Posting some happenings from my group's ACKS campaign. Anyone else with OSR campaign stories please share, or this can be an ACKS general thread.
>I posted some of this story a week ago in the early morning hours but had to leave before I could finish and forgot to screencap, so will be reposting that part
So I've been running an ACKS sandbox campaign for my group for a while (though we switched to the ACKS II playtest rules midway through). Low magic items, high lethality--the party's graveyard of fallen PCs and henches is 70+ deep. The PCs have gotten to an average level of ~6 after a couple big dungeons. They have had a long term funnel effect; from their initial hapless band of misfits and fools, the survivors and replacements are a group of hard, black-hearted professionals. There are a few notables in this story I'll mention now.
Saurkan: a level 4 Zaharan Darklord with a very on-the-nose name, as he's basically mini-Sauron. He can cast as a mage, wear plate, and has various powers for controlling beastmen and debuffing enemies. He also has a d4 hit die and is outrageously expensive to level. Unlike the actual Sauron, Saurkan is only somewhat charismatic, being more of a brain.
Cartamo: a level 6 Fighter who gained minor spellcasting ability through campaign events (eating specially-cooked beholder-kin). An utterly ruthless survivor was the henchman for 2 PCs before becoming a PC himself. Extremely deadly in melee.
Heath: a level 6 elf dual arcane-divine caster. Massive number of spells per day. Wrote "Elf" as his alignment, in effect it means totally amoral.
Saurkan replaced his player's level 4 berserker PC, Slav the Boar. It was just he and Heath who were there that night, and I ran the 1-page module Blade of the Barbarian with a few revisions. (Free to DL here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/301547/Blade-of-the-Barbarian?manufacturers_id=16262). tl;dr: there's a competition with a series of formal and informal challenges of strength, wisdom, and bravery.
The main changes: instead of competing for a magic sword, Saurkan was competing to take leadership of 2 companies of light infantry (240 men) who had recently formed into a brigand band and needed a commander. (This was caused by the party's actions up to this point, as it happens.) I also added Slav the Boar as another competitor. Cartamo would normally have been the obvious contender for this type of competition but his player couldn't make it that night, so Saurkan decided to give it a try. All his opponents were leveled fighters, but fortunately for Saurkan, he had 2 divine caster PCs (cleric, elf custom class) discreetly buffing him before most of the trials. It went down as follows...
The first night and day are the informal and formal Trials of Strength (informal drinking contest acting as tie-breaker for the formal rock-lifting contest). Saurkan wins the informal trial of strength by drinking 5 horns, tying Sauterel. Ulvstark and Slav vomited; Ulvstark got -4 STR total before that, and Sauterel got -2 STR. Saurkan had no CON bonus but the dice loved him, he just aced every single save.
Before the formal trial of strength can start the next day, Saurkan gets challenged to a duel after (correctly) accusing his competitor Elding of cheating by drinking a potion of Giant's Strength before the trial has started. He withstands an opening crit by the buffed-up Elding, though it’s dropped him most of his hp--one more hit will easily kill him. Saurkan ‘victory or death’ and fights on, getting a solid hit of his own on Elding that causes him ignominiously yield (failed morale after dropping him <50% hp--1,1 on the dice).
Despite only having a STR of 15 even after being buffed by Vigor, Saurkan wins the formal trial of strength (lifting the stones) by tiebreaker--the only person who matched him for drinking could no longer lift the 13 STR rock, and nobody could lift more than that one anymore.
>TRIAL OF STRENGTH VICTOR: SAURKAN
The second night and day are the informal and formal Trials of Wisdom. Saurkan WOULD have narrowly won the informal trial of wisdom (a simple showing off of the languages known by each contender) just from his educated PC's own hefty 7 languages known. Instead he cheats with the elf, who cast Telepathy from outside the longhouse and shared the words to even more languages with him, and ends up lapping all the other competitors.
Saurkan next wins the formal trial of wisdom (riddle contest) easily by the player's own personal skill in riddles, figuring it out in just under a minute. (Not saying the riddle is the hardest one around, but he nailed it quickly.)
>TRIAL OF WISDOM VICTOR: SAURKAN
Saurkan could have claimed victory at this point, having won 2 out of the 3 trials. He decides that instead he'll wait to press his claim and finish the trials. So they proceed onto the the third night and day: the informal and formal trials of courage. As a new PC with no real accomplishments to his name (we don't do pre-campaign PC backstories in our campaigns), Saurkan decides to say nothing during the informal trial of courage (boasts of deeds) and just present a quiet confidence, letting Ulvstark win. (Little did he know this would save him from a second duel.)
The formal trial of courage is a doozy, being shot at with arrows by a blind man. Sauterel and Ulvstark's nerves fail them and they quit halfway through. Slav and Kiff Doomseeker were felled by the arrows (blew right past their hp total to quit). Saurkan wins again, as the last man standing. Great luck on his part, hedged with being buffed by the spell Vigor.
>TRIAL OF COURAGE VICTOR: SAURKAN
>VICTOR OF ALL TRIALS: SAURKAN
Slav the Boar is healed by the party, and then successfully hired by Saurkan. (Despite Slav having slightly higher xp, I ruled that Saurkan had convinced Slav that he was the stronger of the two by handily winning the competition--but he'd better get to a higher total quickly before Slav catches on, since henchmen won't work for someone beneath their level.) Since Saurkan hadn't been able to hire more than a couple really shoddy level 1 fighter henchmen up to that point, being able to pick up Slav as a hench is a huge boon--Slav is a really capable combatant during a greater berserkergang, and even had a boar henchman of his own.
The challenger Kiff Doomseeker was also healed, which was VERY unfortunate as that last arrow had severed his manhood. (Living the ACKS meme of genital loss.) Not only denied the good death he sought, but now he REALLY wants to die.
Saurkan as the winner was declared leader of the brigands (2 companies of light infantry, 240 men), who are supplying their own wages and supplies for the first month--after which they'll want to see some spoils. Due to winning all three of the formal trials, rather than claiming victory after the first two (and winning a duel on top of that, AND winning two of the informal trials), Saurkan gained the Legendary Leader status with the men (+1 morale unless he loses two consecutive battles).
It was a very auHispanicious and appropriate session for this dark lord, letting him begin rising in power immediately if he used the troops well. It was also a very handy outcome for the party--they needed troops for their own schemes, but the local ruler was mustering the domain to deal with a threat the party had failed to deal with (which means troops are hard to come by).
