This week I ran my last WFRP session - at least for the time being.
With Hildebard's player bailing out on us in the last moment due to the broken car, party went to their final showdown with cult leaders. Ugrim went to the Watch's commander and asked him for help though, so the guy woke up about ten watchmen – it was already around midnight in-game - to help them surround the cultists performing the Ritual of the Slumbering Earth Dragon in an old druid circle. They've also explained Hildebard's absence by sending him to round up support of Sigmarites and Verenians and follow them as quickly as possible.
Here was the situation at the beginning of the game: white D6-es are standing stones. Rubber is an altar where innocent girl - the same one party returned home after she got lost so many gaming moons ago - is tied up. As irony would have it, it turned out her mother, Brunhilda, is in fact Cult Priestess (purple D6) and now she's chanting the ritual with the help of three other cultists ( transparent dice). Six other cultists (green dice) are dancing around them. Meanwhile, Vizinni - master-swordsman and one of the merchants from the City Council is observing the proceedings. He is represented by Kill Bill D6.
Dieter and Ugrim ordered the watchmen to surround the circle and light their torches at Dieter's signal. Bullwick and Yuviel hid behind the stones in the right part of the map while D&U proceeded to non-chalantly enter the circle from the left.
Dieter: "Good evening everyone. I'm very sorry to disturb the festivities but it would be in your interest to surrender to us now, thank you very much."
Cultists were momentarily disturbed by Dieter's self-assured matter but Brunhilda starts quickly spewing threats, clouds cover Mannslieb, wind starts to blow and green-dice cultists all fall down to the ground squirming in pain. They start visibly changing, growing goat horns and feet and coarse hair all over their bodies. Beastmen! Manimals!
And now it's time for the first Insanity check of the evening: 1d3 Insanity points for failed Will Saves and I roll a one. Fuck! Well, Yuviel at least failed the check – as usual – gaining a big reward: Host of Fiends Insanity as represented by Daemon of Tzeench. I actually rolled most perfect Insanity for her: what with Sigmarites looking for albino elf mutant, she colored her hair black and named herself differently to blend in once again in the town.Split-personality is just perfect addition for her.
Now the party is the one momentarily disturbed – Dieter and Ugrim actually jump to each others' arms screaming at the top of their lungs – while the Beastmen continue to writhe in pain. But faithfull Bullwcik jumps into action with his sling, hitting Brunhilda straight into her head. Vizinni leaps towards Ugrim and Dieter with his rapier and starts kicking the Beastmen to join the fray.
It was a fun fight, made even more so because we were on the time limit: without Jay to transport us all home, we had to catch the last bus so we had about two hours to actually run the entire combat. We nervously glanced at the clock constantly and played our turns as fast as possible.
Dieter and Ugrim quickly got surrounded by Beastmen and Vizzini which gave the enemies nice fat bonuses on their Weapon Skill Tests, especially when combined with All-Out Attacks they were using. And, while Dieter insuccesfully tried to attack Beastmen, Ugrim quickly managed to kill one of them by slamming his axe smack in the middle between monster's horns.
Two Beastmen tried to ramm Bullwick and Yuviel with their horns, but not before Bullwick, the killer Halfling managed to kill my sweet spellcasting Brunhilda in mere two rounds! No jokes about halflings in this party anymore. Unfortunately, ritual continued with other three cultists chanting it. After dealing with their Beastmen, Yuviel and Bullwick started to make ranged attacks against chanters, downing them quickly but not before one of them slid the knife in the poor kid on the slab, ground started shaking and contoures of a giant earth-creature started to appear all around the druid circle: standing stones started to form into fingers, trees and shrubbery turned into hair, a small hill into a knee or an elbow, stuff like that. Basically, party was fighting in the middle of the Earth-Creature's chest.
Which meant another Insanity roll was due. This time I rolled 3 on 1d3 Insanity points which gave Ugrim and Dieter a nice big push toward Insanities. Ugrim was great in all of that, drawing attacks to himself and having giant Toughness Bonuses (I think somewhere around 6 or 7, with his armor included) it took about five opponents several rounds to actually bring him down to zero. And when I rolled a Critical hit against him, he went down bad with the worst-possible result on the Crit Hit Table: "opponent dies in a most blood-soaked and dreary way GM imagines". This was, BTW, enough to push Ugrim to over the edge into Insanity territory but, luckily, player had his one Fate Point he chose to spent now so that Ugrim didn't in fact died.
Dieter starts screaming "Ugrim! NOoooooOOOoOOOooooooooo! Reinforcements! Reinforcemenets!" and watchmen start running towards the battle. With Ugrim down, Beastmen naturally turn towards him and start kicking the crap out of him until he also fell down but not until him and Bullwick downed another Beastmen with the small help of watchmen. Getting a crit hit pushes Dieter also into an insanity territory – Third one in the same session! YAY! – and made him fall down and roll Toughness Saves each round so that he doesn't die. This, in turn, made his faithfull menservant Bullwick scream "Dieter! NOoooooOOOoOOOooooooooo!" and down Vizinni with a stone straight into his forehead.
While Yuviel stopped the ritual by killing all the chanters and prevented the creation of the Earth Creature, last thing Dieter sees is a whole bunch of Sigmarites and Verenians charging towards the remaining couple of Beastmen and timely arrival of Jay's character to heal him before everything turns to echoes, slow-motion and finally, dark.
But not to worry: everyone survived, Arnsberg was saved, XP was earned and insanities dispensed.
(GNN)
|
