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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tolamaker" data-source="post: 9425403" data-attributes="member: 7031495">The Battle for Gate Pass: Sessions 89-96What year is it? The past few months have been a blur for me, with summer jobs and travel and a million other little things that have essentially forced our game into biweekly for the moment (though that should be ending soon). I keep meaning to update this, but I keep falling behind and forgetting more, so I'm going to just give shorter descriptions for these as I catch up to today.Session 89Downtime Session where players either did their own thing or helped out the war effort. Knowing they were going to free Gate Pass next, Gruz masterminded a plan to use the Torch to create the appearance of a northward push into Ragesia through the Alydi gap, coupled with illusions and spells from Eluriah and Corban. The party is told of the plan to Teleport into Gate Pass and assassinate Ragesian leaders before the main assault. They teleport into a trap, but are immediately rescued by the dashing Renard (reminder that I mixed up Renard and Rantle's names back in Adventure 1, and the names stuck.)Session 90Renard points the party to their target, the enormous red dragon Vorax-Hul, who recently burned two districts on the orders of the new Ragesian Commander, Legate Korvus (I think that's the name?). Vorax-Hul has issued an open challenge, so the party isa ble to ascend the clock-tower where he resides easily, and a fight breaks out after Vorax-Hul taunts them as he adorns an enormous Inquisitor's mask. Despite his magical abilities, they are able to defeat him because of his lust for glory.Session 91Renard takes the party to a resistance stronghold beneath a church of Uzat, where they meet the three main leaders: Renard, the vigilante hero of the people; Jennis, the student-turned-resistance mastermind; and Osoka, Mishka's mother who fought the previous Ragesian occupation. Each has their own goals. Jennis wants to treat with the Shahalesti who are waiting just beyond the eastern gates. She believes their support would ensure Gate Pass's survival. Osoka wants to rescue old members of the Resistance being held in the tower of what used to be Gabal's War Mage school. Finally, Renard believes taking the gates between districts and flying the flag of the Resistance will rally the populace to join the fight.The party goes to the prison first, as a favor to Osoka. There, they fight they're way up and defeat the warden, the old assistant to the headmaster. Inside a magic mirror meant to steal prisoner's souls, the party finds a strange trillith they recognize: Indomitability, who has been reborn as Vigilance. His natural abilities protected the Resistance members, and he assures the party that he and other trillith like them have no desire to see the entire world fall into nothingness.Session 92The party was intending to go treat with the Shahalesti when they get a panicked message from Tiljann that the Alliance forces have been stalled outside the walls of Gate Pass, and Kiernan was killed by a balor. The party decides to help the Alliance break through the gates, defeating a force of barbed devils, skeleton archers, and trolls (and one harpy).Session 93The party decides they can't fight their way to the Shahalesti, and decide to teleport to the eastern gate, where they land among a contingent of wyvern knights. They defeat the knights after the mutual surprise, though their commander is competent enough to escape despite her mount being killed from underneath her.Session 94the party finally reaches the Shahalesti forces, where they negotiate with Lord Shaaladel to join the Alliance over a lavish feast. They manage to stop him from taking dibs on Ragesia, and convince him to be an equal member, not leader of the Alliance. However, they aren't completely able to maneuver him from claiming Innenotdar for Shahalesti. When the party tells Shaaladel of their intention to destroy the Torch after the war, he laughs, but then realizes they are serious, and says that he is content with no country having control over such a weapon. He also declines to join any sort of "league of nations," as he believes that while war is to be avoided, it is "inevitable between the races."With their luncheon done, and the terms decided, Shaaladel rises and calls his forces to join the battle.Session 95The party makes their way along with Shaaladel's forces, and come back to the Resistance church to update the leaders, but are forced to rescue them from a squad of giants.Session 96The party decide to join the main push to the central districts, and break through to a alley where they are surrounded by platoons of Ragesians and an enormous Grand Cavalry mammoth with howdah atop it. As the platoons close in, Eluriah is able to maneuver past Inquisitor's counterspells to reverse gravity and send all