The troops would be seeing action soon, for Saurkan had PLANS. He’d hired a few ruffians in town to carouse for rumors. Specifically, rumors about kobolds in the local area. The same month as Saurkan found himself with a small army answering his orders, this paid off--2 of those ruffians nailed their carousing checks. There was indeed a tribe in the area (I’d rolled out all the clanholds and their locations randomly using the beastmen rules; there was only a single kobold clanhold in the whole region).
Why kobolds, specifically? Because Saurkan was level 4, and that meant with the weakest sort of beastmen, he had figured out a very special trick his class could pull.
>will be back in a little bit
Saurkan assembled the party and his new army and they marched for the kobold clanhold. The army marched up to their gates and then Saurkan himself marched right in. His signature darklord ability, to dominate beastmen in much the same way as clerics can turn/control undead, was just strong enough at level 4 to auto-dominate all the regular kobolds, and he gathered a bigger and bigger crowd of fawning supplicants as he progressed toward the chieftain’s lair. He also rolled hot for reaction rolls with all the stronger kobold champions (who he still had to roll for), who formed an honor guard. While he was perfectly ready to have his new minions replace the kobold clan chieftain if he didn’t see the writing on the wall, it wasn’t necessary. His luck with the dice stayed high and his hiring roll with Gleekan the kobold clan chieftan resulted in an elan result. The chieftain happily swore loyalty as the darklord’s newest henchman, bringing all his kobolds with him.
But Gleekan warned his new lord that the bugbears who had ruled over the kobolds until then--and also ruled over a tribe of nearby goblins--would surely object that their tribute was ending. Gleekin knew of ~60 bugbear warriors. Saurkan figured that would be a quick and easy fight. He'd secure his own rule over the kobolds, plus get loot to pay his bandits--and from there, take over the goblin clan.
So with 290 kobolds added to the 240 human light infantry, Saurkan took his now far-bigger army and with the party marched straight for the village of bugbears.
He neglected to actually do any recon beforehand.
While they did get a recon roll anyways, it was a bad roll, and they marched up to the bugbear village to find way more than the suggested 2 platoons of bugbear warriors… it was 3 of them.
AND a platoon of the thralls, and even one of the whelps, who got turned out to fight when the bugbear chieftain saw just how many raiders were rolling in. They were not close to the combat power of the warriors, respectively about as good as a unit of orcs and kobolds, but when you’re fighting kobolds, that's not such a bad deal.
AND it so happened that this was when the goblin subchief had brought his tribe’s wolf riders with their monthly tribute.
AND...
>"WTF DM, is that a unit of hill giants?"
actually was a phantasmal force spell from the bugbear witch doctor, but they didn't know that
The players were pretty stunned to see the giants on the field and had no idea how they could be there, though they had a hint: the “giants” didn't react in the slightest when Cartamo and Saurkan rode forward to parlay and Saurkan tried to bribe them to change sides or at least quit the field. The bugbear chieftain found that attempt hilarious.
He stopped laughing when Saurkan thought he'd try that with the goblins, and barked at him that parlay was over, as of right now. (Saurkan could have tried dominating the goblins anyways, but would have gotten charged by the massive bugbear general in response, who was dealing 2d6+8 damage per swing... basically guaranteed to one-shot the d4 HD 4th level darklord.)
>Starting army for the PCs: 11 platoons of kobolds, 8 platoons of light infantry infantry
>Starting army for the bugbears: 3 platoons of bugbears, 1 platoon of thralls (as orcs), 1 platoon of welps (as kobolds), 1 platoon of goblin wolf-riders (and 1 illusory platoon of hill giants)
>see previous post's pic for the pre-battle assembled army setups
The PCs had more heroes and way more troops on the field, but they had no cavalry at all and the bugbear units were each far, FAR tougher. They had thrice the attack power of a kobold unit, more AC, better morale, and way more unit hp before they'd have to make morale rolls. To the point that without heroes, I'd estimated it as almost a 3:1 power balance in the bugbears' favor.
The illusory hill giants did a great job of being intimidating and just kept moving toward the left of the field. The party pulled a bunch of units away from the real fight to handle them, until finally the ruse was discovered. This little tactical deception did a real number on the party's overall scheme of maneuver, leaving a bunch of their force out of position for the rest of the fight.
Cartamo commanded the human brigand light infantry, and the party loaded him up with 10+ levels of buff spells before the battle started. He didn’t really care about preserving his forces (much to Saurkan’s irritation, since those were HIS men); he just moved to engage the enemy general as soon as possible. The bugbear chieftain had also been well-buffed by his casters, and the two champions of the field traded blows. This came to a sudden stop when the chieftain’s bugbears sent Cartamo’s light infantry into retreat, and Cartamo got carried off by the fleeing mob. (This ended up in his favor because the bugbear shaman was going to cast Dispel Magic later that round to knock likely all of Cartamo’s buffs off.)
The darklord did a clutch move of temporarily dominating the goblin wolf-riders, and even did some damage to the bugbear chieftain (who could probably have one-shot him if he'd stuck around). And Heath’s valuable elf mage henchman cast Stinking Cloud on a mostly-untouched bugbear platoon and caused it to rout.
Still, it was looking pretty bad. The party hadn't used their superior numbers to effectively flank/encircle the bugbears, due to being tricked by the illusory giants and due to Cartamo not giving a fuck about tactics. After taking a bunch of losses, most of the kobolds were running for the hills after the PC's army was reduced enough to trigger army-wide morale rolls. The elf mage henchman became a priority target for the bugbear heroes after his Stinking Cloud, and one of them carved the elf’s arm off at the shoulder with a brutal axe hit.
Then Cartamo returned to the battle. Closing with the bugbear general again, he dropped him with a pair of devastating strikes. The bugbears let out a wail. They held on for a short while longer, but without their general’s morale bonus, and already banged up, most of the survivors fled the field, leaving the rest to be cut down by the PC’s army. Or what was left of it, at any rate.
Remaining on the field for the PCs after the battle were a mere 2 platoons of kobolds, 2 platoons of light infantry... and 1 platoon of goblin wolf riders who got dominated mid-fight. There were 6 totally destroyed platoons and 5 that routed after taking losses. There were also 5 entire untouched units that routed without even taking losses, who'd failed the army-wide morale check after enough friendly units were destroyed (mostly these were low-morale kobolds). Saurkan was able to ride out and round most of those kobolds up after the battle, but it was something of a Pyrrhic victory. Heath’s elf mage henchman survived, but his loyalty roll afterwards went none too well and he quit. Cartamo had a valuable henchman of his own, a custom bard-type partial caster class, go to 1 hp but avoid being dropped by the skin of his teeth.
