DF Suicide Squad, Session 1 - Cave of the Dark Elves

We played a one-shot of characters with Social Stigma (Savage) on Sunday, March 21st. It was GMed by Marshall LaPira, who plays in Felltower and runs his own DF game for a different group of players.

Characters:
Gobert, goblin wizard (250 points)
Kito, hobgoblin martial artist (250 points)
Krag Ironbelly, half-ogre knight (250 points)
Magnus, wildman rage barbarian (250 point)
Otto the Terrible, orc unholy warrior (250 points)
Shank Shankley, goblin swashbuckler (250 points)
Yoruck, half-ogre wizard (250 points)

(From what I gather, we started out in jail in a town. They put us to magical sleep, forced posion down our throats, and released us to go find some missing elf women. I missed all of this as I was not able to join the game until a few hours in. I arrived as the group started to fight a group of wolves. I apparantly missed finding some campfires and knowing we're a day behind the elf-kidnappers.)

The group was in a clearing, surrounded by trees and getting jumped by wolves. Gobert used Mental Stun-20 to stun one, so Otto shot it with his crossbow, putting it down. That one was near a tree containing Shank Shankley, who Otto assumed was a thief and needed rescuing. Turned out Shank was a swashbuckler and just wasn't willing to risk combat with a conscious wolf (Cowardice fail, I gather.)

Wolves mobbed us. Magnus had apparantly shouted a few back with Shout of Force before they rushed into melee backed by a dire wolf (apparantly, like rats in a cellar, this is a "classic" that post-dates my intro to game. Heh. To me, classic is murdering orcs in their homes.)

Yoruck, the half-ogre, attacked the wolves in melee with his staff using Deathtouch. Gobert dodged around casting Mental Stun to keep them unable to attack. Kito was attacked and bitten badly, but Yoruck used Spasm to knock the wolf off. Krag meleed a couple of wolves, killing one - he rolled a 3, max damage critical, and then a hit, and rolled max damage - then and stunning another. Kito killed a wolf or two swinging his kusarigama kama-end-first.

Finally the dire wolf engaged the group.

Otto, meanwhile, reloaded his crossbow and and then kicked one stunned wolf in the head before it was eventually put down by Magnus. He then aimed at the dire wolf, who was fighting Krag. Krag wounded it badly and drove it back, stunned . . . and then Otto killed it with a crossbow shot. Eventually, the group killed all of the wolves. At this point, Shank, who had hid up in a tree most of the fight, jumped down and killed the unconscious wolf that Otto shot the first time.

The wolves dead, we bandaged up the injured and we headed further into the woods, along a trail. Magnus used a lightstone created by Yoruck, since he was the only one who couldn't see in the moonlight without external light.

Eventually the group found a T in the path, and Tracking showed the way to go was to the right. We, going up the hills and eventually finding a cave mouth.

Kito signalled something, as he had a vow of silence and had torn his own tongue out to make it stick . . . but only had Gesture-8. He then snuck off with Light Walk and Stealth. He checked the cave, then came back and signaled us. No one had any idea what he was signalling, so we followed him into the cave.

It opened deep into the hill, so we crept in, not too loudly but several of the group failed Stealth. We found a badly rotted corpse with a silver ring with decorations on it. Shakely apparantly found another, earlier, but no one knew that. Someone pocketed the non-magical ring and we moved on.

Even so, we found a room carved deep in the cave. Kito spotted a temple within, and three figures with his back to the group. So, he decided to sneak in with Light Walk, but blundered into a tripwire connected to bells. The enemy was alert!

They turned and moved to fight us - two dark elves with melee weapons and a female with a bow. Everyone ran in as they could, with the total lack of coordination of typical delver parties. Gobert blocked Otto for a second, Shank hid in the back, Krag ran in and off to the side, Yoruck moved in as well. As this happened, an arrow came down from the ceiling and hit Kito, who parried it.

Was it a spider hanging upside down on the ceiling, with a goblin sitting on its belly with a crossbow mount?

Was it a spider with three bows?

No, it was a drider hanging from the ceiling in a webbed "blind." I guess that's okay, too.

Magnus used Shout of Force and knocked him off the ceiling and the other dark elves back.

Eventually Otto got into the room and used his secret ability - Terror! He yelled, "Dark elves, orcs are upon you!" and revealed his true form - a twisting mass of shapes and colors that shouldn't be. All of the dark elves, and several PCs, had to make Fright Checks.

Naturally, they all made it, so that was that. Meanwhile, Kito was hit with an arrow and knocked out (he critically failed his Knockdown and Stunning roll.)

Otto shot the drider with his crossbow and wounded and stunned him, but the drider resisted the venom Otto had licked onto the bolt between fights. The female archer shot him in the leg for 8 injury. Impaling is x1 for the limbs, and Otto has 16 HP, so he wasn't too put out. He dropped his crossbow onto its sling (not a proper sling, a cheap ersatz one) and readed his shield as the archer shot him in the arm for 6 damage. Otto was at half move and Dodge.

Meanwhile Krag ran in and melee'd one of the elves. The elf critically hit him in the neck, but rolled poor damage and couldn't get past his 10 DR (scale over leather, plus half-ogre DR, plus Fortify +1 on the top piece.) Krag, though, was pissed. He started to All-Out Attack, Feint + Rapid Strike, eventually hacking the elf down. He then finished him off on the ground before rushing the archer.

She didn't last long against Krag, either.

