Gaming log
Feb. 10th, 2002 08:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eyelessgameNo Ars Magica today -- Ryan is out of town, and I cancelled before even knowing this, which shows some sort of karma or other.
Chris and Chris (Whitefire and Hogarth) were absent today, so we mostly left them back at the boat. It was determined that Whitefire knows Alarm, so he and his ring of wizardry kept Alarm spells up constantly on the boats for a week, while Theo spent a week upping her cleric level to seven.
Looting the spectres' haunt (er, sorry) gained a scroll of second-level druid spells in addition to the druidic loot, and the naga's home (once dispel magics were thrown about) yielded a few potion-like spell objects -- oils of arcane lock, powder of knock, that sort of thing.
Exploring up the stairs... Raven took the lead, finding a large throne-like room containing a single winter wolf, a single frost giant (yipe!) and hints of daylight streaming out the doors at the far end. Raven and Tesla spiderclimbed to the ceiling as the rest of the party quietly began filing in; the wolf smelled something, and whuffled up near the stairs, where hell broke loose.
Winter wolves are ten feet long; Raven and Tesla discovered that when it stands on hind legs with forelegs on the wall, its 15' breath weapon can reach a 25-foot-high ceiling.
Tesla blasted a Web into the center of the room, temporarily binding up the giant and sealing the doors to outside, as the others made short work of the wolf. The giant broke free, charged, and thanks in no small part to Afon cleverly packing a number of fire spells (Produce Flame, Flame Blade, and Flaming Sphere), the giant was dropped before its reinforcements could arrive.
However, the reinforcements were something else again. The doors behind the webs opened; the PCs listened as wolves yowlped, giants snarled something in their own language, and sounds of some large animal being wrangled made it through the webbing. Then a pair of wolf breaths swooffed into the web, freezing the first fifteen feet of it... after which something else went WHUMPF and the entire forty-foot-diameter web froze.
The players went 'uhm' a lot. Gamemasters live for moments like that.
Moments later, another frost giant and two more white wolves emerged from one side of the web. PCs maneuvered to that side. Then three wolves and two giants came out the other side... another giant and four more wolves on the first side... and something, accompanied by yet another giant as its wrangler, launched itself directly into the center of the frozen web and appeared to get stuck there as the wrangler cursed at it.
"Outclassed" was the PCs' conclusion. They shouted at one another to engage in a fighting retreat. As one set of wolves and giants charged, Theo flung two fireballs from her necklace of missiles, dropping the wolves but barely inconveniencing the giants; Gunthar stood at the top of the stairs and warned the chaotic-neutral party members behind him so he could cast Holy Smite; and Cashel, bravely covering the retreat against two winter wolves, did an attack-and-backup, eating two attacks of opportunity, one of which rolled a 20 and another 20. Cashel had eight hit points and white wolves do d8+6. 22 hit points of damage; he fell over dead.
The enemies were closing; Tesla, sticking to the ceiling, was screaming at everyone else to get back to the stairs, Theo nearly decided to charge to Cashel's body to pick it up even though she'd almost certainly turn into a second unrecoverable corpse...
And then the dragon in the web turned its head and breathed sleep gas onto all the wolves on Cashel's side of the fight.
Tesla followed up with a second web right on top of Cashel and the one awake wolf, leaving only a narrow gap for the giants to squeeze through on the other side.
As Theo covered the top of the stairs, Gunthar Holy Smited the two closest giants, both of whom failed their saves and were blinded for a round. This was Raven's cue to place a pair of arrows into the closer one, doing over fifty hit points of damage from her sneak attack; Afon dropped it with another handful of fire.
The other giant, once it recovered from the Holy Smite, paused at the top of the stairs, was confronted by an unwounded, fire-wielding Afon and the confident Gunthar, and decided to high-tail it, accompanied by the rest of the giants.
Tesla, watching from the ceiling, saw the giants retreating, and the dragon raised its (muzzled) head, looked directly at him, winked, and stopped struggling, content suddenly to be led off docilely by its wrangler.
Cashel's body was recovered, to have one of the emergency raise-dead scrolls applied by Gunthar, and the party returned home after dispatching the sleeping beasts, bruised but confident. (This was an EL 14 encounter, not counting the ambiguous dragon! And they not only survived but got the better of their opponents. Excepting Cashel, who, instead of earning the 3100 xp, had a net loss of over six thousand after being raised, one of my pet peeves with D&D reward mechanics.)