Final payout: ~28,000gp from sacking the bugbear village, plus a number of bugbear captives to be turned into kobold slaves/food. It was a solid haul, even with the army taking a chunk of it.
Saurkan was happy about the win and the loot, but fuming about how many valuable brigands got killed and crippled by Cartamo just flinging them into the fray. (While the brigands are criminals, they can at least march around the settled domains nearby in broad daylight without bringing hate from all sides. And beastmen have a major drawbacks with their "irregular" troop type: it means they MUST pursue enemy units that withdraw, so it’s harder to keep a cohesive battle line, and they can’t use the useful Defend or Ready actions.)
How long does it take to set up and play out a fight as a wargame like that? Seems like it would be a huge time sink of prep.
That's my only reservation really. if there was an online system like how DND has which lets you set everything up and roll it with button presses I'd be down.
I was able to set up all tokens and have a mass combat set up in about 45 minutes in roll20, but I saw in another thread something about a Foundry or Steam setup that made it really fast. There's also this which looks interesting if/when it is ever finished: https://youtu.be/4OgkyCpCIvc?feature=shared
Depends on the size of the armies, how high morale they are, how many heroes and spells are in play, and how well people know the rules. An hour or two is pretty typical, but there was a high-magic mass combat tournament I read the after-action from where two players with really carefully tuned armies were at it for -7 hours- because they'd slapped so many high-level magical debuffs on each other but had armies that were designed not to fail morale. Usually what happens is way before that, one side will hit a breaking point due to losses or their general dying and start seeing some of its units flee, which makes further morale rolls harder so more units will fail theirs, and then you get this cascading morale failure where most of the army bails from the field, causing the situation to be even more hopeless so that more units flee, and so on. (Rather like what often happened historically.) Then there's a pursuit phase, but usually at least some units survive to escape and reform rather than a whole army being wiped out in a single battle.
A battle should be over in 15 mintues tops'with the Quick Start rules that came with Domains at War. Youre wasting everyone's time.
I've never seen 15 minutes with Domains at War: Battles like OP was using. With the rules in Domains at War: Campaigns or the new mass combat rules that are default in ACKS II, then sure 15 minutes should be the norm.
The Quick Start, the one with no minatures or hexes and where you just use Battle Rating and rolls for everything.
Yeah that's the Domains at War: Campaigns rules. Those work well for a more abstracted resolution, but if you want to increase the granularity so that player actions have more input into the outcome of the battle, you'd want to use the Battles system instead, or the middle-ground ones in ACKS II or Axioms 4. It's all about what level of detail you're after. I'd never use it for a minor skirmish where the outcome is obvious or for NPC vs NPC fights, for instance.
>He neglected to actually do any recon beforehand.
>Unfortunately... rather than doing recon he focused on staying out of sight.
Did the players ever spot the pattern here?
>>The challenger Kiff Doomseeker was also healed, which was VERY unfortunate as that last arrow had severed his manhood. (Living the ACKS meme of genital loss.)
fuggg
keep going op
I am running ACKS 1e soon, I've run a lot of games for many years but this is my first OSR style game. Any advice? Also, please let me know what your recommended FoundryVTT modules are, if you have any!
My usual advice for OSR is about just setting up a sandbox for the PCs to go nuts in, and letting the dice fall where they may.
ACKS-specific advice:
- if using book treasure recommendations and it feels like your players are getting quite a bit of gold, don't get bothered. ACKS has a bunch of ways PCs will be spending that gold: monthly upkeep (if they want to be considered and treated as a character of that level socially), troop wages (damn but these do add up quickly), building castles or navies, researching spells or crafting magic items, and so on. Not to mention paying for the more powerful sort of healing to remove lasting injuries or try to bring back dead comrades (though those come with lasting tampering effects).
- the last chapter in the core book gives really good advice for setting up a setting that a lot of new-to-ACKS DMs don't bother reading. If this advice is used it makes the transition from the adventurer to conqueror phase much easier. (The author expanded on it further in his GM advice book Arbiter of Worlds, and apparently it's being included in the ACKS II judge book.) That was something my own group had some trouble with, our GM had built a just, peaceful, and powerful empire ruling over the setting with just and capable rulers leading it, and most of our group couldn't really conceive of the idea of trying to take over from that bunch because they seemed to be doing a great job. Whereas if the rulers are incompetent, dickbags, or otherwise piss the players off, they're happy to raise an army to start sacking cities.
Any advice for dungeon building?
Not really what you asked, but I just use modules for pretty much all my dungeons. There's lots of solid ones out there, and I don't mean megadungeons where it becomes the entire campaign, but small sub-100 room ones that are easily dropped into a game. Over the years I've found prep time is more fruitful to build out the region as a whole with its locations and NPCs and how they are linked, along with small lair locations I can drop in anywhere. It's harder to find worthwhile resources that do that, compared to dungeons.
Find a map you like, populate with a die, it's easy
There's going to be a big Foundry update in the next year for ACKS
Now THIS is how you shill a system.
No, it's still pretty awful shilling. Better than the earlier "YOU MUST BUY THIS GAME" bullshit, but this is still coming off as extremely tryhard, with plenty of little things only someone trying to sell the system would say.
It's actually kind of gross, like uncanny valley corpse gross, because he's really trying to act like a real person, but the more he writes, the less he's able to hide his agenda and motivation for writing all this.
It's not to tell a story. It's to showcase some really awful and dumb mechanics in what he thinks is a positive light and to try and pretend people would gladly sit through literal shit calculations or would think a castration mechanic was anything but the most juvenile shit.
It's bad shilling, and ordinarily for other things I'd try to give points for effort, but all the effort really just makes it so much worse.
I don't assume people know ACKS-specific mechanics, so yes I am mentioning them when I think it clarifies things. Saurkan walking straight into the kobold village doesn't make sense if I don't explain that the darklord splatbook class has a beastman domination power, etc.
Meanwhile, Cartamo chased down the routed bugbear whelps with plans to raise them up as jannisary-like soldiers speaking elvish (the extra language he knows, to keep better control of them).
What Cartamo told the welps after they were assembled in the village courtyard:
>When I am done speaking here, that will be last time that your goblin tongue will be spoken in your, or my, presence. When I am done speaking here, henceforth the elvish tongue will be the one you hear and become native speakers of. Your lives of eking out a miserable life on the edges of civilization, always one step forward, two steps back, is over. I will show you a different way. A more powerful way. You will be rigorously tested for martial and arcane talent, and those who pass through having proved themselves worthy will be the first in a new breed of a new order. That is all, I trust I have made myself clear.
