Strategic Challenge

[Greenfield]

Okay, we're facing a strategic challenge in our game. We're playing D&D 3.5, just to be clear.

Our party consists of a Bard9/Sandshaper1/Sublime Chord 3, A Ranger6/Druid7, A Wizard5/Cleric5/Mystic Thurge3, a Fighter12, a Barbarian3/Wizard7, A Rogue/Shadowdancer (Exact level unknown) and a Rogue7/Wizard3

We hold an otherwise deserted city, along with about 50 soldiers, mostly Warrior1 or 2. I think there's a Sergeant Level 5, but I might be wrong.

Surrounding the city on four faces are forces of Orcs and Ettins with higher level spell support of unknown capacity. Somewhere between 800 to 1,200 in all.

They want the city, we need to hold it.

For spell artillery power, we have two Wands and a Staff of Ice Storm, two wands of Wall of Fire, one wand of Lightning Bolt, and a Wand of Burning Hands.

We also have a Wand of Invisibility, a Wand of Silence and several Wands of Magic Missile.

Our healing sources are solid (Lots of Healer's Belts and a few Wands of Cure Light and one of Cure Moderate).

The Dwarf fighter is a hefty melee artist who can lay 100+ points a round, and the Ranger/Druid is long range death with a bow. We can pump a few of his arrows with spells so they do massive damage, but only a few.

The city walls are probably half a mile or more per face. There really isn't any way for us to man them to any meaningful degree. We'll probably end up letting them fight their way through obstructing magic and missile fire to enter the city proper, then fall back to the castle itself. Shorter walls to hold.

The Barbarian/Wizard, our ostensible leader, wanted to go out and melee them in the field. We talked him out of it.

The enemy has been hiding in the woods, trying to keep their presence hidden. We found them though, and they know they've been found. We don't know why they've been waiting, but they have. Maybe more re-enforcements are due to arrive.

In any case, we have somewhere between zero and seven days before they begin their assault.

So how do we stop them?

 

[Greenfield]

My own thoughts are that we need more intelligence on the enemy.

It's too large a force for them to be living off the land, and far too extensive for them to be conjuring food to feed them all. If their supplies are centralized, they're an obvious target point.

Destroying them would help if this were a prolonged siege situation. As things are, loss of those supplies would simply force their hand, prompting them to begin their assault sooner.

Identifying leaders, and spell casters in specific, would be a great help. Fireballs dropped from orbit (high fliers) always feel good, but sometimes a knife in the dark is the better choice. And that really depends on how good our Rogue and ShadowDancer are at their jobs.

One big concern is that if we do any coordinated strike at any one of the four camps, the other three will simply move in and slaughter the relatively weak defenders left inside.

We also have a temptation: They have siege engines. Destroying them will slow their assault capacity. But if we could capture them intact...

Anyway, that's my thought process so far.

 

[Dandu]

Why do you want the city? If it is purely for the strategic location, you could lure troops in and then set fire to the city.

See if you can get the sneaky ones to go around causing infighting. Kill an orc, for example, and plant that orc's prized possessions a rival's tent. Steal tasty food or alcohol from one camp and put it in another's.

Poison the local water supply.

Act like nothing is going on. Try playing musical instruments on the city walls.

The Barbarian/Wizard, our ostensible leader, wanted to go out and melee them in the field. We talked him out of it.

No. Don't. This way, you will get a new leader. Perhaps someone with a better character build.

 

[Greenfield]

We have a grudging partnership/sponsorship by the ruler of a neighboring city. The two cities have been in an on again/off again war for years. The neighboring city's spell casters tried to summon a Devil and use him as a weapon against our sponsor's city. It went wrong, the Devil wasn't contained or controlled, and the city got evacuated.

Our sponsor took in many of the refugees from this neighbor, and once it was confirmed that some of the lands around that city were safe, he extended the protection of his guard to the people living there. And his tax collectors, of course.

We cleared the city of the forces that occupied after the Devil took over, and have been burning and burying bodies for a week.

Our sponsor sent a small number of troops to help us secure the place until the population is ready to move back in. He wants to unite the two by placing his son as regent there. It's a long term investment in peace. Plus a larger tax base.

