Recap: Silly Romperoo, Season 1 Episode 5

The players go into a very dark,
very large room, fighting archers and
orc warriors that can see in the dark.

A fight that nearly lasted the entire session.

Cast

There are a lot more characters signed up, but these are the ones that were involved for the large part.

Provided portrait.

Alisa 

A Paladin of a death god. Fights with a flail and shield, and has decent armor.

Provided Portrait

Isaac

An unusually youthful student of the Kabbalah, a fact hidden by his head of grey hair, Isaac Cordovero was amongst the most gifted students of the lot, displaying an affinity for the Sephirah Chokhmah to the extent of displaying talent even in the most hidden arts. However, his relative inexperience with life - not even forty years of age - had him passed over for the position of Rebbe at the Yeshiva and told to experience life to its fullest in order to gain a complete understanding of the nature of Ein Sof, as required of the greatest thaumatologists.
Brashly confident in his powers, Isaac chose to join an adventuring party, hoping to bring fame and glory to the Yeshiva and, above all, to the thaumatologist's art. He crawls dungeons, the loot secondary to his greater aspirations.

Also no source

Arron

Provided character
portrait

A two handed swordsman. He is quick but frail, and eager to kill.

Lilli

Covered in grey rags, only her face is left uncovered. The shadows accentuate her colorful eyes and if you look closely, maybe you can make out her brown hair which she keeps short.

Raised in a village near town she was a woman always prone to fight, preferring fist and her legs to words and diplomacy, but this was a little too unorthodox for her old-fashioned village. When she grew up, she was challenged to unarmed combat by the local captain of the guard and she lost. She had to leave home and her old life with it, but she is a strong-willed person. In her travels she found masters of combat, philosophy, and all other arts. She learned that being strong doesn't mean getting into fights with everyone. She struggled internally against the urge to give into raw anger, but years of training let her take control of it and she has since become an even more impressive martial artist. However, she still has a long road to the title of master. She will become the strongest and she will spread her knowledge and style in hopes of helping those who find themselves in the same atmosphere she endured growing up.

Summary

The party retreats from the awful smelling room for just a bit to work on lighting, Isaac gives a charm to Lilli to illuminate the area around her better. Now both Alisa and Lilli are enchanted so, and the party runs in. From the darkness arrows start firing but the party is able to dodge them successfully. Arron decides to cross over cisterns via jumping and Lilli and Alisa follow suit, leaving the slightly less athletic Isaac to his own whims. Arron getting ahead of the group is unable to deal with the enemy's excellent armor or the extreme darkness penalties, but is still able to defend himself effectively. Lilli on the other hand, gets surrounded and tries pushing the opponents into the rotting cisterns. The enemy proves to be too strong, and she gets a grievous axe wound instead, sending her far into the negatives. Alisa catches up and Arron disengages his fruitless combat with the enemy to go protect his ally. [I allow him to spend a point on Sacrificial Parry in the middle of combat to help.] Lilli with her extremely high HT is able to easily persevere despite the desperate struggle. Soon the three working together are able to neutralize two of the three enemies. Meanwhile, two powerful orcs attack Isaac, who is stranded by himself across two pulls of sludge, he is able to fire off a stun charm and get it to work in the dark, but unluckily for him the dumb orc got a really good IQ roll to snap out of mental stun. but helpfully for his next trick, it put both orcs within range of the same terrify charm with an area effect. Meanwhile, Arron borrows the light enchanted staff from Lilli and brings it to Isaac to help him see better. It helps so much his terror charm is a success. This absolutely devastates the enemy. [Wondering if I did the effect too strongly, or if their low will and bad rolls just made it really bad.] One immediately went into a coma from the fright, and the other became physically ill. Suddenly, the orcs deeper in the darkness began to scream horrifically, and the doors start locking around the room. All the orcs break away from the fight, hoping desperately they can get out through one of the doors. The party is bracing for whatever is coming next.

After Action Report

• What went well
• Players said they did enjoy the more difficult combat and the enemies "felt legitimately threatening."
• Not seeing in the darkness helped with the immersion making the oozes more frightening, and the archers in the darkness more oppressive
• I think using two "aura" circles to simulate the relative darkness penalties, though obvious in hindsight was a bit of a master stroke.
• What could have gone better
• We floundered a bit on a question of whether magic is resisted by will or IQ. It seems that will is always the more appropriate choice, though in a few rare very physical cases, HT might be called for instead.
• The players say that splitting up the party was probably a bad decision. To me, more than that, it was rushing ahead of the party that was problematic. At the start of combat, 4 PCs were split among three fronts. I mean, everyone can be an armchair tactician in hindsight and point out flaws when the players aren't operating with perfect information. An assumption was made that knocking out the archers as quick as possible was the best decision. What they didn't know is that the archers also had backup weapons and shields and that there were more warriors in the opposite direction they didn't even bother to look. I mean thinking on it, there is not much that could be done with the tools available to the party. The obvious choice is to reconnoiter instead of just barging into a huge room, but no one is equipped to dig around a pitch dark room with trained militants that can see in the dark. In the end, the fight was about as challenging as I hoped it to be anyway.