Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shiroiken" data-source="post: 8103987" data-attributes="member: 6775477">To do a raid correctly for the PCs, it's best if they have a specific objective; otherwise it's just a bunch of random combats that serve no real purpose. In a campaign where we led a barbarian horde against a city, we set up multiple fronts for the NPC units, while we took a small unit through a magically created hole in the wall to attack a specific noble house we had a grudge against (the barbarians just wanted a good raid). From our standpoint, nothing mattered except our single mission, with us finding out everything else afterwards.Are the PC's obviously part of the non-Vikings? If not, they could be sent in as spies and saboteurs. Since the city is at the coastline, the docks are by far the weakest part of the defense. They could do one of a couple of things (or multiple of the players are creative) the night of the attack to weaken this even further. They could set fire to a warehouse area nearby, causing many on the docks to go help put out the fire (fire is devastating in a city, destroying entire neighborhoods/districts very quickly). They could assassinate the various lookouts that would be watching for danger from the sea, reducing the time the city has to prepare defenses. They could poison wells used by the barracks to cause them to become sick before the attack. The goals could be endless.If the PCs cannot infiltrate the city, they're still a few ways to use the PCs in a way to impact the raid, but these are likely to require higher level characters to pull off. A short and simple mission would be to light a bunch of fires outside the city away from the docks, in order to look like either campfires or torches for an army. The standard response would be to send out mounted scouts to verify the level of threat, and the PCs will need to stop them from returning. Start with a fairly small scout group at first, then repeat a few times with more and more scouts. Eventually this will force the city to mobilize troops to meet the apparent threat, from which the PCs will withdraw from.If you want the PCs to be part of the raid itself, I'd keep them all on one ship under an NPC commander. The first encounter would be with another ship before the docks, with the party simply part of the greater melee (keep your map limited, but remember that AoE will go beyond to help/hurt allies). The second encounter would be to take the docks, which is again should be kept to a smaller section, where the PC have to take out soldiers and civilian resistance (mostly sailors). The next should depend on the ultimate goal of the non-Vikings, because in a typical raid you want loot, so I'd have them first take a warehouse, then hold it against soldiers while NPC non-Vikings transfer the loot back to the ships.</blockquote>

Verification