Having just listened to Hida-O-Win's lament about the lost opportunity in the final fight in the Enemy Within Book 4 (from the Adventuring Party podcast #752, spoilers ahoy for Enemy Within) I thought I'd try and execute his vision as described in the final fight in my Spelljammer Academy mini-campaign.
The whole session was a bit of bricolage - it was the boarding and clearing of an old Dwarven Citadel taken over by a rogue Astral Elf star empire (the Xaryxians, straight out of the book). it started with a stolen version of the fleet action from Chapter 10 of Light of Xaryxis for the approach then gave the heroes the option to fight the fleet or be the landing party.
They chose landing party and for the interior of the Citadel I used Graphite Primes Mazes set up. The presence of a pair of artificers stood them in good stead getting past hazards but then there were two fights buried in the maze.
First was going to be the Xaryxian command post, second was their Scro allies who were looting technology from the Citadel. The Xaryxian fight was a nasty little brawl in a room, a knife fight in a phone-box that was difficult based off testing a range of the Xaryxian tougher types. There was effectively no terrain in that beyond a few stairways.
The scro fight I attempted to make more interesting. My sketch map below. Here we have high mesh gantries 60 ft up, 10 ft wide on either side of the room. The big thing in the middle is a 40 ft diameter cannon, a main gun for the citadel. 1/4 in from each end of the room and in the middle were a gantry of chain winches, essentially a curtain of chains. The opposition were three pairs of Scro warriors with a chest each they were carrying and a pair of Scro sergeants overseeing them. The two sergeants were up in the chain-gantries keeping an eye on things. The Scro were re-skinned Giff from the Boos Astral Menagerie - the warriors were CR3 Shipmates, the Sergeants CR6 Shock Troopers. They had muskets and grenades, according to the CR calculation widget this should have been a CR16 encounter, classed as Deadly.
The roster for the night was:
Ugloo - notoriously ugly kobold rogue, Spelljammer Academy's greatest advocate and recruiting agent, chef extraordinaire with a strange talent for communing with the dead.
Liam - human fighter, poster-child of Spelljammer Academy. Dashing, brave, poor of judgement but strongly supported by 'vassals' Greg, Greg II and Grub.
Ella - forest gnome rogue - collector of monster lore, possessor of a very nice hat from Karantin, expert repossessor of stolen goods.
Roast - giff artificer - sender of many messages praising Spelljammer Academy on enchanted arrows.
ROB - autognome cleric, most rapidly promoted captain, best pincushion impression.
Varyen - elven artificer festooned with gadgetry with big mechanical wolf companion, expertly worked the party past hazardous ruins
Blop - plasmoid rogue, backed up Ugloo in sneaking and stabbing.
A pretty tanky bunch, maybe a touch brittle with three rogues, two artificers, a fighter and only a single cleric to keep them all standing.
The party enters bottom left, high up on the gantries which gives everyone, even the tanks, a movement choice about when and where they want to get down. The scro are attempting to exit at right with their cases. Our party going in is chunky - 7 PCs - but they have been somewhat chewed up by the Xaryxians. This was an open encounter in the sense that had the players chosen to negotiate, the Scro were open to just taking their payment from the Xaryxians and abandoning them. The players shot first so there went that option.
The two Scro sergeants up in the chains were supposed to provide a challenge by only being attackable with ranged weapons on top of being pretty tough. The bulk of the cannon and the size of the hall was supposed to force movement by providing a big chunk of cover. I thought swinging out to the cannon and running along the top was a likely approach. I figured the Scro were going to do a fighting retreat, see if they could get the party to back off with ranged fire then run for it.
As it played out, the party went after the Sergeants, pelting them with various shock effects (artificer grenades, thunderwaves) that shook them out of the chains, dealing with that problem nicely. The scale of the hall proved an unexpected challenge when it put people out of range of healing or other buff effects. In the end the two Sergeants used grenades to good effect, with some stuns achieved but were overwhelmed once the party got into melee range. Some of the more athletic party members chose to leap to the chains and tarzan-swing out to the cannon or down the hall. This got some of the party into contact quickly but spread people out when athletics rolls were failed. It broke out into a fight between an artificer and fighter atop the cannon with one Sergeant and ranged combat with the others along the side, with people dispersed all along the walkway.
Concentrated ranged fire took out one of the Scro teams and the other two used the opportunity to escape. A moonbeam spell dropped at the back of the cannon smashed down the last standing scro but blocked the path and let the last other team escape. Once out they barred the door behind them and the party tried to chase them via another exit but lost them in the citadel maze.
All in all I think it worked well, I should have put more of the Scro up high, to keep that challenge in longer. The scale provided an interesting challenge for folks pushing things out past the usual 'all my buddies within 30ft' scale. The grenades that the Scro had also drove people apart. I could have been more of a hard-ass about how difficult it was to swing on the chains but some people passed, some people failed, I feel the riskiness was about right.
Beyond the terrain it was fun having a foe with a goal beyond 'die with honor' which they could work towards. It still all went off in about 3-4 rounds, so as ever, the enemies need to use their tricks pretty quickly or they will never get to. Strictly it was a party defeat - with the enemy achieving their objective of fleeing with cannon schematics (though at a cost). As mentioned elsewhere a defeat that is not a TPK can be handy motivation and certainly we have set up for an 'against the Scro' follow up now that the Xaryxians were chased off.
Awesome stuff, what was the player feedback? Positive from the novelty or mixed due to the difficulty? Was there any after combat discussion about how they could have prevented the schematics from being spirited away or did they think it was too hard to stop?
ReplyDeleteI did not get much feedback as we were over-running our time slot and needed to do session wrap-up and campaign epilogue; overall people were happy - what I recall is mostly they were happy that the Scro were focused on getting out because once they engaged them they turned out to be more dangerous than they had expected.
ReplyDeleteI'm taking no complaints about the terrain as it being a positive addition to the scene.