Will the fight ever end?
Date: 12/21/2025
Game Date: 10/5/2025
Weather: Warm and mild.
Characters
Chop, human cleric (362 points)
Duncan Tesadic, human wizard (346 points)
Hannari Ironhand, dwarf martial artist (360 points)
Persistance Montgomery, human knight (347 points)
Rogar Thane-Blood, human barbarian (250 points)
Thor Halfskepna, human knight (368 points)
Vladimir Luchnick, dwarf scout (333 points)
We picked up where we left off, at around second 52 of the fight.
Rogar was down, Hannari chasing down some escaping Gith, Thor cornering an axeman, Percy bashing thorkers, and Chop dodging thorkers. Duncan began to move to put up a wall to seal off the room from the "south" (screen down) entrance.
Things went sideways immediately. A number of thorkers rushed out to assist the Gith that Hannari was after. Others stood up from where they'd fallen, healed up enough to get back into the fray.
The PCs pulled back a bit, as Thor finished off the axeman and Percy downed a couple of thorkers. Duncan put up a wall of earth and then immediately tried another, to seal another corridor into the room, but failed. Chop followed, feeding him energy with Lend Energy and drinking paut as fast as he could.
The PCs fought the advancing new thorkers off for a couple of seconds and Duncan sealed off that side, too. Meanwhile, thorkers retreated back, in response to some unhead command, and dragged off some fallen Gith. Hannari and Percy and Thor rushed over, with Vlad providing arrow support, to try and stop them. A tossed sleep grenade by Hannari put one down, but another escaped with two bodies dragged behind.
Duncan turned two of the earthen walls to stone, and then rushed over - still fed energy by a trailing Chop - and sealed the last one off.
They rapidly began dragging corpses of the Gith to the hallway, rescued the fallen Rogar and began to heal him, and prepped to get out. As they did, a few thorkers stood up, and needed Percy to put them back down. Hannari dragged one to the GFS and threw him off the landing and down the deep, deep, deep put to the "domed city" level far below.
As they dragged corpses, though, the "west" wall disappeared - the Gith leader had dispelled or dissolved it, somehow. Thorkers rushed in just as Thor was dragging two bodies. He quickly let them go and ran back to the party, grumping the whole way but knowing the plan was grab and go. They fought briefly in the entranceway before walling it off - Hannari dive-rolling into the safe area and grabbing a sleeping thorker - put to sleep in Part I - to keep him on their side of the earth wall.
Duncan got the wall off, turned it to stone, and they fled with their loot - four dead Gith, and one sleeping thorker. Left behind was probably a dozen fallen Gith, easily a score of fallen thorkers and norkers, and everything they dropped during the fight (like a Wand of Fireballs, Rogar's axe, and some thrown weaponry.)
From there, it was a quick trip back to town . . . no wandering monsters turned up (yes, I roll, Felltower is DF on hard mode.)
Notes:
Short crew today - no players for Rogar, Chop, or Percy, but Vlad and Duncan's players, respectively, stepped in for the last two. Rogar was unconcious until the very end. Normally we don't allow PCs to come along without the player, but we do cover for players who can't make all of a multi-session delve.
Finally, this grindy, epic fight ended. It was a grind but not a slog - it really felt like every turn was a decision point . . . and we ended on the 70th turn for most of the PCs.
The PCs didn't nearly get the loot they "earned" but they did get a lot. Four suits of magescale, a magical Gith longsword, chameleon clocks and stealthy boots, and a live thorker to hand over to a "sage" - vivisectionist - for research. The cost was high - a lot of consumables, a dropped Wand of Fireballs with 14 charges, a number of weapons - but no PCs were killed or maimed. They almost certainly killed a number of enemies - a few decapitated or skull-smashed Gith and norkers, for sure, and maybe some of the thorkers. The enemy will be more ready, but have they taken such heavy losses - dozens of their number down - that they can't muster such a hard-crust defense again? We'll see. The PCs will be back, eventually.
MVP was Duncan for the walls.
XP was 4 xp for loot, +5 XP for 5 extra sessions, for 9 xp each. Not bad, oh, and $22K or so in cash, each, after Duncan took the suit of Magescale in best repair.
Fun stuff! Like I said, this was long, but man, I enjoyed every session. I think my players agree, but they'll be happy to do one-session delves if they can pull them off.
