Episode 22: Good plans and awful luck

Well when we last left our crew half of us had planted 2 bombs in the town of Warwick and half of us had escorted some were-wolves to a safe place. All mostly successfully, though there were mishaps. This crew is made up of the following characters:

Fizzledorp, the Gnome Paladin of Epsu desperately trying to keep us on the straight and narrow

Vohn, the Kobold Gunslinger whose attitude far exceeds his size

Malek, the Tiefling Magus, quietly lofting magic via his arrows towards our combats

Lutor, the Asterion Cleric, boldly making friends wherever we go via food and booze

Thonk, the Orc Barbarian who believes he's a Mage, is not so bright, but oh so much fun to interact with

Meghan, the half-Drow Druid wondering what on earth she's gotten herself into

This crew ended with just Meghan and Malek in the mayor's mansion, awaiting the return of everyone else. Come morning time, in comes Lutor and Thonk. Apparently they met up with Vohn outside, so for some unknown reason Vohn and Fizzledorp go off towards the grove to find Shinara. So there was some breakfast between the four, and we snuck out to place the bomb in the tree line behind the mayor's mansion.

And because we can't leave well enough alone, the four of them come up with a plan to plant the last two bombs. In all things odd, Meghan is going to remain in drow form for this portion of the adventure. She's also getting concerned as she hasn't heard from her animal friend Paul in a bit, he had been sent to the grove with a note for Shinara.

But we decide to use some of Meghan's druid spells to break into the armory, steal the gunpowder, then seal it back up and break into the temple zone and seal that back up. Malek is going to be the provider of invisibility, and Thonk is the pack mule. Lutor decides to buff Thonk so he can easily carry the entire barrel of gunpowder.

At this point Fizzledorp and Vohn return, and Vohn's in quite the snit. He's quite mad at Malek and Meghan, mostly Malek. So we lay out the new plan, Vohn and Fizzledorp are not all that thrilled with it, but we decide to do it anyway.

The plan is to sneak up the far west path, which is friendly territory, to the edge of the tree line near the armory. Meghan is going to remain in human form for this caper. Then Malek will turn himself, Meghan, and Thonk invisible and we'll sneak up to the backside of the armory. Everyone else will wait in the tree line if there's a catastrophic failure. At the armory we were going to meld a hole in the side, walk in, Thonk will carry the barrel of gun powder, we'll leave the armory, Meghan would repair the wall, then we'll do the same stunt in the nearby wall around the temple zone. What could go wrong?

Apparently everything.

We managed to get up to the staging point without a problem. Malek turns the 3 point people invisible and we sneak around to the back of the armory. Malek indicates where Meghan is to meld stone, so she does. Only it turns out that that's not where the storeroom was. So we start scrambling and making some interesting choices, which don't really hide our actions as well as they should. But we did get the gunpowder needed. The bad werewolves start getting antsy and our silly selves up the ante.

By doing stone to mud on the city wall and then going the other direction to the temple zone gate. While the bad werewolves are distracted Thonk power lifts the gate open far enough for Meghan to slip under, then she lifts it farther with the gate mechanism so Thonk and Malek could get through. We then hid out of sight to catch our breath and fill the bombs. We planted the one along the northern temple zone wall since we were in there and then sent Paul back to the ones hiding in the tree line with a note to get back to the mayors mansion and warn the villagers outside the town walls that the bad werewolves are riled up and threatening action.

Malek decides to have Thonk, our not terribly bright soul, plant the last bomb while invisible. We stress quite clearly to Thonk that no "magic" is to be done, just sneak over, place bomb, and return to Malek. Meghan helps them get out the temple zone gate, then closes it and turns into an owl to fly away. Malek and Thonk get the last bomb planted, and Thonk managed to not do "magic", but things got a little dicey for those two trying to get back to the mansion. Turns out the bad werewolves had figured out that there was some shenanigans going on and were laying traps for invisible people. Thankfully, Malek was able to reason his way through and Thonk followed along without "helping".

Getting back to the mayor's mansion we find Lutor is helping by plying Vohn with booze. The little one does not hold his liquor well. He's also still in a snit. Great. So Meghan returns to human form and we head out to the villagers in the outskirts to report on the bombs, make sure they're aware that the bad werewolves are a bit riled up, and get some rest. What could go wrong?

Apparently our luck is still not with us.

We report in, I'm pretty sure the blacksmith turned new mayor was born cranky, and we wander off to rest up. Only, the bad werewolves decided that nah they're done playing nice and attack the outskirts.

Luckily the cranky blacksmith turned new mayor is pretty good at organizing and arming people, so when we roll out of our tent they've got villagers at the walls poking at the werewolves with pikes/spears and keeping a lot of them at bay. The mayor asks us to be ready for any creatures that break the line. Ok sure, that seems reasonable.

A wolf and a couple of werewolves break the line after a little bit and we go to town. Thonk and Fizzledorp rock up to one of the creatures, Lutor and Meghan to another, while Vohn starts shooting at things. Shinara had pulled Malek over to another section of wall for the time being. But it turned into a cycle of we'd kill one wolf or werewolf and another would arrive.

Eventually Malek returned to the fight, done with whatever Shinara had him doing, and starts adding his magical arrows to the fray. Which was good timing because yet again our luck started turning. While Thonk got in a massive hit on one werewolf, literally cutting its legs off and killing him instantly, a lot of us started missing entirely and at one point Vohn's gun jammed.

And then one of the wolves latched on to Meghan's leg and knocked her flat on the ground. The two werewolves delightedly ran over to her and proceed to knock her about quite a lot. Her animal companion, Paul, does not like this situation at all so he flies over and starts harassing the werewolves ... flying at their faces, beating with wings, hawk-screeching and the like. So Meghan takes this opportunity to slam her sword into the wolf, killing him.

She's still in dire straights, laying on the ground in front of two werewolves, so everyone springs into action. Malek does this odd stunt where he uses his arrow to slit his own arm, apparently reviving him a bit (he was looking quite spent) and he went back to shooting arrows. Vohn keeps shooting. Thonk runs over in a fit of, well, something, and proceeds to try to cleave through one werewolf and into the next.

Remember I mentioned our luck was dreadful?

So Thonk completely smashes on the first werewolf, but then his weapon bounced back at him, smashing him in the noggin and it was lights out for Thonk. He fell to the ground with a loud thump and is snoring. Fizzledorp comes over to heal him while Lutor casts sanctuary on Meghan.

One of the werewolves tries to break sanctuary but fails miserably, while the other tries and succeeds. Thankfully he completely missed Meghan or she'd probably be dead. So she decides to hop up, provoking an attack of opportunity which also missed. And then our luck finally turned decent again and we were able to finish off the remaining two werewolves.

As Meghan was hopping up from prone she saw out of the corner of her eye the villagers beating back the bad werewolves pretty solidly, so that's a good end to the evening.

And that was the end of lunch. Ok, that was actually 3 game sessions in one as apparently I hadn't kept up with this story line proper. Hopefully more soon!