Session 16: Adventures with KoboldsNOTE: Much fighting ahead! SynopsisThe party makes another foray into the kobold mines. It's a fair disaster (as far as PC adventures go) with two party deaths. They capture a kobold who claims the merchant isn't even there. Ouch! Back to the Mines! (I should start every write-up for a while with this heading, I think)Buoyed by fresh adventurers willing to march into harm's way, the party heads back to the kobolds' section of the Mines. They find one of the entrances they'd explored before, and the new mage shows off her skillz by bashing in the covering over the entrance. With Magic! It makes a lot of noise...but no excitement ensues. Oddly ominous. There appears to be no one in the guard area at the top of the shaft. The party lowers a rope into the darkness - and Tilden demonstrates their grace while climbing...by slipping and falling the last few feet. Nothing happens. Cautious exploration of the soot-lined passage follows. The long spikey-log trap that hurt Noer so much lies blocking a large part of the passage; no one has repaired the trap. The passageway ends in a door, and the halfling princeling finds a trapling on the door, which he disarms. The party has already found a key, but discovers the door is unlocked, so they go in. There's a room on the other side with another door and a small passageway leading out. The other door seems to lead to the surface (and the halfling doesn't find any traps on it). They leave both doors open and then go to the door at the end of the 20' passageway...and then they find kobolds. There's a short affray and then the mageling magicks the door closed - in their faces! Then they find out the hard way that there WAS actually a trap on the second door - which is now closed. Little slots open in the walls and darts shoot out! Poisoned darts: the elfin mage is hit and goes down. Luckily, the poison doesn't seem super strong, she recovers fairly quickly. Trapped Doors
The doors were set up so they triggered the trap mechanism when they were closed. Using the key would disarm the trap, but the kobolds didn't actually lock the doors. They just knew enough to use the key any time they went through - or they got a laugh at whoever got hit with the paralytic poison. Bonus construction - the doors are weighted to close slowly on their own. The second door was trapped, but was left open...until it closed on its own and set off the trap. Luckily they were able to lock out the kobolds while the mage recovered. Oops. A little set battle.Or, how to concentrate enemy fire on your weak point!The setup looked roughly like this: |---+-|
k | |
k --------@ |
k +@ |
kk --------@ |
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+ - door
Lori was the designated door-opener - the halfling had already declared the door safe from traps. (We know how well that worked last time, eh?) Roger was behind the wall ready to start blasting and firing arrows the moment Lori threw a lit torch into the kobold's room. There might have been another fighter ready to shoot as well? (My notes here aren't great and it doesn't make much difference anyway...I think it was only Roger and Lori vs however many kobolds?) Everyone else was hiding. This might have led to an interesting standoff after the kobolds expended all their javelins - kobolds behind cover, Roger behind cover, no one doing anything for a long time? Assuming everyone survived 20-ish javelins. But that's not how things played out. What happened.The battle went down something like this:
.... At this point, it's something like 6-7 kobolds against one wizard and a halfling who is rapidly discovering that javelins hurt. (He did throw some rocks into the room, with the intent of confused the kobolds. It even worked for a moment or two! But there were so many kobolds, javelins just kept on coming. Sharp, pointy, unhealthy javelins.) Lori, unable to move on the floor, was also a target of some javelin love. Lori does not feel charitable towards kobolds. Eventually, One-Eyed Mattie ran down the hall to rescue Lori and the elfling mage slammed the door shut again with her magic. Whew! The party disengaged. And by that, I mean retreated. They went back to the rope while Abel and Tilden stood rearguard and hauled the half-burned spikey log to the end of the tunnel to stand as a makeshift ladder. Lori was unceremoniously hauled up, adding bumps and bruises and scrapes to her pointy-stick wounds. Abel did some nice chop-chop-ing, slowing the kobolds before making a dramatic jump for the rope and making it to safety. Safety. Heh. Some kobolds, feeling emboldened by defeating the initial assault, had clambered up the other exit-way, and were running towards our Heroes. Luckily, the mage Roger was on lookout and he got into a firefight with them, bow against javelins. As reinforcements ran to each side of the line, a stray javelin hit the princeling in the shoulder, killing him instantly! The elfling ran to her friend and found him dead. She also took a javelin wound that incapacitated her (she had a threshold of pain of 5? 6 CON, heh). The kobolds finally broke and ran. The elfling, barely conscious, grabbed at one's foot as they went by, and tried to stick a dagger in them. The kobold mercilessly slit her throat for her trouble. Thus ended a great friendship of two unusual and brilliant people, dying together in search of power, fame, and fortune. RIP Nimbus Stout, halfling princeling RIP Persimmony, elfin mage Question the Prisoner!The party collected what the could from the battlefield, gathered their fallen comrades....and discovered one kobold was still alive! Bonus - they spoke Goblin, which Roger also knew! So our heroes patched them up and asked some questions! Their conversation went something like this (redacted to remove profanity):
The kobold also had this to add before they released their badly wounded prisoner: ***** **** **** ******** ************ ****** you ******** ****** **** ********* ******s. A quick funeralThe survivors built a funeral pyre for Nimbus and Persimonny and consigned their remains to the flames and their souls to whatever gods they worshiped. They kept Nimbus's family dagger, with the hopes of returning it some day to his family, but they don't even know where Persimonny came from. Such is life sometimes. Quote of the Day
Loot gainedA bunch of cheap small wicker shields, several handfuls of short javelins and spears, a handful of trade coins and a few coppers, a spellbook apparently about doors? (Roger can't make much out of Persimonny's notes, alas), and a bunch of foodstuffs - the halfling had at least been eating well, and there's no point in letting it go to waste!
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