Last night, we played the 11th session of our AD&D 2e campaign. The play report for our last session is here.
To recap briefly, the party went on a long journey from the city of Southreach to the muddy halfling town of Grimerun in the north. On the way, they encountered a large band of orcs and had to hide in a field of crops until they passed.
Grimerun was being terrorized by a mysterious forest beast which was gobbling up the village's residents. The party met with Jakayla, a local ranger, who took them to the site of the last attack. They found a 30-foot-deep burrow in the earth leading to a series of tunnels. Hesitant to go skulking around down there, the party laid a trap to draw the beast out.
Eventually, the beast took the bait - an 11-foot-long ankheg emerged from the pit. The party sprung the trap, with great success. They hoisted the beast into the air with a giant mancatcher and slew it as it thrashed about. Because the ankheg was relatively small, the party concluded that there must be more where that came from.
They tried the trap again the next day, with less success. The trap failed, and the ankheg escaped. The party decided they needed more manpower, and promised to return to Grimerun to solve the problem once they had recruited some henchmen. They headed south to the town of Stormhelm to do so.
*Slaps the Top of My 17 Charisma* You Can Fit So Many Henchmen in this Bad Boy
The party spent an evening in Stormhelm and asked around about who might be willing to join a bug-hunting expedition. Haymond Baler met Yuliana, a local cleric of Chauntea, the Goddess of Agriculture. Having been a farmer himself, Haymond liked the cut of her jib, and recruited her. With his 17 Charisma, he can take on 9 more henchmen, should he so choose.
The party traveled another day south to Grasshold, the larger town. There, Ash met Derrell, a druid, which the party took as an auspicious occasion. I use the 2e Monstrous Manual's Character Subtable in Appendix III: NPCs (page 379) to determine demographics, which lists only a 3% chance of encountering a druid. Not wanting to pass up the opportunity, Ash recruited the druid. With 11 Charisma, Ash can have three more henchmen.
Each of the players has a henchman now - Bernhardt Dalton has the elf fighter, Yinvalur Sparkguard, and Karven Stone has the human thief, Sheyla. Their party now numbers eight, and the ranger, Jakayla, was waiting for them back in Grimerun. They estimated that they now had enough numbers to brave the ankhegs' den. They turned back to the north to return to Grimerun.
Filling Out the Party
On their way out of Stormhelm, the party encountered a mounted patrol from town. The party expressed their intent to solve Grimerun's monster problem. The patrol wished them luck, and bid them to also deal with the village's nasty hobgoblin problem while they were at it, then return back to Grasshold to root out the ogres lairing nearby. You know, just reminding the players of all the other stuff they have to do.
The party completed the day-and-a-half journey back to Grimerun without further incident. They reunited with Jakayla, and paid two halfling bounders, Panster Keenblossom and Sylyra Softleaf, to watch their mules, dogs, and supplies while they went exploring the tunnels.
The halflings are hirelings, so the party pays by the day, and estimated they would need three days' of work from them - one day of travel to the burrow, one day exploring inside, and one day of travel back to the village.
The party was now traveling with eleven members, two mules, and three dogs - now we're playing AD&D! They set out for the burrow. The journey took seven hours, so they had an extra hour to poke around inside the hole. They lowered a rope and rappelled down.
The tunnels were more expansive than they could have imagined, but Jakayla was able to pick up a trail, which she believed she could follow directly to the ankhegs' nest. After a half hour of scouting, they turned back to climb up out of the hole and rest topside.
Ambushers
In the middle of the night, Bernhardt heard a pair of large figures, speaking to each other in Ogrish - and they were heading directly towards the party's camp!
I rolled that the ogres would be surprised, so I let Bernhardt's player know that they seemed unaware of the party's presence. Bernhardt, Jakayla, and Yinvalur were awake, so they quickly roused the rest of the group, who scattered into the surrounding foliage, intent on ambushing the ogres.
