DF Whiterock Session 48: Turtle Parliament

Date:

2019-05-10

Weather:

Cool, overcast

Player Characters:

Garreth (Zuljita), Half-Orc Fighter, 361 points
Ibizaber (Demented Avenger), Human Thief, 356 points
Polly (Kalzazz), Wood Elf Archer, 344 points

Seépravir (Archon Shiva), High-Elf Wizard, 378 points

Significant NPCs:

2 Stirge Swarms

Quickened Giant Snapping Turtle

4 Trolls

The party (minus Elias, who had church) started in Cillamar.  The most interesting rumors were that Lord Flitwick's bodyguard Gord the dwarf had died in jail, and that King Mirias Stormwarden was going to visit Cillamar in July.  Zaber and Seépravir used their Propaganda skill to try to ping Gord's death on Lord Flitwick.

Seépravir cast Flight and Invisibility on everyone, but the party couldn't survive without their wheelbarrow full of junk, so they ended up walking to Castle Whiterock anyway.  Garreth rolled an 18 on his Hiking roll and burned a use of Luck to avoid risking a broken leg.

Once they reached the dungeon, the group went down a level, across to the elevator, then took a skiff down the underground river to the huge cave.  Seépravir cast a suite of vision spells on herself, then cast Wizard Eye and put Invisibility on it.  The eye, scouting ahead, spotted several trolls, moving west.  Seépravir had the eye follow them across a stream, up a narrow hidden path, and into their cave, which contained a bunch more trolls.  Then the trolls began beating each other up, regenerating, and repeating.

Everyone wanted to ambush the trolls, so they started sneaking west, but the trolls had a head start.  While sneaking along the north edge of the huge cave, the party was noticed by some stirge swarms, which dove on them.  The PCs outrolled the stirges for surprise, so it ended up being a fair fight against two stirge swarms.  One managed to injure Garreth, thanks to his unarmored face.  The other bounced off his torso armor.  Then Garreth backed out of that hex and tossed an Alchemist's Fire in with the two swarms, singing them.  Polly fast-drew her rapier and did some rapid stirge swatting, dispersing one of the swarms.  Seépravir cast Mass Daze on the remaining swarm, causing it to just sit there in the fiery hex for a second, long enough for the flames to finish it off.  So a very quick and easy fight, at the cost of one Alchemist's Fire, and then 30 minutes for Seépravir to perform First Aid on Garreth.  Thanks to Bless and 20 HP, that healed 6 out of the 7 points of injury he'd taken, and he was happy to press on.

The group continued west until they reached a wide, deep stream flowing north-south.  With Flight, getting over the stream was no problem, but the group decided to have a long conversation next to the stream about how best to ambush the trolls in their cave.  Unfortunately, that took long enough to cause a wandering monster roll, and a I rolled a 5, and then the wandering monster was the Local Denizen which happened to be a Quickened Giant Snapping Turtle, and then the Quickened Giant Snapping Turtle rolled a 3 on its surprise roll.  As Polly wisely said a bit later, "New plan, if friendly people tell us horrible monster lives in river we do not hang out there to conduct a session of parliament."

The turtle was going to try to eat someone, and it randomly picked Zaber, who was standing with his back to the river.  It came up behind him, rolled a solid hit on its bite roll, rolled pretty solid damage -- and Zaber's Bless spell decided that this was a good place for a miracle, averted the hit, and went away.  The turtle was slightly grumpy about this, but all the PCs had to spend the next turn making IQ rolls to recover from Mental Stun, so it got another turn to eat Zaber.  However, with its opponents about to go active, it decided to spend that turn using its Quicken power (which looks a whole lot like the Great Haste spell).

All the PCs made their rolls, so they got to go, so that was the end of the turtle's fun.  Garreth fast-drew his katana and stepped within head-chopping range, but missed twice.  (He was taking a rather large deceptive attack penalty.)  Polly asked about the presence of eyes and/or skull, and when told that the turtle appeared to have both, Waited to be able to shoot it in the eye as soon as Zaber got out of the line of fire.  Zaber, not waiting to be eating, ran away from the turtle, and then Poll shot at its eye twice.  It dodged the first, but not the second, and the arrow crippled its eye and lodged into its brain for large amounts of damage.  The turtle made its death, consciousness, and stun checks.  (There was a large penalty on the consciousness and stun checks for a brain hit, but the turtle had a large bonus to those.  Unfortunately it didn't have nictitating membranes to protect its eyes, making its impressive shell DR mostly pointless.)  Seépravir flew straight up to get out of biting range.

The Quickened turtle went for an All-Out Attack (Double) on Garreth for its first action.  It rolled two hits, but he rolled two retreating dodges.  (He was smart enough not to parry the giant turtle's bite, which was big enough to break his katana.)  It then followed up with a step and attack on its second action, but Garreth made that too.  Garreth tried two more heavily deceptive rapid strikes to the turtle's head, but he missed the first and it just managed to dodge the second, with a retreat bonus.  Pretty fast for SM +4!

Polly decided to shoot out the turtle's other eye, hit, and it failed to dodge.  This did enough damage for a second death check, which the turtle passed, but then it failed its next consciousness check.  The unconscious but not dead turtle started slowly sliding down the muddy sloped bank toward the stream.  It didn't live long enough to get there.  Zaber stabbed it in the eye socket with his knife, then Garreth smashed it in the skull a couple of times, hard enough to take it to -5 * HP where it didn't get any more death checks.

