We played for a very long session yesterday. I didn’t take notes real time on this one, because I was playing single dad as well as gaming, which isn’t terribly responsible but I only get to game once every few weeks, so I didn’t want to miss it.

This is a bit of a winding path with much “what next?” musing after, so I’m going to summarize:

Two hard fights, two traps, one easy fight. We cleared this dungeon, prevented a demon-god from manifesting into the world, and emerged a lot richer. Walked away with a lot of really good items and $11,000 in spendable cash, at least.

Wandering Recap

In any case, we started out still in the dungeon. We were more or less healed and rested, and we pushed hard into the place. In no particular order, we encountered:

1. A giant statue trap that spun for astounding damage, followed by another trap room which would flood (and be sealed off with forcefields or something) and drown potential trespassers. We wenat at this obliquely for a bit, and then tried a different route.
2. A gelatinous cube, which we fled from, but then trapped squeezing through a doorway and just deep fat fried the thing with repeated lightning blasts.
3. Back to the giant statue trap, and this time we used hobgoblin bodies to determine the trigger (get close enough) and then finally we just bum-rushed the thing, jumped on the pedestal, found the “off” switch, flipped it, and then rendered it into fine powder, just to be sure. We made similar “probe magically and then deal with it” short work of the drown-you-out trap

We then moved on, and after some movement through the dungeon arrived at a relatively confined room with two entrances in front of us, one to map south and one to map east (that’s really up, down, left, and right on the VTT screen). As the Knight-guy with Leadership present, I quickly shouted out some tactics. Each entry corridor was three yards wide, so I suggested that the PCs and our allies (Splug the goblin and three dwarves, each 125-point characters but one of them was one we called a dwarf prince as his kit was pretty amazing, including a suit of armor we estimated would fetch $30,000 or more, leading to jokes about Kevin playing them very recklessly – though he didn’t). So we had something like seven PCs and four allies, maybe.  Each of us has mostly been at all the sessions, so we’re all pushing 275-285 points at least. We have

• Thor the Knight (powerful magic sword, fine/balanced medium buckler, kinda crap armor): A glass cannon doing 3d+10 or so with skill-21.
• Persistence the Knight (I think a knight; two-handed flail and kitted out in magical brigandine armor; no shield, same ST 17. 2H flails are really hard to defend against)
• Chop the cleric
• Duncan the wizard
• Hannari the martial artist (his schtick is really Throwing Master, and he can throw kamas for impaling or cutting damage to very happy ranges)
• Urbaine the bard, who we keep putting as a front-line combatant. He shouldn’t really be one, but he keeps surviving and even thriving, so…
• Handsome the scout, who does what scouts do, but as a half-orc.

So yeah, we had eleven folks with us, though Splug has a tendency to hide in the back. The dwarves were played ably by Kevin and they stuck together and tag-teamed foes very effectively.

My tactical suggestion was putting me, Percy, and one other as a single thin line blocking the map-south corridor, five blocking the west corridor, and of course the scout, cleric, and wizard in the middle where they could support both lines. We were attacked by a whole mess of “rune-covered zombies” and then what turned out to be a family of ghouls with a tragic backstory. We didn’t care; we killed them all without reading it. (They were the knight who failed to defend the place’s family, turns out. Again: we didn’t find that out until after all were slain, and didn’t stop to ask questions).

The rune-covered zombies turned out to explode into an Area 3 flaming explosion when you killed them, which would frequently do something like 10-15 points in the same hex as them, 6-10 at Range 1, and then 3-5 in range 2 (this is a house rule for this group). As some of us were not well covered in armor, this left folks reluctant to engage at Reach C or 1, but both Percy and Thor have Reach 2 weapons, the scout can kill you from anywhere, etc.

The ghouls had a paralysis attack too, leading us to initially believe they were wights of some sort. The lower line with all the heavy-hitters did Reach 2 attacks and caused a few chain explosions. Much like Doomchildren, this caused more havoc to them than us, as you occasionally had sympathetic detonation of zombies. Because of that, and judicious choice of target selection, the heavy hitters cleared the less-numerous southern flank in a few rounds.

The western attack was actually pretty hard pressed, but they avoided killing too many that were line-adjacent, and we allowed the line to bow backwards and connect with the heavies. Chop and/or Duncan hit a few of us with well-timed fireproofing spells, which included Thor. At that point, we just laid into all of them, and while there was no time when we were bored, per se, no one took a serious hit, no one was paralyzed, and everyone did what they were supposed to do, and we mopped them up in detail.

Peter called it in the after-game, but basically, what we saw repeatedly in this long session was everyone played their niche extremely effectively. A lot of die rolls also went our way, and very much against the foes, in both big fights.