Yoruck and Gobert fought the other draw warrior. Otto moved up with his sword, activated Dastardly Deeds and got +2 DX for 15 seconds. He helped beat on the stunned warrior.

Meanwhile, the drider had engaged the group in melee. Magnus fought him and wounded him. The drider, badly wounded by multiple hits, used his Darkness spell to try and cover for himself. Sadly for his ally, the other warrior was just outside the darkness. Otto could see out, and proceeded to attack from within the darkness on the stunned dark elf, who had to defend at -9 (-4 stunned, -4 can't see attacker, -1 deceptive attack).

Shank moved up, and eventually melee'd the warrior that Otto and Gobert were banging on. He wounded him badly. Otto yelled that the dark elf was his, and stabbed him twice in the vitals and killed him. He then touched him to restore 1 lost HP.

Meanwhile the drider finally went down under the attacks of Yoruck and Magnus.

We looted them, found a dead elf on the altar with a sacrificial knife in her (she was sacrificed to Lolth, Otto determined, as he's a fellow demon-worshipper and made his Theology roll). Otto took the knife and kept it.

We took what we could use from them, and decided what to do with Kito. He was knocked out, badly wounded, and no one was friends with anyone. Otto killed him and restored 1 HP for doing so with Blood Healing.

We took the heads of the drow. Someone took a drider leg to prove one was a drider. We found where they slept but nothing else of interest, and took a few silver coins out of their blankets. Otto filled one with heads and carried it. We headed out of the cave and then rested until dawn.

We then headed to the edge of town. There, we met a "wizard" who took the heads as proof of what we'd done, shrugged at a "spider leg," and mourned the loss of life of the dead elf we plunked down next to the heads. He cast Neutralize Poison on us, or so he said he did - no one used Identify Spell to be sure.

He then waved us off and the guards gave us the evil eye. We headed away from town.

And that was that.

Notes:

- The group was an interesting mix. Some people clearly went the "evil" approach - such as Otto. Others went the "don't care about other people" approach - Krag and Magnus. No one actually cared about other people except as useful tools, if that.

- The old "poisoned and we'll give you the antidote" routine. Otto was skeptical. He said there were three ways to do this:

1) Lie about the poison. How will someone know if you gave it to them?

2) Give them the poison, but don't actually have an antidote. Or have a second agent which will finish the job, or just poison them when they come back in the guise of an antidote. If you dislike someone enough to poison them to get them to do a job, you don't care if they live and probably prefer they die. Why give them an antidote?

3) Actually do the "give them the poison, but have an antidote" thing.

In any case, Otto reasoned, the real enemy was in town. If it was #1, we didn't need to do the mission. If it was #2, we didn't need to do the mission. If it was #3, then going on the mission was going to the one place we knew the antidote wasn't. But no one else seemed inclined to try this out. Otto wasn't concerned . . . HT 14 and Resistant to Poison +5 means that unless it was a "no HT roll" poison he was probably okay. Force-vomit and tough it out.

- So Otto was only hit twice, both in the two locations he didn't bother to armor up - his arms and his legs. I still stand by my decision not to armor them. I could have had much worse armor everywhere, and potentially been killed by a skull or neck or vitals hit. Instead, he took two serious limb wounds but thanks to the x1 multiplier for impaling on limbs and Otto's HP 16, he never even suffered a major wound. So, yeah, in one way the armor choice didn't pay off, but if Otto had just leather everywhere maybe the archer would have shot for his torso and he'd have been down after those two hits (6 and 8 damage impaling.)

- We didn't have an easy way to heal up Kito, who was badly wounded, and none of us knew each other from anyone else . . . and had no mission requirement to bring back all of our members. So why bother? Plus, killing him restored a HP to Otto. Yes, life is that cheap. Plus he had saleable, usable gear . . . and no one cared.

- I was very disappointed with Terror. It's 27 points, and in return I can use it once against people who make a flat Fright Check. With two fights, I could have used it against the wolves (where it wasn't necessary at all) and the dark elves (where it wasn't effective.) Plus with DFRPG rules, the Fright Check is likely to just cause mental stunning for a short time (a few seconds, tops). I feel like 27 points is too much for what you get here. I'll have to play around with options and ideas in a later post. For an NPC, who cares, but for a PC, that was a lot of points to sink into something much less effective than, say, 30 points in Luck, 24 points in True Faith w/Turning, Shout of Force 2, Weapon Master (!), Magery 2 . . .

- I wasn't the only one with a character with build flaws. Kito had a vow of silence, but also had cut his own tongue out. He communicated with Gesture-8, so he couldn't communicate anything but simple concepts and we couldn't understand even those. It wasn't a good choice for a character . . . who also insisted on scouting! Not that I did anything exciting by taking a specialist in fighting Good when it was clearly billed as an evil vs. evil game. And Cowardice on a fighter-type is crippling - we had a Swashbuckler who wasn't able to really engage in combat very much because his disadvantage worked against this.

- Someone accidentally referred to Krag as "Craig." I said that in no time he'd go from Krag Ironbelly to Craig Ironbaum. So out-of-character we called him Craig Ironbaum from then on.

- At least Otto ended up better equipped - a couple of silver, a really nice knife, better armor than he'd purchased (mail everywhere), and some food. Hurrah. I'll have to find out what happened to that edged rapier - it's a better tool than his cheap broadsword. He headed out to the town that is an enemy of this town, because why not?

- We got 5 xp. MVP was Craig Ironbaum for that awesome two-max-damage turn, mauling the dire wolf, and killing two of the four dark elves.