Session 45 - Bolstered Strength and the Cost of Consequence

Plot points/Scenes

CONTINUING THE MASSACRE

• Round Three (cont'd)
• The obsidian guys around Gregory attack, and on eight swings hit twice for a grand total of two damage, then second wind
• The obsidian eye shoot a lot at Jalan, they hurt a lot, but he makes so many Con saves, he crit succeeds on one and no longer can lose concentration on Darkness from taking damage
• Gregory takes two blind swings at one of the obsidian dudes in the darkness with him
• Robin activates his boots of striding, and on a luck roll of 14 he doesn't explode, then springs over to Fritz and attempts to attack the dudes behind her - fails
• Fishfingers screams "YOU! SHALL NOT! PASS!" and all of the squishies etc. fire on the owlbear...but with some pretty shitty rolls,
• Vincent retroactively casts bless on Fritz, Jalan, Drant
• Sean loads his massive crossbow...oh noes
• Given his height, we have good reason to believe he's a goliath
• Round Four
• Fritz absolutely wails on Watson, unleashing a full action surge and landing five full attacks on him, also draining 4 strength on a crit
• Watson disengages the immovable rod, shoves it into Fritz's bag, reactivates it, then activates his jetpack and tries to jet away - Fritz uses her attack of opportunity to grapple and succeeds - we rule for flavor that the immovable rod in her bag is what's holding her down
• F: "haaaaaa-"
• DM: "well that backfired"
• Ivan starts to make a beeline for the squishies, but stops short at Brother Gurp and his Holy Cattle - attacks Nymph, who's with them, then holds...
• Nymph attacks Ivan but he unleashes his held action and deals 64 damage on a reaction (good lord, I deal 2d6 on a hit at best...Christ sake)...Nymph goes down, but deals some good poison damage on her way out
• Holy Cattle unleash their antennae attack and lower Ivan's AC by 2, Brother Gurp unleashes two attacks and hits with both!
• Alvira heals Nymph for 10hp, then hits Ivan with a crit'd booming blade for 86 damage, holy shit
• Jalan makes eye contact with Sean the crossbow guy...he's definitely aiming for Jalan. Jalan drinks a potion of water breathing, shoots his Velkaa'd-up crossbow at the owlbear, then gracefully dives into the river
• Owlbear tries to squish Fishfingers but his AC of 24 is impenetrable...he retreats, and the other hive-mind animals aso begin retreating
• Frank Mitchell attacks and barely hits Dan, deals 11 damage...the other two bounty hunters have spotted Jalan jump into the river and run down to the bank to go after him
• F: "oh my god these guys are assassins, they're going to wreck you-"
• Drant is continuing his running away, the rest of the animal hive mind is following him and he's not running full-speed...maybe we can still help him
• Methos (rolled by DM) gets a natural 20 on a straight roll, dealing 78 damage to one of the heavies next to Gregory
• Massicar the Nameless is "invigorated"
• Obsidian Eye - fail to hide, attack 'Teagen Perry', one of the bounty hunters on the shore
• Gregory attacks last heavy, does some damage, then shouts for the caravan
• Ivan is scared of nothing again and sprints away, out of melee with eight separate people
• Rust monsters make (illegal) attack with their antennae, take away 2 more AC, Alvira hits good (plus booming blade), Brother Gurp rolls bad but hits with the lowered AC
• And...since it's Gregory's turn, they all go again! And lower his AC to 11! Brother Gurp misses, Alvira hits with booming blade
• Ivan is looking like he's on the very edge of what he's capable of doing...
• Naomi follows Jalan into the river, Calypso sees Ivan run out of view behind the darkness and runs towards him, holding out his hand and shouting "stop! Stop fighting him!"
• (F: "I hope Calypso knows what he's doing..."
• (C: "He's with the Inquisition! We're working with him!"
• (F: "god damn it, Calypso"
• Sean can no longer see Jalan, or really anybody else, he moves forward - Frank Mitchell pulls out a hand crossbow and attacks Jalan...the other two bounty hunters
• Jalan surrenders...they tie him up and drag him on shore
• Sean points his massive crossbow at Jalan's skull and tells him not to move or he will no longer have a head
• J: "
• Round Five
• Fritz starts attacking, crit fails once, loses her grip on Watson and he starts to fly away - she uses her final tech point to taser his backpack, he rolls really well on a tinker's check for how well he designed the pack, but Fritz uses her final inspiration to make him reroll it and it works! It goes haywire, then a natural 20 luck roll from Fritz says it slams him into the ground for 37 damage...then her air in the bloodstream hits
