SKT Episode 7: My Empire of Dirt

Starring:

Author’s Note: This week’s chapter titles are brought to you by Johnny Cash and some of the greatest lyrics of all time from A Boy Named Sue.

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That Which Must Be Repeated: This campaign contains hard encounters. It is often not required for all of you to kill all of them in order to succeed!

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Season Recap: Chapter 1 – A Great Upheaval

– The party have saved the fortified village of Nightstone from goblins following an attack by cloud giants from a floating castle (that went east).

– The characters travelled to Triboar and on the way met a cloud giant called Zephyros who travels in a floating tower. He explained that the ‘ordning’ (which regulates giant society) is broken and the players are destined to fix it.

– They arrived in Triboar safely but soon the town came under attack by orcs and a pair of fire giants.

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Pre-session Guff

It turns out the DM boomered the recording yet again and grabbed video by mistake. Downside: huge file size. Upside: The DM can actually remember what actually happened.

There was no session last week because Mike thought his anniversary was more important than D&D and the DM wanted to watch the US Open golf. I don’t think I need to say any more about that.

There was then a halt to proceedings while the DM tried to figure out why the fuck Adam wasn’t showing up on Discord for Mike and the DM but was for Jake.

Once this was corrected the DM kicked off the Theme from Rocky. Adam laughed and said it was going to be his theme tune. Mike suggested his theme tune should be ‘Hurt’ and then the DM and Mike both agreed it absolutely must be the Johnny Cash version “I hurt myself today…”.

Chris was late and was roundly abused in his absence. Matt turned up and sounded like his head was in a bucket of water.

Rocky Theme ends and Queen start up with We Will Rock You.

Adam attempted to trigger the DM by explaining the current DFU civil war over dashes and slashes. The DM was on leave however, and couldn’t care less. Chris turned up:

And so, with Johnny Cash singing “And you could have it all, my empire of dirt” we turn to the main session and pick up where we left off; with Joffrey stuck under a rock..

Well, I hit him hard right between the eyes…

The DM explains that the rock was not actually pinning Joffrey and that was just for comedic effect. It turns out plans had been made around Joffrey still being pinned and so the DM put it to a vote. Surprisingly, they didn’t all vote to leave him under there. I think we were all feeling a bit sorry for Adam after last week’s write up.

Spoilers: it doesn’t get a much better this week.

The boulder was moved so it was slightly away from Joffrey’s unconscious body and the Orc raider.

Then the DM realised he had forgotten to turn on the map grid:

So, the main group of players is in the middle of the east side of the map by the Lord Protector’s tower. Joffrey is in the middle of the map adjacent to a large rock and a single orc raider stands beside him. Three Orogs and six Orc Raiders are sweeping down from the north and the two giants are in the north-east corner. One is digging and one is looking smug.

The orogs dash towards the party and finish about 30ft short of Clay. Regulus finishes laughing at Joffrey, runs away manoeuvres back a bit and attempts to crotch-cannon the closest orog. His first roll of the night was a 2, much to the amusement of the rest of the table.

His second attack was much better and he even remembered the ‘to Hit’ part, and a lightning bolt streaks past Isaac’s ear and strikes the orog in the chest.

The DM detects a small amount of latent hostility from the warforged who clearly still hasn’t either forgotten nor forgiven Joffrey for nuking Boarax Thatmightchange a couple of sessions ago.

At this point there was a minor delay as the DM discovers that a dry-wipe pen applied to a board two weeks ago is no longer dry-wipe and had to find something a bit stronger to clean it with. Yes, we may be in a digital age but the DM still writes initiative and hit points down on a board. Don’t knock it, it works.

Mostly.

And he went down but to my surprise…

Abelas throws a Chromatic Orb at the closest orog and rolls a natural 20! Yay!

However, despite the DM thinking he laid out spell crits pretty plainly a couple of weeks ago in a ‘Fuck me, D&D is complicated’ section of the write up, Jake managed to utterly bugger the interpretation <sigh>

Good times.

