It was fun, but that wasn't the big fight. They fought just two of the bad guys, and the orcs were unprepared for them due to the short timescale involved. There are four left, and they will we prepared!Pielorinho said:
The fight didn't last too long - the PCs did make fairly short work of them. With the paladin on a flying tiger, charging in and whacking the archer for about 90 HP of damage in one blow, and the archer unleashing his barrage, along with fireballs from the wizard and searing light spells from the cleric, the PCs were dishing out buckets of damage.
I used that "Abyssal Entangle" spell from the post above; that worked well. The PCs cleverly used telekinesis to knock riders off their mounts and dispels to reduce protections. The bad guys didn't even reach them - they started to fly towards them from the fort and made it about three-quarters of the way there.
I did dish out some damage, though. The orc archer (I used the OotBI character posted above, with some tweaks) harried the PCs quite a bit. I don't think that I used the druid to his full effectiveness, and the wyverns certainly didn't get the chance to shine. That sort of thing just comes down to getting more practice at running high level games, though.
Next week will be a bigger fight, and I plan for the bad guys to be much more prepared and coordinated. The PCs have had their preliminary tussle with them, and proved more powerful than expected, but the bad guys won't make that mistake again.
So, next week we have:
1) Cloron himself (still undecided as to his nature)
2) An undead orc archer
3) An undead orc wizard
4) An undead orc rogue
5) A living orc sorcerer
All but the sorcerer have wyverns, of course.
The PC tactics were very good (their method of ensuring that they only fought a couple of opponents was ingenious, but they only get to fool them once!); they are now weakened (I'd say about 25% of their resources, which makes it a good encounter). If they try and leave to recover, the bad guys get the little girl and then the PCs problems get exponentially worse, so they're going to have to stay.
So, I'm still very insterested in help designing Cloron & Company's game plan for next week. The orcs are now angry, and they know everything they need to know about the PCs.
