Absolute Chaos. But this time, it was expected.
The PC's scouted the bandit camp in the hills. It was situated on a large bluff. Three sides were rough terrain, as the hill sloped upwards, and could even necessitate climbing. They attacked at night.
Three bandits were on watch, two by the firepit and one in a sniper's next on the roof of the leader's cabin. The group split up, slowly moving towards the camp. The three bandits on watch were humans, without darkvision, so they could only see about 60' away from the campfire normally, with disadvantage beyond that.
The bandit leader is a 7th level Wizard equivalent. When setting up the camp, I asked myself what a 7th level Wizard could do to defend the camp. I might have went a little too hard.
*Alarm cast on the cabin. As the spell is a 20' cube, this basically meant anyone trying to enter or anyone who got onto the roof, would awaken the leader.
*Tiny Hut cast inside the cabin. Never came up.
*Glyph of Warding on the cabin door. Never came up.
*Random stones with Glyph of Warding cast on them, strewn around outside the camp save for the main path. The trigger condition excluded anyone wearing a special copper earring that all the bandits wore. I assessed a 1 in 6 chance for a player to step on one of these when moving in these areas.
Aside: I think this spell is broken. At the cost of a 3rd level spell slot, you can create a land mine that will persist until it is triggered, even after you've recovered the spell slot. But the blast glyph is the tip of the iceberg.
The spell glyph lets you cast another spell into the glyph, which the glyph triggers. This spell slot also can be recovered. When it goes off, concentration does not need to be maintained on the spell effect, which lasts it's whole duration. Warning flags here, but I decided to go ahead anyways- I figured having seen it in action, the players would have a frame of reference if/when there's a discussion to nerf the spell.
The blast glyph would have been pretty terrifying and probably would have gotten the PC's to retreat, so instead I went with hypnotic pattern. This would maybe slow down the PC's, but at the very least, the momentary lightshow would alert the guards.
Multiple PC's actually triggered glyphs, who had, for some reason, split up into groups of two to assail the camp from different directions. Despite this, almost everyone made the Wisdom save, leaving only one character stupefied.
From there, the fight was on.
(I wasn't sure how the players would react to this, whether or not they'd find it unfair. To my surprise, they were more annoyed at themselves for not thinking there could be magic defenses!).
In round one, the archer on the cabin used a handbell to rouse the camp while the other bandits fired some ranged attacks. I decided that the rest of the bandits wouldn't come out until turn 2. A couple bandits didn't come out until turn 3 (a bugbear lieutenant needed to finish getting his half plate ready, the Wizards had spells to cast first, and the Warlock needed to cast their darkness).
The players decided to use fog cloud and darkness to hide their movements and give the enemies no initial targets to attack. This proved to be somewhat of a double-edged sword as it limited their attacks.
There were three basic bandit types, archers with shortbows, "dragoons" armed with short swords and hand crossbows, and a pair of alchemists, who had some alchemical bombs.
Then there was Fitch, the 3rd level Wizard, who was a coward who wanted to avoid combat, armed with sleep, web, and magic missile.
Sergeant Crusher, the Bugbear, armed with a halberd. "Cambion" the Warlock, using the darkness/devil's sight combo with eldritch blast. Cambion's Imp familiar, Fargaz.
Valdar, an Eldritch Knight and rival of the PC's, and Corrina, the Bandit Leader, the 7th level Wizard. The encounter was deadly*, even with four allied NPC's, but there likely wouldn't be any more fighting to be done today.
The Manticore had proven that 1 big enemy was never going to make an impact on the party. Lots of enemies make for long fights, but I hoped to avoid the misery of the Duergar encounter by letting the PC's know mostly what they were getting into and make a plan. Said plan fell apart almost instantly, lol.
Still, with all resources online, most attacks on PC's elicited a reaction of some kind, and a buff that lasts 1 minute basically will last the whole fight. I keep telling myself this is a good thing, but it's a little frustrating, lol, when you get lucky and get a hit in, only to get told "well actually...". Lol.
The bandit archers and dragoons started getting picked off in short order. Moonbeam makes it really hard to engage in melee when you're forced to move to avoid being fried!
The alchemists were bothersome, but friendly fire was constantly a problem. The Eldritch Knight was built to be a hard to kill melee opponent, but found himself facing a highly mobile character who wanted to be in ranged combat. After his sleep spell failed (he had no way of knowing the PC was immune, being of a fairly rare species), he was reduced to casting magic missile.
The level 3 Wizard got pinned down and only managed to get off a web before retreating into a hut, with a goblin barbarian hot on his heels. He got off a magic missile, but things aren't looking good.
The level 7 Wizard dispelled a Moonbeam and got two PC's in a Slow, but only for 1 turn. The PC Warlock was very annoyed with Slow, which he called a "caster killer" spell. He's not wrong, but in the end, thanks to misty step, he avoided most of the consequences.
The Bugbear came in and did some damage, as he was able to charge into a group of three NPC's allies and none of them seem too happy about being the first to provoke.
The real problem children were the Imp and the Warlock. Being able to strike from invisibility and being difficult to track meant when the Imp would attack, the PC's usually had forgotten it was around. But the Warlock was probably too much- I'd made them a Feral Tiefling with a 30 ft. fly speed, devil's sight, at will darkness, and the eldritch spear invocation so they enjoyed very long range on their eldritch blast.
While the PC Warlock also has devil's sight, they are on the other side of the battle map, giving the players no real way to deal with them at the moment.
When we called the session for time, the fight was not yet completed. 5 bandits were dead. Most of the rest were wounded, but the most dangerous foes are untouched. The level 7 Wizard keeps getting stupidly lucky with her blink spell (the PC's howled with dismay hearing it has no concentration!), but what they don't realize is that it's prevented her from employing counterspell.
I admit to a "bad DM" moment where I took joy in being able to use the PC's tactics against them, when they attacked the Eldritch Knight and, when they finally got a hit on him, I grinned and said "shield!".
I mean, they're constantly reacting to my attacks, so it's only fair, right?
Maybe not. We'll see what happens if I get a chance to use silvery barbs on them.
*Even with four NPC allies, the xp award if they win will be truly massive, something like 1175 xp! What I should have done is had less bandits and no NPC's to make this go faster, but it's hard to take a bandit gang of only seven guys seriously. The adventure called for 15 bandits and a leader, so they got 15 bandits and a leader (and a familiar, and an eldritch knight who they'd failed to kill before). The good news is, there won't be another fight this size until the next adventure, which opens with...
A bandit attack. Yay!
