GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, Session 168, Felltower 120 - Draugr Do-or-Die (Part III)

A continuation of the delve started weeks ago in Session 165 and continued in Session 166.

Game Date: 2/20/2022

Characters:
Aldwyn, human knight (360 points)
     Varmus the Hanged, human apprentice (180 points)
Gerrald Tarrant, human wizard (420 points)
     3 skeletons (~35 points)
     1 tough skeleton (105 points)
"Mild" Bruce McTavish, human barbarian (340 points)
Sir Bunny Wigglesworth, human holy warrior (281 points)
Wyatt Sorrel, human swashbuckler (378 points)
Ulf Sigurdson, human cleric (366 points)

We picked up where we left off - the PCs fighting 33 draugr in a crypt in Felltower. About 2/3 of the draugr were either down or totally blinded. The remainder attempted to back off and re-form a cohesive fighting position. The PCs kept up the pressure - Aldwyn rushed them, and Wyatt continued his Great Haste-powered Run and Hit swoop in, Feint and stab to the eyes, stab a few more eyes, and then run back out. Aldwyn methodically advanced on them. Crogar held the line with Sir Bunny, the first unwilling and the second unable to advance on the draugr.

The casters kept at it - Ulf moved up cautiously (and still Invisible), Gerry kept putting on Great Haste, failing once and then succeeding on Aldwyn, and Varmus creating and then building up to a 9d Explosive Fireball. He threw that shortly after at a group of re-froming draugr, only to have one he tried to throw it past block it with his shield, taking the brunt of the blast on his shield and only having one other (badly) scorched from the 39 burning damage blast.

One draugr tried to drag Bruce away, but he was immediately dispatched by Wyatt. The others formed up even as Wyatt took them out one by one. Crogar rushed them, finally. In a short melee, Crogar was attacked from behind and wounded, but only mildly. He fended off others trying to slam or hit him. Wyatt dodged a shield rush and let one past him - the leader, it turned out - who had otherwise been holding his own against Wyatt's attempts to kill him.

Aldwyn and Wyatt fought the remaining draugr in place, as Crogar rushed back to aid Sir Bunny and attack the leader.

Crogar hacked away at the leader, overwhelming his defenses with waves of strikes with Great Hasted, repeatedly cutting him in the torso. This wounded him, but he had was too high HT and too many HP to fall from that. The remaining draur were finished off by Wyatt (mostly) and Aldwyn (who decapitated one and wounded another). Then Wyatt swooped in, as usual, and stabbed the leader repeatedly in the eyes until he dropped.

In the end, the leader fell, and no more able-bodied draugr stood. One had one arm, the remaining 12 or so blinded. We handwaved Wyatt rushing them one by one and stabbing them to incapacity.

With the draugr fallen, they quickly divied up tasks. Varmus and Gerry checked the sarcophagi. Wyatt and Aldwyn stripped the draugr, taking their mail off, gathering the weapons, and so on.

Someone - Ulf? - briefly suggested "taking off their helmets, cutting their heads off, and burning them before they regenerate." But that wasn't feasible. They had mail hoods, not helmets, sawing heads off was going to take time, and burning them would involve Varmus and he was busy. Besides, even if the draugr could come back, it wasn't a quick process. They had hours if not days before there was any issue, if there even was one.

In the end they put Sir Bunny to watch the stairs, dragged the dead around, and so on. This is what resulted:

- they found 2 gold eagles ($100 gold coins) in each sarcophagus - clearly coins for their eyes.

- Varmus found the centermost of the sarcophagi had a bone scroll case, a dried pot of ink, and an old, frayed quill.


- Varmus found (Made Per by 8!) a faded inscription on the whitewashed walls of the crypt room. It was written in Theological Common, which Ulf read as:

Cursed be those who were buried here, may judgment find them wanting.
Cursed be those who lay, that they may never rest.
Cursed be those who were placed here, that they may suffer eternally.
Cursed be they until the world ends, and cursed be any laid here forever after.

It seemed clearly laid down by clergy of the Good God. Possibly the reknowned Monseigneur Sarducci.

- the whitewash with the cursed inscrition had a few flecks missing, showing something red underneath. Eventually Gerry flaked this off (Hazardous Materials skill) and found a red hand. Gerry and Aldwyn touched it and suffered HP and FP loss and general shakiness.

- the sarcophagi were old, much older than Sterick's time. They were also whitewashed and had Sterick's heraldry painted on them . . . over runes and motifs associated with the six-fingered ones and the cone-hatted cultists who associated with them.

- they gathered up ~67 spears, 32 swords (one especially nice), 33 axes (ditto), 32 necklaces of silver with gold medallions with Sterick's Axes and Tower heraldry (9 badly damaged by fire and battle damage), 1 necklace of gold with rubies (the leader's), 33 suits of mail (one especially nice), and around 30 shields. All of the weapons and armor were damaged, and the swords and axes roughly sharpened off the stone edges of the sarcophagi and badly nicked from battle damage.

The scroll tubes were eventually opened by Gerry, who stripped to his underwear and put all of his gear a distance away. They had two (not especially good) poems, written in a shaky hand by someone unused to writing. They read, in older common:

Thirty-three did guard you, bravely did fight,
All have been felled, and laid rest in their tombs.
Below you wait, down the narrow stairs.
We could not defend you, and now none can reach you.
Trapped but undefeated, sword and axe by your side.

and

You dwell in the center,
Tricks and traps to distract,
Foe’s pawns set to guard.
Five trips through doom,
Sixth time will reach you.
Your city, trembling, awaits your return.