Chris and Chris (Whitefire and Hogarth) were absent today, so we mostly left them back at the boat. It was determined that Whitefire knows Alarm, so he and his ring of wizardry kept Alarm spells up constantly on the boats for a week, while Theo spent a week upping her cleric level to seven.
Looting the spectres' haunt (er, sorry) gained a scroll of second-level druid spells in addition to the druidic loot, and the naga's home (once dispel magics were thrown about) yielded a few potion-like spell objects -- oils of arcane lock, powder of knock, that sort of thing.
Exploring up the stairs... Raven took the lead, finding a large throne-like room containing a single winter wolf, a single frost giant (yipe!) and hints of daylight streaming out the doors at the far end. Raven and Tesla spiderclimbed to the ceiling as the rest of the party quietly began filing in; the wolf smelled something, and whuffled up near the stairs, where hell broke loose.
Winter wolves are ten feet long; Raven and Tesla discovered that when it stands on hind legs with forelegs on the wall, its 15' breath weapon can reach a 25-foot-high ceiling.
Tesla blasted a Web into the center of the room, temporarily binding up the giant and sealing the doors to outside, as the others made short work of the wolf. The giant broke free, charged, and thanks in no small part to Afon cleverly packing a number of fire spells (Produce Flame, Flame Blade, and Flaming Sphere), the giant was dropped before its reinforcements could arrive.
However, the reinforcements were something else again. The doors behind the webs opened; the PCs listened as wolves yowlped, giants snarled something in their own language, and sounds of some large animal being wrangled made it through the webbing. Then a pair of wolf breaths swooffed into the web, freezing the first fifteen feet of it... after which something else went WHUMPF and the entire forty-foot-diameter web froze.
The players went 'uhm' a lot. Gamemasters live for moments like that.
Moments later, another frost giant and two more white wolves emerged from one side of the web. PCs maneuvered to that side. Then three wolves and two giants came out the other side... another giant and four more wolves on the first side... and something, accompanied by yet another giant as its wrangler, launched itself directly into the center of the frozen web and appeared to get stuck there as the wrangler cursed at it.
"Outclassed" was the PCs' conclusion. They shouted at one another to engage in a fighting retreat. As one set of wolves and giants charged, Theo flung two fireballs from her necklace of missiles, dropping the wolves but barely inconveniencing the giants; Gunthar stood at the top of the stairs and warned the chaotic-neutral party members behind him so he could cast Holy Smite; and Cashel, bravely covering the retreat against two winter wolves, did an attack-and-backup, eating two attacks of opportunity, one of which rolled a 20 and another 20. Cashel had eight hit points and white wolves do d8+6. 22 hit points of damage; he fell over dead.
The enemies were closing; Tesla, sticking to the ceiling, was screaming at everyone else to get back to the stairs, Theo nearly decided to charge to Cashel's body to pick it up even though she'd almost certainly turn into a second unrecoverable corpse...
And then the dragon in the web turned its head and breathed sleep gas onto all the wolves on Cashel's side of the fight.
Tesla followed up with a second web right on top of Cashel and the one awake wolf, leaving only a narrow gap for the giants to squeeze through on the other side.
As Theo covered the top of the stairs, Gunthar Holy Smited the two closest giants, both of whom failed their saves and were blinded for a round. This was Raven's cue to place a pair of arrows into the closer one, doing over fifty hit points of damage from her sneak attack; Afon dropped it with another handful of fire.
The other giant, once it recovered from the Holy Smite, paused at the top of the stairs, was confronted by an unwounded, fire-wielding Afon and the confident Gunthar, and decided to high-tail it, accompanied by the rest of the giants.
Tesla, watching from the ceiling, saw the giants retreating, and the dragon raised its (muzzled) head, looked directly at him, winked, and stopped struggling, content suddenly to be led off docilely by its wrangler.
Cashel's body was recovered, to have one of the emergency raise-dead scrolls applied by Gunthar, and the party returned home after dispatching the sleeping beasts, bruised but confident. (This was an EL 14 encounter, not counting the ambiguous dragon! And they not only survived but got the better of their opponents. Excepting Cashel, who, instead of earning the 3100 xp, had a net loss of over six thousand after being raised, one of my pet peeves with D&D reward mechanics.)