What the translator told them:
>him high mucky muck. Him words more than all other words. Him say you talk like knife ears now. Him make you mighty warrior like him, and witch doctor.
Saurkan's army had taken a severe hit to their numbers, but he now had a good site to base them out of, and he'd made some good money to fund further plans, paid his troops, and removed a potential source of trouble. After the battle, the party did some rumor-mongering to find leads to a new target, and learned about a "lost valley" about 3 hexes away from the bugbear village (their new base) which turned out to be a whole 6-mile jungle hex surrounded by stone walls hundreds of feet high. This excellent module: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/282762/The-Lost-Valley-of-Kishar
Saurkan’s player had to take a break to handle some real-world stuff, so the rest of the party continued on while he returned to the bugbear village with his forces.
The party poked around the valley a bit, more like bumbled around it really. They killed some stuff and got a bit of loot but didn't really bring their A-game and missed out on a lot of the treasure present. Let me give you an example.
Actually first, an aside: my very first exposure to RPGs, back in the OLD DAYS of dial-up internet pre-Y2K, was this after-action story--and from this story alone I was hooked on D&D, though it would be another decade before I’d be able to join a campaign:
>"So we've just killed the green dragon, and along with its hoard we find three dragon eggs. My eyes got big, we hadn't expected to hear anything like that, and I started thinking about just how many thousands of gold these were worth, or we could hatch them instead and train them as war mounts... and then all of a sudden, our party's paladin shouts out:
>'I SMASH THE EGGS!'
>And that was that."
Fast forward over 2 decades...
The party was excited about the amazing domain possibilities for a whole jungle hex with a 300' high stone wall protecting it. But it's a pretty dangerous place--one of their first encounters was with a tyrannosaurus rex. (Slain with loss of only one henchmen missing an arm and one brain-addled.)
Their initial method of scaling the wall was by burning a ton of spells. Further scouting revealed a way through: a cavern through the wall, in which resided that t-rex’s mate, guarding an egg resting in a pool—a big egg worth thousands of gp. Full of an unusual confidence, the party decided to just buff up big and walk right up to beat it to death, though one PC was absent. The t-rex waited by her egg at the back of the cavern, growling a warning until the party pressed forward to within 30’. The first blows were from the party, dealing some major damage. And then it was the t-rex’s turn. Hit, crit, dropped, cleave. Hit, dropped, cleave. Hit, dropped… no targets in range. The party managed to get their people out before the next round began. Cartamo had both his legs ending in bloody stumps at the knees, Paulie the cleric PC was heavily scarred, one henchman blinded.
So the next session the PCs licked their wounds and decided this time they’d do a proper plan, attack from range, set up some obstacles, and in general not be completely retarded the way they’d been the session prior. But first they decided to make use of a spell that had been formerly much-derided within our group: Sticks to Snakes. That let them send in 9 snakes ahead of them, 3 of them poisonous spitting cobras.
The snakes advanced and began attacking the t-rex. Rather than just cleave through them, the t-rex rolled a 1 on its second attack. And then when the snakes attacked the next round, two cobras hit, and the t-rex rolled another nat 1. Poor mama t-rex: cobras have the poison that kills you dead, without even any turns of waiting. The party’s plan had worked out far better than they’d hoped to expect.
The party threw some light into the cave, and saw the t-rex. “Is it dead?” they asked. “It’s on its back kicking its legs, if you have the Naturalism proficiency or the like you can roll to make an in-character assessment.”
And then Heath’s player exclaims: “It’s still moving? I cast Fireball!”
The fireball flew from his hands and detonated upon the t-rex, with a big damage roll blasting away at its corpse—and also frying the egg, adjacent to its body.
As a cloud of vapor floated over what was once the only loot in the cavern, the rest of the party laid into Heath for having blown up all their treasure--what would have been enough for at least one to level from. Of course, it was only after both tyrannosaurs were dead that I pointed out to Heath’s player that he had Charm Animal on his list and could have charmed each of the t-rexes without so much as a save on their part. The perils of not knowing your spell list… (something that Heath’s player has constantly chided the cleric’s player about).
It was a nostalgic feeling that 2 decades later, completely without prompting, my own players recreated nearly the same tale that drew me into D&D in the first place.
Paulie the PC cleric was high enough level to fix Cartamo’s leg-stumps, but in ACKS that kind of powerful healing magic almost always comes with a drawback: you have to roll on the table for Tampering with Mortality, and gain an effect that is at best an oddity and at worse a curse.
Cartamo got himself a familiar, the kind you’d never want to have: a complete and total asshole of a minor demon who called itself Kallikantzaros. While unable to directly harm Cartamo, it would gleefully pull all kinds of nasty "pranks" to make his life and the party’s life as miserable as possible. Whether it was setting loose the party’s horses in the night, sabotaging weapons, or collapsing the cleric’s tent to disrupt his sleep and stop him regaining spells, the little shit quickly became utterly despised by the party, who tried all sorts of ways to rid themselves of him, but nothing they did seemed to work for long.
Well, they DID get rid of the little shit in the end, but that involved losing Cartamo. Before I tell you how that happened, let me tell you a bit more about Cartamo, because he was a FORCE in our campaign.
Cartamo started as a level 1 fighter henchman, hired by Lareth the elven necromancer-knight (a badass PC who lasted a long time, who at one point turned his own severed hand into a crawling claw familiar). Then a lightning bolt fried Lareth down to stone-cold-dead, and Cartamo pulled his body to safety (to secure the magic items Lareth had carried).
Cartamo next signed on with Lareth's replacement PC, Kalak the chaotic Zaharan sorcerer. When some of the party ate beholder-kin flesh flesh in a dungeon using a strange cookbook, Kalak went insane. Cartamo on the other hand gained arcane power (minor spellcasting power, 1/4 of a full caster’s ability), and smothered his raving boss to death, assuming the mantle of PC himself.
Cartamo was as mean a PC as he'd been a henchman, putting more than one of his own henchmen out of their misery personally, and carving a path as the single nastiest member of a whole party of brutal cutthroats. Rather reckless and impulsive, he was ever at the front of the battle line, and similarly was willing to risk potion miscibility rolls to double up on drinking ritual stat-boosting potions when the opportunity came. Upon finding an uncharged Rod of Lordly Might, he was almost unstoppable in melee. He also left a trail of ruined doors in his wake, using the rod's battering ram power constantly.