They eventually burned the bodies (Varmus just went ahead and did it with Essential Flame without waiting to see if anyone else wanted to help), gathered up Bruce, and left.

(I didn't ask anyone to specify, and no one did - so I don't know who carried over 1,500 pounds of armor and weapons, plus Bruce, plus Sir Bunny . . . )

They decided they needed to check one of the other staircases near the draugr crypt. So they went down it, and investigated the niches with the urns another group had found years before. Their map claimed there was a "black hand" there. There was not. There were red hands. The red hands there, however, were painted decorations and not a supernaturally-powered one. They found the remanants of a stone golem, bits of skeleton and a broken sledgehammer and knife, and so on. They wanted to "just check" one niche by smashing it open and investigatingt the urns their notes say are there, but had nothing like a stone-breaking hammer, just a wooden mallet for driving in spikes. They decided not to Summon Spirit on the skeleton (thankfully - this takes a lot of real-world time as they organize for questions) and headed out.

Back in town they sold the jewelry and converted the coins and paid to identify items - one sword and one axe was magical, so was all of the armor, and the leader's amulet. They got an estimate of rough price they could expect, and then voted (6-1, Varmus the only no) to keep all of the "regular" mail until Gerry can learn Analyze Magic and Repair so they can net a couple thousand each more. Aldwyn is keeping the 32 suits in his room. Crogar kept the axe and leader's mail, and they sold the sword and are still deciding who gets the necklace, which turned out to be a Salamander Amulet.

Notes:

- In the end, the draugr were destroyed. They weren't able to cope with the massive qualitative advantage of the PCs - each combatant PC had all of higher skill, better defenses, and more magical support than the draugr. Most of them also had more Luck, did more damage, had game-changing advantages that let them do things the draugr couldn't reasonably attempt (Run and Hit, Extra Attack, Slayer Training), were almost all under Blur and all under Shield, . Oh, and only one melee PC had less DR than the highest DR draugr (the leader). Otherwise, the draugr gave up everything except HP and numbers in this fight, and in GURPS DF, HP and numbers don't amount to much once you add in Luck and Great Haste. The ability of the PCs to move into and out of range made Beat impossible to use, Slam was useful but not fight-winning, and Close Combat wasn't a big help, either. All of the plans of using fire to channel the enemy, shield-users to stop waves of spears, mow down the draugr at range, use Explosive Fireball to do something other than just damage . . . weren't used and weren't relevant.

This isn't a complaint, but it is an example of what happens when you put off something until you have overwhelming force - it might take some time, but you can only lose through very bad decisions. They still lost Bruce due to bad decisions, and rolls going against Sir Bunny cost him a leg (until they got back to town.)

But it's worth noting only one draugr landed a single blow this session, hit the Neck by luck, and did woeful damage (13 on 4d6+4 for 12 injury). Crogar wasn't even hurt long enough to be injured on his own turn. And yeah, after a long time of "we can't win this in a slog," they won it in a slog. I stand by my earlier assessment.

"I've said this before, here and to the group: I personally don't think the draugr are a puzzle. I think they're going to be hard battle."

- Run and Hit and Great Haste is supremely lethal in tandem. Wyatt had two swords, Extra Attack 2, and Two-Weapon Fighting. That's 4 strikes. Add in Great Haste and he can run in 6-7 yards, Feint and toss off 3 attacks, then Feint someone else and toss off 3 more, and then run away. (I'm pretty sure he ended up with nine attacks over two turns, but I'm not sure how - I'll have to double-check. I might be misremembering times when he was so close he could All-Out Attack (Double) as the first maneuver, instead, but no one ever tells me what Maneuver they're taking unless it's Wait. Except for Gerry's player. He always states his Maneuver.)

- Naturally, people wanted to roll against things for details on how to kill the draugr. Sigh. They've already done these rolls over and over and over again with every character, and keep coming back to the same answers. It's enough to make me wonder if I want knowledge skills in my next game done in this style.

- I don't mind them keeping the armor to sell later. They keep good records these days. It's just an example of giving an inch ("You don't have to worry about your stuff in town") and taking a mile ("We store nearly 2 tons of mail safely in town for when the sale market is better.") Given the nature of a group, you can set the game to be beer-and-pretzels pickup delve games and have it turn into a mercantile loot maximization game. I'll have to calculate the lost material costs to repair the mail. And with Repair soon to be in play, I'll need to know the % damaged and sale value of everything in the dungeon again, since they'll take every single thing that can be fixed and see if the raw material cost stacks up to the sale cost. This is also why I don't do market fluctations, as it would strongly encourage this. I have a rule idea for that, but not one I could use without my players trying leverage it.

- the loot, by the way, is a pretty good haul. It would have been a tremendous haul earlier, and provided cues to what's ahead in the dungeon. The Salamander Amulet (not sold in town!) would be a tremendous item. Now it's just one less spell up for one of the casters in the face of fire. So it goes.

- XP was 4 each for loot. MVP was Gerry for spell support. ("I used 10 paut," was his argument for this.)