Mephistopheles
First Post
A party of adventures pushes deeper into a series of underground caves, their faces resolute but their movements tinged with trepidation. They've been here before and things did not end well: after facing a number of perils they stumbled upon a pair of orcs, one of them a warrior and the other a necromancer, along with the necromancer's undead entourage. The adventurers, already weakened, found this conflict too much for them and fled, vowing to return.
And return they have. How will it end this time? That's what we're here to find out.
In a session last week the party were returning to a series of underground caverns for a second crack after being forced to flee from a necromancer and his undead entourage - we ran into him when we were low on resources, surges in particular. It's a bit of a sandbox campaign so there are no guarantees that we aren't going to come across things that are too tough for us. The group make up was a dragonborn warden, dwarf cleric, elf archer ranger, eladrin melee ranger, human wizard and half-orc brutal rogue.
We didn't get to see a lot of what this necromancer was capable of the first time around - it only took a round or two for us to realise that the fight was beyond us in our condition at the time - so we were going into it without knowing too much about what to expect except that it was not going to be easy. After not too many rounds we had a man down (the eladrin, to be precise), the cleric was out of heals and it seemed unlikely we would see our way to victory without losses, if we'd see our way to victory at all. We made the call to withdraw. Again.
The half-orc dragged the unconscious eladrin from behind enemy lines to the cleric at the front line for some battlefield triage - stabilisation was the best we could do as he'd already used his second wind - and then we began the retreat. We made a fighting withdrawal back down the corridor from the necromancer's room and over a bridge in the next room that had an underground river flowing through it, at which point the archer and wizard waited on the far side of the bridge to try and drop one of the enemies pursuing us, which they did, but then forgot to take the comatose eladrin with them when they moved on making for an interesting moment of realisation a round or so later as the rogue hauled the limp ranger up to them, then on to yet another room after which the warden closed the door and leaned his weight upon it to keep the pursuing undead and orcs, all of whom had been on the heels of the warden the whole way, from pushing through while the rest of the party carried their unconscious companion into the final room before we could make good our escape...by climbing a rope up a fifty foot shaft.
The dwarf cleric began his climb up the rope as the other party members quickly constructed a rope harness to fix the unconscious eladrin to the rogue for the trip up the shaft while the undead were beating down the door one room away. The warden abandoned that door as it started to break apart and took up a similar position at the door to the room with the shaft, where he was joined by the elf archer, as the wizard started up the rope after the dwarf. It was slow going for the unfit book herder and things were looking grim: with the unconscious eladrin ranger slung in a harness on the half-orc who was himself not in great shape and the warden almost out of puff it seemed only the elf was still in something resembling good spirits even as the door began to crack and splinter under the assault of the undead on the other side.
It was at this point that the tension, which had been simmering for a while, became pretty palpable. It was hard to see how we'd all make it out and the player of the warden remarked that it would have made for an exciting sequence in a movie. For a moment I stopped looking at it in terms of athletics checks and squares of movement up a rope and hit points and how long it would take the necromancer's undead to break down the door and I realised that he was right: it would have made for a tense action sequence in a movie.
Are there any moments like this that you recall from your own games?
And return they have. How will it end this time? That's what we're here to find out.
In a session last week the party were returning to a series of underground caverns for a second crack after being forced to flee from a necromancer and his undead entourage - we ran into him when we were low on resources, surges in particular. It's a bit of a sandbox campaign so there are no guarantees that we aren't going to come across things that are too tough for us. The group make up was a dragonborn warden, dwarf cleric, elf archer ranger, eladrin melee ranger, human wizard and half-orc brutal rogue.
We didn't get to see a lot of what this necromancer was capable of the first time around - it only took a round or two for us to realise that the fight was beyond us in our condition at the time - so we were going into it without knowing too much about what to expect except that it was not going to be easy. After not too many rounds we had a man down (the eladrin, to be precise), the cleric was out of heals and it seemed unlikely we would see our way to victory without losses, if we'd see our way to victory at all. We made the call to withdraw. Again.
The half-orc dragged the unconscious eladrin from behind enemy lines to the cleric at the front line for some battlefield triage - stabilisation was the best we could do as he'd already used his second wind - and then we began the retreat. We made a fighting withdrawal back down the corridor from the necromancer's room and over a bridge in the next room that had an underground river flowing through it, at which point the archer and wizard waited on the far side of the bridge to try and drop one of the enemies pursuing us, which they did, but then forgot to take the comatose eladrin with them when they moved on making for an interesting moment of realisation a round or so later as the rogue hauled the limp ranger up to them, then on to yet another room after which the warden closed the door and leaned his weight upon it to keep the pursuing undead and orcs, all of whom had been on the heels of the warden the whole way, from pushing through while the rest of the party carried their unconscious companion into the final room before we could make good our escape...by climbing a rope up a fifty foot shaft.
The dwarf cleric began his climb up the rope as the other party members quickly constructed a rope harness to fix the unconscious eladrin to the rogue for the trip up the shaft while the undead were beating down the door one room away. The warden abandoned that door as it started to break apart and took up a similar position at the door to the room with the shaft, where he was joined by the elf archer, as the wizard started up the rope after the dwarf. It was slow going for the unfit book herder and things were looking grim: with the unconscious eladrin ranger slung in a harness on the half-orc who was himself not in great shape and the warden almost out of puff it seemed only the elf was still in something resembling good spirits even as the door began to crack and splinter under the assault of the undead on the other side.
It was at this point that the tension, which had been simmering for a while, became pretty palpable. It was hard to see how we'd all make it out and the player of the warden remarked that it would have made for an exciting sequence in a movie. For a moment I stopped looking at it in terms of athletics checks and squares of movement up a rope and hit points and how long it would take the necromancer's undead to break down the door and I realised that he was right: it would have made for a tense action sequence in a movie.
Are there any moments like this that you recall from your own games?