Speaking of which, we then went down some stairs, through a short hallway, into a vast chamber – must have been 40-50 yards square (because from the doors to the nearest bad guy for me was something like 20-22 yards, and the other side of the place was just as big). The huge room had an altar on the left with a dismembered corpse, a few statues of elder evil gods on the right, and a pulsating portal that was where the Super Big Bad would clearly come through if we frakked it up.

So, we saw I think six foes. Maybe seven? Two we recognized, one was named Franz Gruber, clearly the evil boss warlock, and the other was the only elf to treat Urbaine the half-elf nicely, causing him to instantly distrust her anyway. There were two nasty demon creature things I didn’t ever really recognize, one draug, and some sort of pale-looking wizard woman. Some dragon pendants we had received after one of the prior sessions started to glow. They were Blessed, which turned out to be a big deal later.

Franz started to monologue, and we cut that right out. Hannari hurled a kama some 20 yards with Throwing Master, which hit and punched through non-trivial DR to injure Franz a bit; this was followed up by a well-placed bodkin shot (armor piercing arrow) to the chest or vitals by Handsome. The two together injured Franz quite badly, and he Blinked to the relative safety of a pentagram right before the pulsating portal stone.

Effectively, on the first round of combat we made the Bad Guys split their party, and put (one of) their warlocks on Extreme Defensive mode. Handsome would continue to harass Franz with arrows as much as he could, and only a few good rolls kept him alive at all. Thor began the long sprint at the other spellcaster, absorbing several FP-dealing spells. Again, either Hannari or Handsome or both hit the second wizard with a convenient arrow, which let Thor get close, and then in two rounds I first lopped off one of her legs and then decapitated her.

Urbaine was bull-rushed with a shield-rush by the draug, I think, who missed and slammed face-first into a pillar, which did him something like 7 points of damage, knocked him down, maybe stunned him, and then folks more or less clustered around the draug over the next few rounds and beat him to a paste. This wasn’t quite as simple as that – a draug is a very tough foe that usually has to be taken down all the way to -5xHP, so it takes a lot of pounding. Fortunately we had Persistence close by, and 3d+lots crushing damage from a flail, almost always to the torso with deceptive attack (plus FLAIL) had a tendency to deliver something like 40-50 hp of pounding per second. Even a monster who can typically absorb 120 damage to autodeath can only stand three seconds of that before shuffling off.

Urbaine was also saved from a KO or deadly shot as an arrow (I think) from the elf archer which would have hit him badly was deflected by the power of Bless. Barring a crit (and remember: Blessed amulets), Thor’s block defense was more than enough to deal with her arrows on the regular, and there was no hope of survival once he got to Reach 2. Urbaine threatened horrible death to her and she wound up surrendering, throwing down her arms as Thor made a bloody beeline for her. Urbaine went to collect her surrender as Thor and Hannari both changed their vector to the top of the map, where what was left of Franz (still up, but he’d been hit enough by Handsome that he was in roll each turn for KO land), and at least one of the non-draug melee monsters were trying to make a last stand.

But it didn’t last. We mopped up resistance, Handsome feathered some folks and some tentacles that tried to creep out of the portal, and we basically finished the job. Tentacles pulled the spirit/soul out of Franz as he died, which likely did not bode well for his afterlife. But … mission accomplished.

Then we more or less set out to canvass and sack the dungeon, collecting our loot from various stashes (remember, we entered and never really left the combat area for more than a moment or three). When all was said and done, we wound up with a very nice haul.

The Loot

Thor probably wound up with the best set of gear, when all was said and done, though that was mostly by virtue of two of the really cool items simply only being usable by him. The sword of the former guardian Sir Lionhart or whatever his name was is a magic bastard sword that is something like +2 to hit, +2 damage, flaming weapon, worth over $30K by itself. The full suit of magical brigandine that Persistence ended up with has Fortify +1 and Lighten (-25%) on it. So it’s DR 6 all over and comes in at 45 lbs, which is pretty friendly, worth nearly $8500. Thor walked away with a full suit of mundane full plate ($7500, 60 lbs) with a hinged visor, giving him DR 6 all over as well.

Note: This is where swing damage gets unreal. This fight, one-handed with a bastard sword Thor was dishing out something like 3d+10 cut damage, which means that even through full plate the sword would push 3d+3 cut through it. Even using some sort of armor multiplier for “balanced cutting weapon,” or the blunt trauma rules from Low-Tech, Thor would be routinely delivering incapacitating damage through full plate. Damage Resistance as protection is a fool’s errand in the DFRPG.

