Fire on the Water
16 April. The Battle of Sandpoint, stage one. The fight the adventure path does not contain.
How it was run
Not as one enormous combat. The night ran as a mass-battle mini-game layered over ordinary play.
The battle proceeds in stages. Each stage is resolved by opposed rolls between the two commanders — Grace for the town, Nualia for the horde — and the party's decisions feed bonus dice into those rolls. A good plan or a competent sub-commander is worth a die. A real battlefield effect, like setting a forest on fire, is worth advantage. Time passes in half-hours, not six-second rounds, until something becomes a crisis point — at which the table drops into ordinary initiative with a stated victory condition. Winning a stage is worth five points.
Grace commands throughout. The sub-commander rotates. Everything else is negotiable.
The disposition
| Who | Where |
|---|---|
| Grace | Commanding, from the town |
| Thalanadil | Beside her, running his raven as scout and courier |
| Lucian | Sent out along the river with a handful of acolytes to deal with the undead |
| Stone | Making the fires terrifying, then the bridge |
| Flightless | Faking up cover, prepping horses, then the bridge |
| Orik | Fighting for the party |
| Shalelu Andosana | Out past the wall with the forward scouts |
Grace also asked, in passing, for "some of my dad's trained guys" to be put on the ballista covering the southern bridge. Nobody at the table noticed. It was the first hint of something that would not land properly for another three months.
Fire
Her opening move was the one she knew everyone would object to, and she made it as commander rather than as a proposal.
"I know what you guys are going to say to this, but I want to do it anyway. I'm the commander. Light the fires."
Not the town. Not the wall. The treeline — across the approach to the gates, curved, so the goblins could not reach the walls without climbing through it. Woodcutters dragged pitch out of the shipyards and set the woods alight.
Thalanadil checked the obvious thing — the wall is stone, the wall will not burn — and then made her case better than she had: "that would certainly channel them along the road. At least we'll be able to see them now."
Then Stone did something small and very effective. He has a knack for thaumaturgy, so he spent the stage repeatedly making the flames flare, flash and roar — "trying to make them brighter and more scary looking." Goblins love fire and are badly distracted by it. The DM handed the party advantage on the roll.
Elsewhere, the tannery's wicker baskets were being draped with tanned hides to fake up cover along the approach. "They would never fool anybody in the daylight." — "You never know, in the middle of a battle in the middle of the night."
The raven
Thalanadil spent the entire stage with his familiar in the air, and it was the only reason the defenders had any command and control at all.
The raven tracked the goblin column down the coast road. It carried written orders out to the forward scouts — "just like a carrier pigeon, only it's perfect." It swept the southern peninsula to make sure nobody had slipped in behind the town. And when the scouts were about to be surrounded, Thalanadil's advice was the correct one, and Grace took it:
"I don't want to lose them. The point is to slow the force down. They need to do a controlled, organised fighting withdrawal back towards town."
Shalelu, out in the dark with six to ten foresters and woodsmen, said fine and did it. The DM's assessment of her, in full: "Shalelu is pretty badass with that bow."
The river
The goblins did not only come down the road.
The raven found groups of them coming to the river with bundles of reeds — not proper rafts, little floats, one goblin each — out of sight of the town, and crossing. Not drifting downstream. Crossing, deliberately, to get behind the forward scouts and surround them.
Twelve to twenty of them at once, in clumps.
Lucian got within range and spent a second-circle slot on scorching ray, and the reasoning was better than the spell.
"I would like to aim for the larger groups so that it spreads quickly. The reeds are going to burn fast. And it may not even kill the goblins — but it's going to put them in the water. And I don't think goblins swim very well."
It worked. Reed floats went up, goblins went in, and roughly half the crossing force never reached the far bank.
And as they burned, Lucian saw the thing nobody had accounted for.
Hands. Under the water. Gripping the floats. Pushing the goblins across.
When the fire came, the hands let go. Afterwards he watched shapes moving downstream, with the current, towards Sandpoint — fast, and too indistinct to make out.