Lot to say about this fight, most of it good.
ReplyDeleteYes, it was a slog, but it only felt like a drag initially, at least to me. The thorker/norker combo that took like 10-11 hits to bash what almost HAD to be Supernatural Durability and Injury Reduction 5 or so felt like a slog. They were skilled enough that one couldn't ignore being surrounded, so we still had to fight cannily.
The deadly floor kept life interesting.
And then first the mix of "yeah, those guys over there are skilled spellcasters AND melee fighters" made it a tactically interesting challenge. Then when they started to show up in waves...things got "oh, we might not make it out of this" dicey, which kept it fun.
The last few games were very "oh, we're screwed" then "ok, we have taken control of this fight" and then back to "oh, we're screwed" followed by yesterday, which went from "cool" to "screwed" to "really screwed" to "oh, maybe we got this" and then back to "screwed" in time for Wall-E Wizard to drop that final earth to stone which let us get out.
It was a very long-for-GURPS fight, very dynamic. I hope that we discover a way to make shorter work of the thorker/norker masses, as finding their alleged/theoretical vulnerability would let us turn the tables sooner on the gith/lichtor/axeman crowd.
The amount of magical armor and weapons "up for grabs" (assuming we keep winning fights and inflicting casualties) makes it a source of very profitable delving. But these guys don't strike me as DX 16, Sword-22, IQ 4 types. They will certainly be prepared for another incursion if we give them time, and walking into the magical vampiric equivalent of a claymore mine is something we'd better be ready for!
Good fight, long fight, but at least we have a pathway to some real treasure, which we didn't see a way towards up until this delve.
That's very helpful, Doug.
Delete"at least we have a pathway to some real treasure, which we didn't see a way towards up until this delve." - Truth. I think the issue was no one really saw a pathway that wasn't through. It just too enough of you guys to say, f- this, the pathway around is straight through. You didn't crush the opposition like it seemed for a while like you might have . . . but it's clear the players know what to do next, and next, until the problem is no longer much of a problem. I think that was a critical step. That it resulted in a very long but very interesting fight pleased me immensely.
I think that my character disads and my personal preferences - if I'm going to spend 8 hours committed to something, it had better be glorious, if not lengthy - both will push to "let's f**king DO SOMETHING" going forward.
DeleteI see the upcoming series of delves very much as "let's see if we can continue to run the ball up the middle until the other team is exhausted through attrition and injury." We also assumed that we could kill 'em all and then have enough time to get out. That might not work. We might need to hit the foe, collect some high-value bodies/loot, and then do a fighting or cautious withdrawal and try and stage raids rather than sledghammer blows.
We shall see. I don't think we're likely to get cocky - that was a HARD fight - but we probably got out with ... half? a third? ... of the potential loot on the ground and it was still one of our most profitable delves *after we split it seven ways*.
So I'm definitely looking forward to the next few sorties.
There were a lot of highs and lows, exactly as Doug described, which really makes it memorable. At one point there was a real feeling of despondency, when they took down the wall, but the fact that the Gith themselves did not immediately advance was pretty good, and once Duncan got the last wall up, that was great. If we can get some good research on the Thorkers and at least figure out how to make them less of a hassle, or better yet, permanently eliminate them, so much the better. Not sure what the Gith will do next, or how they'll prepare, but at least we know we can go to that area now and not be hopelessly outmatched (like a previous delve or two).
DeleteI think you guys just played better than before - better tactics, a lot less reliance on your opponents conforming to your tactics, and a better idea of how to support each other. Previous delvers hit a weaker group of foes and did less well.
Delete@Doug: I’d say we got roughly a third of the loot we could have gotten. There were probably up to a dozen suits of magescale, and we got only three weapons out of close to somewhere between 18-24 that we might have gotten. (Not including “how do we carry all this?”). But lots of fun and profit.
DeleteI know it's dangerous, but I have been saying for a while that the real loot was below. Harder to get, and it would take some good play and tough fights . . . but think about the fact that there were 12 suits of $55K armor in play in that fight and up for grabs if you won. That's not the only loot.
DeleteI wasn't kidding when I said the loot was down below. And you guys spent all those sessions doing Seek Earth to scour the plundered upper levels for a few hundred silver. But oh no, Deathtouch floor, we can't handle that. :D ;)