Arcade Mode sessions 6--10
Session 6: Gliding through dark water, Lichway 1
Patrick and Fishbones. Patrick has a gift for character concepts. He pulled in a Knave necromancer with a hireling that had “big bones”, no doubt so he could reanimate the guy once he died. I asked if they wanted any hirelings and they took several, maybe 3 or 4.
My memory of this session is dim so I’ll skip a lot of it. I want to focus on a few key situations.
In the set-up, I had a really tough time explaining the geography of the situation. In part I blame the module, because the geography doesn’t really make sense. I also think I had some misleading word choices that caused a lot of confusion. There’s no concrete lesson in this. Describing things accurately is a skill, and needs a lot of practice.
The dungeon has a lot of water features, and the players followed an underground stream through it, avoiding a lot of potential violence. They found themselves in the east branch of a four-way intersection. North and south lead apparently to dead ends. North also had a rope ladder, fastened to the floor, just piled up — no “down” that anyone could see. West was a crawlspace, through water, into a dark room. They searched the north end and found a secret door opening 15 feet above a flooded room. They let the rope ladder down and one guy descended. They tossed a rock into the flooded room and disturbed something in the water — I rolled a random encounter with 2 lizardmen, who could only have emerged from that room. Their dispositions were neutral, but I decided that they interpreted the rock as a sign of aggression. The lizardmen swam towards the party, remaining underwater, though I told the players they could see large shapes moving through the water. The party retreated, but left the secret door open and the rope ladder unfurled. I decided that when the lizardmen reached the ladder, they would climb it stealthily. If the players didn’t leave a rearguard (and they didn’t) the lizardmen would have a chance of surprise against them.
Meanwhile one of the party wriggled through the crawlspace and found himself at the top of a mini-waterfall pouring out into a pool in a magician’s headquarters. The magician, Dark Odo, arose and ordered her minions (hidden in the pool below) to grab the adventurer. He retreated far back enough to break line of sight, but stayed on his knees in the crawlspace so he could poke anybody following him with a spear. (Of course no one would follow him into such a terrible position.)
While this was going on, the other player was doing some math on the size of the southern branch, and realized it too led to a secret door which must connect to Dark Odo’s room. He was right, and I told him so, but I decided that, even if someone knows there’s a secret door somewhere, one still must search for it in order to open it. But while it normally takes 10 minutes to search for a secret door, with a 1-in-6 chance of success, because he *knew* there was a door there, I’d give him the same chance of success in each round of melee spent searching. Their plan, I think, was to sortie from the secret door and take Odo by surprise. I would certainly have given them a chance at surprising her; I thought it was a very good plan.
dAt this time we did indeed switch to melee, because the lizardmen had succeeded in their surprise and got the jump on two of the retainers! They munched one of them and grabbed the other. As the players had an enemy to the north and west, and no immediate chance for sortie to the south, they opted to retreat. I think that was the best option for them. As I said, Odo’s forces wouldn’t follow them through the crawlspace, and the lizardmen were attacking opportunistically, and wouldn’t follow either.
They continued their delve, coming upon a long hallway lined with sarcophagi, hundreds of them. They correctly realized that all the sarcophagi contained skeletons, which would reanimate when the party solved some magical whatever in the place.
Two further points for that session. I played a giant spider as a genuine ambush predator, grabbing a hireling and killing it instantly after a successful poison attack, and then immediately retreating to its web above. The players decided they didn’t want to tackle it. Then they encountered a band of drunken Xvarts. I described them bumping into the Xvart’s sentry, but then I realized that the Xvarts had two entrances to their camp and only one sentry. In that case, why would the sentry magically occupy the entrance the players chose? Thus I flipped a coin to see which entry they guarded, and wound up retconning the exchange. (“Never mind that, the entry is unguarded. Here’s what you see…”.) I didn’t make my reasoning clear in the moment, and later one of the players asked me what the deal was there.
8: Big battle, Borshak 7
I got a lot of ideas from the RPG Theory about how the orcs of Borshak’s Lair would fortify their hideout after the last session, and I prepared a whole order of battle and fortifications and stuff. The orcs were really mad about the last incursion!Adam and a new player, Aggie, whose brother is in our Reavers game. (Aggie also joined that game.) Aggie had never played with any GM other than their brother, and consciously opted to let Adam take the wheel in this session.
I offered to Adam that he could have his delve take place the next day or two after the previous delve (when he had killed Borshak) or wait a few weeks in-game to let the orcs cool off. If he chose the lattter, I told him, their defenses will have relaxed but they will have penetrated deeper into the tomb complex, removing some of the loot and getting new spells and stuff (but maybe also taking casualties). Adam chose to return immediately.
