Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 2740578" data-attributes="member: 143">Yeah, but with Arun and a pair of clerics in the party, disease isn't that big a deal, even if by some miracle they were to fail a fortitude save.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  Of more dire consequence is the fate of the town of soft humans above. Although, as we'll see today, the grimlocks aren't exactly pushovers.* * * * * Chapter 496Hodge had actually gotten a momentary warning of the ambush.  He’d been standing by the rough-hewn northern passage, most of his attention on Arun and that heap of self-righteous cleric, when he heard a skittering noise from the tunnel opening.  He’d started to turn, reaching for his magical waraxe, when the explosion in the center of the room blinded him.  Fortunately he’d been looking away; he blinked a few times, the bright stars clearing from his vision.  He smelled something acrid, a stench like burning rags, and looked down to see that his beard was on fire. The hurled oversized flask that had narrowly missed Arun had struck the ground in the center of the room, almost at Umbar’s feet.  The force of the explosion had knocked the dwarf backward, but even though white flames licked at the entire front side of his torso, the remnants of the explosive mixture coating his armor from his helmet down to his greaves, the cleric was quick to recover.  Beorna, who’d been partially shielded from the blast by the cleric’s body, moved to help him, but she had to turn and draw out her sword as a horde of grimlocks erupted from the small side passage, bearing black axes that they quickly put to use as they engaged the dwarves.  Arun, likewise, found himself hard pressed by another group that swarmed through the small round doorway to assault him.  The grimlocks were raging, launching violent all-out attacks upon the dwarves, but they also moved with cunning, setting up flanking positions that allowed them to slip devastating sneak attacks through the dwarves’ defenses.  Arun’s potent armor protected him from the first few blows, but he found out firsthand the hazards of letting himself get surrounded as an axe crushed into his hip from behind, sending a white-hot wedge of pain through his limb.  He gritted his teeth and blinked his eyes furiously as he tried to clear his vision enough to clearly distinguish the enemies swarming around him.  His first stroke had gone utterly wild, cleaving only empty air, and he heard the mocking chatter of the grimlocks, confident that this foe would be easily overcome. Unfortunately for them, they were gravely mistaken in that assessment. Umbar pulled himself up in time to stagger as a grimlock hurled himself bodily into the cleric, trying to bear him down to where he could be hacked to pieces.  The priest of Moradin was menaced by only this one foe at the moment, as Hodge and Beorna had blocked the others, who crowded around them in a blur of vicious cuts and counterattacks.  Blood sprayed across the room as Hodge took one grimlock’s arm off at the shoulder, but he fell back a moment later as another stabbed the finely-edged length of a drow shortsword into a crease in the armor plates covering his torso.  Beorna, likewise, had been surrounded by four of the creatures, but her adamantine sword was already wreaking havoc among them, the deadly black blade exploding a grimlock’s chest and then cleaving into the jaw of the next, sending teeth and bits of bone across the chamber in a gory spread. “Taste Moradin’s justice, foul creature!” Umbar said, thrusting the grimlock off of him and the driving the head of his magical warhammer solidly into its face.  The blow would have shattered the skull of a common man, but the grimlocks were fiercely durable, honed by the trials of the Underdark into machines of violence and destruction.  The grimlock, absorbed in its rage, snarled, spraying blood from its shattered nose and jaw as it hacked at the cleric with its axe.  The adamantine weapon clanged hard into the dwarf’s armor, failing to pentrate the layered plate but nevertheless inflicting pain as the impact of the blow drove through Umbar’s body. The cleric, of course, merely grunted and kept fighting. Hodge paused a moment to slap at the gob of burning… whatever that had splattered his beard from the explosive contents of the grimlock flask.  Hot wisps of flame had spread across the unruly mass of whiskers that the dwarf had cultivated like a wild forest, but he could not spare more time to deal with the growing calamity as three grimlocks pressed him intently, spreading out to take him from left, right, and ahead.  He could feel blood running down his side and leg from the nasty stab wound one had put into his torso, but that too was a lesser concern to the deadly axes that continued to batter at his magical armor.  He wasn’t as experienced a fighter as Arun and Beorna—the cleric was still an unknown quantity—but he was veteran enough to know that these were no common foes.  He had a gnawing suspicion that only their heavy armor had kept them up as long as they had, and as he saw the one whose arm he’d taken off stagger back up, grasping its axe with its other hand, he knew that these guys would have to be literally taken apart. Well, so be it.  Grimacing, the dwarf planted his feet—a decisive gesture for one who’d taken the path of a defender—and started laying about him with his axe, accompanying the assault with a steady stream of dwarven profanity.  A few feet away, Beorna thrust her sword deep into the body of the grimlock whose jaw she’d mangled a few moments earlier.  The creature fell, blood exploding in a fountain from the grievous wound, but even as she turned toward the next of the two still attacking her, the mortally injured grimlock seized at her legs with desperate strength.  That alone would not have been near enough to threaten her, but the one behind her detected the stratagem and hurled itself at her, latching onto her shoulders and dragging her down with its full weight.  The templar could not adjust her footing with the grimlock literally holding onto her legs with a death grip, and she collapsed back onto the one holding her from behind.  That creature paid a price as the heavily armored dwarf woman crushed its chest with her considerable weight, but it continued to clutch at her, seizing her helmet and yanking it free.  Her last foe, the one she’d been about to strike, had been waiting for that opportunity, and it stepped forward, its axe lifted above its head in both hands, ready to separate her head from her troublesome body. Arun staggered under the impact of another blow that had penetrated his defenses.  He swept his sword up against his attacker, and connected, but the angle had been poor and the grimlock spun away from the impact, a deep gash in its side gushing bright red blood.As he lifted his sword to strike again, one of the grimlocks behind him leapt and seized the limb, trying to force the deadly sword from his grasp.  The creature was strong.  Not as strong as Arun, especially with the paladin’s magical belt, but it had allies, and Arun was still somewhat disoriented by the aftereffects of the explosion and its accompanying flare.  A battleaxe clanged hard off his helmet, dazing him, so that he did not immediately see the grimlock who darted in, a long knife poised as it targeted the vision slit in Arun’s helmet, intending to finish the job begun by the bright flash of light upon the dwarf’s vision.</blockquote>

Verification