Arena Match recap, 12-31-04 and 1-2-05
((The following is a recap of events and such from the recent pair of gladiator matches I ran for Emiricol/Tralin, Evandariel/Jorgund, and Ezieer/Breenuk.))
Well, on Friday (New Year's Eve) we ran a match with Tralin, Jorgund, and a new gladiator Breenuk the glaive-wielding half-orc warrior, of Morte Nobilis, against a handful of foes from Noctus stable. It was late in the afternoon, gloomy after a long rain, and the Arena sands in Doluhre were still muddy, but the master of the games wanted a match anyway to please the small first crowd.....
Noctus sent four hellhounds and a new nagan warrior-monk to fight the champions of Morte Nobilis' lower ranks, but in a stunningly short battle, Noctus' forces were trounced. Though Tralin and Jorgund endured a few bruises, burns, and bites, the half-ogre quite swiftly chopped the nagan Kasariss and two hellhounds into little pieces. Breenuk, the newcomer to Morte Nobilis, did a fair job hacking up some of the hellhounds before one ran away and the other was finished off by Jorgund's flailing falchion, while Tralin took out the runner with a few shots from his bow. As Breenuk viscerally chopped up one of the enemy corpses and made a show of eating part of his slain foe, Jorgund roared in triumph and it appeared Morte Nobilis had quite thoroughly won.
However, it was not to be. A surprise rematch of sorts began immediately, Noctus taskmasters sending out two infernal, bat-winged imps accompanying a pair of large, rust-colored man-sized roach-things, entering the fighting area and heading towards the confused gladiators of Morte Nobilis..... Will the trio be victorious again, or will this surprise attack have them eating mud when they fall to the Arena's rain-sodden ground unconscious or dead?
The Morte Nobilis gladiators Tralin, Breenuk, and Jorgund fought their sudden rematch with Noctus. Talking to some other Morte Nobilis gladiators later in the Practice Yard, they learn that the critters Noctus sent against them were a pair of imps and a pair of rust monsters. The devious set-up, taking advantage of the gladiators' minor wounds and bit of wasted strength against the first group of hellhounds and the nagan, resulted in disaster for Morte Nobilis.
The fight got off to an odd start as the two rust monsters, appearing to be giant dun-colored roaches, rushed Tralin and Jorgund, instantly corroding Tralin's greatsword and Jorgund's armor into rusty dust, though Tralin got in one solid hit with his sword before it was destroyed. The imps approached more slowly while airborne, and used their inherant magic to compel Jorgund and Breenuk to focus on stabbing the giant roach-things to death before they become a danger. Breenuk resisted the compulsion, but Jorgund spent most of the battle doing exactly as the imps suggested, even wresting Breenuk's glaive from the half-orc's grasp at one point, only to lose the glaive to a rust monster the very next moment.
Jorgund, despite stabbing the roach-like rust monsters many times, didn't lose his magic falchion until he had killed them both, his last strike killing a rust monster and dissolving the magic sword as it just couldn't take so many brushes with the critters' corrosive antennae. All in all, during the fight, Jorgund lost his armor and falchion to the rust monsters, while Breenuk lost his glaive, and Tralin lost his greatsword and armor. The rust monsters caused little real harm, however, aside from these aggravating losses of armor and weaponry.
Meanwhile, the imps under Noctus' control (or employ?) changed form and fought in those new forms, one taking the appearance of another rust monster and subsequently destroying Breenuk's glaive, while the other took the form of a beast later identified in the Practice Yard as a digester, an acid-spitting, two-legged, armless, lizard-like monstrosity. The imps caused significant harm in these forms before they suffered terrible wounds, the imp in rust-monster-form being slain by Jorgund's devastating punches and Breenuk's club.
The other imp, sorely wounded from the Morte Noctus gladiators, retreated and assumed its natural form, flying up to stay out of reach while it rapidly healed. Tralin harassed the imp with arrows, but scored few hits, and eventually the imp used magic to deliver multiple suggestions compelling Breenuk and Jorgund to duke it out. This only worked, however, because Jorgund stole Breenuk's weapons after his own falchion dissolved, and Breenuk struck him in retaliation due to the imp's next compulsion, which only made it easier for the imp to then compel Jorgund.... It was a vicious cycle, but the imp found it all most humorous and never stopped cackling, except to speak the occasional magic suggestion. Eventually the imp managed to compel Tralin to believe that his arrows just weren't working well enough and that he had best escape the fighitng area and forfeit if he wanted to keep his life, lest the imp sting and poison him to death. The human warrior finally fell victim to the compulsions, and fled. The match ended in victory for Noctus as Breenuk sorely wounded Jorgund, who then killed the half-orc, and finally the imp finished off Jorgund with a sting.....
Later that evening, in the Practice Yard, Jorgund and Breenuk were raised from the dead by hobgoblin clerics of the Doluhre Arena, though both were quite bitter over the tricks and the betrayals. The trio from Morte Nobilis learned what had happened by talking with other members of their stable, who were mostly furious at Noctus' trickery and underhandedness, though a few admired it, and a few others were even angry at the trio for losing to Noctus in such a humiliating and pathetic manner, as they put it. Fortunately, the crowd watching that bout was very small, so any humiliation for Morte Nobilis will be minor. The half-orc and half-ogre, naturally, pummeled anyone who insulted them as stupid and incompetent halfbreeds, and with Tralin they nursed their bitterness in the Yard's tavern with plenty of ale and brawling.
It's been rumored amongst the Morte Nobilis gladiators that Noctus had set up the sudden rematch with the imps and rust monsters, bribing or intimidating the Master of the Games, without the knowledge of the Morte Nobilis stablemasters and factors. Factors and gladiators of Morte Nobilis are investigating this, and may turn up something later to damn Noctus or at least get some revenge.