Come up with a knife and cut off a piece of my ear

Jake asked what combat round we were on as this governs how long his Blade Song cheese lasts. In the following conversation it was established that:

The DM rolled a 4-shot volley from the NPC archers and rolled so low that, as Mike pointed out, even adding all four up still wouldn’t have hit the 18AC orog they were aiming at <sigh>

The male giant digs, the female giant picks up another boulder and holds her attack.

Clay charges the orogs and launches an attack! It falls just short! He remembers Isaac’s Bless! He rolls an extra d4 and hits!! Isaac is super impressed with himself! Clay’s second attack also hits and the orog takes a hefty chunk of damage.

Isaac lands a 10-point Toll the Dead on Clay’s orog and then turns to the unconscious Joffrey:

Isaac> I shout to him “Selune has abandoned you my idiotic friend! May Lathander heal you in her ever-glowing light!”

Whilst the DM admired the gall of the 5 Int cleric calling the druid an idiot, his inner Yoda was sighing and saying “Only just begun, the healer wars have”.

Isaac then casts Healing Word on Jeffrey for 5 whole hit points and Isaac runs behind a market stall.

DRUID UP!

The orc raider next to Joffrey goes next, rolls high and hit the druid with a greataxe for 9 damage.

DRUID DOWN!

Isaac helpfully shouts at him “You must accept the light brother! Embrace Lathander’s goodness!”

Joffrey was unimpressed.

I expect Lathander was as well.

The DM is genuinely feeling sorry for Adam at this point.

Two raiders attack Abelas and he casts Shield to gain 5 more AC.

Joffrey has to make a death save and despite Abelas willing it to be a 1, he made it comfortably.

Clay, now surrounded by three raiders and two orogs, gets hit twice by the raiders.

FIGHTER DOWN!

It’s looking a bit rough now with two of the five players on the floor! The three other mounted raiders charge ahead and engage Isaac, Regulus and Abelas up close. The slower orogs follow behind.

Abelas, the melee wizard, misty steps out of melee range <sigh> He did kill one of the raiders with a Toll the Dead though. The DM had the NPCs back-the-truck-up and volley-fired into the remaining raiders, killing them both. This only left the orogs and the giants. The giants both started digging, giving the party some breathing room.

I busted a chair right across his teeth…

Isaac and Regulus actually start planning on what to do and how to do it. It was quite remarkable. The main gist of the plan was for Isaac to use Healing Word on Clay who was “choking on his own vomit” and for Regulus to head over to Joffrey who was “probably ok” and use Cure Light Wounds on the downed druid.

There was a “Are these ten-foot squares?” moment and the skies momentarily darkened as Lathander abandoned the perpetrator.

Regulus was a bit worried about the oncoming orogs but Isaac was more worried about the three raiders surrounding Clay’s unconscious body:

There was then a five minute discussion on whether Isaac should Fireball absolutely everything, Fireball only the orogs or Fireball only the raiders and Clay.

Isaac didn’t actually want to Fireball anything. Abelas wanted Isaac to Fireball everything. Regulus wanted him to Fireball just the orogs. Joffrey didn’t have an opinion because Adam had fallen asleep having not done anything for the first hour.

Eventually Isaac gave up on the Fireball plan and resorted to the original idea:

The first roll missed by quite a lot. The second roll just hit. The third roll was… well it was a bit weird. You have to go some to bollocks-up a digital dice roll by Chris managed it and cocked a virtual cube. Outstanding.

The table thought that was an 8 but the DM decided the table was full of shit and called it as a crit. The last roll also missed. So four shots fired, two shots hit, but one was a crit. Damage wise, the first ray hit for an unimpressive 5 damage but the crit hit for 24. There was a certain amount of overkill as the orc got vaporised.

Spell slots were running low but Abelas reassured everyone that he still had his staff so everything was ok.