of the soldiers and party up into the air, immediatly ending the spell, letting the Ragesians fall to the earth while Corban featherfalls the group.Slowly, the party whittles the enemy troops down, ending in a river of blood as Mishka guts the mammoth after cutting loose the howdah, and Eluriah encaging the remaining soldiers in a wall of thorns and then blasting them back into it once they push through. As the party emerges into the central district, they see Alliance soldiers cheering as a white flag is hung from the balcony of the Ragesian headquarters. Despite this, the party is unconvinced that the fight is over.Post-session thoughts89: I enjoyed Gruz plan to distract the Ragesians, and plan to have it come up during surrender negotiations.90: The Vorax-Hul fight was a disappointment for me, and I take the blame for underestimating when to start the fly-by stage of the fight. The group were suitably awed by a dragon wearing another dragon's skull as an inquisitor mask, so that was fun.91: The Vigilance reveal was very fun, and also let me reveal the evil trillith plan after I balked on it last adventure.92: This fight was fun, but it seemed to prove to me that the squad rules in the module didn't work for the way I was running it. The skeletons were underwhelming, but the invisible trolls were a lot of fun.93: THis wyvern fight was also fun, largely helped by the fact that one of the knights would not stop rolling crits, to the point that I had to give her a name, and declare her the captain. She survived her wyvern being shot out by being perfectly placed above another wall on the map to let her parkour roll off and escape. Delightfully frustrating for the players.94: I can't remember the last time we had a full roleplay-only talking session. Rolls were made at the end of each argument, but my players really showed that they do remember stuff from previous sessions, and often made suggestions to lower the DC that were straight out of the book, and a few that made sense to me that also helped.95: I made up this giant fight because I felt like I needed some drama around getting information. This was a short session, so I probably didn't need it.96: Using some different squad rules, this fight was a lot of fun, and really felt like a great chance for the players to show off their high level abilities.Changes to the moduleI kept getting names mixed up with the Resistance, and it felt weird to call both Seaquen and Gate Pass the same thing, so I've started calling the alliance created by Seaquen... The Alliance. Gate Pass is now the Resistance.91: I changed Gabal's ghost to a subordinate that betrayed Gate Pass. I have other plans for Gabal to appear later.92: I added the trouble with getting into the city because I wanted this battle to feel meaningful, and to kill some NPCs. Kiernan has been my go-to assistant with Simeon, so he felt like a fitting sacrifice. I smushed the barbed devils and the skeleton archers together because I didn't want to run extra NPC soldiers like I did at the Alydi Gap. Because of this, I tested the squad rules as is against the players (Total damage is a static number minus AC) and didn't love it.94: Because of the way I've changed short rests, this battle has been going much faster than intended in the module. Instead of forcing the battle to last overnight, I decided to give the players a long rest from their delicious meal with Shaaladel. As written, they would only get 2-3 fights at level 18, so I figured this would space things out a little more evenly as well.96: Here I made a mishmash of [USER=6776887]@Tormyr[/USER] 's rules and this <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/UnearthedArcana/comments/pnewbv/5e_armies_of_war_complete_army_siege_and_command/" target="_blank">reddit post</a>. I kept the commander and Inquisitor abilities, and changed damage to 4x the normal weapon damage, and allowed the platoons to make attacks against every adjacent enemy, and to automatically deal damage to enemies who start their turn in the midst of the platoon. Because they had 300 hitpoints, I changed the "Half health loses commander and inquisitor abilities," and cut the platoon into three parts: soldiers, inquisitor, commander. When the platoon lost 100 hit points (giving two checkpoints instead of one), the platoon would lose one of the three parts. If it was an AoE attack, I rolled randomly to see what was lost. If it was due to single target damage, I let the attacker decide in a mini "How do you want to do this." If the commander or inquisitor were killed those abilities were gone, and if the soldiers were "killed" I started using half damage. This worked really well for my group, honestly way better than I would have expected.Whoo boy. Alright, I'll hopefully be back in two weeks to start being a little more on task with these things. Next session, a perfectly war crime-free negotiation of surrender.</blockquote>

Verification