The Battle of Sandpoint
The defence of Sandpoint against Nualia Tobyn's goblin horde. It ran across four sessions and the party won it, three phases to nil.
Why it happened
Because the party hit Thistletop early, killed the goblins' champion and a good part of the garrison, and withdrew without finishing the job.
Nualia had been waiting until she got the fiend out from behind the sealed door before attacking, and she had not found the door. Losing her bugbear changed her mind. Orik predicted it out loud during the interrogation, and the party's own read was the same:
"If I took a morale defeat like that, I might want to try to make them mad about it, and then use it, and move more quickly."
Which means, from one angle, the party saved Sandpoint from a battle they precipitated. It also means Sheriff Hemlock did not fail to defend his town. He left to fetch soldiers for a siege that was weeks away, and came back to one that had already happened.
Nobody has said that out loud to him. He may not have finished thinking it himself.
How it was run
Not as one enormous combat.
- The battle proceeds in stages. Each is resolved by opposed rolls between the two commanders — Grace for the town, Nualia for the horde
- 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. Spending a real resource — a spell slot, a use of divine sense — upgrades the die
- Grace commands throughout. The sub-commander changes each stage
- 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
Stage one — the river and the bridge
Won. Party 5, goblins 0. Sub-commander: Lucian.
Fire. Grace had woodcutters drag pitch out of the shipyards and burn the treeline across the approach, curved, so nothing could reach the gates without climbing through it. Stone spent the stage using thaumaturgy to make the flames flare and roar. Goblins love fire and are badly distracted by it. Advantage on the roll.
The raven. Thalanadil's familiar was the defenders' entire command and control — tracking the column, carrying written orders to the forward scouts, sweeping the southern peninsula. It is also what spotted the river crossing before it landed.
The withdrawal. Thalanadil's advice, and Grace took it: not a stand, a controlled fighting withdrawal back towards town. "I don't want to lose them. The point is to slow the force down." Shalelu ran it with six to ten foresters and woodsmen.
The river. Twelve to twenty goblins crossing on bundled reed floats, out of sight of the town, to get behind the scouts. Lucian spent a second-circle slot on scorching ray, aimed at the clumps so the fire would spread, reasoning that burning reeds put goblins in water and goblins cannot swim. Roughly half the crossing force never reached the far bank.
And as they burned, he saw hands under the water, gripping the floats, pushing the goblins across. They let go, and moved off downstream towards Sandpoint.
The bridge. The ballista worked exactly as intended: the goblins refused to approach the bridge it covered and went round to a second one out of its arc. That was the crisis point, with the condition stated plainly — if more than two goblins get into the town and disappear, they win.
The party had already pushed carts into the middle of that bridge as a makeshift wall — carts specifically, so it could be shoved aside when the relief arrived. They fought over it against goblins, zombies out of the river, and Lyrie Akenja behind them with a wand.
Thalanadil put a flaming sphere into the zombies and rammed it into them for the rest of the fight. Orik jumped down to meet them, took two hits, got grappled, and held. Lyrie dropped both fighters with sleep — Grace and Stone had twenty-four hit points between them — and two goblins got over the carts, which is the losing number.
Lucian killed one with scorching ray. Thalanadil put sixteen points of magic missile into Lyrie and told her to go home. She went.
Stage two — the North Gate
Won. Party 10, goblins 0. Sub-commander: Thalanadil.
A much larger force, drawn from several tribes, down the Lost Coast Road, three quarters of a mile out and closing.
Preparations. Every non-combatant in Sandpoint moved into the tunnels under the glassworks — which surfaced the problem that the party controls one end of that tunnel and not the other. Fix: one militiaman, in a boat, offshore, with Stone's horn, watching the far mouth.
Stone rode out with the scouts burning divine sense to sweep for undead and fiends, and picked up a fiend to the east he could not see or identify.
The raven was much less use this time, because the party had burned a forest down a night earlier and the smoke was everywhere.
It went badly almost all the way through. A goblin with a staff stepped out of the smoke, stamped, and drove a thunderwave through the line — Stone off his horse, Shalelu thrown backwards, and a horde through the gap behind them. The party never got the initiative back.
Then Nualia appeared in person behind her own line, laid a bane over Thalanadil's breakthrough, and the goblins around her pushed the whole advance back.
Goblins 7, party 0. Driven all the way to the wall.
The crisis point was the North Gate itself, victory condition hold the wall, fought with two guardsmen, four townsfolk with spears, Orik, Shalelu, and Aldern Foxglove in a coat with a rapier. The trees were gone, the smoke cut visibility for everyone, and there was nothing to hide behind on either side.
Lucian cast light on a rock and threw it out in front of the gate as a marked killing ground for a Channel Divinity. Grace picked the goblin caster out of the smoke and hit him twice at disadvantage. Thalanadil landed a sleep that took four goblins including the spellcaster. Stone held the postern. The caster answered with spike growth across the approach, which cost the defenders as much as the attackers.
One of the townsfolk burned to death on the wall.
They held it. And in the second wave, the party killed Lyrie Akenja, the goblin druid, and Chief Ripnugget — every officer Nualia had left, all three in one push, at one gate.
Stage three — the streets and the market square
Won. Party 15, goblins 0. The battle is over. Sub-commander: Lucian.
Goblins inside the town, in several groups, being pushed back in a running fight. This phase ran on wisdom — insight, perception, survival — with Grace's specialist troops, locals who know the streets, worth an extra die.
The party herded rather than fought. One force towards Junker's Edge, another down High Street onto Festival Street and towards Water Street and the docks, with the mill pond used deliberately because goblins do not swim. "I would like to drown them."
Then a runner: a woman with silver hair, a red demonic arm and a two-handed sword had broken the militia on the other side of town and was coming down Festival Street.
Both sides hit twelve. Everyone converged on the market square, victory condition kill or capture Nualia.
She opened with bless on her goblins and threw black flaming darts from the scaled claw at Stone. Thalanadil worked her with magic missile from a wand, deliberately at first circle for the extra castings — she put the arm up, took it, and her eyes glowed red at him. Lucian cast light on the ground beside her as a trap and spent his last slot on a healing word for Grace instead. Grace, out of superiority dice and down to a crossbow, taunted her.
Then Stone — who had been saving everything since the bridge, three months earlier — spent Divine Quarry, swung, and critted with a divine smite for forty-four.
The goblins broke immediately.
Afterwards
A column of soldiers crossed the Market Street Bridge with Grace's father at its head and Roland beside him, and scattered what was left.
The party went to fourth level and took about a thousand gold out of Nualia's rooms.
The relief the entire battle was fought to buy time for arrived after it was won.