• He goes limp
• F: "god damn it, I was trying not to kill him. Alvira!"
• Notices a green light illuminate on the suit, and hears Watson begin to groan
• The mechanical enlightenment guys attack Robin...four hits, the first one brings him unconscious...the final three kill him outright
• F: "ALVIRAAAAA!!"
• She takes an affliction, gains 6 strength and 30 movement speed for the remainder of the fight
• "Panic: Disadvantage on Dex checks and saving throws"
• Ivan teleports, then "yeets himself into oblivion" - turning tail and running as far as he possibly can
• Jalan commands Stewart to linger behind and track Jalan with his nose
• Methos attacks the final Massicar next to Gregory, kills him! Woot Methos
• Obsidian eye follow Ivan's lead and "yeet themselves out of here"
• Gregory sheaths his sword and the darkness disappears - then commands everyone to run forward to Streamwalk, he's going to create a defensive line...Fishfingers takes the front (he took on the largest owlbear known to man, by himself, and survived, without a scratch)
• Alvira runs towards Fritz/Robin, shouts "I'm coming"
• Gregory sees Jalan's in trouble, starts over there with Calypso and Methos
• Naomi jumps out of the water, grapples Jalan, and drags him back into the water
• Sean shoots Gregory...who goes down
• F: "...Alvira, everybody's dying!"
• Teagan and Lily...Teagan refuses to go into the water, Lily jumps in after Naomi/Jalan
• Teagan tries to attack Fishfingers and misses...Fishfingers doesn't even flinch
• Round Six
• Fritz just unleashes her attacks on the collective
• Natural 20 on the first attack...drains 6 strength, deals a shit ton of damage...another good attack, then another natural 20...drains 4 more strength and deals a shit ton more damage
• Fritz is now up to 40 strength
• DM says for buff funsies, she gets an action surge and second wind back, and can spend her bonus action for a tech point
• Holy god Fritz
• ME collective flees and tries to grapple their leader
• With a +18 athletics, and advantage because of the immovable rod, Fritz handily succeeds on a grapple check, with a 32
• F: "I feel like Ragnar, this is great, do you feel like this all the time??"
• Surround Fritz in a circle, get in a slumped stance, feel something gathering energy
• Jalan pulls a boat patch off of his robe of many things and activates it in between him and Lily, pushing her downstream slightly
• Methos hops on a horse, creates a rope with silk, attaches some scrap tinker metal to one end and tosses it over the bridge towards Jalan, then ties the other end to the horse and drags him out of the river
• Gregory fails a death save, Vincent hobbles within range and uses healing word...Gregory knows when he's been beat so he runs
• Fritz yeets Watson and Robin off the cliff, overdrives her Where's My Super Suit technology, hits him mid-air
• Her armor is momentarily ruined...but based on homebrew Strength-for-AC rules,
• Alvira runs onto the pleasure barge and starts performing emergency surgery on Robin
• Left temple to right below left ear, caused left eye to turn white
• F: "we match!"
• J: "just make you both mechanical eyes!"
• He also takes a lasting leg wound...talking about making the cyborg leg, how gold might not be the best metal, Fritz says she's got the perfect thing to make a mold out of, talking about making gold-phantasmium alloy
• J: "you can't kill all of us! Just...let us go!"
• He puts down his crossbow for a moment and claps...and Fritz lunges - a 5 foot step then a 40 foot leap
• Happy Gilmore's the crossbow over the bridge and onto the other bank, 30 feet, then unleashes two attacks in fury
• Stewart jumps down the bank, grabs the crossbow, and starts dragging it farther into the woods
• Teagan Perry somehow charms Fritz...she now thinks that he's a friend, he tells her to "kindly fuck off back to your friends and leave us alone"
• Sean and Frank both make an invisible box around Fritz, everybody starts backing up - Sean tries to grab the crossbow but Stewart grabs it and leaps across the river, manages to make it without mishap
• Fritz smashes through the boxes around her, sees Sean and Frank stagger
• After some debate with DM, she lunges forward again to attack Sean - sure, she regards Teagan as her friend, but she also regards the people at her back as her friends, and that bond is stronger and deeper and if it's friend against friend, she's going all in - DM lets her attack at disadvantage, still gets two hits in
• Then adrenaline stun hits in...they retreat as far as they can in a round, leaving their fancy crossbow behind, and she just drops to her knees screaming rather than chase them down

