The North Gate
30 April. The Battle of Sandpoint, stage two — the longest session of the campaign, and the one that went worst.
The situation
The river crossing had faded away — the fight at the bridge ended it, and the party never had to burn the planking to do it.
The real force was somewhere else. A much larger body of goblins, drawn from several tribes, coming down the Lost Coast Road on the north side of the Turandarok. Three quarters of a mile out and closing. Shalelu and a handful of Sandpoint woodsmen were harassing it and could not stop it.
And there was at least one spellcaster with the column.
Underground
Grace's first order of the night was to get the town's non-combatants out of the way. She sent word to Ameiko: anybody too old, too young or too sick to fight goes into the tunnels beneath the glassworks, with soldiers on the entrances.
It is a good order. It is also the one that surfaced the thing nobody had thought about since the campaign began, and Lucian was the one who thought of it.
"We were never able to make it to the entrance to that tunnel. I know we blocked off our end of it really well — but we never made it."
There is a smugglers' tunnel out of the glassworks. It comes out on the cliff a couple of hundred yards beyond the wall — reachable from the water, or by climbing down from above. The party sealed their end months ago and have never controlled the other one.
Every civilian in Sandpoint had just been put at the far end of a passage with a mouth the defenders did not hold.
Lucian's fix cost nothing and was exactly right. One militiaman. In a boat. Far enough offshore to see the cliff. With one job: watch that hole, and if anything goes near it, run.
"Does he have a way to alert us?"
Stone: "I've got a horn."
The horn came back two days after the battle, dented in the bell, with an apology nobody needed.
Out with the scouts
Stone rode out east with the scouts, burning uses of divine sense to sweep the road for undead and fiends. In the mass-battle system, that converts into a better die on the stage roll. In the fiction, it is a paladin standing in his stirrups in the smoke, feeling for what is coming.
Thalanadil and Lucian swapped places from the last stage. Thalanadil went forward with the skirmishers to gather "a really small mobile reserve" of guardsmen — a handful of men he could throw at any local breakthrough — using the raven to spot them coming. Lucian stayed in the command post with Grace.
The raven was much less use this time. The party had burned a small forest down two weeks earlier and the smoke was now everywhere.
Two things came out of it
The first was a ping at the edge of Stone's range: a fiend of some sort, somewhere east along the road. He could not tell what it was. He could not see it.
He decided to ride a little closer and get eyes on it.
The second was a goblin.
It stepped out of the smoke with a staff, stamped on the ground, and drove a thunderwave through the line. It knocked Stone off his horse and threw Shalelu backwards, and a horde came through the gap behind them. Shalelu got Stone back on his horse and both of them galloped for the town.
That exchange cost the party the initiative, and they never got it back.
Grace breaks
The best scene of the session is not a fight.
The goblins were advancing fast, a quarter mile out, the scouts were in retreat, and Grace was standing over a map in the command post with the town looking at her. She has never commanded anything. Her player said so out loud, and then had her say it out loud:
"I can't do this. I'm lost. I don't know what to do."
Mayor Deverin got there first. She is not a soldier and has never pretended to be — she has spent the whole battle keeping townsfolk calm and moving them where they are told. She came up beside Grace, leaned in as though she were pointing at something on the map, and said it quietly, so it looked like map talk:
"Keep it together. Everybody's looking at you. If you panic, they'll panic. If you don't panic, they won't panic. I don't know what the hell I'm doing in this situation either. I'm just trying to stay calm."
Then Lucian pulled her aside. The mayor drifted off to intercept anyone coming towards them, so the two of them could talk without being overheard. He turned Grace to face him and put both hands on her shoulders.
"You've got this. You were raised for this. You've trained for this. You can do this. One misstep does not cost us everything — how we respond to that is what makes the difference. We need to take a breath, assess what's happening, and figure out how to counter it."
He apologised afterwards for having no useful spell prepared. "I brought mostly damage and a little bit of crowd control." It did not matter; the DM gave her the bonus die anyway, because that is what a sub-commander is for.
You were raised for this was the second pointer this battle at Grace having a military family. The first was "some of my dad's trained guys" on the ballista two weeks earlier. Nobody joined them up.
Nualia
Thalanadil sent his raven up and got a clear look through a break in the smoke.
