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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ThirdWizard" data-source="post: 4498730" data-attributes="member: 12037">Leader of MenOOC:[sblock]I'm going to keep this one brief, going over the main details, then leave some space to come back and finish it. It was mostly a side adventure, though it does have enough consequences that I won't skip over the whole thing. Right now I'd like to catch up to where we are in the game, so I'll mostly gloss this one.[/sblock]Heading south, the group decided to push off other matters for now in order to try and recruit troops for their standing mercenary force they are trying to build up. The town they were headed to was about a month away, so the trip was fairly long. They were attacked by bandits once on the trip (who they intimidated away without battle) and demons charged from the forest to attack them as well. The demons left an easy trail to follow back to where they came from, but the adventurers weighed the risk of discovering where these vile creatures had come from against the possibility of losing their cart, and decided that the cart was far too important to leave behind.OOC:[sblock]Yes, I don't expect my players to jump at every hook I throw. But, come on. Skipping out on tracking demons because you like your 20 gp cart? They'll never live this one down. Ever.[/sblock]After arriving in town, the group met up with the leader of the mercenaries, Lion's Pride, who were having a hard time. Their leader was a man named Nathan Hart, and he was desperately trying to keep morale up. The men followed him loyally, but with a recent horrible defeat in the nearby swamp, they were having a difficult time. What they thought was a den of kobolds turned out to be controlled by a group of lizardfolk.Seizing upon the opportunity, Quinn decided to lead them into combat against the ones who defeated them. The kobolds by far outnumbered their lizardfolk masters, and the troops could handle them. The adventurers would be left to deal with the lizards themselves, a task they felt up to. If they succeeded, morale would be raized, and the men would be more willing to follow Nathan in serving Quinn and his new found company to the north.OOC:[sblock]I decided that I wanted to run mass combat, but I didn't want to have to worry about the odds and ends of the NPCs fighting other NPCs. (I really hate rolling NPCs vs. NPCs.) I decided to make the combat encouters of the troops vs. the kobolds happen completely "off screen" using skill challenges, with the ability of the PCs to command the troops determining how well the troops performed. I could put the rules I created in the house rules section at some point.The basics of it are that the PCs use skills like Diplomacy, History, Religion, and other things to order the men around, use battlefield tactics, and keep morale up. These skill checks determine how the troops come out of the battles at the end. Morale bonuses are awarded for really good checks, which give bonuses to the next battle that comes up. If checks go badly, troops die, morale goes down, etc. It worked pretty well.[/sblock]And so they went into the swamp. After a day tracking back toward the ruins that the kobolds and lizards called home, they were attacked by former companions, soldiers risen from as the undead, fighting their former allies. After defeating them, somehow they managed to keep the men's spirits up enough to continue onward.They fought their way through the outside of the ruins into one of the still-standing structures. The kobolds had set traps for them, and they had to fight in flooded areas made difficult for humans but where lizards could swim freely. The battles were hard fought, but the adventurers and the Lion's Pride came out victorious, collecting the spoils of war before heading back to town with the heads of their enemies on pikes.</blockquote>

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