500 Dinosaurs Attack! Help!

barsoomcore

Unattainable Ideal
Okay, so last session on Barsoom I may have gotten a little carried away.

Our heroes are part of a caravan making its way across the savage plains of Yshaka, where dino-riding barbarians make it their sacred duty to wipe out those who dare tread where they are unwelcome.

So the first wave comes in the form of a hundred or so warriors mounted on velociraptors, sweeping through a caravan of eight three-story armoured wagons towed by pairs of brachiosaurs. Well, with the advantage of position and lots of funky abilities, our heroes manage to drive off that attack with no loss of hit points on their end whatsoever.

I was a little cheesed about that, I admit. Maybe I'm a bad person.

Anyway, it was getting on for midnight and I was pretty well done, but they were all so complacent and "We rock," and everything, and so I rolled and got a barbarian attack encounter a couple of days later, and on whim decided to roll a d20 to establish the size of the attack.

I got a natural 20 on that roll. So it had to be big.

So basically as I was wrapping things up I said, "Oh, and you see forms approaching from all sides. Looks like hundreds of chasmosaurs and T-Rexes converging on your caravan. Being ridden by lots of crazed barbarians. See you next week."

It was a great ending cliffhanger.

Only now what?

There are three tribes of warriors, the Raptors, the Serpents and the Wind. The Raptors are the guys who ride velociraptors (natch), but there's no necessary connection between the tribe names and their mounts, so these guys could be of two tribes or just one. Dunno. Anyway, our heroes are 14th level and so kick pretty reasonable amounts of butt, but even so HUNDREDS of T-Rexes and potentially THOUSANDS of barbarians are a little beyond their means.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Snarky comments?
 

log in or register to remove this ad

Barbarians using a stampede as cover for their attacks?

chasmosaurs as the herd stampeding and the barbarians riding the T-rexes into battle (or the other way around).

Sounds like fun.

oh, and: "snark" :P
 


Rule one: always do what the players won't anticipate.

What if the barbarians are headed there to get the PCs' help? Geez, something must be a huge problem if they're coming to recruit the heroes who killed off their brethren. . . and whatever is driving them away from their home is going to be pissed.
 

Do you use a battle-system? (such as the one published in pdf by badaxe-games for example).

What are the abilities of the characters? I mean, is it D&D with spellcasters, or something Grim Tales or d20 Modern?

In any case your campaign sounds cool.

Well, you wouldn't need to kill the PCs in any way. Maybe just wound them, then make them prisoners stripped of all their possessions?
 


There's a pretty powerful psion, a monk/Shintao monk (OA) who's got some really fun abilities, a sorcerer/acrobat with a bunch of paper doll spells (see Spirited Away for the idea) and a sharpshooter/scout with a rifle. They've got a bunch of crystal rods that they know summoun SOMEBODY but they don't know who, and all the cargo in their wagon that they don't really know what it is yet.

And they're on their way to the Sun Disk which is apparently the entrance to the Ghostwalk, the path the dead souls of Barsoom take on their way to Omean, the Buried Sea, where they have to go to recover an artifact that was taken from one of their late comrades. They got told this by a PC's daughter who died ages ago.

PC: nice one. I may just nick that.
 

barsoomcore said:
Snarky comments?
Rocs fall. Everyone dies.

Seriously, though - what are your PCs' abilities like? Any diplomunchkins or terrain-altering abilities? Any natural features that they can be besieged in? Perhaps they have to retreat underground and realize that there is a good reason the barbarians keep the trespassers out when they free some Ancient Evil (tm) by mistake.
 

I do like PC's idea, but maybe, if you do want a fight, they don't have to fight every single barbarian. They take down a few as the rest of them thunder past, then make their escape (any natural, but small, cave formations? teleportation?). Or they kill the chief, and the rest scatter (or some pledge fealty...). Or maybe they just use the crystal rods, and they find out what happens? Or maybe they're just captured by the barbarian horde, who want to eat them/sacrifice them to their gods/use them as a bargaining chip with another power.

Demiurge out.
 

Having thier raiding party defeated, and a surviving scout return, the leader of the two tribes has realized that he has a potential asset to get rid of the telepathic twin brother Red Wyrms ravaging his dinosaur herds.

So he wants the PC's to fight, single combat, mano a mano, thier champion against his, nonlethal only.

Here's the trick...

If he wins, they are his slaves.

If they win, they are considered part of the tribe.

Either way, they take on the twin dragons.
 

Remove ads

Top