Session 78: The Ballad of Princess Grogdalene
7/21/24-7/26/24, rest 7/27, active 7/28
PC: Gwendolyn, Alex, Legany, Okiedoke
Hench: Amadayo, Mahin, Em
Lord Eros Tyring had been trying to recruit and interact with PCs for a long time. That finally culminated in a plan to rob the paychest of the presumed BBEG Warval the Orc Warchief, King of Spinecastle. It had been in the works for weeks if not months, but the revelation that we were to have another wargame event soon accelerated the timeline I think.
The goal of the heist was to use magical disguises as hobgoblins, plant specially minted coins in the Spinecastle treasury, get aid from magical Scrying on those coins, then finesse their way into the vault and escape with as much loot as they could carry via magical potions of teleportation. What actually happened is… well…
They had a guide to the suspected location in Tyring’s henchman Lucky Bill the Explorer. He kept them from getting lost and increased their chances to evade encounters, which they did on a few occasions. Disguised as Hobgoblins, they assumed they’d be safe from Chaotic enemies, but that’s not really how Chaos works. It eats its own. I ran reactions in a much more swingy way than I would for human vs human, with results being more extreme, but fortunately for the PCs they generally went their way.
There were some terrain encounters that they ignored due to not wanting to be distracted. An orc warband showed up during one night’s camp only to bully into the campfire light and strike up their own camp. The party was able to learn a little bit about the area from them. Then they got to the swamp.
Hello, fellow beastmen!
They forced a march to try to get through it all in one day. A checkpoint of wererats shook them down for a toll which after much griping the PCs paid. Alex wanted to kill them all but the others weren’t keen on risking lycanthropy. They also ran across a pair of Cyclops who were looking for their lost sheep. The adventurers assured the giants that they hadn’t seen the livestock and carried on.
They bypassed a suspected lizardman stronghold and good reaction kept them from being challenged. Nearly out of the swamp, Lucky Bill missed the roll to discover a Viet Cong style pit trap along the road. The third rank of adventurers fell in and it was a doozy, 30ft down onto disgusting slimy spikes. Okiedoke the assassin was killed outright while Mahin had only a few hps left. They found some treasure from other poor saps and dragged out the victims. Some talk was had of using the dead adventurer as a war trophy to boost their “tribute” to Warval, but the other henchmen balked at the idea. They burned Okiedoke’s body once they exited the swamp.
Along the road to Spinecastle were about half a mile of crucified PC-playable races… humans, elves, dwarves, etc. There was a saving throw forced after walking some distance but no one knows why. Spinecastle itself was huge with tall, formidable walls and the primary tower itself rising from the middle like Saruman’s tower Orthanc, complete with the wide pit of industrial shenanigans. Around the tower was a thriving city of Chaos, a bizzaro world of slavery, pit fighting, and crime dressed up as civilization. The players were shocked at the scale of both the city and the massive army camped to the south and west.
The kobold gatekeepers interrogated them briefly but Gwendolyn easily bluffed her way by. Bearing a pass sealed with human slave blood, they were admitted into the city. They found a room and avoided the sketchier foodstuffs on offer, eventually settling for what they could convince themselves was “mutton”.
So far so good. They were in the city with their “tribute”. They just needed to deliver it and hope it made it to the vault. Off to the tower, where their pass allowed them entry to wait in a queue of petitioners also come to pay tribute to the Boss. They met a necromancer named Also who condescended to them as the stupid hobgoblins that they were. They did not like Also and tried to make a bunch of puns and wordplay goofy responses to him but he didn’t get it and continued with his melodramatic putting on airs.
Most of the other supplicants had war trophies which made the group’s lack a point of anxiety, but a hefty bag of gold is universal. Also disdained their gold and showed his tribute, plates and cups and chalices and candlesticks of gold and silver. Certainly more impressive looking but as to value who can say?
When their time came they were ushered in and announced by a human female of some rank by her dress referred to only as the Herald. When asked for names to be announced the players froze and stuttered out gems like Princess Grogdalene of the Grok Tribe, Alex Kicked-by-Mule, Daddy Kicked-by-Mule, and Firesucker.
