Episode 22: Giant Deception

When last we left this party they had followed a dratted kobold through some traps into an underground prize-fight arena. After a fight that Evangeline growled her way through, they found a way out of the arena complex and back to the 1st floor of the lair. This is another catch-up story, so some details are lost with time. As a reminder this party is made up of:

Unit 2408, the Warforged (humanoid living construct) Barbarian

Luthis, the Kenku (humanoid raven who can not fly) Blood Hunter

Dancing Wind, a Tabaxi (humanoid cat) Wizard

Elniss, a Human Cleric of Ilmater

Evangeline, the Tiefling Paladin of Tyr

Upon reaching the 1st floor we return to base camp to rest up, so Evangeline scribbled off a note of our status to Rubis. We received almost immediate word back that we're to report to the surface. So, even though we're exhausted, off we go to the surface, to find Rubis waiting for us. He takes us off to report to Lady Laeral Silverleaf.

As we walk into the tower to report in, Evangeline immediately recognizes the person with Lady Silverleaf as The Right Hand of Tyr, the leader of all of her order in Forgotten Realms. She immediately drops into a knight-kneel in front of him and formally introduces herself. After that and a few more introductions all around, the leaders of Waterdeep proceed to lay out an audacious plan of attack.

They're planning a 5-prong attack to try to take back their city from Hallister's forces, and they want our party to pick one of the scenarios and join in. We will, of course, do this. This Hallister is really proving to be a problem

One prong is to retake the Great Library. Another the Garrison. Yet another an area holding prisoners. And a fourth city based prong is to retake the Cathedral. The 5th prong is actually outside the city walls, to ride out to meet an incoming army of undead. Where do we think we'd be the biggest help?

And here is where Evangeline's loyalties can get divided as she was ready to follow the Right Hand of Tyr out to meet the incoming horde of undead, but she also knew that was not the whole party's strong suit. In the end, the party thought we'd be best used aiding the forces taking back control of the Garrison.

The City Leadership gave us our meet-up instructions for in the morning and we were finally able to get some rest.

In the wee hours of the morning we meet up with the portion of the forces we're working with and introduce ourselves to the leader of the group. His forces are used to working together so he gave us a specific specialized task. Once we get through the south gate and approach the Garrison, their larger forces will defend while we breach the wall with the goal of getting the gate open so they can enter. Seems simple enough right? Once we enter the south gate though we have to be on alert as there could be wandering scouts for the enemy.

So our band left through the north gate, part of the forces heading to deal with the army of incoming undead, but when we got to where the road splits we continued to the south gate while they headed out.

The south gate is under ally command so we went through that fairly easily, but we were warned that while the area between the gate and the Garrison is fairly quiet, there have been scouts for the enemy found periodically.

Making our way through the streets it is eerily quiet for the most part, but when we got closer to the Garrison we did find an outpost manned by a pair of Fire Giants. Our party moved in to take care of the issue. This fight was fun as the party ganged up on Giant one to take him down while Giant two was under a hold spell, unfortunately it was able to break the hold though. So Evangeline does what she's good at and tanked. She didn't do a ton of damage, but she stopped Giant 2 from joining his buddy long enough for the talented party to kill Giant 1. Luthis does a ton of damage with his crossbow and Unit 2408 with his sword is very damaging.

After taking care of the Fire Giants we continue to our objective, the Garrison. Arriving there we find the gates down and secured and guards on the walls. Since our job was to get the gates open, we branched off from the main forces at this point. We decided that since Evangeline and Unit 2408 are more tank and less stealth, no stealth really, we'd just walk up to the side wall and put up the ladder. Bit brute force ish perhaps, but the real goal was to get the invisible Luthis up the ladder. See, Unit 2408 and Evangeline, while not stealthy, are great at getting the attention of the enemy, and the more they focused on us, the easier it would be for the stealthy and invisible Luthis to get up there and do his deception. And we did deal with some incoming ranged rounds but we got Luthis to the ladder.

And it worked. Luthis got up there and studied the guards a bit, then changed himself to "appear" to be one of them. See, the Kenku, while having no language of their own, are very skilled at mimicry. So Luthis got up there and did his mimicry and walked right into the guard shack over the gates and talked the guards in there into helping him open the gates, under orders of course. It worked. It was epic the level of skill this took.

Meanwhile the rest of us proceed up the ladder to ramparts as well, but Elniss decides to make friends with the guards using calm emotions. So we're just chilling up there ready to attack the minute the gates open and our forces move in. While we were up on the ramparts we also scoped the inner courtyard situation to see what we were up against. 3 Giants and a passel of ground forces. Cool, what could go wrong?

Well, the first thing that went wrong is Evangeline went to leap from the ramparts to the nearby Giant, but missed epically. So she gets up and actually charms the creature into picking her up and putting her on his back. And that's when the gates opened.

So we got busy doing what we do. Kicked off the fight with Evangeline smashing the Giant she's standing on and Unit 2408 picking up the nearest guard and literally tossing him off the wall and away from the fight. The guard died. The Giant, taking offense to his friend smashing him, picks up Evangeline and tosses her the same direction as the guard just went.

Evangeline rejoined the fight in full swing as the forces we were with dealt with the gate area and we dealt with the courtyard where we breached the wall. Again it was too long ago to remember exact details but Luthis was a ranged machine while Unit 2408 and Evangeline slashed and smashed their way through the Giants. Dancing Wind continued his spells of chaos while Elniss kept this whole mess alive.

But between the forces and our adventuring party we were able to slay the Giants and the rest of the combatants, securing the outer courtyard of the Garrison. We decide to take a few moments of rest at this point, catch our breath, while the leader of the troops deployed his men along the ramparts.

Of course, Hallister couldn't leave things alone for long because while we're catching our breath there's an almighty rumble like an earthquake. And out of the earth comes a Lich riding an undead dragon. Poor Dancing Wind puffed up to 3x his normal size in terror.