Been pretty quiet around here, hasn’t it? Don’t worry. Things should be picking up again fairly soon.
Anyway, last night we had the latest installment of the Storm Point campaign. We joined our heroes in the middle of the siege of Storm Point, after they had just failed the skill challenge to ward the city against magical assault, which allowed the enemy to summon in a squad of demons to wreak havoc in the town. Most of the characters were out of action points, having spent them for rerolls in the siege skill challenges, and several of them were down healing surges and suffering penalties to die rolls because of lack of sleep.
Now, the past couple of sessions were fairly abstract, dealing with things through skill challenges and roleplaying, with little actual combat played out. I decided that I wanted this session to open with a tough, knock-down, drag-out fight. As it turned out, because of several things*, the fight was all we had time for.
As I said, I wanted to make it tough, but I knew that the party was a little low on resources, so I created the encounter as 9th-level for 6 characters, with 3 canoloths, 3 runspiral demons, and a needle demon (2,200 xp total). I then scattered the runespiral demons through the neighbourhood that I layed out using the very pretty city tiles from Rackham, put the canoloths in an open plaza, and hid the needle demon out of sight.
The party rode in on their hippogriffs, so I gave them perception checks to see if they could spot the demons, and they found them all except the needle demon. They decided to concentrate on the individual runespiral demons first, and swooped in on one. And, of course, that’s when the needle demon popped out and dominated a couple of them and had them leap from their flying hippogriffs head first to the paving stones.
Well, that got their attention, as did the fact that I had the unengaged demons set fire to buildings or eat civilians on their turns. They ganged up on the needle demon and one of the runespiral demons, while the ranger took on another runespiral demon from the air with his bow. Once they had put those three down, they went after the canoloths.
I had a string of crappy rolls in the fight, which made the remaining demons much less of a threat than they might have been, but it was somewhat balanced by the dazed cleric who could not roll a successful save, despite the extra opportunities granted by the warlord. In the end, the party defeated the demons and organized the citizens to put out the fires, and then we were done for the night.
I hadn’t expected the siege of Storm Point to last more than two sessions, but people still seem to be having fun, so I’m not too upset about it. Next session should see us to the end of the siege and (hopefully) the climactic battle with the commander. I’m willing to push it one session farther than that if I need to, but if it looks to run to three more sessions, I’m going to have to take some action to wrap things up.
But for now, it’s working, and people are enjoying it.
[[EDIT: Corrected name of the runespiral demons.]]
*Including the Winnipeg Zombie Walk, which went right by the store where we play. Back