawl logistics need to be streamlined. We can't have 90-minute delays anymore.

Orcs are just not a threat to the party. Monsters are not only more interesting, but provide a better challenge.

Session II: Crit Party

Slorta the archer, played by Dan [250]
Wan the monk, played by Scott [250]
Brock the fighter, played by Siobhan [251]
Jefe the wizard, played by Ian [255]
Thaeryn the cleric, played by Aldarian [252]

Henchmen
Crog, load bearer/map maker.  He's a foreigner, who doesn't speak the language very well.

Slorta is a very accurate archer¹ and is also the first non-human character.  Slorta is an Elf, with bonuses to archery and survival skills.  He is especially dangerous when aiming for the eyes or vitals.  His Elven Longbow is Signature Gear, and as such comes with the guarantee of replacement if when I throw an equipment destroying monster at the party.

Wan is a monk with a varied repertoire of combat abilities.  He is skilled in Karate and Judo, as well as having several Ki-powered abilities.  He has some Ki armor, protecting his otherwise unarmored flesh.  He can get an extra attack, and can use Power Blow for more damage, Push for battlefield control, and Kiai for some crowd control.  Wan is a versatile agile fighter.

On a side note, Brock named her sword "Natural Causes."
Also, we learned that Thaeryn is a little bit racist toward goblins.

The group started in town, wasting only a little time with rumors and shopping.  They heard that a wizard lives in a tower on the other side of the mountain, that there's a necromancer in the dungeon creating undead, and that some of the dwarven vaults are in fact tombs for their kings.

They grabbed somebody to carry their loot, and carried on into the dungeon.

However, the party did not inform the new members of previous dealing with the goblins.  Jefe conjured up a new illusion of the old slorn, frightening Slorta and Crog into fleeing into the dungeon.  Not recognizing the new guys, the goblin gate guards opened fire on the archer.

As the illusory slorn came into view of the goblins, Slorta attacked it, disrupting the illusion.  The goblins saw the party, presumed dead, and fled into a panic at the "zombie invasion."  Jefe, thinking quickly, illusioned up zombie heads that the party could carry in.  When confronted with the goblin "welcoming party," (every armed goblin in the area) Jefe announced that the gods brought the party back to life after the battle with the slorn to solve the goblin's zombie problem².

The party passed through the goblin town with no further incident, straight into a war zone.  The orcs from the lower levels were trying to invade the goblin level.  Barricades had been set up, with a no-man's-land in the middle.  Slorta hopped the barricade, and promptly got shot in the groin for his trouble.  His armor soaked most of the damage, but he was later mocked for it.  The party pushed down the hallway, to get a better shot on the orcs taking cover behind their own barricade.

The party split in half, with Slorta and Thaeryn on the left side, and everyone else on the right.  They took cover in side passages, with uncleared doors all around.  For some reason, the party stopped shooting at the orcs and started opening doors³.  Wan opened his door right into an incoming Orc ambush, surprising both parties.  At the same time, Slorta and Thaeryn opened their door, finding themselves face-to-face with another slorn and its orc handler⁴.

Two separate simultaneous combats broke out.  The fight against the orcs was a knock-out-drag-out brawl.  The monk used his Push to play dominoes with a few orcs, and the massive damage from Brock's greatsword, while blocked, was enough to stagger and knock back orcs several times.  The orcs did eventually slip through the front line, surrounding Wan, Jefe, and Brock.  Wan tried to use his acrobatic skills to jump over the orcs, but got tripped up and fell on his face.  Due to the orc's good block skills, Brock was less able to wreck everything like usual.  Jefe took up the slack, dealing a surprising amount of damage with a 1-point flame jet, striking over ally's shoulders with his staff.
Wan started a grapple, removing an orc from the fight.  When that orc was the only one left, Brock risked an attack into the grapple.  With a crit fail, she managed to hit Wan instead, tearing into the poor monk's back.  It didn't cost them the battle though, and they beat the Orcs down with no real casualties.

On the other side of the hallway, the fight went much differently.  Slorta shot down the slorn with a single shot to the eye⁵.  Thaeryn managed to get behind the handler, wrecking him with a mace to the back of the head.  After that fight, Thaeryn offered to "apply ointment" to Slorta's groin injury, which Slorta vehemently rejected.  Thaeryn settled on a casting of Minor Healing, and the issue was uncomfortably settled.

After a long rest, and some looting, the party continued along, taking an alternate route to the orc barricades.  The first thing the party noticed was that these orcs were much better equipped than the previous ones.

The opened a door near the barricades, and Brock and Wan bursted across the hall where the orc archers couldn't see them.  Jefe and Slorta took cover behind Thaeryn.  This left the poor cleric as the orc's only viable target.  He blocked the first hit, but the next one hit him in the arm, and the next landed high-damage blow to the skull, seriously wounding Thaeryn. (Who medics the medic?)  Slorta critted (again) killing an orc with a face shot.

Realizing these weren't puny goblins, the orcs called for reinforcements.  Brock and Wan had a harder time dealing with these heavily armored and more skilled orcs.  Brock was forced to only attack the neck, where the armor was thinnest.  Wan tried grappling.  The orc was too strong to be completely disabled by Wan's Judo, but wasn't strong enough to completely break free, either.  Eventually, the orc got knocked down, and Wan let go.  The crazy monk the critted the standing orc in the face, hitting with a terrifying penetration blow to the eye, instantly killing the orc.

At this point, an orc shaman and a pack of dogs teleported in behind the party, and tried to hit the party in their squishy flank.  This backfired horribly, as the dogs ran into the fairly tanky Thaeryn, and attacked fruitlessly.  Jefe Great Hasted Slorta, who then proceeded to Arrow Hell the shaman, ruining whatever spell he had prepared.  The shaman died before being even remotely dangerous.

Back behind the barricades, the knocked down orc tried to acrobatically get up by rolling backward down the stairs.  He succeeded in rolling down the stairs, but failed to get up. Brock waltzed town the stairs and wrecked the poor knocked down orc.

With the fight finished, the party looted the orcs, getting some gold and silver, and their plate armour. From the shaman, they looted some potions and some spell stones.

On the way out of the dungeon, the party traded slorn meat instead of paying the goblin's tax on the way out. I suspect this will be the beginning of a long string of ever more creative tax evasion methods.

With all the loot tallied up, the plate armor was worth more than everything else combined, making this trip very profitable indeed.

The whole party got 5xp, and Crog spread the news of their success.

Footnotes:

1: Weapon Master (Bow), Heroic Archer, and Bow 21.

2: Realizing he was the de facto face of the party, Ian actually gave Jefe points in Fast Talk.

3: Opening a bunch of doors should get the party wrecked. I must remember to punish this more harshly in the future.

4: Due to the previous illusion shenanigans, Slorta was convinced this new slorn was an illusion.

5: The shot was just short of actually putting the slorn into the death range, but it crit failed the "stay concious" roll, and passed out from the damage. Slorta finished him shortly.

Lessons learned:

Combats are taking too long. I have to find some way to streamline them. Possibly having tough enemies just die at -1xHP, with only very strong enemies and bosses make HT to survive.

I must be careful with enemies' equipped gear. The orcs' plate armors were really valuable. I don't want to overburden the party with money.

More enemies need eye armor. I don't want to make the precision attacker useless, but the eye shots are looking like they will wreck even very tough enemies. I have to find a good balance.  Possibly sending enemies that don't have eyes, such as undead.