Adam grabbed a bunch of men-at-arms, wise for a siege, a mix of archers and heavy infantry. Two of the infantry had big two-handed shields, pavises. I don’t think much of this as a strategy; pavises are better used against ranged attacks than in melee, where you really want to be able to stick the other guy. Otherwise his setup was good.
I took out the (hilariously vulnerable) sentries from the dungeon and replaced them with a Magic Mouth spell that would holler whenever somebody other than an orc, goblin, or ogre passed through the entrance. I also added a barricade to the first large room, beyond which 10 guys would wait in ambush with ranged weapons. I set up a sleep-watch-raid schedule with the inhabitants, figuring out how many of them were at each position at any given time. (One quarter on guard, one quarter outside of the dungeon on a raid, one quarter sleeping, one quarter resting awake.) And I figured out what the orc magician would do with his spells, if he were engaged in combat again.
The session had two forays into the dungeon.
In the first foray, the orcs had piled up wreckage blocking most of the doorway. I thought this was a decent plan, because the players would have to take apart the barricade in order to pass through. By chance, the orc magician was on guard duty when the players arrived. They had a very clever idea, which helps to explain why real armies don’t totally barricade up doors like this: they would push out the very top of the barricade, and use it as cover while they sniped the enemies beyond. I decided that if the orcs got the chance to re-fortify, they would take apart the barricade and instead use it to make a whole field of “difficult terrain” which would prevent charges and slow attackers. They wouldn’t give up their line of sight again.
So Aggie, who had a bow, climbed to the top of the barricade to shoot at the orc magician. At the same time the orc magician began to cast an ice wall spell at the ceiling above the party. I left it to initiative to see whose action would go off first — the arrow naturally interrupting the spell. The orc won initiative and flattened Aggie and several hirelings with a sheet of ice from above, dealing some 3d10 damage to 150 square feet of dungeon.
The gang retreated after this, and Aggie rolled up a new character. Adam grabbed some new hirelings. I rolled for a new defense crew and found the magician was sleeping. Instead an ogre was helping man the defense. I also reworked the barricade into difficult terrain, as I discussed above.
Adam had his footmen advance with their pavises while taking shots from goblin and orc archers behind a barricade and up some stairs. They warded off the arrows thanks to the pavises, but then the ogre came out and started smashing the pavises. Then the goblins sent a runner to grab the quarter of the troops that were resting but not sleeping, and the players again retreated, confident that they couldn’t break through the lair’s defenses. They lost 6 or so retainers but neither PC was scratched, I think.
Adam wanted to lay seige to the lair, and I knew how the magician would respond to that. He would burn through his spell scrolls, tossing a fireball at the besieging force, and preparing a sally with mass invisibility, and summoning an invisible stalker to either carry him to safety or take out the leaders of the seige. Adam wasn’t interested in playing out the siege itself, I think because he was demoralized by the loss, and said he’d prefer to abstract it and pay 1k gold to hire forces. I decided that, given the quality of the wizard’s plan, any small seige would simply fail, and the money would be lost. It would take a big effort to crack this place.
9: Lichway II
Just Patrick this time, with a lot of retainers. He made it far into the dungeon and tried to befriend the bandits that lived there, eventually asking Dark Odo to become her apprentice. I had a tough time handling this, for two reasons: I didn’t know how Odo might respond to something like this, and I didn’t know what it would mean for our play. In the end I had Odo ask him for all the treasure he had, “to prove his worth”, and rolled a reaction check using the treasure as a bribe modifier. She didn’t accept him as an apprentice, but she was happy to let him go in peace, since (she thought) she’d relieved him of his valuables.
This session was mostly chill and fun. If I have to run a one-on-one game, I’m most comfortable running for Patrick or Adam. Patrick’s ideas can sometimes be more zany than I’d like, but they’re always fresh and exciting.
I was glad to avoid a serious roleplay challenge like figuring out what Odo would want from her apprentice, and how the apprenticeship might change Patrick’s character and adventuring opportunities. I’d be happy to revisit that kind of situation later, when I’m more experienced, but for now it seems like too much for me.
Patrick added up some incidental pieces of information about Odo’s band and realized that they were extremely hungry, starving even. They must not be very good bandits! As soon as he guessed this, I knew he was right. So he formed a plan to bring a cart of food back to the Lichway next session, and to try and seduce some of Odo’s men into his service.
Here’s Patrick’s take on the session:
10: Lichway 3
Patrick and Nathan, Aggie’s older brother. They brought the cartload of food into the dungeon with a few retainers. Unfortunately, they made a tremendous tactical blunder, and were all defeated by Odo when they allowed her guard to sound the alarm. One sleep took out the whole party.
Here’s Patrick’s take:
And here’s Nathan’s: