DF Whiterock Session 4: Orc Ambush

Date:

2018-05-18


Weather:

Cool, cloudy


Player Characters:

Seépravir (Archon Shiva), High-Elf Wizard, 150 (+15) points
Garreth (Zuljita), Half-Orc Fighter, 158 (+7) points
Ibizaber (Demented Avenger) Human Thief, 150 (+10) points
Durkerle (M.C. Warhammer) Dwarf Cleric, 150 (+12) points
The Redcap (Humabout), Gnome Bard, 150 (+5) points


Mostly-Inactive Player Characters:

Bernard (threethreethree) Human Fighter, 150 (+5) points


Significant NPCs:

Dodger Cat familiar
6 Orcs of the White Talon Tribe

The session began in a room behind the ruins of Castle Whiterock, where the hopeful heroes had just defeated a skeletal owlbear.  Redcap, who had been readying the horses in the nearby stable in case the group needed to make a quick escape, wandered in.  After taking a few seconds to catch their breath, they had several choices of where to explore next: a pile of rubble to the west, a door to the east, a pair of double doors to the south, or a hard-to-open secret door to the north.  Or they could double back west into the outdoor portion of the ruined castle.

The cat seemed to want them to go east, and, after some discussion, most of the party seemed to trust the cat.  Ibizaber tried the door, but it was locked.  He immediately picked the lock and opened the door.  It led to some dark, wide, steep stairs heading down.

That started another discussion.  Durkerle said it was dungeoneering common sense to finish exploring the first level before going down to the second level.  Everyone else seemed willing to take the risk, since they were pretty sure the person they were here to rescue was down the stairs.  After much debate, they started down the stairs, with Bernard staying behind to guard their backs.

Seépravir cast Infravision and needed to rest a bit before casting Hush, but Ibizaber got impatent and walked down the stairs a bit.  He didn't see a tripwire on the stairs, finding it with his foot instead of his eyes, but was dextrous enough to avoid falling.  Ibizaber alerted the rest of the group to the trap, and they discussed whether to disarm it or just avoid it.  The consensus was to leave it there, to possibly catch anyone chasing them.  So they all carefully stepped over the wire.

A few yards down the stairs was another tripwire, but Ibizaber spotted this one before actually kicking it.  They avoided this one too.  Seépravir convinced the others to let her take the lead, and she carefully stepped down to the bottom of the stairs.  When she got there, she stuck her head through a doorway, and saw orcs with glaives to both sides, prepared to ambush.  They clearly had heard the group on the stairs, but Seépravir was silent and not carrying a light, so they didn't time the ambush quite right, and she had a chance to jump back onto the stairs before they got a chance to swing their glaives.

Both orcs pursued Seépravir onto the bottom of the stairwell, trying to introduce her to their polearms.  She dodged, retreated, then cast a Grease spell.  As the orcs followed, neither spotted the invisible grease, and both slipped and face-planted on the steps.  This slowed them down for several seconds and gave the other PCs further up the stairs a chance to move down into position.  As Redcap's light got close enough to illuminate her, Seépravir gestured to the rest of the PCs where the grease was, so that none of them would step into it.

The two-yard radius of grease was enough to keep most of the PCs away from the downed orcs, but Garreth had some throwing daggers and a greatsword.  He got in a moderately effective knife throw, mostly stopped by the orc's scale armor.  Meanwhile Ibizaber was hiding in the shadows, hoping one of the orcs would step next to him so he could backstab it.  Durkerle cast Flaming Weapon on Garreth's greatsword to give the one weapon long enough to swing over the grease some bonus damage.  As the orcs struggled to get up, Garreth moved into greatsword range, and Seépravir (the only one with infravision) noticed a third orc with a glaive running up, and three more orcs with crossbows about 50 feet to the southeast, behind a low rock wall.

The third orc ran right into the unseen grease and went down.  Garreth started slicing orcs.  A couple managed to reach their feet and tried hitting back with their glaives, but failed.  Redcap yelled some insults in Common, which at least one of the orcs understood, as he yelled something back.  This let him know that he could try a Song of Humiliation, which he did soon afterward, stunning one of the orcs.  Ibizaber eye-stabbed the stunned orc with brutal effect.  Eventually Seépravir cancelled the Grease spell to let her allies get at the remaining melee orcs, and Garreth finished them off.

That left the orcs with crossbows, who had been patiently aiming, waiting for their targets to come closer and give them an easier shot.  But as the battle went poorly for their allies by the stairwell, one of the crossbow orcs left his position behind the wall, and ran for a door on the east side of the room.  This was outside of the radius of Redcap's Continual Light stone, so the heroes didn't catch on right away.

Garreth debated between doing All-Out Defense (Dodge) and moving toward the remaining crossbow orcs at half speed, or just sprinting at them at full speed.  He chose the latter.  One of them fired, out of the darkness, and Garreth missed his Perception roll to get a chance to dodge the unseen bolt.  He decided it was a good time to use his Luck, made his Perception roll on the retry, and then barely made his Dodge.  Durkerle and Redcap were behind him, but short enough and lucky enough that the bolt whizzed over their heads.

