I’m sitting on the couch after having eaten too many pancakes. From my couch I see three books I feel I should be reading: Something about Swiss history (“Geschichte der Schweiz und der Schweizer”), the first book of the Malazan books by Steven Erikson (“Die Gärten des Mondes”) and a book I borrowed from a friend (“The Dictionary of Lost Words”). Tsundoku – being surrounded by piles of unread books.
A week ago, as the party was passing through Springmills, they had heard about a nearby tribe of orcs and decided to wage a war of attrition against them. See 2023-08-02 Orc camp mechanics for how that went. Now, I say “a week ago” because that’s how we run this multi-referee campaign with a peculiar way of tracking time:
and it is best to use 1 actual day = 1 game day when no play is happening – Dungeon Masters Guide, by Gary Gygax, p.37
There’s actually a pretty interesting example on that page where the party splits. Some characters are “resting”, presumably because their players can’t make it to the next session. That session, some other characters go and investigate a dungeon, return and rest for a few days, go again, fight a big monster and loot it. The session ends after the big monster fight and the loot. The next session, the players who didn’t participate are back and decide to go to the same dungeon! At this point in time, the big monster and all the loot is still there. Now what? You can bend reality and say the monster and loot just cannot be found because the other group will have found it in the future, or you can do what I do: force-extend their rest so that whenever there’s a session, it is “now”. Once the big monster is slain, there’s no adventuring in the same dungeon at some point in the past. The players have the choice to explain what else they were doing in the days until “now”.
Anyway, in this multi-referee campaign, we’re doing what Gary Gygax suggested, and more. Between sessions, in-game and out-of-game days pass at the same rate. In order to keep time travelling paradoxes to a minimum, the game uses our real calendar, and if possible the game starts on the current day.
In the simple case, a session is an expedition that happens in a single in-game day. Thus, a magic-user or elf memorises their spells as the session begins and gets just those spells for the adventure, for the day, for the session. It’s all the same. And if we play seven days later, the party had seven days to rest. Seven hit-points recovered, if there are no clerics! See 2019-02-08 Still No Clerics. Yeah. Still no clerics.
In the more complex case, a session is an expedition through the wilderness that takes many days. The characters are marked as being underway until such and such date, in-game and out-of-game. That is: if another game happens in the next few days, those characters cannot participate because they’re still on their expedition – and ideally no party goes near because nobody should disturb the timelines. 😇
I’m in two multi-referee campaigns and the other campaign has separates timelines per “region” that are synchronised every now and then and players need to pay attention when moving from region to region. That’s different and allows us to use the Greyhawk calendar – but when referees are inactive, their entire region starts lagging behind, so when they return, there’s a big leap forward where nothing important happens.
All of that just to say that the party returns and a week has passed whether the players want to or not!
Yeah, that stinks, in this situation.
I had already decided that the orcs were going to attack. They had 7 days to prepare. This was the situation I had:
It’s colder up here and the *Thorny Vine Wood* is dominated by junipers. At night, the orcs of the *Finger-breaking* tribe hunt these lands. 46 **orcs** led by *Muzdog* (HD 2) live here (HD 1 AC 6 1d6 F1 MV 12 ML 8 XP 100). *5 gems.* Their settlement is protected by a palisade and surrounded by spiked pit traps (2d6). There are several large iron spikes with a dozen skulls each near the entrance. These orcs are looking for allies to go to war against *Springmill* – like the orcs of *Grishg* around *Poleveney*.
What’s up with those other orcs? This is what I have:
20 **orcs** led by *Grishg* (HD 3) live here (HD 1 AC 6 1d6 F1 MV 12 ML 8 XP 100). *12000 gold coins. 10 gems.* A scroll of *bashing walls* (punch a hole 20m wide and deep into anything made of wood, earth or stone; living things, textiles, leather, metal, and all that are not affected). A pair of *gloves of strength* (strength 18). They keep a low profile, living deep in the forest, but lone travellers, or fools that don’t make it back to the village before sunset, or reckless idiots looking for trouble, they’ll all find the orcs to be more than willing to kill.