Isaac ducks behind a stall gaining cover but an orog still hit him with a javelin provoking a discussion about the difference between cover and concealment. It started with the DM using the word ‘frippery’ and ended with a comment from Mike of “She might not penetrate me but it did not come out well” <sigh>

And we crashed through the wall and into the street…

Regulus moved over to engage the orc near Joffrey (still down!). Abelas ran away from an orc raider and an orog provoking two attacks of opportunity. The orog hit him but his cheesy blade ward mitigated half the damage.

The DM volley fired all six NPCs and missed with every single one of them <sigh>. The second volley hit the orog twice. The Lord Protector has a stern word with her troops.

Isaac then randomly decided he gets to move his spell range and took off 60ft north. This was corrected with some minor abuse and then he healed Clay. Yay.

The DM uses push to talk on his microphone but OBS records everything whether it is pushed or not. At this point on the audio stream the DM can clearly be heard to sigh loudly as his spidey sense tells him where this is heading.

I’m not quite sure what exactly sparked Chris to start a race war as well as a religious war but I’m sure it will all end well. However, being a cleric in medium armour the odds are far more likely that the shape-shifted druid with a massive hit-point pool will be the last healer standing in many future battles but Adam will almost certainly forgive and forget, right? Right.

The DM had an amazing turn which ended with him proclaiming “For fuck sake, these fucking orcs fucking suck!”

Joffrey is down and has failed one death save. If he rolls a 1 he is dead.

He rolled a 3.

There’s a definite pucker factor in this campaign so far.

Abelas is adjacent to the NPC archers on one side and the last two orc raiders on the other side. The melee oriented wizard cast Blade Ward and, once again, did not actually melee despite both starting and finishing his turn in melee range of an enemy <sigh>. We have a bladesinger who refuses to bladesing. I’m not sure if he even has a sword at this point.

The NPC archers finish off the orc raiders.

Kickin’ and a gougin’ in the mud and the blood and the beer

The giants find what they were digging for and it appears to be quite large as the male giant has to use an action to free it from the ground.

Clay makes a single crossbow attack against the last surviving orog. He rolls a 3. He uses Bless. That made it a 4. As Isaac succinctly put it “You spent an hour dead and that’s what you came back to?”

The orog (not Abelas) got Toll the Deaded by the cleric for 4 hit points. That’ll learn him some manners.

It’s Joffrey’s turn. We started at half six, it’s now a quarter past 8. The DM is still feeling sorry for Adam despite the fact that it was self-inflicted. Joffrey’s return to action was met with enthusiastic support and encouragement from his team mates such as “Why don’t you wild shape?” and “Cast Tidal Wave again!” and “Just walk over to the giants!” and “Let the wizard mount you again” and “Wear another rock as a hat!”.

The druid runs behind the boulder for cover and Ice Knife’s the last orog.

The DM then gave a pertinent description of the how the orc died horribly but was frozen in place and thus the dex save for the rest of the spell effect was unnecessary. It seems however that whatever key the DM was pressing was not the push-to-talk key and so everyone got really confused and he had to repeat it <sigh>

Regulus asks Joffrey if he needs healing. There is no response. Adam’s hand (in Table Top Simulator at least) is going round in circles but from Adam there remained no response. It then transpires that Adam had left to go for a leak and inadvertently put his headphones down on the left arrow key. This of course caused the next two minutes to be filled with everyone trying it out until the DM got dizzy and tried to get the fight back on track.

I tell you I’ve fought tougher men…

The male giant pulls out a 2” thick band of adamantine roughly 11 feet long and looking like it weighed somewhere in the region of 1,000lbs (that’s 450kg for the young’uns). The giant has to use both hands to carry it and he starts to head out of town. The female giant picks up a boulder and accompanies him.

Now that the item was free of the earth the DM called for Arcana checks and Joffrey rolled a natural 20.

The DM apologises for what he is about to tell them. If they get carried away here we could see a total party wipe but he doesn’t tell them that bit.

The item appears to have once been part of an enormous construct. It also looks to be extremely valuable, at least several thousand gold pieces worth of valuable.

This provoked the obvious discussion about what they could spend that on (plate armour!) vs having to be alive to spend it. As far as the Lord Protector is concerned, the giants are leaving and she is very happy with that.

