The Market Square
23 July. Twelve weeks after the last recorded session, and the night the Battle of Sandpoint ends.
The session opened with the DM reading the recap off his own notes, because the last one had ended mid-round and mid-fight.
They held the North Gate. And in the second wave at that gate they killed Lyrie Akenja, the goblin druid with the staff, and Chief Ripnugget — every officer Nualia had left, all three of them, in one push.
Party 10, goblins 0. And no recording of any of it.
Four at the table for the finish: Grace, Stone, Lucian and Thalanadil.
Stage three: the town itself
The goblins were inside Sandpoint. Not in strength, and not winning — several groups had broken in, were being pushed back in a running street fight, and one larger body was trying to work north towards the temple or round to Tanner's Bridge.
This phase ran on wisdom rather than on tactics: insight, perception, survival, the business of reading a fight you cannot see all of. Lucian took the sub-commander's seat. And Grace had specialist troops — Sandpoint guards, locals who know the streets — which the DM priced as an extra die on every roll.
The party did not fight this phase so much as herd it.
One force got driven towards Junker's Edge, the cliff the town throws its rubbish off. Another was pushed down High Street onto Festival Street, then towards Water Street and the docks. Grace asked whether the mill pond was an option and was reminded that goblins do not swim, and immediately decided that was the point.
"Send them to Mill Pond. Push ours towards the docks."
"Yes, I would like to do that. I would like to drown them."
It worked. "They're getting kind of desperate. You've whittled them down pretty good." A few plumes of smoke stood over the town in different places. Sandpoint was not burning.
Then a runner reached Grace at a dead sprint.
A woman with silver hair, an arm that is red and demonic, and a two-handed sword had appeared with the goblins on the far side of the town. They had broken through the militia and were coming down Festival Street.
Both sides hit twelve points. Everyone converged on the market square, and whoever won the fight there won the battle.
The last fight
Nualia, what was left of her goblins, and a handful of Sandpoint guards on the party's side. The victory condition was kill or capture Nualia, and she had no intention of either.
"She's mostly looking to cause as much damage as she can."
She opened with bless on her goblins, which is not the spell you cast when you expect to walk away.
The goblins were extraordinary. One of them rolled two natural twenties and an eighteen in consecutive rounds, dropped two guards, and put arrows into Stone and Grace. The DM's own verdict, delivered twice: "You guys need to recruit this goblin. He's awesome."
Two guards went down. Grace ended the fight on nine hit points and Thalanadil took a scimitar across the face for nine, and observed, correctly, that he could not take many more of those.
Nualia raised the scaled arm. Black flame wreathed the claw, and she threw two black flaming darts at Stone — one hit, one missed off an armour class of twenty.
Thalanadil worked her with magic missile, and did it the smart way. He had a wand with three charges left and he burned them one at a time, deliberately casting at first circle:
"If I cast first circle I get more missiles. It takes two rounds, but I get six instead of four."
Ten damage, then eleven. She put the arm up and took all of it. When she brought it down, her eyes glowed red as she looked at him.
"She doesn't seem happy with you."
Lucian did the cleverest thing in the fight, and it was a cantrip. He moved to within ten feet, cast light on the ground beside her, and centred the twenty-foot circle so that Nualia and the goblin next to her were both standing in it.
He was not lighting the square. He was marking a killing ground for the Channel Divinity he had waiting, and he was fully prepared to do it over and over.
"If she's going to waste a dispel magic on a cantrip, instead of making two attacks — go for it. I'll just keep casting light every round, and one time she won't dispel it, and then I'll roast her with forty-eight damage."
He never got to spring it, and it worked anyway. She had one dispel magic and had been watching him use that trick all night, and she was one turn from spending it — which would have cost her two greatsword attacks. She was cornered by a cantrip.
Instead of the trap, Lucian spent his very last spell slot on healing word for Grace, and rolled two ones. "Enjoy your five hit points."
Grace was down to a light crossbow, out of superiority dice, spent every luck point she had re-rolling a miss, and missed again. So she taunted her instead.
"Come a little closer, baby. I feel like taking you down."
And she said the other thing, the one that has been sitting in her since the boat:
"I'm pretty desperate to find out what happened to this baby. So we might be starting her villain arc."
Stone
He had been saving up since the bridge, two sessions and three months earlier, and said so out loud afterwards: he had deliberately spent nothing on anything else, because he knew he was going to get one shot at her.
He walked in, spent his bonus action on Divine Quarry — advantage on every attack against her, and extra radiant damage — and swung.
Natural twenty.
Everything doubles on a crit, including the smite. Twenty-nine from the weapon and the quarry, fifteen more from the divine smite.
Forty-four points, in one hit, from a man who had been holding it for three months.
DM: "And she dies."
Grace: "That's why we don't mess with paladins."
Nualia had been hit repeatedly and was nowhere near full when he reached her. The hammer came down on somebody already failing, which is exactly how it is supposed to work, and the DM said so.
"Somebody wore her down enough so that when you hit her it was decisive. That's just good planning. I don't ever feel bad about that."
Two goblins were left. "They're not going to stick around once Nualia got killed."
Party 15, goblins 0. The battle is over.
The column
With the square cleared, a body of soldiers came marching over the Market Street Bridge — the southern crossing the party had deliberately left standing all those weeks ago, for exactly this — and scattered what was left of the goblins.
At the front of it was Grace's father.
"Grace's father's back. He'll take back over the sheriff position. He's very pleased."
And beside him, Roland, who had been sent down the Lost Coast Road on the second of April to find him and force-march him home, and who had done it.
She had been running his town, in his job, while he was away raising the relief. Two sessions of half-heard lines snapped into place at once — "some of my dad's trained guys" on the ballista, and Lucian at the gate telling her you were raised for this.
The relief the entire battle had been fought to buy time for arrived after it was won. Which is the honest shape of it, and does not take anything away from either of them.