It was his impulsiveness which caused the party to lose him. They found magic items in a tomb in the valley; rather than wait to have a sage carefully identify or even to check with spells beyond detect magic and detect danger, Cartamo just up and popped a gleaming armored helmet on his head.
>private message: "It's a Helm of Alignment Changing, act accordingly."
Without explaining why, the next morning Cartamo quietly quit the party and slipped off, taking his three surviving henchmen with him. Heath was not amused when he realized that a huge chunk of the party’s magic items had just gone with them. Cartamo stopped at the bugbear village while Saurkan was out, ordered the beastmen into the village square for a formation, cast a couple buffs, and then just started killing as many as possible starting with the bugbear whelps he'd started training previously. Saurkan was not amused when he discovered the heaping pile of corpses that had been useful income-generating subjects.
After that Cartamo rode to the temple of the sun god Mithras to offer his service as a Mithran Knight, seeking atonement for his life of evil. More than any other PC or NPC in our campaign, Cartamo was a survivor, lasting from levels 1 to 7 in a campaign with a 70+ deep graveyard of PCs and henchmen. He left a huge mark on the campaign world and nothing ever managed to kill him despite being in the thick of the action the whole time.
>back in a bit to return to the main thread of the story, where the real shenanigans happen
Saurkon's player, coming back to the campaign after being present for some of the valley exploration, decided that it would be the perfect place to set up a domain for his kobold tribe. Between the 41 infantry, 290 kobold warriors, and the females and whelps it was 500+ individuals he commanded.
So he has a big migration of his kobold village and infantry, carrying all the tools and supplies on their backs since they had almost no pack animals or carts. Everything was going great until they run into a random encounter of 4 chimeras right before they arrived, and were attacked from the air. Saurkan's spell list had nothing to handle this; kobolds, being beastmen, are not disciplined enough to Ready weapons for an airborne threat. They've basically got nothing that can seriously stand up to this attack.
Saurkan wisely cuts his losses by ordering the dominated the thralls and whelps to stay there as a sacrificial distraction, takes his human infantry and berserker henchman with him, and orders Gleekan to bring the slower kobold warriors to meet up with him at the valley entrance.
Saurkan gets to the valley with a mere platoon and change of light infantry rather than a whole kobold village. Unfortunately, their food was with the baggage train. They turn back to see what can be scavenged, but find a bunch of giant carnivorous flies feasting on burned corpses. Saurkan orders an attack, and the troops kill most of the giant flies by weight of numbers, losing several men, with the infantry's morale roll at at the sight of the first man dead being VICTORY OR DEATH.
>The fallen men are left where they lie in the mud, Saurkan disregarding anyone too weak to survive.
>Actually he didn't realize anyone can try to heal someone to prompt a Mortal Wounds roll, he thought you needed a healer or cleric.
>He would lose 8 men before realizing his error.
>Despite this, his men never failed a morale or loyalty check during combat, it was crazy.
The men got enough human-edible food from the packs of the charred and mangled fallen kobolds for a week of rations, and Saurkan returned with them to the valley, leaving a lookout for the kobold warriors. (Little did he know that Gleekan had crit-failed his morale check and took his kobold warriors back to their village instead. He would keep trying to figure out just what had happened to his expected reinforcements, but still hasn't sent a scout over to their old settlement to check.)
Saurkan takes his 37 remaining infantry and heads through the valley to a small 100-person primitive village the party had found, and announces himself to meet with the leader: Jirell, Queen of Apes. She's a Tarzan-like woman from the module with a pair of winged ape guardians, who lives in a big skull-shaped tower. He's lucky during diplomacy and manages to charm her with his mystic aura, promising to help with the village's woes. Catching on that she seems to have fallen under his enthrallment, Saurkan carefully presses this further over the course of some days to seduce her (strategically, fade to black) and get her as a henchwoman.
So along with the 41, I mean 37, er 36, oops 33, now 31 man platoon whose numbers kept getting whittled down by the valley's dangers, he's got a pretty solid level 4 berserker, and now a new level 3 barbarian with really nice stats (and a couple magic items, a couple 5HD winged apes, and the village of primitive humans). He's de facto leader of that 100 person village now but they don't really make money like a typical domain (the winged apes feed and guard the village, they basically are a bunch of hippie bums who laze about as much as possible).
Now where the party had been bumbling about the valley, Saurkan instead was taking notes and paying close attention to clues. He starts poking around the valley's secrets more and checks into a tomb the party partially plundered.
MEANWHILE: Heath (the elf dual caster PC) lets me know he wants to go back to the valley for a solo session to murder Jirell to get her 4000gp of israeliteelry and the magic items that he'd seen with detect magic earlier, doing it on his own so he could keep all the loot for himself. Heath is not a nice elf.
A favorite concept of his is skinchanging into a bird, flying in, turning into a gorilla and beating a target to death in their sleep (he'd this off, sort of, earlier against a baron he'd been given a Quest spell to remove from power, though he nearly got iced by the baron's guards in the process).
So seeing what Saurkan has been up to while catching up to the party time-wise, I'm thinking Heath might be in for a hilarious surprise when he finds his old teammate shacked up in Jirell's quarters. But things don't quite end up that way...
In the tomb, the darklord finds not just some cursed coins (the party had left these behind during their looting because each is individually cursed and there's thousands of them, it would take ages with Remove Curse to fix it all), but a skull laying behind a short pillar with a nail in its head. When people get near, they hear a repeating whisper in their mind telling them to help it! On further inspection he sees a scrape on it and correctly surmises that the party knocked it off the pillar with a weapon.
>Saurkan: "Did those idiots really...?"
He decides nothing ventured, nothing gained, and "if I had a nail in my head I'd want someone to take it out". Out comes the nail. Now the skull can actually properly talk! It demands that he bring it to its body. Doesn't even ask, and is constantly giving him lip about being quicker about it.
All the same, he follows its directions and takes it to the swamp on the other end of the valley, obeying its demand to go immediately rather than heading back to the village to rest for the night, and finds a skeletal body on an altar. He sets the head on top, and...
>The eyes of the skull light with an eerie dark flame, and the now-completed skeleton rises from the stone. Your infantry platoon, who faced all manner of death and danger with unflinching resolve, cry out with a low moan of horror and flee.
>Even brave berserker Slav and his boar cannot stand the sight, and they too turn and run.
>The undead creature speaks. "You're still here? Good for you, I guess. Looks like this place has gone to the dogs while I've been away. But now Daddy's home, and he's brought his belt to straighten things out. Starting with my tower."