Other folks got some fun stuff too. There was a suit of giant spider silk armor (DR 2, layers freely with other armors), at least one suit of friendly light mail maybe, and a bunch of other stuff. We did well enough (plus some of the “I no longer need this” gear, like my mail hauberk and old fine medium buckler) that everyone got several things they wanted and we sold the rest. All in all, even after upkeep I think I also pocketed $11,000 in coins and sold loot.

Thor Gets Stronger

It also brought a ton of character points, and Thor used them to increase to ST 19, HP 20, and upgraded Weapon Master from “Bastard Sword and Shield” to “Knightly Weapons” for 5 points. I’m 10 points away from human maximum ST for the knight, but Striking ST 21 gets 4d-1 swing, which means weapon master gives me 8 extra damage in that mode. With Aecris, this works out to 4d-1 (core swing), +1 for the sword, +2 for the enchantments on the sword, +8 for Weapon Master. so 4d+10 cut. Oh, also it’s a Flaming Weapon, which gives 2 fire damage if I punch through DR.

What Next for Gear?

I’m looking hard at what else to do. I have a pretty spiffy shield (fine, balanced, ornate +1 medium buckler) worth $900, but I could upgrade that to a fine, balanced, lightened large shield for a net $2,360 and 14 lbs. My character has Shield Wall training, so I would not take any penalties for striking around the shield. DB +3 for less than three pounds extra is a no-brainer. It’ll take three weeks to get the enchantment laid on the shield when we get to a town large enough to make it happen (Felltower qualifies). Budgeting for that, it still leaves me with roughly $8K spendable on Other Things.

Upgrading to Knightly Weapons for WM means that I could legit carry a spare broadsword (in which I already have skill), axe/mace, or flail in case – as happened once before – I am found weaponless by dint of a crit fail dropped weapon result, or some dingus vaporizes the sword. I currently carry a long knife because it has reach C, 1 making it usable in close combat with my not-so great Knife skill. Everyone loves good seax. Upgrading this to (say) fine, balanced, meteoric and giving my Knife skill a +1 with my unspent-as-yet point would be 4d-1 cut or 2d+1 imp in close combat.

So, the nifty-cool shield seems a given. A nice backup backsword (if allowed) would give me a brawling attack for C with the hilt (2d crush), reach 1, 4d+8 cut, 2d+5 imp even before I throw money at it. Not sure if I’d be taking -4 for the max reach of the sword being 1 fighting in C (probably), but the use of Broadsword means that it’s at least as good as a few points dumped into Knife or Brawling would be (Skill-14), and if I use it as Odin intended I get spectacular weapon master bonuses. A fine/balanced (or just balanced) meteoric broad/backsword would be pretty spiffy. Ah, but alas: it’s $14,400 by itself. But a regular plane-jane fine/balanced broadsword as a backup is $4,800; balanced only is $3,000 and honestly, maybe just leave it as a thrusting broadsword at $700 and suck it up if I break one.

The last thing I’m really looking at here is for the future, once I pick up a few more points for Armor Mastery, is nabbing an underlayer for my armor, though even with my current ST, the best options are going to involve finding them in dungeons: giant spider silk (DR 2, $15,000, 18 lbs) or light mail with lighten 2 (DR 2, $12,700, 18 lbs). With that kind of cost, Lighten 1 on Extra-heavy plate ($12,500, 63 lbs, DR 9 with Armor Mastery) starts to look pretty attractive.

So it looks like I’ll be dropping a few more points in Brawling and/or Knife to get to DX+2 or better, maybe the same sort of investment in Axe/Mace and a pole-weapon skill. If allowed in this game, I already qualify for the Master at Arms weapon talent, and throwing a total of 4 points (not extra points) at each of Brawling, Knife, Axe/Mace, and Spear or Polearm would round out my capabilities quite nicely, and that would make the weapon talent a good way to push skill from my current 19 to 23 in my primary and make my backups very credible (up to Skill-19).

Enough Musing: Act?

First order of business, then, seems to be the fine, balanced large kite shield. That’s a mundane item I can get right now for a trade in cost of like $300. Trivial. A backup broadsword, nothing fancy is only $700. Again, that leaves me $10K freely spendable. The lightened extra-heavy plate would then be a wait-three-weeks item (and the vendor would have to accept a partial down-payment, say half), but when it came in would only be a net of $5,000 if Urbaine can get full value for my existing plate armor. That would leave me a final $5,000 for some sort of meteoric backup weapon like the aforementioned $3,240 fine, balanced, meteoric long knife.

Plans have been hatched. Now we see if they survive the upcoming transition to Felltower proper…