The main issue is the lack of spell slots. Clay cares not for spell slots however “We could take ‘em!”. The rest of the party were unconvinced.

Indeed.

As Drikk Fra-Kar, six-time grand champion of the Luskan extreme arena once said: “Nobody likes Fire Giants, mainly because they are gingers. There’s also the plate armour, the mountain of hit points, the immunity to fire (and thus most wizards), and the bad attitude. But it’s mostly because they are gingers”

The DM asked if anyone wanted to contest the exit of the giants. Even Joffrey realised that this was a bad idea. Regulus wanted them to rebuild it so that he and the construct could “become… BROBOTS!”

Don’t make me put a ‘dad joke of the week’ section in here Mike! Aint nobody got time for that!

But I really can’t remember when…

Regulus then decided to use the last round of combat to throw another tribble from the Bag of Tricks (I told you I was going to regret that), rolled an 8 and got the Giant Moose. He proposed several name choices, one of which was “Hello, my name is Bambi, you killed my mother, prepare to die” or “Anonymoose” <sigh>

There some more abuse but eventually we got back to the game and everyone levelled up.

DING, DING! LEVEL 6!

Good times.

He kicked like a mule and he bit like a crocodile

The party were asked to go back and see the Lord Protector the following morning for their reward and so they went for a good meal and long, well-earned rest. During this period a number of the NPC militia members visited the party and quests were obtained! I’ll cover those after next week’s session when they leave town.

Abelas was looking at his hit points and his new Life Transference ability which deals 4d8 damage to you but heals for twice as much; “I could go down if I take all of it”.

That’s what she said.

The following day the group went shopping and Clay bought a longbow. Abelas bought a rapier. Other shopping was going on when the DM suggested that just maybe, they should go and get their rewards first and then do shopping later because, you know, you’re probably about to be given a chunk of money.

They return to the Lord Protector’s tower where they are duly thanked and rewarded with 200gp each and a set of Glamoured Studded Leather Armour +1 which is handed to Elvira.

The party also receive two quests, one to go to Everlund to speak to the Harpers and the other a bit more local. It seems that when the giants entered town they trampled through several buildings including The Boar’s Rest which is the home of the wizard whose gargoyles they disposed of. No one has heard from the wizard since and no one in town wants to risk going up there so she asks the party to check it out and see what happened to him.

She points out that there is absolutely no rush which prompts Regulus to wink slowly at her and say “I understand!”

I heard him laugh and I heard him cuss…

Much laughter and abuse followed particularly between Joffrey and Isaac.

Much as the DM hates to criticise a good rant, and hates defending Adam even more, he never said the armour was for Elvira, he actually said the opposite. It was just handed to Elvira as the most suited to use it.

Also, criticising a player for forgetting a character’s name while getting their class wrong (“I’m pointing at the ranger behind us”) is a tad hypocritical. Elvira is a fighter. It was funny though, so who cares?.

When all this calmed down, they went shopping properly and this time bought Healing Potions! Yay. They then headed off to rob check on a wizard.

He went for his gun and I pulled mine first…

Two fire giants had walked through the house and the magmins had some fun too. It was looking a bit ropey with about half of the structure in ruins.

They search the ruins and find a vault entrance and a body, mostly buried in the rubble, with just an arm sticking out. Clay goes to check the body and a call for first aid is issued. Joffrey assists the fighter and rolls a 1 <sigh>. He does get advantage and the second roll is marginally better: they are fairly sure he is very dead.

Then, because they have the attention spans of goldfish, they decided not to check the body but to go into the vault. The DM interjected to simply point out that if they go into the vault, he will not remind them about the body when they come out of the vault next week. Well, that isn’t entirely true the DM would remind them about the body at about the time they arrive in the next town.

They wisely decided to check the body first. The dead wizard had no loot on him but nearby was a chest that had been summoned via a Leomund’s Tiny Chest spell just before a house collapsed on him. In the chest were some Bracers of Defence and a Wand of the War Mage +1. Abelas nicked both items without even asking the others.