Congrats darklord, you've restored a lich who used to rule this valley but was sealed away hundreds of years ago, and is responsible for most of the strange crossbreeds within.
And the tower he's talking about is the one where your barbarian henchman has been ruling the village from.
Very luckily for Saurkan, he gets an "indifferent" result on the reaction roll. The darklord quickly volunteers some info about the village and tower, how its defenders are no real danger and that he has its leader bewitched.
>"What's this, you're trying to serve me or something? Fine, I'm a bit light on minions right now, I guess you'll do."
Saurkan being not completely retarded rolls with it, asking what comes first.
>"What's first is I'm going to go see what's left of my tower, and exterminate whatever vermin have moved in."
>"As for you, since you want a job so bad then sure, I have something for you to find. You mentioned a black cauldron earlier... that must be my Nightmirror. Bring it to me. I don't think the cost of failure needs explaining."
Saurkan agrees and then hauls ass along the partially-lit roads to get to the village first, arriving a mere 2 turns ahead of the lich who walked straight through the mire. With no time to spare he evacs his henchman, who brings the winged apes and the villagers, and the lot of them flee into the forest.
Saurkan is eventually able to round up most of his troops and Slav from where they'd fled to (some of them vanished forever into the swamp). He decided to bring the entire bunch back to the bugbear village, coming more or less full circle from where he'd left, but in the process acting like a wrecking ball to the region's status quo.
About a week later…
So as mentioned, Heath is a level 6 elven dual arcane-divine caster, a custom class the player designed with the class creation rules. He flies to the valley skinchanged as a giant hawk with a henchman navigating for him on his back. Heath has been in the party a LONG time. In a chaotic party, he's probably been the most quietly, but consistently, selfishly amoral and evil. And that's saying something when that party has members like Cartamo and Saurkan. Heath is not a nice elf.
So his plan is to cast skinchange fly in at night with his henchman holding a pebble that has silence 15' radius cast on it, go into the tower and change to a combat shape, murder Jirell, loot her, and leave with nobody the wiser.
Unfortunately... rather than doing recon he focused on staying out of sight. Had he scouted the place out again, he'd have seen the village was empty and that might have tipped him off. He flies in at night with his henchman and hawk familiar, none of them seeing nothing amiss (barely able to see enough to navigate, really, hawks have poor night vision). He might have paid more attention to how the winged ape nest in the tower was empty, maybe snuck into Jirell's hut inside the tower as a mouse or something first to check it out.
Instead, he turns into a gorilla, slides the leaf-curtain at the front of Jirell's hut aside... and sees a pair of glowing malevolent eyes turn to face him.
I gave him a +1 bonus to surprise since he was expecting creatures inside... Heath still rolls a 1 and fails. Fortunately, his hench (a level 3 d6 HD guy wearing chain, basically a mid-tier fighter) passes his save against magical fear.
What he should have done here is immediately run, but he has his henchman and familiar attack. But, despite the hench standing his ground and not being surprised, he doesn't have a magic weapon, so though he actually manages a hit against the high AC lich, he doesn't do damage. The hawk familiar does all of 3 damage to it, for its part.
The lich for his part can't cast his spells in the silence zone but is dealing 1d10 damage with a save vs Paralysis on every attack, and his attack throw as an 11HD creature against Heath's low-AC crew always is critting (we used the crit rules from Heroic Fantasy Handbook), so it's 2d10 damage per hit.
A round too late, down to 6/19 hp, Heath realizes the serious danger he's in, and starts trying to bail, turning himself into a housefly with his action. But before his familiar and henchman can flee, the familiar is hit and paralyzed... and then the cleave hits and paralyzes the henchman.
Heath flees the tower, turning into a hawk on a nearby perch, and hears the lich ranting at the paralyzed duo about their supreme idiocy of trying to ambush HIM--and it's not even been a month since he's been back!
Heath realizes the silence pebble has been crushed. He could bail--if his familiar dies it's a 6+ that he needs to roll to not die from backlash, not horrible odds. But Heath decides to take a risky move to save it instead. He flies back to the tower, turns back to an elf, and tries to apologize to the lich about it being a simple case of mistaken target. Maybe if he'd offered a bribe with the apology, things might have been okay. But the reaction roll was pretty low and the lich immediately turned, said, "There you are, you little shit!", and started casting.
Heath beat him to the punch with another Silence spell to disrupt his casting, and then won initiative again to cast Protection from Evil. The lich, failing to identify it, struck at him but found himself recoiling from contact.
That's a problem easily solved, and the lich was no idiot: he walked over to the paralyzed henchman and ripped the sword from his hand. Meanwhile, the elf pulled out something that he'd saved for well over a year in-and out of-game: a ritual scroll of Resurrection. He'd quietly kept this scroll, that turned up in a random encounter of all things, and not even used it when long-running PCs have died. (Heath is not a nice elf.) I'd forgotten he had it.
Against an undead creature, casting Resurrection destroys them instantly, no save allowed. All he has to do is win initiative and succeed on his attack roll to completely pull his ass out of the fire and claim total victory.
And Heath wins initiative! He begins casting as the lich walks over with the sword... he only has to roll an 8+ to hit and he'll make it!
He rolls... and... it's a 2.
The last thing he sees is a sword crashing down on him.
>And that's where this thread's story ends.
>Thanks for reading
fucking a, glad i stayed up to catch the end of this. thanks for sharing op
Glad you liked it. It was one of the crazier instances of various PCs' actions all coming together into one of the most unexpected outcomes I've ever DMed for. It made me very happy to be running a no-punches-pulled sandbox where things like this can organically happen.
>Aftermath: Heath's player took it well and rerolled, as did Cartamo's player when he retired. The party has continued on with adventuring in the region, and has brought an army of a disaffected noble plus a bunch of orcs to try to sack the town of the local countess who they felt slighted by.
>I could tell some more about that party but this was my favorite portion of their most recent escapades.
>If people want more ACKS storytime let me know and I can post a thread about our all-thief party's hijinks where we focused on heists and crimes and almost never set foot in a dungeon.
yeah post it op
I'm tapped out for writing for the night, I'll post it in another thread unless this one lasts for longer than I'd expect.
In the meanwhile this can be an OSR campaign stories general thread, or ACKS general thread, since there's already an /osrg/.
>If people want more ACKS storytime let me know and I can post a thread about our all-thief party's hijinks where we focused on heists and crimes and almost never set foot in a dungeon
I'd be interested to read that.
That was a wild ride anon, I enjoyed it a lot.
Can't wait to run ACKS II when it's out.
>If people want more ACKS storytime let me know
Absolutely, I loved this.