The Barb/Wizard is his son. Letting him kill himself really isn't an option.

The "why" of it is that gaining an entire city, with the associated lands, is a huge thing. While we won't personally hold it, we'll almost certainly be rewarded with lands and titles. In terms of stabilizing the local economy, it's hard to describe the impact.

What the Barbarian Prince needs to do is hold the place until we can ensure it's safe for people to return to (we're slowly closing hell pits, removing curses, exorcising hauntings, etc.), then see it repopulated.

Once it has a population, the trained soldiers we're working with will become the new royal/city guard. They'll have a population base they can recruit more from to make the place defensible, long term.

This isn't the typical PC adventure stuff, where the player characters roll into town, smash, burn and blow things up for a few days, then ride into the sunset. It's a longer term project, with longer term rewards.

Also, since this is the DM who buried us in loot (including a woodpile worth of magic wands), I suspect that he plans to burn that excess right back off again.

The problem, of course, is that most of the wands aren't that well suited to facing an army. Burning them to win really isn't an option. It won't work. We're too thinly spread to try and brute force our way through this challenge. Elegance is called for.

One clue is that we keep hearing about "The Four Sisters", and suspect that these forces are being lead by them, or their puppets. Eliminate the sisters or cut the puppet strings and life gets a lot easier.

 

[Binho]

Do you know why they want to invade the city?
How is the terrain around the city?
The forces are split in group of only orcs and groups of only ettins?

 

[Greenfield]

I like the Empty Fort strategy. We have no civilian population for the soldiers to mingle with. We do, however, have a lot of empty buildings for them to hide in.

And the Bard (my character) does have a reputation for unexpected tactics, tricks and surprises.

He does have a way to conjure a crowd, of sorts. Not illusions, but a variation on Unseen Servant that in this case is visible and apparently solid. It burns a 6th level spell, but he can get about 4 dozen per casting.

Using this approach to delay the opposition, we'd probably have the party focus their efforts, with support fire from whatever troops they could take with them, on the force to the North, while the Bard and an apparently crowded market place played their role at the opposite gate.

The gate ploy would only work once, if at all, but ...

But it lends itself to further exploitation.

I also have to wonder what would happen to an army of Orcs and Ettins if they found two dozen barrels of whiskey, wine and ale delivered to their camp? Not poisoned or cursed, just delivered, or better yet "captured" from a merchant's wagon that apparently broke down near by.

You could take a sizable force out of action for a day, maybe longer, like that. And again, that leaves one of the four forces out of play while a forcible strike is executed against another.

 

[RUMBLETiGER]

Do you have a wheelbarrow and a Holocaust cloak?

(I'll ponder and come up with something more constructive shortly)

 

[Greenfield]

Do you know why they want to invade the city?
How is the terrain around the city?
The forces are split in group of only orcs and groups of only ettins?

The city was controlled by a noble (exact title/name keeps changing) who also controlled several other cities in a moderate fiefdom.

While he himself was killed, and his son's first attempt to retake the city resulted in massive losses (and us having all the collected magic from that army), his family hasn't given up.

Ultimately it's about pride, money, power.

The area is northern England, near the coast of the Irish Sea, just south of Hadrian's Wall. (i.e. near Scotland). So the area is hilly and moderately forested. There are farm lands about, of course, cleared fields et al, but scattered (as opposed to being unified into a single open area), and overgrown from several years of disuse.

As far as we can tell, enemy forces are mixed with giants and giant kin, as well as Orcs. There may be others as well. We really don't know exactly waht's out there, but the forces we've seen so far are mixed.

 

[Greenfield]

Do you have a wheelbarrow and a Holocaust cloak?

(I'll ponder and come up with something more constructive shortly)

No and no, not necessarily in that order.

We have whatever we can salvage from a city that was held by demons for several months, which means very little burnable, edible, usable.

I'll actually be hard pressed to come up with empty casks to fill with booze, much less the wagon or cart to transport them (and break down at some convenient point.)

 

[Dandu]

Eh, given what orcs are used to drinking, you could probably get away with pissing in several casks and calling it a day.