Monday, November 18, 2013

Mass Battle, End Of An Era, Brain Eating Turns Out To Be A Good Idea

So there was this army of the undead, right?


And they've been sweeping across the land like a scythe since basically forever. Since like the first ever actual play report on this blog. That's 4 years of undead army.

Once the players got to grips with the whole actually-doing-something-about-it thing (which required some minor time travel) there's a whole strategic layer where they maneuver around the map Ken Burns Civli War style and pick their battles:

Once their army bottled up the enemy in that area between the red gorge in the center of the map and the"Jagged Rox" hex northeast of it, they got to grips with actually wading in and trying to take out the boss level undead monsters at the center of the swarm. These were many and varied....

...like that's a vintage Vornheim Plasmic Blob there.


So this session was a 4-hour fight. 2 four hour fights if you count last session, when the party was almost TPKed and buried under by the first wave of the undead and a lot of gluten-free pizza.

Tonight was one of those fights where everybody contributed something cool...
clicking makes it less small

...although, like a lot of sessions I've been running lately, people do end up spending a lot of time unconscious if they're not careful--that is, if they're new or Connie.

Explaining what Connie did here takes a little doing:




For the first half of the fight, she was doing well sneaking around, backstab-disrupting bad guys and disappearing back into cover but then the Hex King got his eye on her in the same round that the undead giant natural-20'ed Laney and kicked her halfway across the battlefield leaving the group with almost no way to harm the unsettlingly magic-resistant uberlich.
Long story short: a TPK is imminent and Connie's unconscious, stripped of stuff, and one round from permanent death forever when the combined efforts of Mandy, Stokely, the part of  future Mandy's brain that Connie ate that had a Dispel Magic stored in it and one lucky die roll pull her back from the brink.
She then backstabs the everliving fuck out of the Hex King for 104 hit points and finishes him off the next round as David's insane defensewizard grapples him, bashing the archfoe to into crown, powder and lichy bits.

Decimated and leaderless and now at terrible penalties to maneuver rolls, the skeletal force is routed and driven toward the booby-trapped river. They are washed into the sea.



No more of this shit.

So.....will have to think up something new for next week....

8 comments:

David Pretty said...

Suitably epic conclusion to an epic adventure hook.

da1barker said...

Time for an awards ceremony and a political assassination followed by a faction war land grab... I honestly didn't think it would ever end. :P

jmk jr said...

Has Laney been a part of the crew for very long? Very cool regardless. I was a fan of her run on this recent season of Face Off.

Zak Sabbath said...

You can click the "actual play" tag and scroll back to find her first game

p said...

Hey kid, sorry to go off topic, but do you have a lead on where to pick up a hardcopy of Vornheim? I'm having a devil of a time finding one.

Zak Sabbath said...

I don't know, P--I would ask LOTFP, they might know.
I know they are sold out at the warehouse but there may be a few in distribution or on ebay

p said...

Many thanks. I'll check them out. I have the pdf and love it...great work by the way, lots of fun stuff in there.

Kindling said...

I kinda wish I played in your game.