Felltower Adjacent Session 6 - Traps & Temples of Orcus

Yesterday was a session of Vic's Felltower Adjacent game. I think the next game will be GMed by me, in Felltower. For the previous session, see my brief summary here:

Session 5

Characters:
Handsome, half-orc scout (me)
Hanari Ironhand, dwarf martial artist
Thor Hafskepna, human knight
Chop, human cleric
Urbaine, half-elf bard
Duncan Tesdic, human wizard
Persistance Montgomery, human knight
plus some semi-useful dwarves and a goblin

We started off in the dungeon, having looted and sent off the surviving hobgoblins. We parcelled out the magic items, and Handsome put on the amulet from the hobgoblin wizard and restrung his bow. We found the dwarves' gear. Tarkov had armor tailored to him that detected as magical. Aha, prince Tarkov, clearly. We sat around until an hour and then headed deeper.

We found a pair of double doors and unlocked them, then found another pair and just opened them up.

Beyond the doors were a statue puzzle trap. A giant statue of a knight with a sword stood on one side of the room, near the door. On the other side were statues of dragons. (I asked, but never got an answer to, "Are there scorch marks in front of them?" - I found out later no, and why not, but I want to go on record as looking first.)

It was clearly a puzzle or a trap, and there was the usual "this will animate and kill us" chorus. We couldn't spot any mechanism to set it off, set Handsome moved in a bit . . . and was promptly clocked by the statue.

Handsome set it off by approaching within 15' of the sucker and got whacked for 14 crushing which sent him flying.

Handsome suggested we drag over some dead hobgoblins, use Levitate to move them around, and see what sets off the trap. The first one got pinata'ed into a spray of gore. Bwahahahahah. So we used the other and avoided the 15' arc and sent it by the dragons. They blew air to knock you into the knight's reach, proving it to be a baseball trap. Splotch.

We got another hobgoblin and manuevered him down to the far end of the room, where four white statues of cherubs with jars of water stood. It passed them, and a forcefield appeared, water filled the area up and splashed around violently until the hobgoblin corpse was in tatters, and then the water drained away.

The group voted to go check out the side area.

We did that and found a stone door marked "Closed." We opened it up, and spotted a gelatinous cube coming. We closed the door. There was talk of backing off but it turned out we, a) had torches, and b) had a wizard with Lightning, and c) you can kill them with melee attacks so why not do that?

We opened the door and waited with torches. The cube came, and Duncan blew it apart with 2 x 15d Lightning spells, doing 44 and 43 damage, between which Hannibal, Persistance, and Thor burned it with their torches. We collected some cube ooze which can be sold in town.

We found 11 sp and 2 gp and some old weapons beyond the cube but no way around the trap. We veto'd a suggestion to triangulate and burrow a hole behind the trap.

We went back to the baseball trap and sent Hanari in and he spiked it in place. We then found a lever to turn it off on the back, then Thor chopped its legs down.

We worked out way around back of the dragon statues and turned them off, not that it mattered.

The fighters dragged the big statue's sword over and stuck it in the flooding area, which did nothing. So we did another hobgoblin, and didn't see any clue to how to disarm it. So we threw a lasso over the front two statues, one at a time, and dragged them down and broke them. IIRC it was Handsome (ST 13), Thor (ST 17), Persistance (ST 17) and one of the dwarves. With them broken the trap was useless.

We opened the locked door thanks to Yegenny's lockpicks.

We find a pair of corridors, straight and right. Ten rune-covered zombies come from both sides, so we split up - three dwarves and Urbaine on one side, and a heavily-loaded flank with Persistance, Thor, and Hanari - two knights and a martial artist.

We fought a bunch of rune-covered zombies that explode when they die. They rushed in close, so they lit some fires as we cut them down. Mostly fratricide caused them problems and the explosions didn't bother our front-liners too much. Handsome contributed with a few cutting arrows, but mostly they blocked them and the one he hit didn't die from the arrow.

Accompanying them were a family of undead - mother, father, little boy, and little girl zombies. They rushed us from the weaker flank. The better fighters moved to help that line as it bowed under pressure. Handsome dropped his bow on a 17 and had to recover it, preventing him from helping in a useful manner until a few turns later.

Eventually we chopped them all to bits.

Finally we found stairs down, and headed down after waiting 20-30 minutes to rest up.

By the law of pre-written adventurers and movie tropes, at the bottom we found a ritual almost complete - we'd arrived in the nick of time!

There was a big room with a gate on one end (with tentacles reaching out of it), pillars down the middle, an altar on one side and a giant statue of Orcus on the other side. Over by the altar were two draugr, two bleeders (DFRPG Monsters 2) (which I thought were Ramex, thank goodness they weren't), a weird undead that hurled black evil bolts, a wizard - Franz Gruber, and an archer. Those of us who prayed at the altar upstairs got Bless +1 for the duration of the fight.