The turtle corpse slid into the stream.  Garreth suggested Polly go carve its shell off, so she put her bow on the shore, jumped int the water, and started sawing.  This was taking too long because of the need to come up for air, so Seépravir lent her the Ring of Water Breathing, and in a few minutes Polly had separated the turtle's shell from its body.  Unfortunately the shell weighed about a ton, too much for Polly to lift.  However, Garreth was to use his newly learned Power Blow ability to briefly crank his ST to 38, enough to throw a very heavy shell out of the stream onto the east bank.  Polly also decided to carve off about 40 lbs. of turtle meat for use as troll bait.  The turtle weighed many tons, so there was plenty.

At that point the troll ambush discussion that had been so rudely interrupted by the turtle attack started again.  Seépravir noticed through the Wizard Eye that the troll cave contained another exit out the back, and a bunch of piles of refuse.  The leading tactic seemed to be starting a fire in the back exit to keep the trolls from escaping, but avoiding burning the trash since it might contain valuable but flammable loot.  They kept talking and talking, and then Seépravir noticed through the Wizard Eye that 4 of the trolls were heading out of the cave toward the PCs.  There was much rejoicing.

Zaber the stealthy decided the best place to ambush the trolls was up against the edge of the cave, where the path to the troll cave reached ground level.  So everyone headed there and squeezed up against the wall, with Garreth at ground level, Polly 6' up, and Seépravir and Zaber about 20' up.  It was a great ambush setup, but it was foiled by the PCs rolling a 17 on their surprise roll for an automatic failure.  The trolls charged, but they didn't have any ranged weapons so Garreth and Polly were the only ones they could reach.  All four charged at Garreth, and two were in Move and Attack range, but they missed.

Seépravir dropped some excess spells to reduced her casting penalties, and then dropped a Mass Daze on three of the trolls.  They failed to resist and stood around like dummies until hit.  Polly shot two arrows at the alert one and it dodged one of them.  The other did pretty decent damage, but it was a troll, so that didn't mean much.  Garreth fast-drew his katana and rapid struck one of the Dazed trolls in the neck.  It didn't get a defense against the first attack, which did a lot of damage but dispelled the Daze.  It failed to dodge the second attack, and took enough damage for three death checks, except it was a troll and the damage wasn't fire or acid so it laughed it off.

Zaber wanted to attack a troll without risking injury so he decided to fly down, Move and Attack, and fly back up out of reach.  But he didn't quite have enough movement to pull that off, so instead he just flew above a troll and threw a knife at its head.  He rolled a critical hit, but not a lot of damage.  Polly then put a couple of cutting arrows into the neck of a troll, while Seépravir lectured everyone about how Dazed trolls won't wake up until you hurt them so better tactics would make this easier.

One of the beat-up trolls decided to All-Out Attack (double) against Garreth for four total attacks.  (Trolls have Extra Attack 2.)  He rolled a 17 on one dodge, but then used his Luck.  The troll hit once, but it was a torso shot and not enough damage to penetrate Garreth's plate armor.  It then realized that it should attack the less armored face instead, did so, and rolled a critical hit, doing enough damage to annoy Garreth.  Garreth made his stun check, though.

Seépravir cast another Mass Daze to re-Daze the three trolls that were moving around.  All failed to resist.  Garreth teed off on one troll for a whirlwind of damage that was enough that I ruled it was a pile of troll parts until it had time to regenerate for a while.  Zaber went for a neck stab on another troll and rolled another critical hit, but with unimpressive damage.  Polly pulled out her Rapier for variety and sliced up the troll that Zaber had injured, wounding it severely and knocking it out.  At that point Seépravir cast Create Fire to create a one-hex region of supernaturally hot fire, and Garreth started throwing disabled troll bits into it.  Then he went over to the last Dazed troll and repeated the process.

The four trolls were a pile of burning goo, but there were more left up in the troll cave, and we were out of time.  The PCs decided to stay in the cave and press the attack, rather than going back to town.  We'll see next week if they can finish off the rest of the trolls, or if the other trolls are smarter or luckier than the ones encountered so far.

GM's Comments:

The stirges were a minor annoyance of a random encounter, basically wandering damage.  They caused the party to waste an Alchemist's Fire though.

The turtle was pretty tough, but suffered the usual one-versus-four problems that most monsters without allies do.  It got very lucky to achieve surprise (combined with the party being dumb enough to stand next to the stream for a long time to give it a chance to do so), but Zaber was saved by his Bless.  If the turtle had gone after Zaber a second time rather than spending the turn activating its Great Haste, it might have gotten him.  With hindsight it should have activated its Great Haste before revealing itself, then gotten at least two and probably four free attacks on Zaber, probably getting a chance to demonstrate Swallowing Whole.  It had IQ 5 and no Tactics skill though, and probably didn't take the party very seriously since they were so itty-bitty.

The trolls were lucky not to get ambushed, but got owned by Mass Daze, and the squishier PCs were smart enough to stay out of melee range.

Scouting ahead with an Invisible Wizard Eye was a smart idea for the party, though a bit boring since if the Wizard Eye gets spotted and destroyed, it doesn't really matter.  One issue is that the giant cave is multiple Roll20 maps, and Roll20 doesn't easily allow a party to be split across maps.  So, it pretty much requires that the Wizard Eye stay on the same map as the rest of the party.  Which, maybe that's technically not a GURPS rule, but now it's a house rule: if a Wizard Eye travels far enough from its caster that the GM finds it annoying, it's dispelled.  To be fair, the wizard can sense when the Wizard eye is about to reach that range.

No real treasure this week, unless you count a giant turtle shell that's probably too heavy to get home.  But the PCs are still in mid-delve so they still have time to find something.