Next steps forward

• Jalan asks if anybody saw where Drant went, he just wandered off into the woods with those creatures
• Jalan suggests we retreat to Streamwalk, leave the squishies behind, take a break, then regroup and head back out
• Methos says time is of the essence, we should go out now
• Jalan says he'll die if we go anywhere now, he's very badly hurt
• Fritz numbly says that she agrees with Jalan: "I think we're lucky to have gotten out of that with only two losses. One, if Robin makes it through this. None, if we can get Drant back. We should not have survived that."
• We decide to retreat to Streamwalk, get help for our people, hopefully avoid Ivan and his goons, then strike out to help Drant
• Robin survives his surgery with Alvira, ends up losing an eye
• (Anna: "the entire Fritz crew, the characters I always play minus Vincent, are all missing an eye. Do I need to start wearing eye protection in everyday life now?"
• Our new crossbow toy that Stewart so helpfully retrieved:
• *have to pass a DC 25 strength check to load it
• 4d12+20 damage
• Action, bonus action, and movement to reload it
• "Exotic weapon" - special training to get proficiency
• Methos immediately gets super excited to have a horse-mounted (Fritz suggests pleasure-barge-mounted) arbalest-like turret, but Fritz will have to construct some mounting mechanism
• M: "if I buy you a drink, will you bump it to the top of your list?"
• F: "you're gonna need a lot more than a drink, buddy"
• M: *suggestively* "ahh, I see, I'm glad we're on the same page then..."
• F: "uh, no, we are definitely not on the same page, no stop-"
• But talking about fun upgrades:
• If it's not already a line attack, make it a line attack
• Maybe a slingshot (J: "how far can it throw a kobold?"
• Methos as aerial assault, with a glider or parachute
• Instead of piercing damage, maybe it just hits so hard that it's bludgeoning damage
• Naming it...we decide on "Thonker"
• DM: "oh nooo, now you've named it, now I'm gonna feel terrible for stealing it back from you"
• Fritz agrees to move the turret mount to the top of her crafting queue if Methos lets her make him (and make him wear) a little vest that labels him as a "service kobold" or "emotional support kobold"
• (because Fritz was like catatonic/traumatized after this battle, and Methos responds with "teamwork makes the dream work" - Jalan says he's a bit overly cheerful, Fritz says maybe we need a bit of that once in awhile, he's like our emotional support kobold)
• On the way to Streamwalk, Jalan asks where that methanol vodka is - Fritz says unfortunately the arm wrestling Calooshiis took our last full bottle
• Methos suggests alchemy-making him alcohol, which is not possible, Jalan asks Alvira if she has any rubbing alcohol, ultimately Methos decides to try to make Jalan some drgus of some kind: rolls a natural 4, Jalan's last luck...still a four
• Makes some kind of depressant, not too terrible but not really what he was going for
• Fritz rolls for stress after her buffness wears off, gets another affliction (disadvantage on wisdom checks and saving throws)
• DM hints that we were supposed to have been able to figure out what Teagan was
• Able to charm, and afraid of water
• After a long bit of discussion, we lock in our final "oh, duh" answer as a vampire
• And thus ends this chapter...we will see you in part v

Plot type

Session

Parent Plot

Act 4: Untitled