Dwarrowdeep #7

In the month of Haring sightings of the dragon ceased. It was not known if this meant she had moved to another region, or that she had roosted in preparation to lay a brood.

The Upper Hall north of the coal mines had been retaken, and now our party was being sent to explore the route north, following the tracks of the mine carts.

But when they arrived at the Upper Hall from the Lower Hall, they heard a great commotion. Dwarves were fleeing towards them: the Darkspawn had launched an attack!

They were urged to flee south, but our heroes chose to remain to help. A guard asked them to go to the Hall of Many Pillars, where many warriors who were wounded during the taking of the hall had been convalescing, and to lead them to safety.

Bertil, Milgrim, and Zunn (see PC profiles here) sped towards the Hall, fighting off a group of darkspawn in their path, and arrived at the doors of the Hall to find that the casualties and three dwarves caring for them had barricaded themselves inside the Hall. Several of the wounded were too weak to walk on their own, and Legnan, one of the carers, argued that they should remain in place and wait for the attack to be repelled. It took the party some time to convince the dwarves that they should flee, with those able to helping those unable to walk, but by then it was almost too late: a party of darkspawn accompanied by an ogre was coming down the corridor towards them.

The party barricaded the door once more, but it was clear that the door would not hold the ogre for long. But the three mages had a plan: they prepared their spells, and threw the doors open, and held the ogre in place with magic, so that it prevented the other darkspawn from entering the Hall, while our heroes attacked it. Bertil and Zunn were wounded by the ogre's powerful attacks, but eventually it fell to Milgrim's gauntleted fists; the rest of the darkspawn fled when they saw their champion fall.

The whole party then made its way towards the main square, where they would be able to flee south. Their pace was slow on account of the wounded, but they managed to avoid parties of darkspawn roaming the corridors.

Their hopes lifted when they neared the plaza, but were as quickly dashed when they found it occupied by a dozen darkspawn, under the command of a genlock emissary. They had no hope of defeated so many darkspawn, but once more our mages came up with an audacious plan: Zunn would cast a spell sealing the emissary inside a forcefield together with Milgrim, who would try to strike him down and so cause the rest to once more flee; meanwhile, the dwarves would try to cut their way to the south while the darkspawn tried to aid their leader. To help them get to the emissary, the three dwarf carers volunteer to don armour of slain darkspawn and infiltrate the darkspawn and to clear a way for our heroes.

The plan almost worked - the darkspawn were surprised by the sudden attack, and in the confusion the dwarves were able to cut their way to the south while the darkspawn were focused on Milgrim, but as they surrounded the emissary and Milgrim it became clear that the elven mage would not survive...

Then just as suddenly, there came a dwarven war cry from the south as warriors from the Lower Hall arrived. The darkspawn were driven off in the ferocity of the attack, and our heroes would survive to fight another day.

Prepping and Running the Game

I had planned for the party to explore the hall to the north of the Upper Hall this session, but as two other players were unable to make it, I decided to run something that was more appropriate for a smaller, all-mage party.

Once again, the challenge was to introduce some human (dwarven?) interaction in a dungeon crawl, so I decided to have the party do a rescue mission instead of a purely combat one. I needed a large enough number of casualties to make it a challenging scenario, but to make the role-playing manageable, I only had names and personalities for three of the NPCs, one of whom was Legnan, a pessimistic dwarf who would advocate staying instead of fleeing.

I was once again impressed by the players' heroism, with them essentially sacrificing themselves to allow the dwarves to escape in the final scene. No doubt their reputation among the dwarves would be much elevated after this episode.