He saw the line of goblins advancing. He saw Shalelu hauling Stone back onto his horse. He saw the goblin with the staff running back the way he had come — and then, fifty or sixty feet behind the front line, he saw who the goblin was running to.
A young woman in half plate. Long blonde hair. A greatsword on her back.
And her left arm completely red and scaled.
Then the smoke closed over her again.
That is the first time anyone in the party has laid eyes on Nualia Tobyn. It is also the moment everything Orik said stopped being hearsay. The transformation is real, it is visible, and it is not finished.
Thalanadil went ahead with his plan anyway: sleep into the goblin skirmishers to drop as many as he could, and his small reserve of guardsmen in behind to kill them where they lay. It worked. The strike force punched a hole in the line.
And she walked out of the smoke to meet it.
She reached forward with the scaled claw and spoke something "guttural and nasty", and a black blanket of obvious magic settled over the whole area. Bane. Thalanadil's men went tense and slow, and the goblins around her surged into the gap and pushed the whole advance back.
Goblins 7. Party 0.
They were driven all the way to the North Gate.
The wall
Crisis point. Victory condition, stated flatly: hold the wall. If they are pushed off it and retreat, the goblins take the stage.
The trees outside had burned away weeks ago. There was nothing to hide behind on either side. The smoke cut visibility for everyone, which suited the goblins better than it suited the defenders, and both sides were shooting at disadvantage into it.
Thalanadil raised the fair question — the party were already 5–0 up, and losing this stage only puts the battle at 7–5 going into a third and deciding phase. Was the wall worth spending resources on at all?
"They don't expend any resources getting in either," the DM pointed out.
Flightless: "Sandpoint's our home. Are we really just going to give up? I mean, this is our home, y'all."
That settled it. "It doesn't make any sense to abandon the walls. We haven't even fought for them yet."
What they had to hold it with:
| Two guardsmen | Light crossbows |
| Four townsfolk | Cobbled-together leather, one spear each, and four more spears propped against the wall to throw |
| Orik | Still fighting for them, still not run |
| Shalelu | Handed to a player to run |
| Aldern Foxglove | A nobleman in a coat, with a rapier, who turned up and volunteered |
The DM's description of Aldern is worth keeping exactly: "He's not really armoured. He just has his rapier. He's a noble guy. He's the guy who invited you all out for a boar hunt after the initial battle at Sandpoint, because he thought you guys did a great job and liked you."
An unarmoured aristocrat with a duelling weapon, at the worst point of the worst night, for a town he does not live in and a party he has met once.
The fight
Lucian's opening move was a trap he had time to build. He cast light on a rock and tossed it out in front of the gate — a marked patch of bright ground, five feet or so beyond the timbers.
"If they all group up right there at the gate trying to get through, I can roast them with the searing holy light of Sarenrae. We short-rested, so I have my Channel Divinity back."
Grace worked the crossbows and used her tracker's instinct to pick the goblin with the staff out of the smoke, then put two crossbow bolts into him at disadvantage and hit with both. Lucian followed up with sacred flame for nine. The caster did not die.
Stone took position at the postern gate rather than the wall — "in case we need a counter charge back out there to push them back" — with Orik beside him, both of them useless at range and both of them waiting.
Shalelu shot from the wall and ducked back behind the crenellations between shots. Thalanadil landed a sleep that took four goblins including the spellcaster. Townsfolk threw spears at goblins climbing the wall and mostly missed. The goblins came on in waves, better armoured than the ones at the bridge, and the caster answered with spike growth across the approach — which then cost the defenders as much movement as the attackers.
One of the townsfolk was caught by a spell and burned to death on the wall.
Where the session ended
Ten o'clock. End of round two. Mid-fight, mid-round, with a fresh wave of goblins inbound, the mage still up, and one figure at the back that the DM flagged on the way out: "this guy looks like he might be a bit more than the average goblin — he's actually wearing a chain shirt and a shield."
The next session was twelve weeks away.
What happened next
They held it. And it was the bloodiest thing that has happened in this campaign — for the other side.
In the second wave at that gate, the party killed Lyrie Akenja, the goblin druid with the staff, and Chief Ripnugget — every surviving officer Nualia had, except Nualia. All three of them, in one push, at one gate. Nobody in the party ever learned the druid's name.
Nobody recorded it. The session ended before it, and the next one opened with the DM recapping the win from his own notes.
It is the one part of the Battle of Sandpoint with no transcript at all.