Pictures from Sunday's DF Session

Here are some pictures from Sunday's session.



I've finally gotten around to using my Cardboard Heroes Dungeon Floors set. Well, a copy of it - I'm not cutting up the OOP original. I wish they'd release it and Caverns (which I don't own) on PDF so I could buy a nice, clear, easily printable official set.

I turned a few 3 yard wide "rooms" into corridors, and cut them down to use as marching order markers. It's useful because with just the hex sheet people tend to assume more width, and without anything they put in odd spacing.



You can see a room I made next to it, too, so I could have some standard sized ones (10 x 10, 20 x 20, 30 x 20, 30 x 30) that I could drop in as needed instead of having to take the time to count out hexes and put down pseudo-LEGO walls every time.

Here are three pictures taken by andi jones at the session:



That's early-ish in the fight, as Mo and Raggi are both down with leg injuries and Hjalmarr is moving to engage the mummy.



This is mid-fight, as the golems are still up and fighting and the mummy has moved back to a defensive position. Kian is charging to her doom.



That's late in the fight. The rocks indicate the edges of a the Fog spell, and the mummy is now in a circle of fire. Fire is normally good on mummies, but a spellcaster mummy with Resist Fire isn't impressed. It used the fire to its own advantage.

Like I said, this wasn't really meant to show people how much it sucks when you've got near-perfect defenses and high DR and piles of HP to fight against. But it did kind of turn out that way.

The players took the strategy of beating down the golems, dealing with the toxic skulls, and finishing the mummy last. That worked out, but it was an interesting choice. The mummy managed to get off a Curse on Gale, kill Kian, bash down the best zombie Gerry ever had, and prolong the fight with its magic. The golems also took down some skeletons, and the toxic skulls really hurt.

This goes to show the value of mixing foes together. The PCs had to deal with:

- a spellcaster
- spells that countered their primary magical damages
- hit-and-run attackers (toxic skulls)
- high damage attacks
- low-damage DR-ignoring attacks
- foes too strong to bully or shove around (or threaten with Levitation)
- flying opponents
- a "trick" foe (mummy couldn't be slain while it had its funerary amulet on)

So even with Invisibility and Levitation and Great Haste the wizards were constantly dealing with attacks they couldn't counter easily from foes the ground-based fighters couldn't really help with. No one was safe at any time. The need to throw attack spells meant the fighters got a fraction of their "usual" buff array. The big bad guy made the others fight better and could inflict lasting harm, and was hard to kill, and lacked almost all normal vulnerabilities and was a tough kill even at 0 DR (yes, DR zero.) The high-damage high-DR high-HP golems could threaten harm and ignore minor combatants. The PCs really had to stay on their toes to keep alive, and eventually won after casualties and a huge resource drain. Combined arms means you can't just change the nature of the fight to match your superiority and cheap out a win.