OP here, glad you guys enjoyed it. I'll get the other campaign writeup drafted up but looking at the amount of my campaign notes it may take a bit, I'm thinking I'll be able to post it next weekend.
That was a fun story OP. Just how far did all of that deviate from what you'd planned for your campaign's plot?
I don't think you understand how this stuff works, anon. Old-school games like that are not supposed to have "plot" in the traditional sense, as a linear narrative that unfolds. Plot is what your players do and what you decide to simulate in the background to better accommodate the sandbox gameplay. That's why Keep on the Borderlands has dimensions and layouts for the guard barracks, kitchens etc.: the players may never visit them, but if they decide to steal from the Keep, or, even better, to bring all the goblinoids from the Caverns of Chaos to storm it, that information might come in handy.
If you did things like that how would you even make sure you ended up with an epic campaign arc?
Module/region/dungeon structure. It's pretty much lost art at this point as nobody can do it properly (besides some madmen like the guy who did Barrowmaze and other ultraoldfags who are fast approaching Alzheimer age), but unlike "modern" narrative approach to storytelling old-school shit was allowing for better emergent storytelling just by virtue of good worldbuilding which facilitates interactions between in-setting entities and PCs. Like when you make a hex map with 2 goblin tribes who hate each other, PCs entering the scene will upset the status quo and allow them to meaningfully affect the region (even if it's just by slaughtering both of the tribes or stealing their shit). The lich situation is an absolute classic thing to do, I remember one of the cool modules having a 20 HD fuck off demon in a summoning circle that could be safely ignored because he's not going anywhere while the runes are intact, but your PCs might have a different idea, especially when promised a hunderd k gold pieces or immortality.
Everyone who malds about modern GMing is just a 5edrone mad about being caught by the filter. Never once in 15 years of GMing have I devised some "plot" my players are supposed to "go through" or whatever. I don't even understand how this is done, given the nature of RPGs and frankly I'm not convinced it even exists. You play Blades in the Dark or Dogs in the Vineyard and you get even less of a "plot" than you do in ACKS, despite it being a "story game".
>plot
>ACKS
>Cartamo got himself a familiar, the kind you’d never want to have: a complete and total asshole of a minor demon who called itself Kallikantzaros. While unable to directly harm Cartamo, it would gleefully pull all kinds of nasty "pranks" to make his life and the party’s life as miserable as possible. Whether it was setting loose the party’s horses in the night, sabotaging weapons, or collapsing the cleric’s tent to disrupt his sleep and stop him regaining spells, the little shit quickly became utterly despised by the party, who tried all sorts of ways to rid themselves of him, but nothing they did seemed to work for long.
What did you use for the stats for it?
I used the stats for a pixie, but no flight and he detected as evil. He could disappear whenever he wanted to, and usually stayed invisible watching for opportunities to mess with them. He'd show up smoking a cigar after one of his "pranks" was discovered to rub it in and gloat, and remind the party that he hated each and every one of them.
When the cleric "killed" the little bastard, Cartamo had to make a save, and he took a pile of damage when he failed it. Then his "familiar" was back within a matter of days and focused his tricks on the cleric for a while, lighting his stuff on fire and collapsing his tent in the night so he couldn't get a good night's sleep, etc.
Do you have a good list of modules that work well with an ACKs game? Like easy to slot into a sandbox?
Anything by Olle Skogren will work great and he actually has several that include full stats for mass combat: Sudden Siege for the Cup of Wonder, Antediluvian Slaughterpit, Tidal Terror Tower, are those ones. The Temple of Hypnos is probably what he's best known for, but he also did the nice mini-modules Knightly Woes, and Blade of the Barbarian which was mentioned above.
Autarch has a series of 6 modules, AX1-AX6, most of them are solid modules and easy enough to slot into a sandbox, but in particular Capital of the Borderlands is great to use as a fully built-out regional capital city with lots going on in it. Secrets of the Nethercity was also fun for us, and we got some good use out of the fort part of Secret Stone of Sakkara. I know a lot of people who swear by their dungeon Dwimmermount, though it's not for me.
Chaotic Henchmen Productions has several great ones. Many Gates of the Gann being by far their best and one of the top modules I've ever run. The Fane of Poisoned Prophecies, and The Withered Crag, also great.
Gabor Lux has a lot of mini-modules in his Echoes from Fomalhaut magazine that are easy to slot into sandboxes, all high quality stuff. Lost Valley of Kishar, mentioned here, is a highlight of his company's.
Caverns of Thracia was a lot of fun in ACKS, easy to pop into a region. Barrowmaze was decent and easy to incorporate. Fate of the Ruthless Wizard was pretty fun with minimal adjustments to a few things. Demonspore/The Secret of the Shrooms was easy to add to my region but the players never bit.
Quite a few classic modules like G1-G3 are easy to add.
Basically if it's 100 rooms or fewer, and not super-gonzo, it will probably not be terribly difficult to slot into a sandbox with a few adjustments here and there. More than that and it starts getting into campaign-defining and region-defining megadungeon status, which I personally find detrimental to good sandbox campaigns.
couldn't get enough seething, coping, and malding about acks on reddit huh?
You know if you want a My Little Pony PbtA thread, you can just start one. The rest of the broken transsexuals can join you there.
Anon, that would be a global rule violation.
Go back to Ganker holy shit
tbh if shill threads mean getting fun campaign story, then bring on the shills
Shadowrun Storytime was probably the single most successful shill attempt on /tg/, with just 20 threads it single-handedly resurrected shadowrun discussion and made shadowrun general a nigh-permanent thread. nobody complains because it was an awesome story
>Shadowrun Storytime was probably the single most successful shill attempt on /tg/, with just 20 threads it single-handedly resurrected shadowrun discussion and made shadowrun general a nigh-permanent thread. nobody complains because it was an awesome story
Where I can find it?
https://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?searchall=shadowrun+storytime
You might also enjoy the Dark Heresy campaign story of The All Guardsman Party, also on sup/tg/ but consolidated for easy reading here: http://www.theallguardsmenparty.com/index.html
Thanks kind anon
np. fair warning, both of those are LONG campaign writeups, like novel-length+ in entirety
NTA, but I remember when I first read this and couldn't believe it was a real game until several years later I've talked to a guy who knows TwoDee and one of the players personally (he actually did his own storytime, I think it was 40k rogue trader about how players made the primarchs disappear through sheer warp fuckery, god knows how to search for it nowadays, it's most likely on suptg as well), he confirmed that besides some creative liberties for better readability it was all true.
