Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, DCC-Style

[oncelor]

Over our last two gaming sessions I threw "Steading of the Hill Giant Chief" at the party in our mythic-Northumbrian campaign. They spent several hours scouting out the environs of the steading, over-heard giants talking about a "big feast" tonight with lots of drinking implied, and formulated a plan to explore, carefully and cautiously, after the carousing was over.

Then for reasons I'll never quite understand, in an impromptu charge, they dropped that plan and engaged the steading in a day-time full-frontal-assault at the main gates. By the 5th round of combat, every giant combatant on the upper level was mobilized and spoiling for some Anglo-Saxon blood. By the 8th round, a pack of dire wolves appeared behind the party, cutting off their only line of retreat.

And it just got worse for them after that. Every fighter in the party was slogging on with one or more shattered bones, having fallen to zero once or more. The clerics were casting healing spells as fast as they could, one with a -6 penalty to each roll from accumulated disapproval. The wizards were having the best luck with sleep and color spray -- the giants have relatively low Will saves -- but they couldn't keep up with the reinforcements. The wizards bought a little bit of breathing room for the party with a pair of large choking clouds that drove the giants back for a few rounds, giving the party a chance to finish off some stragglers and pray for some much needed healing. The thieves were finding it hard to get good criticals on the giants since their Fort saves are so high, and some of the best criticals involve Fort saves. The King of Northumbria lay unconscious, a victim of friendly fire.

Then the eponymous chief appeared, rallied the giants who had fled the choking cloud, led a renewed assault, and personally started killing characters one per round. I started thinking about plot ideas for a new campaign ("Slave Pits of the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief"??) while the players started to look for ways to stall their slow but inevitable demise...

But no! Like some sappy miracle, Idris "the Welsh Wizard" -- now in the front line of combat with his 14 AC and 9 remaining h.p.'s rolled a critical success casting color spray. With the bonus from the eldritch staff he crafted out of Atlantean steel and a basilisk's horn a few sessions back, plus twice his level from the crit, the spell result was 32, or "The spell creates an arcing pattern around the caster, forming a powerful rainbow shining down from the heavens toward the caster’s fingers. The display of light is visible for several miles. All enemies within 200’ of the caster’s location are potentially affected..." Twenty remaining giants and ogres, and a dozen dire wolves were immediately rendered unconscious for a half-an-hour.

Combat was over.

So three cheers to Blackie Smith; Joda; Delwyn Hunter; Doort the Pictish Barbarian; Sister Bee Bee; Tidraed of Gateshead and his trusty steed, Squishy the Octostag; Eins the Zealot; Idris the Welsh Wizard; Kuruus the Atlantean; Eric Bloodaxe, King of Northumbria; and his loyal dog, Bandit. Your plan was less foolish than lucky. But only very, very slightly so.

[finarvyn]

Your players certainly had a rather unusual approach to a classic dungeon adventure, but it sounds like a lot of fun overall.

Love the map, by the way. How do you make those?

[oncelor]

I asked them when the session was over why they abandoned their plan to sneak around, and they started blaming each other (in a friendly way of course) -- so even they don't really know how the reckless front assault came about.

We play DCC using MapTool (http://www.rptools.net) and Skype. The map is just a screenshot taken after the battle was over. The map of the steading is something I found online somewhere and plopped into the program. I've got a fairly simple campaign file framework I've built up for DCC that automates things like critical hit results, fumbles, turn unholy results, and spell check numbers, but we still have to use some of the tables by hand, like spell results or mercurial magic. I do prefer playing around a gaming table, but my players are scattered across the U.S., so that isn't really an option for that campaign.

I recommend MapTool for playing RPG's online. We've been using it for years and haven't had any real problems with it. It's very customizable and very functional. There is an issue with the latest version of Java, and so we all run older versions of Java to circumvent this. If anybody is interested, and if Goodman Games doesn't mind (I do reproduce some of the game tables more or less verbatim inside those files), I'd be happy to try to post the DCC campaign file framework for DCC that we've been using somewhere.

[Ravenheart87]

Wow, that's an awesome story.

[Skyscraper]

Very cool story there! Nice spectacular outcome.

As for why players throw caution to the winds and dive head first into the bad guys: I think they do it because it's fun. Players in my game, mostly very experienced gamers that are also GMs in their turn, do it all the time. Once, they went undercover to a costume ball full of important people, in an enemy's manor. They knew they had a lot of people to mee there. They had barely scratched the surface that they infiltrated the dungeon, started a fight with the guards, and barely escaped with their lives by stealing a horse-pulled cart.

It pretty much always comes down to that in the end. Risk of dying? So what. The cart chase was much cooler!