GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Session 175, Felltower 124 - Mission for the Masters II

Date: 11/13/2022
Game Date: 10/24/2022 and 11/13/2022

Characters:
Crogar, human barbarian (375 points)
"Mild" Bruce McTavish, human barbarian (349 points)
Gerrald Tarrant, human wizard (420 points)
Ulf Sigurdson, human cleric (366 points)
Varmus the Hanged, human apprentice (180 points)
Wyatt Sorrel, human swashbuckler (382 points)

We picked up in combat. The combat didn't go too long.

Wyatt scrambled over to his fallen swords and knives and frittered away a couple of seconds trying to retrieve them quickly and rolling poorly. Meanwhile, Gerry harassed the death brain, which kept attacking him and stunning him in return. Wyatt got his sword and chucked it and hit the brain, knocking it from the ceiling. It was hurt more by the fall, and then Wyatt kicked it twice, both times for max damage. Gerry floated down and swiped at it twice, and hit it the second time for 3 damage with the staff (minimum) and 18 damage with a 6d Deathtouch. That did for it.

Meanwhile, the mindwarper kept lashing away at the advancing PCs. It hit Varmus five times, and wounded him badly. Varmus faked unconsciousness, poorly, but then fell unconscious for real a second later.

The golden swordsmen - two, anyway, still at full HP - ran at the mindwarper. So did Bruce. It lashed away at Bruce over and over, inflicting quite a lot of damage and cutting him to half move and dodge. They still managed to run it down to a far wall. Bruce reached it and swung his sword and hit, but it deflected it with a lash of some color-that-wasn't-a-color force. A second later it turns and touched a few spots on the wall with its tentacle-like . . . fingers . . . and it disappeared with a psychic scream that rose and then fell off sharply (although only Bruce heard it, the others not being close by.)

They carefully moved around for a bit, ensuring the combat was over. They fed potions out and managed to revive all of the fallen except Ulf. The golden swordsmen huddled up and did something - no one noticed in the confusion - and got their wounded up again, too. Only one lay fallen forever. They stripped him of gear (before the PCs could - yes, someone asked) and layed him out with his arms across his chest and eyes closed.

They explored the area at the gestures of one of the swordsmen. They found one area seemed unstable (they didn't check it further, on caution from Bruce), another gave Bruce weird distractions (and -2 IQ rolls for a while), another was where the void brutes lived (there was almost nothing at all there), and a room with strange writing. Gerry read the runes as best he could (he has 1 point in Elder Tongue), and found them interesting . . . so interesting . . . he could puzzle them out . . . but he managed to snap out of the trap. It was nonsense, at least to him, but designed to seem compelling.

They eventually gathered everyone up, the golden swordsmen pulled them out of the barrier, and they headed back. The golden swordsmen had one lead and the other four follow - one carrying the fallen sixth. The PCs went along and returned to the Masters. They were brought back to the balcony, Levitated up, and questioned by the talkative tall one. It demanded a report. Varmus explained.

It wasn't satisfied that the mindwarper escaped. Varmus said, "to my credit, I was unconscious." They were ordered to disarm. They found themselves compelled to do so. Once stripped nude, things went fuzzy. They found themselves back in their cells. No one tortured them this time around, they were just fed and guarded.

Time passed.

And they came to their senses in a square room with three passages out. One was blocked with caltrops (with a very narrow, straight path through the middle) and a weird crab-shaped urn on the ceiling. There six Gith aka Masters and a few norkers stood, and told them to arm up and to go out that right passage, take another right, and kill everything they found. Wyatt asked again for Aldwyn's weapons, saying he could have completed the previous mission if he'd been given the extra weapons. The Masters seemed unimpressed.

They walked out the narrow, straight, caltrop path ("tactically unsound," sniffed Wyatt) and into the next chamber, an octogan-shaped one. It held four obsidian golems and an iron spectre, which watched them as they went past. They cast a few light spells and moved into the caves where they were told to go and kill everything.

They began to move through the cave, exploring the right-hand side. As they moved left . . . suddenly Wyatt cried out in pain. They began to move forward . . . unknown to them (but known to the PCs, because of the turn tracker and a f-ing map lighting issue I can't figure out), towards a half-dozen Eyes of Death!

We stopped there, and we'll pick up in two weeks.

Notes:

- In my next campaign, I won't allow Fit. Because every single session - every - single - session - someone has asked, "Does Fit count?" on a HT roll. I could write a whole blog hosted on fitcountsonallheathrollsingurps.com and write nothing but posts about how all HT rolls means all HT rolls and I'd still get this question. I'll get it again, even after this. Because, you know, maybe this HT roll doesn't count it. So mark my words - it's gone.

- I love the death brains. Lots of fun. They're really glass cannons . . . assuming you can get close to them. Had Galen been around, they wouldn't have been for long. Missile weapons are relative weak except when they're not.

- We updated the GURPS package and Foundry . . . and while the fight we had worked, we had status effects we couldn't remove, weird issues with lighting, and the like. It's a learning curve. I'd be angrier if I wasn't running a VTT on a third-party host with a different third-party unofficial rules module not planned for in the base VTT.

- I was a little unprepared for the PCs to actually just return to the Masters. But they did. And so, for their sins, they got another mission. Everyone gets everything he wants. So I had to quick-upload the map and icons I needed for the next fight. One of my players said he hadn't seen any real decision points up to now. Well, no, not after they returned to the Masters. I just wasn't really honestly expecting them to go back, but players will do that to you.

- I have no idea how to do lighting. I just don't. I did my best, with lights on PCs and Fog of War on, and they can still see large swaths of the map that are outside the reach of their light. I'm trying to fix it, but it's painful. And it - plus the turn tracker - reveal all that would stay hidden on an actual tabletop.

- MVP was Varmus's player, who was running Wyatt when he threw the sword into the death brain and then kicked it twice for max damage when it fell. It's MVP, not MVC, so the player gets the point, not Wyatt.

- We'll pick up in two weeks, on 11/27/22.