OK, so Grishg is more powerful than Muzdog, and much, *much* richer, and they’re careful. So I figured that Muzdog is going to send a messenger, asking for an alliance. One day to travel there, one day to travel back. They have five days to win Grishg over. I needed a 10 or more with 2d6 to get a cooperative result. On this table, a 9 is described as “no risk” – and with Grishg being so careful I decided that this was not good enough. See 2014-08-21 No Dice for the rest of the table. I rolled five times and got no cooperation. Grishg was not going to help with the assault!
I told each player that they had one week to prepare for the orc assault. What were they going to do to improve their chances?
This is what I had for the village:
This is *Springmill*, a thorp of 30 **humans** (HD 1 AC 9 1d6 F1 MV 12 ML 7 XP 100) led by Flaviana, the owner of the largest cow herd. The mud huts are protected by 3 **war dogs** (HD 2+1 AC 7 1d6 F1 MV 18 ML 6 XP 200). A jar containing the elemental prison of an ifrit called *Death of Eleven Cities* (HD 10 AC 3 2d8 + 1d8 fire F20 MV 24 ML 12 XP 1000; *illusion*, *permanent living flame*, *invisibility*, *wall of fire* and *creation* at will; only harmed by magic or magic weapons). These village-folk are brandishing lit torches, even during the day.
OK, that jar was extremely powerful. Would Flaviana release the ifrit in order to save herself? How would the ifrit react? Did she even know what this was? I decided that no, Flaviana knew nothing. Perhaps a pyromancer had lived here two or three generations back, or a fire worshipper, perhaps there’s a Sutr temple ruin somewhere. The villagers were still worshipping the flame, but nobody knew that this forgotten jar might have saved them all.
There was also a dragon hunter present:
The dragon hunter **knight** *Lakshana* (level 7) is trying to hire two score desperate peasants to go and slay *Fire Despair the Sleeper*. “I am generous: two shares of the treasure found for me, the rest to be shared equally amongst the other survivors.” A potion of *knockout* (dark red, 1h, save vs. poison or lose consciousness; tasteless, can be mixed with water and wine). An *elven cloak* (5 in 6 chance of hiding in the wilderness using magic camouflage when standing still).
The dwarf had already met Lakshana while passing through this village on a previous occasion and the dwarf had already seen the red dragon *Fire Despair the Sleeper* – up in the mountains nearby was a fallen Mithra temple with a lava pool, a bunch of grumpy salamanders, two fire giants, and a sleeping red dragon. The dwarf had decided that they were a dwarf from the Deep Down Under, knowledgeable about lava and volcanos and a devotee of Mithra, goddess of brotherhood, oaths and underground fire. Seeing that fallen temple, they had sworn to rebuild that temple. The giants had chuckled and offered some magic armour in exchange for magic weapons they knew – but since the party hadn’t gone after those weapons, and didn’t feel ready to tackle fire giants or red dragons, nothing had changed. When Lakshana made her offer to go dragon slaying, the dwarf had not agreed and hadn’t said anything about knowing how to get to the sleeping dragon.
Now, needing all the help they could get, the dwarf decided to talk Lakshana. In exchange for fighting on their side, the dwarf Mithra-promised to join Lakshana in their quest to slay the dragon. Interesting developments afoot, given that the dwarf is level 4.
The dwarf also encouraged the villagers to build a palisade. One week for 30 people to build a palisade seems like not enough time, but why not. It’s not a perfect palisade. I was already thinking of using my Mass Combat rules. How to handle a palisade? I told them this: In the first round, and for as long as the palisade was not breached (i.e. no villagers had taken damage) it would grant a +3 armour class bonus.
The assassin did some murdering and disguising and sneaking into the orc village to overhear their plans and this is how they learned about the results of negotiations between Muzdog and Grishg. Muzdog had been too haughty, had not wanted to accept Grishg’s leadership, and so they had been rejected. The elders convinced Muzdog to try again and so two messengers were dispatched to plead with Grishg – I told the player that this would mean 20 orcs of reinforcements for next session. The assassin then trailed those two messengers and killed them. Yeah, the assassin also has a magic item that allows them to *charm person* at will, and *elf boots*, and an *elf cloak*. “Overpowered!” I say, jokingly. Those charming *snake lenses* were gained in Stonehell, with me being the referee. Oh well. Sneaking and murdering missions are nearly always a success for this character. No orc reinforcements will be coming next week.