Garreth decided to jump over the low wall and slam the orc that still had a bolt in his crossbow.  The jump worked, the orc failed to dodge, the slam was effective, and the orc went down and dropped his crossbow.  Meanwhile the orc that had already fired a bolt was picking up a second crossbow.  Redcap and his light source moved forward, finally illuminating the back of the room, where the third crossbow orc was trying to sneak out a door to the east.  Ibizaber snuck around the low wall and backstabbed the orc that was reading a crossbow.  Seépravir, still back by the stairs, pulled out a Concussion scroll and started reading it.

There was a mad scramble between the remaining two crossbow orcs behind the wall, Ibizaber, Durkerle, and Redcap.  The orcs had scale armor so the less-strong combatants had a hard time wounding them, but they also only had crossbows that effectively only got one shot each, and didn't manage to hit anyone before they were disabled.  The three managed to kill one orc and convince the other to surrender.  Seépravir stopped reading her scroll.

Meanwhile Garreth pulled out his moonlight-dim Continual Light rock and chased the fleeing orc down a hallway.  Garreth was faster, but it still took him a while running through unfamiliar territory to catch the orc.  He hit it hard in the back with his greatsword.  It spun around and took one shot with its crossbow, which Garreth dodged.  And then Garreth smacked the orc hard enough to knock it out, and dragged it back to the room where the others were.  The chase revealed a couple of closed doors and a fork in the hallway, but Garreth didn't stop to explore alone.

Back together, the group interrogated the captured orc.  It was another game of good dwarf, bad gnome, as Redcap threatened horrible things and Durkerle talked about less horrible things.  The orc revealed that he was of the White Talon clan, that some human and elf and gnome slaves were held to the south, that his leader was named Kaernga, and that the intruders had better get back up the steps to the surface before they all died.  The orcs were all larger than usual, with milky-white skin and flowing cloaks over scale armor.  Garreth tired of listening and put a crossbow bolt through the prisoner.

At the end of the fight, six orcs had been defeated, and the party had control of the room at the bottom of the stairs.  In addition to the stairs up, the room had the door to the east through which Garreth had chased the fleeing orc, and double doors to the south that had not yet been opened.  Both the orc's information and Dodger the cat seemed to indicate that the slaves they wanted to rescue were to the south, so they prepared to head that way, when we ran out of time.


GM's Comments:

Almost the whole four-hour session was taken up by one battle.  It was a six-on-six battle, with a lot of fancy tactics, so I guess that's not too surprising, but I still wish we could go faster.

Light mattered a lot in this fight.  Seépravir had an Infravision spell, and Redcap had a bright Continual Light stone, but nobody else had a light source out (until Garreth pulled out his Continual Light stone for his solo chase).  The radius of Continual Light was enough to see the orcs in the front, but not the ones in the back.  This almost got Garreth skewered with a crossbow bolt he didn't see, but his Luck gave him another chance.  The orcs seemed to do fine with no light, so presumably they had infravision or Dark Vision.

The Grease spell was quite effective, knocking 3 orcs down, but also kept the PCs back behind it on the stairs, where they couldn't do much.  If they'd had an archer, or a second fighter with a long weapon, they could have done a lot better.

The crossbow orcs were effectively one-shot combatants.  They were big strong orcs with big strong crossbows, so that one shot would have hurt a lot if it hit, but none of them did.  Reloading a crossbow takes 4 seconds (3 with Fast-Draw), basically forever.  Picking up another loaded crossbow takes 2 seconds.  It was touch and go for a while, but once they fired their bolt or dropped their weapons, they were in trouble.

We had some issues with the turn order dialog in Roll20 at the start of the fight.  I could see the turn order for all the players, but most of the players could only see the ones that were newly added after they joined the game.  We eventually got this sorted out, but it cost us a few minutes.  Also, I forgot about the little arrow that shuffles the turn order so the current player is always on top.  I'll remember to use that next time.

Also, Roll20 features two kinds of light radius per player.  I'd been using the inner one for bright light (no darkness penalty) and the outer one for dim light (-3 darkness penalty, negated by Night Vision).  But it turned out the players could only actually see the inner one, which was pretty unfair.  So I changed everyone light radius to just use the outer one, so the players could see better.  If anyone without Night Vision tries to attack beyond the bright part of their lights, I'll try to remember to impose the darkness penalty.  But nobody in this group really attacks at long range, so it probably won't matter much.

We played text-only again, with in-game text in Roll20 and much out-of-game talk in Discord.  Unfortunately Discord seemed to distract players from Roll20, so it took people a while to notice it was their turn sometimes.  I'm not sure what the answer is here.  Maybe if I use the turn order arrow people will track their turns better.  Or maybe we need voice to more easily get people's attention.

Four sessions in, nobody has gone back to town (because they're still actively engaged in a rescue mission), so the unspent character points are piling up.  We'll see if they manage to finish the mission and get back to town next week.

Overall, the PCs were very successful this week.  Two traps evaded and six enemies defeated, with no casualties.  (They came very close a few times, between crossbow bolts out of the dark and brave all-out attacks.)