Thok rejoined the party as we got started. It proved to be handy to have our tank later.
It turns out there was a magic trap in the two statues flanking the door to the grand hall of the hunting lodge. It hit Censura and me, doing a little bit of damage and freezing us in place. We managed to break out of the freezing effect pretty quickly. After some experimentation, and little extra damage, we found that it was a constant magical effect on the suits of armor. Of course, these were suits of full plate, the best heavy armor in the game. I used dispel magic to clear the trap from one of the suits and upgraded when we were able to get a long rest in.
As I messed around with the suits of armor, a voice called to us from a nearby guard room bordering the foyer. It was an older woman in fancy, but worn out clothing. She said her name was Madam Duffington and she was the owner of the lodge, recently taken over by the Cult. We agreed to help her clear the cultists out of her house (it was something we were planning on doing anyway). She led us through a parlor, warning us about yet another suit of armor, and into a linen room, where we took a short rest.
While there, she pointed out banners the cultists had brought in: purple and striped with the colors of chromatic dragons. She found them to be ugly. There was some banter between Madam Duffington and Thok over a tapestry depicting a boar hunt in the parlor. After that, she mentioned her husband being taken out to their kennels and being fed to a four-armed troll. We ended up meeting the thing later. Finally, she mentioned some "lizard-dog men" sleeping in a nearby room. This of course meant kobolds. I wanted to kill them all.
I used silence to let us sneak into their room as they slept, giving us a surprise round. While Thok, Sandi, and I have multi-attack options that let us mow down some kobolds quickly, Censura only had spells, which silence shut down. Sandi did manage to use alchemist fire to light up a kobold. He survived the longest. I dropped silence after the surprise round, and Censura cleared most of the little buggers with burning hands. After a couple of rounds of fighting, only the one on fire was left alive, which Sandi took out with a critical hit. This impaled it, through the shuttered window, pinning it to a kennel just outside. It started a small fire in the kennel, which attracted Trepsin, the four-armed troll, who brought a couple of his ambush drakes out to play, too.
For those unfamiliar with D&D, their trolls are green-skinned giants with long noses that have a habit of regenerating unless hit with fire or acid. They also tend to have bricks for hit points and hit like trucks. Veteran players fear them.
Thok, being courageous and willing to tank, stepped out and stood between the broken window and the troll, taunting it, and using the Dodge action. This action imposed disadvantage on every attack against a character for a turn. It did help keep Thok alive. Well, the RNG, being the fickle god that it is, had other ideas. While the troll missed with most of it attacks, it still managed to hit with a bite, one of its four claws, and criticaled with the fourth claw attack when the DM rolled two 20s. The odds of this happening are roughly 1 in 400. This allowed the troll to rend for additional damage. Fortunately, the damage was minimal (the DM actually rolled 1, 2, 3, 4 on four dice--insert Spaceballs quote here).
Censura, with a little guiding from us, used fireball, greatly injuring the troll and killing one of the drakes with it, and bloodying the other. I used a higher level spell slot on a cure wounds spell to keep Thok in the fight. Then Thok and Sandi hit the troll with everything they had and managed to drop it in the same turn it had taken the fire damage, canceling its regeneration, and dropping it.
Trolls used to regenerate everything BUT damage from fire and acid. This edition reworked regeneration so that it doesn't function on a turn in which the creature with it has taken the damage. This makes them significantly easier to kill.
We killed the remaining drake, then put out the small fire we had started, making sure Madam Duffington's house didn't go down along with the cultists and their minions. We then explored the kennel, finding four more guard drakes in a cage, and the troll's loot, including a cloak made of a winter wolf with a mithril clasp in the shape of a claw. Censura was enamored with the cloak, and opted to cash-in his share of it to take it as a personal trophy of the troll battle.
We'll continue our exploration of the lodge next time.
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