The ogres stumbled into the middle of the camp, surprised to find it there. They said something to each other in Ogrish, which the party couldn't understand. Without hesitating, they launched the ambush.
Ash and Haymond targeted the smaller of the two, bringing it down with two swift strikes (their two attacks did a combined 24 damage). The remaining ogre was riddled with arrows, darts, and sling bullets from Bernhardt, Karven, Sheyla, Yinvalur, Yuliana, and the halflings, before Jakayla leapt forward and felled it with her longsword.
It was a perfect surprise attack. The players remarked that maybe they could handle that ogre den in Grasshold after all!
Ambushed
The next morning, the party left their halfling bounders and descended back into the tunnels. As they followed the trail Jakayla had picked up, the forest above them thickened. Twisting roots grew down through the tunnel's ceiling and out of the walls, forcing the party to scramble through them, slowing them down. They traversed the tunnels for a full eight hours, covering about seven-and-a-half miles during that time. If the tunnels extended out in a 12-mile radius, as Jakayla suspected, then they were a little over halfway there.
The party would have to rest inside the tunnels, and continue in the morning. They nestled themselves in amongst the roots as comfortably as possible and did their best to nod off.
Haymond and Yuliana were on watch when Haymond heard the sound of tiny creatures scrambling in the dark. Suddenly, the two were beset by at least a dozen tiny, flabby, long-limbed humanoid creatures.
The gremlins impose a -5 penalty to their opponents' surprise rolls, so the party were now the ones being ambushed. I rolled a 3 for their reaction, so they were hostile - whether they would kill the party or take them prisoner was anyone's guess.
The gremlins launched themselves at Haymond and Yuliana, shrieking a hodgepodge language of Common, Dwarvish, Gnomish, Goblin, and Orcish. They clung to the characters' bodies as they tried to bludgeon them unconscious with tiny clubs.
Yuliana was almost killed in the initial onslaught, and Haymond lost nearly half of his hit points. The shrieking woke the rest of the party, who hastily drew their weapons and joined the melee.
Ash, Haymond, Jakayla, Sheyla, and Yinvalur began frantically slashing and stabbing at anything within reach. Bernhardt began firing off hold persons, and managed to paralyze a few of the enemies. Karven drew a few of the gremlins off of Yuliana and began tumbling to avoid attacks from the horde. Derrell cast shillelagh and started clubbing the gremlins. Yuliana attempted to escape certain death with sanctuary, but her casting was interrupted when she was clubbed some more.
At this point, at least one of the gremlins had been killed, and others were below half hit points, so they needed to start making morale checks. Since they hadn't yet killed or subdued any of the party, and because they were now facing magic-using foes, the gremlins had -4 to their morale checks, or -8 if they were badly wounded (because morale is rolled on 2d10 and the gremlins have a morale score of 12, a -8 penalty meant they would automatically flee).
The gremlins began to lose morale, scrambling to escape into unseen passages in the tunnel walls. The party attempted to kill them as they fled. Once they were outnumbered 3-to-1 (i.e. three or fewer gremlins left, since the party numbered nine), their morale check penalties worsened to -12, not that it made a difference. In the end, the party killed twelve of the gremlins, while just two escaped.
Haymond and Yuliana were the only ones wounded, and that was mostly in the initial surprise attack. Bernhardt used his healing magic to restore them to full hit points.
This was a combat that looked very dicey at first, then quickly turned into a chaotic melee which tilted in the party's favor. I was very satisfied with the morale rules here. They kept the fight from degenerating into a boring slog (not counting the initial ambush, it lasted just two rounds), and it felt somewhat realistic that the tiny, evil creatures would lose heart quickly once the surprise attack turned against them.
After the fight, we concluded for the evening. The party gained experience for the ambush on the ogres and the ambush by the gremlins, but no one leveled up. They all need at least a thousand XP for their next level (Bernhardt needs something like 6,000 XP), and they are getting just a small fraction of that number each session, so I suspect that they'll be here for a while.
Next time, the bug hunt continues.
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