The thief and one of their elves try to ambush some orcs of their own but failed their roll to find a single orc so I offered them the chance to encounter 1d6 orcs instead, or hide. They decided to hide.
The thief sent another one of the elf retainers north to deliver a letter and recruit some soldiers from a camp of refugees. Skipping over some details, the ruler of that village had already recruited the refugees but willingly gave them 20 soldiers to defend their village and promised a monetary reward should they succeed. Nice!
I also rolled for seven random encounters during the day in order to see if any other interesting parties might show up and start wondering. I rolled 7d6 and there was a single 1 in the result, which on my table means some bandits showed up. I figured they’d wait and see and then be a bother for the survivors.
And so we were ready to start the fighting! Characters can be with units to grant them their charisma bonus. I started with a list of units:
Notably, I forgot to add the following:
As for the party, we had:
For the purposes of this game, the relevant data for HD 1 and 2 creatures from the Mass Combat rules is this:
+-----------+-------+------+------+ | Creatures | Scale | HD 1 | HD 2 | +-----------+-------+------+------+ | 2–5 | ×3 | 22 | 45 | | 6–10 | ×4 | 45 | | 11–20 | ×5 | 90 | | 21–40 | ×6 | 180 | | 41–80 | ×7 | 360 | +-----------+-------+------+------+
So the orcs have scale x7 but when the orcs drop to 180 hit-points, their scale to drops ×6; the villagers have scale ×6 but when their hit-points drop to 90 their scale drops to ×5; the soldiers have scale ×5 but when their hit-points drop to 45 their scale drops to ×4; and so on.
In the first round, the orcs gained initiative and rolled high so they hit the villagers even though they were protected by a +3 palisade. The defence was already overrun! There was a lot of dice rolling. The thief and the assassin used sneak attacks every single round (+4 to hit, damage ×2). After the first casualty and when half their hit-points were lost, units had to make morale checks. When the villagers failed theirs, Unn the dwarf stayed with them, not attacking the next round and instead rallying them. They made that roll and so the effect was simply having to skip a turn. The orcs managed to make all their morale saves but towards the end they did a fighting retreat: attack and move back out of the village towards the fire pits the villagers had dug, but in that last round they got slaughtered one and all. No prisoners were made.
My notes with hit point totals going down for all the units and other notes.
Looking at the totals after the battle, half the villagers had died (15) and a fifth of the soldiers had died (4).
It was only now that I realized we had forgotten about the village guard dogs and Lakshana. Too bad. I think Lakshana’s deal with the dwarf still stands. We’ll see.
The party rested for the rest of the night and went to loot the orc village in the morning. They heard some dogs barking and the assassin scouted ahead, seeing 30 bandits with 3 war dogs looting the orc village, finding that Orcus statue with the gems in it… so they waited and then, when the bandits were drunk, they snook in, killed the guards, set stuff on fire, and took the gems and the bandit leader’s *goblin assassin short bow* +1 but that is a different story…
In the end, those orc gems were worth 810 gold, the lord of the region paid them 2000 gold as a reward for killing the orcs, and with that letter delivered (and the scroll brought back) another 2000 gold were gained. With three main characters and two retainers with half a share each (and remember that the bugbear was charmed, Luzia is a porter that doesn’t fight and Biff is a dog, so they all don’t get a share) that gives 1202 gold per share, 601 gold per half share.
As for experience points, the orc experience points had to be shared with all the survivors, so 46×100+200=4800 divided by seven party member (this time including the charmed bugbear and the porter but still excluding the pet dog), the villagers and the soldiers (7+15+16=38) gets us 4800/38=126 experience points per person.
The bandits were 30×100+3×300=3900 experience points to be shared between all the members of the party excluding pets and mounts, so 3900/7=557 per person.
Total: 126+557=683 monster experience points per person.
Somewhere in all of that I had lost track of the fact that the bandit boss was in fact a level 5 thief and should probably not have been such a push-over in the night attack, but what can I say, these things happen.
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I’m writing all of this down so people can see how I run such situations and how there are always mistakes but also that making mistakes is no big deal. I forgot Lakshana and 3 war dogs in favour of the villages and I forgot that the bandit leader was actually a level 5 thief. I’m not worried.
#RPG #Halberds and Helmets #Hex Describe #Mass Combat
