GURPS Free Cities Session 38: Battle of the Alchemy Lab

Darrude - Human Wizard (252 points)
Grohk - Goliath Barbarian (253 points)
Morgan Merkle - Human Mentalist (252 points)
          Brother Horace - Human Initiate of Avandra, the goddess of freedom and luck (128 points)
Sado Con - Human Martial Artist (257 points)

Day 86 (Cont.):
Weather: Strong Wind
Date: Coreli 17th, 2526
Grohk continued to be pummelled on the ground while he tried to rip the winged Forsaken's legs off, and Sado started crippling hands and feet like a madman.  Darrude smacked the flying one with a Shocking Touch, but was grappled in reutrn.  In an effort to get the big one away from the unconscious Brother Horace, Morgan fired a Kinetic Lash at it.

This worked, and it charged at him instead.  Morgan managed to parry and started backing up the stairs while firing off more Kinetic Lashes, hoping to cripple its legs.  The swollen one, already crippled and on the ground, decided to crawl up the stairs after Morgan as well.

The winged Forsaken switched its grab and started to snap Darrude's neck, stunning him, and Grohk returned the favour by wrenching (and crippling) its leg some more.  Sado took the one he was fighting down, crippling both feet and the weapon hand, but was too late to stop the other Forsaken smashing Grohk with its club just as his Stone Skin ran out, killing him.

Morgan continued to block and retreated up into the scroll room on the second floor, and managed to cripple the big one's weapon hand after several attempts.  Sado knocked the other Forsaken down by crippling both its feet, and it dropped its weapon while trying to attack him, giving him an opening, and Darrude managed to cast Spark Storm, despite casting out of his HP.

The winged Forsaken was stunned and lost its grip, but Sado failed a consciousness check with a 17 and fell over, and Darrude followed after a failed death check while casting another spell out of HP.  Morgan crippled the big one's leg, and ran away, leaving the rest of his party to die.

Notes:
This was a long combat, but by the end we still had about 2 hours of game time left.  The players decided they'd want their new characters to go elsewhere, as they were tired of exploring the dwarven ruins.  There were complaints that they were too big, which is fair.

I pointed out that, much like the slimes in the dwarven tomb, dumb luck made them run into a series of big tough dudes, which was unfortunate, and monotonous.  A lot of the blame here lies on me, because I made it so that such routes were possible.  I'll have to be more careful in the future.

The players asked what else they could have done to win that battle, and, other than things like "listen when I tell you that attacking its skull has no special effect", it came down to mostly meta-decisions.  Taking more useful spells, unarmed martial artists getting buffed up, not being a berserker, etc.

We discussed Berserk, and came to the conclusion that without somebody to help back him up, a berserker is going to die.

Morgan will join up with the new guys in Adusia, sometime later.

XP:
0 due to nothing being accomplished, no loot being cashed (Grohk had it all), and a bunch of people dying without recovering the bodies.