Actually searched discord messages and found the thing http://img.4plebs.org/boards/tg/image/1388/81/1388818559611.jpg
That was a great story, thanks for posting the link.
oh man you are in for a TREAT
Storytiem thread are one of the best things on /tg/ you seething homosexual.
You offboarders have no idea what an actual /tg/ storythread is.
>offboarder
you outed yourself, go seethe on reddit
This anon is correct. I started skimming about the third post only to see it just keeps going on and on. Obvious a dedicated shill given ACKS history and its community. The Kickstarter is over friends.
Holy ESL
nice english Hans
Still over a week to go, Zak.
Ahhhh acks. Fond memories of us walking into the very first room of the dungeon, it was covered with a thick layer of guano. One player was a farmer IRL and knew guano was a valuable fertilizer, so he got the room dimensions from the DM, thickness of the guano layer and used it to calculate the gross volume of the guano. We bought a cart, made several trips to town to sell the guano and made out like bandits because there was a conversion ratio of dollars to ingame GP, so we could accurately determine the value of the guano in-game. We made thousands of GP and leveled to lvl 4 from 1 in maybe two sessions.
Good times
I've run a dozen fights in the system, the resolution itself is the same speed as normal combat the timesink is looking up rules when there are unexpected interactions because they're organized more like a legal text than a rulebook. Unit stats for normal D&D units are ready made, adapting other monsters as units takes prep.
That was a fun story OP, but mass combat doesn't make sense in D&D when wizards can just cast fireball
Just depends on how many wizards are in the setting.
Fireball and Lightning Bolt in proto-D&D were copied, mechanically, from artillery in previous wargames.
It only "doesn't make sense" if the world in question's setting and mechanics dictate that this is the case. The actual creators of the genre didn't think that mass combat and fireball-style artillery (not to mention fireball itself in the fantasy supplement to Chainmail) were mutually-exclusive.
See also: 19th Century combat, in general. Mass combat didn't go away until the machine gun/massed indirect fire.
I see.
That seems plausible enough I suppose.
>Fireball and Lightning Bolt in proto-D&D were copied, mechanically, from artillery in previous wargames.
That makes a lot of sense. Explains why mages-as-magical-artillery became such a thing instead of the traditional subtle enchantments and potions and whatnot.
ACKS II specifically addresses this point to make mages about as useful as Napoleonic artillery, rather than the "I delete that map grid" OP stuff you get in regular D&D. Doesn't really hurt them when doing dungeons though, because honeslty how often do you need a 20ft vs a 10ft radius fireball when in a dungeon?
ACKS fireball has radius 10' instead of 20' to make mass combat viable. A fireball takes out max 1/8th of a 120 man company and hiring a 5th level mage is 400gp/month compared to about 1,000gp/month for a company of archers who can deal the same damage every round instead of once per day (and it's easier to find/train bowmen than 5th level mages).
OP here - me and my players did meet up again but I don't have another session report. We ended up complaining about immigrants for four and a half hours instead
We complain about immigrants WHILE playing the game for four hours, you complain about not having ENOUGH immigrants on the internet while not playing, which is why you have enough time and energy to make homosexualy comments on threads about games you have no interest in.
Perhaps you might enjoy your life a bit more if you thought about and talked about things you *do* like. Try it!
creating a fantasy world that makes a mockery of everyone that doesn't support your myopic beliefs is a great skill to have as a GM - Keep it up!
There's a spell called bath of the goddess that will turn you into a real woman, so you can pretend to have a life without having to dilate.
Something for everyone, really.
Well, trannies live in one so why not.
are the fascists in the room with you right now?
Why use this over any of the other 10000 retroclones out there?
It's its own thing so i wouldn't call acks a retroclone just as much i wouldn't call Beyond the Wall a retroclone. Follows the same design intent as AD&D, has something reminiscent of thAC0 but less convoluted and more unified mechanics.
That said, after this blatant shilling we're having with acks 2e release, i got soured enough to suggest you should definitely playing something else.
Yo, OP, nice stories. Wanted to ask a mechanical questions: how do you handle retreating/withdrawal when character is "stuck" to an opponent in melee? I remember ACKS having a rule of slowly backpedaling while fighting (which is inefficient and gets you killed) but always felt like B/X-like combat is way too "sticky" and once you're in you either win or die (or rather roll on the table when getting healed which is often "you die" as well).
In ACKS it's basically that they have to declare it at the start of the round. Either a full retreat at running speed, or a half-speed retreat where you can still attack if they come at you.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking about. If they stay put they can just charge you next round.
Unless you run in such a way that they don't have a straight line approach.
Fucking love ACKS. I even made some of my own custom classes for it.
What setting were you using for all of this, OP? Your own or a published one?
>party commissioned to protect a dwarf vault from an extremely powerful dragon and his army
>first objective is to take out a fortress erected by the forward elements of the dragon's army
>we scout it out, determine there's hundreds of gnolls and bugbears inside it
>wait until the cover of darkness
>most of the force is sleeping inside a large barracks
>cast "transmute stone to mud" on its foundation and cause the building to collapse on all of its sleeping inhabitants, killing them all instantly
Later
>the dragon is leading his assault on the dwarf vault
>we've had several real time weeks to plan the defense, using availability statistics for a dwarf vault of this size to accurately determine who can be mustered in defense
>his tunneling creatures breach the main vaultway and they come out
>dragon pokes his head out as several dozen armored trolls penetrate the room
>they all get immediately assraped immolated by several hundred dwarven furnacewives placed in the gallery all casting weaker fireball
>large quantities of the the furnacewives accidentally blow themselves up with casting mishaps
>another half gets disintegrated with the dragon's breath
>Dragon gets maimed to death by our best fighters throwing multidarts at him (each one dealing the fighter damage bonus)
The battle was nuts, some other stuff happened but I can't remember it all.
quantities of the the furnacewives accidentally blow themselves up with casting mishaps
sounds fun but what is a furnacewife, is it like a psyker in 40k?
Type of dwarven spellcaster. Caps out at 10th level & can use up to 5th level invocations (special dwarven magic). Tankier & better armoured than a mage too. You can find the rules for them in "By This Axe".
don't forget to shill the Autarch branded decoder ring needed to read the book. Or the Autarch branded pencils and paper to be able to write down the StatACKstics (tm) of the furnace wives
>write down the StatACKstics (tm)
"41%"
I know it's a shill thread but I'm enjoying reading peoples' stories, wish we could have threads like this that weren't intended to sell a product.
Make some then
personally OP seemed too autistic to be a shill