GURPS Fantasy Warriors Session 10: Solidoak and Ulrich, Mielikki and Dietrich

Characters:

Granmarg The Striking Vanguard, The Boulderstruck, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate
Pomegranite The Treefallen, The Spymaster

Mielikki The Field Marshal, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate

Thicket The Grandmaster Terramorpher, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate

The Battle Rages On

Solidoak bashed Ulrich with one of his massive greatshields, but the old man proved surprisingly agile and rolled with the impact, then thrust the other shield into the neck of one of Ulrich's men who'd fallen down.  In response, Ulrich unfurled a scroll of beguiling patterns; Solidoak closed his eyes, but Papaver felt excruciating pain behind his eyes as they tried to follow the impossible spirals.  Thicket stepped in and a stone spike shot up from the ground, impaling the woman with the bow-harp, and she ran back to the rear lines to tend to her injury.

 

He did it again, this time aiming the spike at Ulrich, catching him in the side, and the blood loss swiftly left him unconscious.  Solidoak and the halberdier continued to duel, both making a series of wild swings with no regard for defence and bloodying the other.  The woman with the bow ran in to fend off Papaver, then grabbed Ulrich and ran off as the Imperials launched a retreat.  Though Ulrich was badly wounded in personal combat, Thicket had also been injured, and the earthling troops went on to lose the confrontation, giving ground and retreating.

 

As the remnants of Granmarg's and Pomegranite's troops regrouped, they discovered that their commanders had been captured, along with Sigillaria, one of Pomegranite's lieutenants.  Swiftbreeze was again given command of Granmarg's formation, while Drirtollor returned replacing Pomegranite, and immediately destroyed the remnants of Tharivol's formation with spellfire from the College's remaining mages.

 

Ulrich, meanwhile, cast a powerful spell, and shortened the distance between the base of a mountain and the peak, in essence flattening it.  This allowed his formation to march directly into the earthling rear lines.  His archers made to barrage Swiftbreeze's troops with a volley of arrows, but some of Pomegranite's earlier spycraft paid off: their bowstrings had been sabotaged, which allowed the earthlings to mount a sudden charge, catching the Imperials by surprise.

The earthlings were equally surprised, however, when the Imperials mounted a staunch defence, and ultimately forced them into a retreat.  In another pass, Hans Hessen marched his troops up entirely unopposed, while further east, Mielikki made a decisive series of charges, crashing through two Imperial garrisons without stopping until they'd reached the Imperial rear.  Dietrich quickly mobilized his troops to intercept the earthlings before they made it to the Imperial camp, but it remained to be seen if they'd catch them.

 

Tharivol returned to the field, but he was dispatched once again by a barrage from the magisters with Mielikki's formation.  Thicket made his move, and, with the help of the earthling terramorphers, the bulk of his troops flanked to the Imperial camp.  Hans Hessen noticed the rumbling and his own magisters swiftly discovered the tunnels, and, though he was too late to stop Thicket, he was able to instead send reinforcements to Ulrich, leaving him with enough men to drastically outnumber the remaining garrison and Swiftbreeze's stragglers.

Dietrich and his bodyguards had finished their sprint and caught Mielikki before he could rampage through the Imperial camp, and the two engaged in personal combat.  The two sides cautiously moved up, until a magister on the Imperial side blasted Hawthorn with a beam of sunlight he'd reflected off of his focus, a many-bladed "blooming" knife.  Once the slowest of the earthling, Garmnrag, had moved up into covering positions, Mielikki ran up onto the flank and slammed his tree trunk club into an Imperial with an axe, but missed due to the momentum of his oversized weapon carrying him almost past his foe.

Carried by a swirl of sand and dust he conjured, Dietrich swooped in and landed a thrust on the off-balance Mielikki with a wrist-mounted dagger.  Now outnumbered, Mielikki held his giant club across his body with both hands, but failed to stop another pair of stabs, leaving him bleeding heavily.  On the other side of the battle, one of Dietrich's bodyguards mimed throwing the polished stone she held.  An instant later, a torso-sized boulder erupted from the ground behind her, banked off a tree, and caught Smugbrush in the back.

 

Hawthorn got some revenge, catching her with the edge of his flaming stone sword, only for the magister with the knife to take advantage of his split attention to blast him with another burst of sunbeams that blinded and stunned the rockman.  The advisors continued their battle, with Garmnrag punishing the magister with a blow from his long nunchaku that knocked him unconscious, and the axeman felling Smugbrush the treeman with a pair of mighty blows backed with the expertise of a lumberjack.

 

As Dietrich stabbed Mielikki again, Garmnrag ran down to help, but his attempt to smack Dietrich with his nunchaku did nothing as the assassin had covered himself in a shell of hardened sand with his magic.  Now on the verge of death, Mielikki fell back, and Garmnrag at least got in Dietrich's way, but the axeman pursued their commander, looking to fell another tree.  Garmnrag fell before Dietrich's assault, but Mielikki, despite taking an axe to the gut, stayed standing for now.

Notes:

The horrific luck continues: the first three damage rolls the PCs made were all 1s, and the first two damage rolls I made were 6s. This general trend would continue.  Pomegranite's player said I have to balance the game around their awful luck now.

 

After this game, we had a fairly lengthy discussion about what's not working with the combat.  Unfortunately, the player of Gramnarg, the main combat PC, had to go right away, so he wasn't around.  There were many ideas, but I think I figured out at least one of the big reasons that wasn't super obvious: defence rolls being so low means that it's better to just All-Out Attack, and Feint and Deceptive Attack have no use.  We'll try some things to raise defences going forward, but I'm not sure exactly what.

 

The other big issue is that, due to a combination of simplifying combat and having the advisors exist so that the rest of the players still have something to do during combat, advisor combat feels super swingy and non-tactical, while also dragging.  Maybe a 1v1 combat system would be better, even if it left them doing nothing for a while.

 

This fight had the axeman prove to be a thematically appropriate threat for the treemen in Mielikki's entourage (Hawthorn is the only rockman, in defiance of nominative determinism).

 

Hawthorn failed three consecutive checks to recover from stun.