The Assemblage ship that ICE captured was much like the previous one, an independent operation with a captain that was bewitched by some heinous warlock. We cured him of his affliction and recruited him to aid us against his offenders in... uh... some way as yet to be determined.
What now? The pirate island stronghold was attracting hooks left and right. Slaid believed he could just waltz in there and convince everyone to love him. I was skeptical. We figured it'd take a while to scout out the pirate town anyway so we'd take a shot at that in downtime. Meanwhile, there were local hooks to look into, the winner of the lottery being the werewolf farm that had gone rogue from the Assemblage. Maybe there were allies there against them?
Wagons loaded and horses mounted and dogs leashed and snakes in baskets and all the other ridiculous things we do as adventurers done, we showed up to the farm ready for action. I held the reserve while the bulk of the party advanced on the dilapidated property. Slaid knocked and attempted to serve the occupants a completely fictitious warrant but was met only with an ominous warning growl. Guygiss snuck around back and discovered a busted open rear entry. He waited for some action to start to cover his approach.
The reserve spotted some wolves prowling from a nearby field to the rear of the building and warned the group, who mostly ignored it. See, we travel in a party of like 20+, but it does no good to stack 20 on the single entry of a building, which we were about to demonstrate in live time.
Slaid and Sloane busted the door open and came face to face with a clutch of werewolves, massive canines with sinister intelligence and brutal slavering maws ready to chomp chomp chomp their faces off. That contact made some racket so Guygiss approached the rear door. Unfortunately, he also ran into some waiting werewolves and he was once again all by his lonesome and outnumbered.
The reserve cast some buff spells and mounted up, intent on cutting off the enemy reinforcements, while the crew at the front door tried to fight their way in and Guygiss tried to survive. Through magic, poison, and luck, the little not-elf kept it going long enough to get relieved. The battle in the front was like a clown car of werewolves, more showing up from the interior of the building every time one was killed.
I was able to lockdown a few of them on a flank and after a while we chewed through their surprisingly dense ranks. Most of the leveled party was in the danger zone for lycanthropy and Sloane had had her arm broken by one of the massive jaws. Unfortunately we captured no prisoners nor rescued any hostages. These guys were just lean, mean killing machines. We did get a heap of treasure for our trouble.
Next up? Pirate island.
Musings:
We concentrated most of our force on the front door of the building, but with the place locked up tight and the only ingress on that side blocked by werewolves, we were unable to force an entry to put figurative spears on target. It took some time and effort to reposition for effect. We discovered later that we could breach the relatively flimsy planking of the structure's walls. We could have also probably used the window on that side. We'll want to consider things like this for the future as that could have really changed what turned out to be our toughest battle yet.
This is the second time recently that Guygiss has found himself isolated and outnumbered. He came out better this time, but he's going to want to hone his flanking tactics before he bites off more than he can chew. Part of that is luck, part of it the superior senses of the creatures we've been fighting.
I play an awful lot of Theatre of the Mind gaming, where the DM holds the objective truth of the scenario and the other participants have a kind of shared imagining of positioning and such. This works out fine with simple scenarios, small parties, online gaming, etc. At our live table, we've got a big grid and it can be fun to lay out a battle and get tactical. We did so this time and were able to illuminate some of the quirks of the battle map.
Of particular note was the zone of control around a figure, that is to say the space that a combatant threatens that restricts enemy movement. ACKS is designed with this style of fight in mind, pages written with specifics about tactical combat that are fun, if time consuming compared to AD&D, to apply. We carefully exploited and also botched this specific rule throughout the fight in tight doorways, hallways, and other chokepoints, but still had a lot of fun.
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