Having robbed the dead, they headed into the vault. The vault is around 50ft wide and about 120ft long. There are four braziers, two on each side of the vault and at the far end is a plinth upon which sits an old oil lamp.

Isaac and Regulus cast Light and Regulus summons Anonymoose <sigh>. However, a Giant Elk is actually size ‘huge’, which is a 15ft area. This is too big for the ceiling of the vault and thus Regulus releases the squished creature and summons… Boarax Thatmightchange!

Joffrey turns into a Giant Constrictor Snake and wants someone to mount him again <sigh> Unsurprisingly there are no volunteers. They light the braziers and approach the plinth and the oil lamp.

Regulus touched it.

He stood there lookin’ at me and I saw him smile…

A genie appeared!

End of Session.

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Next time on Ten-foot Squares:

– Will Adam have wasted another Wild Shape?

– What opportunities will be offered by the genie?

– Will Abelas the melee wizard actually melee?

Tune in next week to find out!

Post-session Guff

Let’s have a chat about the giant fight. First of all it should be noted that there is no right or wrong way to do this. A party of level 5 adventurers up against two CR9 Fire Giants is not something you would be expected to handle. Staying the fuck away from them is not a bad tactic at all.

However, if the party had managed to get one of the giants down to half hit points, which is still quite a lot, then they would have withdrawn from the fight. Obviously the players did not know this.

Had they forced them to retreat, the group would have gotten the relic which is worth at least 5,000 gold if they sell it in town. If the giants had retreated, they would then have come back two days later when the full militia had been formed.

In order to have had a chance against the giants somewhat different tactics would have needed to be employed.

The fight sets up so that the orc raiders and the orogs attack the players to give the giants time to dig up the item. There is only one round of orc reinforcements. Obviously the players did not know any of this. However, the giants were no immediate threat and should have been ignored completely until both waves of orcs were disposed of.

The caravan park runs up the middle of the map and is surrounded by a waist-high wall. This forms a natural choke point in the top corner closest to the orcs. The choke point is 30ft wide between the wall and some market stalls.

A Spike Growth spell laid down at that choke point would have seen 6 of the raiders and all of the Orogs have to traverse through the entire length of it. Spike Growth has a 20ft radius and when a creature moves in it they take 2d4 piercing damage for every 5ft they travel. There is no save which is really nice when dealing with 18AC Orogs in plate. In addition, the ground becomes difficult terrain which would have severely hampered the orcs efforts to close with the party.

To put that into context, each creature travelling through that area would take twice as long to traverse it and would take an average of 40 damage doing so. That would have killed the goat mounts, the orc raiders, the magmins and probably the Orogs (42HP each) just by itself leaving the party with only the other six raiders coming from the other side to worry about and they could easily have been dispatched by the NPC archers, maybe also with a Shatter. Twelve shortbow attacks per round against relatively squishy orcs would have made short work of them.

An alternative to Spike Growth would have been Faerie Fire, a level 1 spell with a dex save, not something plate-clad Orogs are very good at. This would have made the Orogs considerably easier to hit and arrow-bait for the NPC archers.

Either way, by sticking together and using the terrain, the orcs and the Orogs could have been finished off without undue expenditure of resources. However, once it went pear-shaped expenditure of resources became necessary just for survival and that precluded any serious attack on the giants.

Once the orcs had been dispatched, one of the NPC’s would have fired at the giants and provoked the rock-throw response. Joffrey actually did everyone a favour there as the NPC may have been killed and they give quests out if they survive.

Regardless, once the rock throw happened, the way (or ‘a’ way) to counter it would be to cast Fog Cloud, another level 1 spell, on the giants as they were defending a stationary point. Then have everyone move into range and into cover, prep attacks and then have the Fog Cloud caster drop concentration on the spell. If done just after the fire giant’s turn, this would give an instant full-round of attacks on one giant followed by another full turn for the players.

After that it could have gotten messy but it’s a huge damage head start and the casters would have still had most of their spell slots.

Control, it’s a really good thing.