Third Session (14 page pdf) – We continue to hack our way through the hobgoblin troops of the Pouting Pagoda in the House of Withered Blossoms. It’s like the Hell of Being Cut To Pieces!
We interrogate our hobgoblin prisoners to get intel on the next in the series of hobgoblin-manned strongpoints, the Mockery Pagoda. This is where very tactical play benefits you a lot.
Bottom level – drawbridge over a river, portcullis, probably murder holes, loads of high level hobgoblins. Upstairs, parapets with archers, then doors into the pagoda proper. There’s a lot of whiteboard pics and tactical map pics in the PDF this time.
So here’s how it’s done. We didn’t want to fight them all at once, or get pinned down under fire, or waste too much magic on what’s essentially the door guards. We dimension door the lot of us up onto the parapet behind the archers but near their arrow barrel. Jacob throws a wall of ice across the stairwell and doors and we totally ambush murder the archers. When the melee hobs bust through the wall of ice (taking damage), Gobo color sprays most of them into comas and we swiftly kill them all. Three spells, five mostly quiet rounds, and the front part of the fortress is ours.
But then as we go into the pagoda we get ambushed ourselves – by a stone golem! Golems suck so bad in D&D, they’re basically immune to everything. So we used standard anti-golem tactics, the grease spell. It took some doing but we pushed it down the stairs and outside the door, but by that time we had hobgoblin woman monks and hobgoblin leper archers all over us. It is a hard fight to get clear of there.
And then we find a weird pit room where it becomes clear that there’s a gorgon down in it… We kill ogre mage (or “oni,” in Japanland) #1 there and loot.
Gobo’s “moon bridge” oracle power continues to be the best utility magic ever. Without it we’d be so screwed in so many situations, or at least have to use lots of spells, painful back-and-forth-with-a-passenger fly trips, etc. Whenever there’s a gap between where we want to go and we are – boop, moon bridge! It sounds so lame in the book but we have gotten so much mileage out of it it’s crazy.
Geek Related 