Warchief Warval was impressive for an orc. He was larger but not some giant and possessed a clear level of intelligence unseen before in any orc the party had ever encountered. He also had a strange brand on his forehead. During the short interaction, Princess Grogdalene implied that the “Grok tribe of the northeast” had many warriors and they wanted to join the war effort. This tribute was a small fraction of what they could bring. Charades happened over the table as players gave Grogdalene (Gwendolyn) hand gestures for suggestions of how many troops the tribe had. “5… 500… 5000! Yeah 5000 troops!”
This staggeringly high number from a tribe no one had ever heard of made Warval suspicious, but he’d love to have them if they were real. So he “offered” for the party to stay in special rooms in the castle and for Princess Grogdalene to fly out by wyvern the next morning and bring the chief of their tribe for a meeting. Uh oh.
A weird black shadow/spirit thing took the gold tribute and the party was led to their definitely-not-a-prison-cell suite of rooms. The accommodations were nice, but in the way an outdated family restaurant is nice. Fallen far from the original. Two orcs stood guard outside, also clearly superior from your run of the mill beastman. When queried for dinner orders and such they responded professionally and mumbled the orders without leaving their post. Goblins arrived to deliver. They had remote comms of some kind.
A lot of planning and indecision started here. The advanced timeline took away the team’s ability to finesse the situation. They had to pull the heist before Grogdalene was forced onto the back of a wyvern. Eventually they settled on seducing the orcs to lead them on a tour of the castle. The first team of orcs resisted the foolishness but their relief bought full into it, flattered by the flirtation.
Eventually the group was able to con their way to the ground floor of the pit where the vault was for a “quick look”. The orcs were clearly uncomfortable and assured the party that they’d have to leave after they saw the “doggies”. Their scrying overwatch had told the crew that there were giant demonic dogs guarding the vault door so one of the players brought some ham hocks from dinner.
When they approached the vault door flanked by the giant canines, the orcs said, “Ok you’ve seen them, that's it we’re leaving.” But Okiedoke’s player had taken on one of the henchman, a female mage played like a dumb white girl who tries to pet the bear. She ran forward with the ham hocks, “I’m gonna pet the doggy!” The supernatural “dogs” immediately saw her as a threat and the fight ensued.
The orcs were caught off-guard by the suicidal mage. They set spears against a charge and called for their bff Grogdalene to get her party to the lift. The hench scrambled back and threw the hams into the hands of the orcs. The one dog that was engaging chased, the other remained on guard.
Legany rushed to enter through the vault door which was ajar enough for a single man-sized creature. The party knew through their overwatch that there were at least two humanoids inside and the barbarian was going to kill them quick. Unfortunately he ran across the ward on the ground and failed his save, succumbing to magical paralyzation and sliding into the vault.
When others arrived they found the weird humanoids looking down at him. One of them executed the helpless barbarian while the other unhinged its jaw and blasted them with a cone of sonic damage that was enough to terrify them. This fight had gotten out of hand quickly.
Illusion kept one of the dogs engaged while the orcs and the other dog confusedly fought each other. The orcs miraculously passed all morale checks, even after one of them was killed in a single blow. Alex snuck into the vault while invisible, Mahin went down to the humanoids, and the heist turned into an emergency evacuation.
One of the teleport potions was used on Legany’s corpse, which I ruled would not work since he couldn’t metabolize it. He went from an entity to equipment, so the hench added him to her inventory and used her own potion. Mahin’s potion was poured in his unconscious mouth, with Amadayo and Gwendolyn following shortly after. Alex was left alone, invisible in a vault whose door had just been closed.
Having looted for a few rounds and not wanting to risk another blast from the weirdos, Alex grabbed a last handful of treasure and cursed them with what had become the convention of the dialogue for the session, “Grok you, mother grokers!” He drank his potion before they could respond due to really high initiative.
The party ended up in a bloody pile in an undisclosed location with heavy casualties and an unknown amount of treasure.
Musings:
The travel out there had some really interesting potential but the group stayed on task and were not distracted. I was impressed.
The heist, on the other hand, was a disaster, but Warval was clearly onto them and they chose to carry out a frontal assault rather than try to escape. It was a fun session, with a lot of shared laughs that these AARs can’t really share properly. Now I've got to roll what treasure Alex was able to escape with beyond the things that he targeted specifically.
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