We trashed them badly. Hanari threw a kama at Franz and hit and hurt him slightly, despite heavy magic robes. Handsome drilled him in the vitals with a bodkin, and he teleported away after a flash from his Orcus amulet and ended up in a pentagram in front of the gate.

We charged into the room - Hanari and Thor and Urbaine to the left, the dwarves up the middle, Handsome up the right, Chop and Duncan in the back, and the useless goblin off to the side. The draugr and one of the bleeders headed toward Handsome, another bleeder towards Thor and Hanari, and the weird undead launched bolts from the back. The archer readied her bow.

It all went downhill for the enemy from there. The draugr realized they couldn't catch Handsome, so they veered off and slammed the dwarves and Urbaine. Urbaine dodged and the draugr knocked himself down from slamming into a pillar. The other immediately got tangled up with the dwarves in a melee. Chop put Protection from Evil on Thor (or was it Hanari?) as they dealt with one of the bleeders. Handsome rushed Franz while putting the pillars between him and the archer. She took one shot at him but he Dodged, while putting arrows towards and often into Franz. I was rolling at a 9 for four shots and hit with 3.

The draugr who knocked himself down got jumped by Persistance, who clubbed him repeatedly with his flail. Urbaine did an All-Out Attack and put out both of the draugr's eyes, and was saved from an arrow in the back by his Bless. The black bolts hit Thor a couple times and drained some FP, but he rushed the undead and killed her in short order. Hanari put down one of the bleeders with Persistance's help or vice-versa.

Meanwhile the dwarves mobbed one draugr. One grappled its shield and it dropped it, and then it dropped its sword on a critical miss. The others kept attacking it, and the grappler eventually threw it prone. Chop ran in to engage it. Persistance smashed up the blind one and then joined them in smashing up this one.

Handsome's hapless wizard foe put Darkness over himself as Handsome ran up, still shooting, knocking him prone. Guessing, Handsome aimed for hexes covered by darkness and caught Franz in the line of shot, putting an arrow into what turned out to be his arm. Franz tried a ranged Deathtouch from one of Doug's supplements, but rolled an 18 and hurt himself instead. Handsome ran right through the tentacles near the portal (which I swear were not mentioned until then), Dodging away from one of them and shooting it off with a max-damage cutting arrow attack. Then he jumped through the darkness, putting an arrow into the vitals of the wizard as he entered the dome of darkness. The second bleeder, which had been chasing him, finally caught him and tried to kick on a Move on Attack. The -2 to keep its footing made it fall. Handsome shot it, and Hanari ran up and threw his katana into it and cut off one of its arms.

Meanwhile Urbaine convinced the archer to surrender - it was the suspiciously nice elf woman from town. She surrendered, in return for a fair trial, instead of us killing her on the spot here.

The others were dealt with over a few more seconds. Orcus boomed out from the gate, "You have failed me!" and sucked Franz Gruber's surprised soul into Hell. The gate closed forever.

After that, long story short, we found out there was nothing left to loot, so we took all their stuff, drew a map of the place, and went to town.

Notes:

Holy crud, Sean Punch was threatening GURPS Undead Waltons back in the 90s on GURPSNet-L and here it is, a family of undead.

Hopefully this is the end of the undead for a bit.

One of the dwarves, Tarkov, had a $30,000 suit of perfectly fitted magic armor. Turns out he was socially well-connected and wealthy and had a reward of $500 each for us for rescuing him. With our bard, we'd have been better off had he died and we sold his armor. Just saying.

We discussed if Protection from Evil covers draugr. I said no - they lack "Truly evil" and aren't undead by direct choice. Other argued they were. I'm sticking to my guns here - Truly evil means Truly evil, and lacking that tag should mean you don't suffer from effects designed to repel that. It's an effective spell, with broad utility, and I don't think it needs to be any more broad. Also I don't allow it for wizards in Felltower, just Bards and Clerics.

We ended up with 11 xp each. 4 xp for loot, 2 xp for the boss fight, 1 xp for the zombie fight, 2 xp for closing the gate, 1 xp for rescuing the dwarves, 1 xp for mapping the dungeon (which was a "quest."). That is a LOT of XP. Literally more than double what a standard session gets under my system. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Everyone likes the rapid pace, I think, but it feels like way too much. In six sessions Handsome earned 43 points.

MVP was Handsome for keeping Franz Gruber pincushioned instead of actually effective during the fight.

Voting on the MVP was tight, which Hanari a close second, because his kama hit really set the tone for the final battle. Had Handsome's arrow not triggered the defensive teleport, it would have been his, but that swayed some voters. Overall, this session really was interesting in that every PC's strengths were showcased - Handsome did scout things and heroic archer things, Hanari demonstrated his martial artist's high DX and Throwing Art, the bard did assistance magic and talked a foe into surrendering, the wizard lightninged apart a gelatinous cube, the cleric healed and buffed and did secondary fighter things, the two knights engaged in brutal front-line fighting . . . literally each one did their template as designed. Good stuff.

Also see Doug's summary.