Big combat session this time.

The characters (The Vingaardians):

• Drystan Silverhart – Level 8 Aasimar Paladin (Knight of Solamnia)
• Yseult De Lorimar – Level 8 Human Warlock (Noble)
• “Fletch” Siannodel – Level 8 Kagonesti Elven Ranger (Folk Hero)
• Sabelina – Level 8 Human Cleric of Gilean (Acolyte)
• Sidekicks: Hrigg Roundrook and Tem Temble

So, our next session was to investigate a house that a group of Red Dragon Army soldiers were using as a field office, to get some information. It ended up turning into a massive fight – kind of as the adventure intended. The party ended up alerting the guards by the entrance, leading to the party drawing in various groups of Dragon Army soldiers in chunks.

That said, the difficulty of this encounter is basically set up in a way that it allows the party to flex, and just rip through a bunch of opponents who, just 5-6 levels ago, would have been a significant challenge. They’re still in high enough numbers here that if the players aren’t smart with their tactics and resources, they could easily be overwhelmed, but there are also a lot of choke points that can be used to control their flow, limit how quickly they come in.

Also, if you’ve got Fireball and Lightning Bolt at this point, then you get to get your Lina Inverse on. The Vingaardians didn’t have those spells, but they had other things they could use to manage the flow of opponents as it is. This one fight effectively took up the whole session, though I did have the enemies eventually do a strategic withdrawal at one point after the Commander was taken down, partly because it was getting silly, partly because the fight was effectively won, and partly because the session was starting to run long.

In a weird way, one of this adventure’s strengths has been to put the player characters in an environment where they’re surrounded by enemies, and they have to sneak in, and at some point decide to have things pop off, or for things to go wrong and pop off early – but with the class abilities allowing them to smoke an outpost full of fools if they need to, so long as they try to sneak in first.

One issue I did run into in this session is that I still haven’t quite figured out how to do stairs on maps in Foundry yet. I need to get that figured out by next session, since we’ve got a lot of stairs there.

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