Nobody had an explanation. There was no time to get one.
The enemy's officers
Two of Nualia's people showed themselves during the stage.
Gogmurt — introduced explicitly as someone "you guys have not met" — was somewhere in the column spending cure wounds on the goblins the party had blown apart. He never came within reach. He simply made the horde harder to hurt.
And Lyrie Akenja, the mage. She had been leading the river crossing personally, and when it failed she came down to the bridge with what was left of it.
The bridge
The ballista did exactly what a ballista is for. A couple of goblins got within range and were decapitated, and after that the entire force refused to go anywhere near that bridge and went round to the second one instead, out of its arc.
That was the crisis point. Ordinary initiative, stated conditions:
"If the goblins make it into the town with more than two of them and disappear into the city, they win. If you keep them out, you win."
There had already been a fight here. An earlier detachment of defenders had been killed on the far bank, and the goblins held that end. In the middle of the bridge stood the party's own work: a pair of carts pushed together as a makeshift wall — carts specifically, and not a proper barricade, because they wanted to be able to shove it aside the moment Hemlock's column arrived.
Flightless asked the obvious question and got the answer that shaped the night.
"I don't see why we wouldn't just burn down the bridge."
"Because the sheriff needs a way to get into town, and this is the way he'd be coming from."
Thalanadil had a flaming sphere and floated the same idea — drop it in the middle of the planking, slow them right down, possibly burn a hole through. Grace said wait.
So they fought for it instead. Thalanadil put mage armor on himself and took cover behind crates. Grace dashed to the carts and raised her shield, and the goblins spent the next several rounds shooting at her and mostly missing. Stone and Orik stacked up behind the carts as a plug. Flightless got up onto a roof and started putting sneak attacks into things.
Lyrie opened by shooting Orik, specifically, because he was a traitor.
The zombies
Then Flightless, on the roof, made a perception check and saw what had been in the river.
Zombies. Coming up out of the water onto the bank.
Thalanadil put the flaming sphere into the middle of them and spent the rest of the fight ramming it into whatever was closest, taking the dodge action and letting them chew on him in the hope they were too stupid to move out of the fire. They were. He burned two of them to death that way.
Orik jumped down off the bridge and went to meet them with his scimitars, took two hits, and got grappled by a zombie. He held. Stone, watching his mercenary go into a fight alone: "Get them, my dude. We're going to have to do a little bit of trust here."
He earned his gold piece that night.
Lyrie
She had a wand of magic missiles, and she used it properly. She emptied six charges into Grace at once — twelve damage, then another six — and then cast sleep into the defenders and rolled well.
Both of the party's fighters went down. Grace and Stone had twenty-four hit points between them at that point, and the spell took them both.
Stone: "There's no save against it?"
DM: "It's based off your hit points."
Grace: "Good night."
Two goblins climbed over the carts while they slept. Two is the losing number.
Lucian tried to shout them awake with thaumaturgy and was told, correctly, that magical sleep does not work like that — somebody has to physically shake them, or damage them. So he did the other thing. He put scorching ray into the goblins on the carts and killed one outright with sixteen points of fire.
Then Thalanadil upcast magic missile into Lyrie for sixteen, and gave her terms.
"Unless you want to die — call your goblins back and go home."
She surveyed the field and left.
Lucian tried to close for a finishing shot and could not: "she's just far enough away that I can't get. Even if I dash, she's just going to move another sixty feet and be too far away again." The remaining goblins looked at her going and went with her.
Where it stood
DM: "That is the end of stage one. And we will move into stage two at the next session."
Party 5, goblins 0.
The bridge held and never had to be destroyed. The river crossing was broken. Nobody in Sandpoint had died who the party knew by name.
Lyrie Akenja was alive, and had now seen the town's defences from the inside. Gogmurt was alive and healing. There were undead in the river and no explanation for them at all.
And out beyond the smoke, the actual army had not arrived yet.