The Dungeon Game: Weekends at Stonehell, session 23
The company stage a two-pronged assault on the hobgoblins encampment, slaughter them all and close the portal to the elven lands.
Party Members
- Tina the Titanic - Level 7 Fighter
- Telperion Desh - Level 7 Lich
- Tobias Little, a.k.a. Lil Toby - Level 6 Cleric
- Huntsman - Level 5 Martial Artist
Followers
Zorrel "Captain Nasty" Gnast (Fighter 7), Tiny Tina (Cleric 7) and Princess Pizzabones (Thief 4)
Session Recap
With the ability to work tirelessly due to his new found undeath, Telperion spends a couple of weeks putting to use the Orcmaking formula. His first batch come out okay (or as okay as an orc can be...), but the second one turn out wrong, most of them dying a few hours after crawling out of the cauldron and the others being riddled with mutations.
The reason for doing this is that the Crownless Company decided to do the final push into hobgoblin territory, and their plan is to use the orcs as a separate assault force to distract the hobgoblins from the character's sneaking in from the back.
With everyone decked out in gear and the orcs given their orders the party head into the snakemen territory and proceed south, while the orcs go through the Kobold Market, kill the patrol there and then proceed into the fortified entrances on floor 2.
The party make their way fairly quickly through the uninhabited northern section of the hobgoblin territory, finding an old pit fighting arena appropriately filled with pit vipers. Due to her serpentine googles Tiny Tina calms the snakes and they mostly leave the party be. As they look for a way into the hobgoblin territory they are assaulted by a pair of living shadows, which drain the strength of Tina the Titanic and Huntsman. Luckily, Tina had her strength magically augmented before the assault began, so she was fine for the time being (and her strength was then later restored by her personal cleric).
Once the group find a door that clearly leads into hobgoblin territory they bust in, and start going room by room taking out anyone they run into. At the same time they start hearing commotion and gunfire from the south, clearly the result of the orc push into the hobgoblin position. The party soon find the result of that push, with all of their orcs dead, but also most of the hobgoblins in that area of the dungeon also having been killed.
The main notable encounter happens as Princess Pizzabones, invisible due to her ring, is sneaking back from the party's discovery of the battle. As she turns a corner and walks down a long hallway a rifle shot rings out and hits her pretty badly. That shot is then proceeded by a second, which misses, and then a group of strange looking elven hounds rush and rip her to shreds. In the commotion she drops a smoke bomb which fills the hall with smoke, and as the party fight against them they also go face to face with some of the more elite hobgoblins.
Eventually the elven hunter who had shot at her attacks the party from the back, but is killed by Tina the Titanic. Huntsman claims his red boots, tong and sniper rifle. The group finish exploring the territory, eventually finding a connection to natural cave.
Inside it there is greenery and even a small tree, from which Telperion retrieves a delicate and intricately grown wooden mask. The party find the portal to the Summerlands, the dimension from which the elves and their hobgoblin lackeys came from. Telperion and Huntsman pass through the portal and find a large gathering of both kinds of enemies.
They quickly head back and destroy the mushrooms that form the portal, closing it. Tina the Titanic makes plans to seal this entire chamber during downtime.
The party finish exploring the floor, running into another elven hunter that they easily dispatch via Telperion's fireball, and eventually get their work crew from Crownfall Keep, who under the directions of Lil Toby clear out all the gear and loot from the fortress, and also Princess Pizzabones gets brought back to life and spends the next few days resting on her favorite pile of trash to recover.
Observations
Goddamn what a session. Between the magical items, the 112 HD worth of enemies slain and the over 26k gold worth of treasure, the party ended up earning 40,010 XP! As we do not split it, that was enough to level up Captain Nasty and Tiny Tina (even with the half XP for being companions), level up Toby and Huntsman both to the level cap and push Tina the Titanic very very close to reaching level 8.
The hobgoblins and the elves have been something I had planned from the very beginning of the campaign, and so I am glad they finally got their fitting end. I had hoped to maybe branch this off into a whole separate adventure of going into the Summerlands, but frankly I don't have the bandwidth to write and organize that so I am glad to just get this sorted. It did give me a reason for why the hogbolins are even in the dungeon in the first place, and also gave them a bit more of an interesting hook than just...being orcs that are named something else, which is how they are in regular D&D.
This whole session very much mirrored the assault on the orc territory on floor 1, months ago. In that it involved storming a semi-fortified position (this one being a lot better defended to be fair) and then coming away with absurd amounts of money and loot as a result of it!
The players are now I think moving firmly to floor 3 and it's weirdness, which I appreciate because floor 3 I think is where Stonehell really starts to hit its stride and offers a lot of very fun and interesting elements.