The Barricades at the Singing Stones
4 September. Kvothe, Agatha, Ubo, Dravona, Sylvara, Caldris.
The whole night was one battle. Four rounds, three hours, and it still isn't finished.
What made it hard was not the enemy. It was the rule the party gave themselves: do not kill the derro. Every thrall who dies gets added to the twenty-two the party already owe Muranekk, and Muranekk counts. So they went into a fortified passage held by crossbows and fireballs with their own hands tied, and tried to win it by knocking people out.
The ground
Four spiked barricades across a passage barely fifteen feet wide, held by Brain-Captured derro with heavy crossbows, hook-hammers and scimitars, and at least two savants behind them throwing spells. Kvothe had scouted it invisible the day before and counted four barricades and at least fifteen derro.
The party's answer was a pair of rhinoceroses conjured by Ubo, with strict instructions: gore the barricades, not the living.
Fighting with the brakes on
Almost every tool used that night was a way of hurting someone without finishing them.
- Subdual damage in melee — full force, but the target drops unconscious instead of dead
- Dravona's Subdual Spell, spending a sorcery point to stabilise anyone her magic dropped
- Sylvara's sneak attacks, pulled into knockouts — including one critical hit for seventy-seven points that she deliberately turned into a nap
- Rhino shoves instead of the horn
- And a direct order to Caldris, who accepted it with the only caveat a wight would give: "Very well. I am not going to let them kill me, though."
The turns worth remembering
Agatha opened by stacking three Thaumaturgy effects at once — a booming voice and tremors rolling through the stone — and sold it well enough that the derro nearest her fought at a disadvantage for a round. She spent the rest of the fight healing everyone and, by sheer luck of the dice, catching most of the crossbow bolts aimed at the rhino.
Kvothe fought the entire battle invisible and a barricade ahead of everyone else. His best moment was quiet: he readied Silence and dropped it on a savant mid-cast, and the spell simply died in the derro's mouth. Later he gave up his invisibility to land a Hold Person on another caster and freeze him where he stood.
Dravona talked as much as she cast — the Friends cantrip into a stream of Undercommon threats that sent derro running — then shot the fireball-throwers with Scorching Ray and put them to sleep instead of killing them. She tried to Counterspell one fireball and couldn't: she couldn't see who was casting it.
Ubo kept the whole plan upright. Two rhinos, repeated strength checks to smash barricades, and constant healing to keep them on their feet. He took two fireballs, came out on eight hit points, and spent a third-level False Life to get back into it.
Caldris was formally challenged to single combat by a better-armoured derro — a proper duel challenge in Undercommon, which Dravona recognised for what it was. He saluted with his longsword and accepted, which turned out badly for the derro, who had picked a fight with a cold-radiating corpse that most of his weapons barely bothered.
What it cost
Ubo's panther, Pan, was killed by a derro fireball — and there was no time to bring him back mid-fight. Both rhinos were bloodied repeatedly and healed just as often; one got tangled in the wreckage of a barricade and stood there stuck while everyone shot at it. Dravona named them Mitt and Liz, and the names stuck.
The part nobody planned
Two derro died in that passage, and the party didn't kill either of them. The derro savants threw fireballs into their own line.
The reaction was immediate, and it was not sorrow:
Ubo: "If we kill one, we have to save another one. We have one dead." Agatha: "The fireball killed one." Ubo: "They killed their own." Agatha: "Yes — but how are we going to prove that?"
They are marching back to a creditor who counts the dead and has never once distinguished between how they got that way. Nobody in the passage was taking notes on their behalf.
Where it stopped
Three barricades broken, one to go, and the Singing Stones themselves still unentered. Several thralls are unconscious and accounted for; there are at least two more further in that nobody has seen.
And the hammer still hasn't been swung. The plan only really came together near the end, and it's a good one: knock every last one of them out, pile them up together, and free the whole lot with a single pulse of the Chain Breaker. Sylvara pointed out they could always tie up the sleeping ones and do it in the morning.
The session ended with the party at the last barricade, mid-round, having fought for three hours and killed nobody.