When we left off, the party landed on the Isle of Fury, made friends with some fish men, killed a bunch of goblins around a hijacked rune stone, and used Bartix's powers (and sick mind) to disguise the battle as a mystic curse thing.
As the game started, the party found themselves at a literal crossroads: they had come from the east, from the beach they landed on, and had met a goblin party coming from the North. They decided to track the goblins back to their point of origin, which ended up being a hill crested by more of these 8-foot high runestones.
Mendas prowled around the forest at the base of the hill to see what was what... he saw four guys and a wolf on the hill, kind of poking around, getting ready to uproot more of these stones. Actually the wolf used a cougar miniature, and I should have kept it as a cat (using wolf stats, I guess). No one likes to hit a dog, and I had fun making "Mrroow!" noises.
The party coallesced and planned their assault. Mendas snuck up the south side of the hill, making his stealth roles all the way up to the stones. Bartix took the center, finding a firing position at the base of the hill behind cover. Rurik and Gudrun advanced from the north, getting about halfway up to the base before they were spotted.
What followed was our best-orchestrated fight yet (including the opening test against kobolds). One goblin won initiative and charged down the hill against Rurik, the only guy he could see. Rurik then got hit by a goblin javelin, and finally a blast of lightning from the hobgoblin warcaster on the hill. He was hurting, but the rest of the party snapped into action.
Bartix had been withholding his action, but fired off a Ice Field on the Hobgoblin (hitting the wolf and a goblin too) designed to keep them from advancing down the hill without slipping. It didn't damage anyone, but may have kept them in place. Mendas jumped out and delivered the first of many sneak attacks, I believe against the goblin. Down at the base of the hill, Gudrun had the last initiative, charging out and killing the goblin in one blow with a crit. This shouldn't be a huge thing, a goblin is pretty much the weakest enemy in the game, but the luck wasn't running with us last game like it was in this battle. It's fun when the players win without extra help from the DM; just the dice!
At the start of the second round, things were in place for a well-controlled battle. Mendas stabbed, Bartix blasted, and Rurik charged before any of the monsters could act. When they could, it was miss after miss. Gudrun joined the fray and locked up the battle: by the time the warcaster got to his third round, he had nowhere he could shift, and couldn't use magic. He went down really fast, helped by Mendas's Blinding Storm of Stabs. It hit these four dudes, and blinded all of them; I think it's the best Daily Power the party has access to.
At this point the party was Blessed from the Rune Stone of Ygdrassil, they had combat advantage nearly all the time, they had some warlord effects: the bonuses were getting crazy. I trust that the math was right, because the goblins died fast.
Once everyone was dead, the party enacted Bartix's plan of runic disfigurement and freeze rays. Sadly there was no treasure. Everyone slept, as the Dailies were all exhausted and the healing surges were running low.
Anthony showed up at this point, and picked up Hermiad, an Elf Two-Blade ranger. Uh, in game he was watching the boat or something. This was the first time we met the 4th Edition equilibrium point of five characters, although with only three players. Anyway, thank god we got to five swords for the next encounter.
The next morning the party went out to the crossroads to check out the scene of their first battle. They found tracks that came from, and went back to, the south of the island. The party followed the tracks back to a cave, which they thought might connect to other caves they had seen from the sea. Mendas and Hermiad scouted and found two more caves, one of which had no evidence of humanoid entrance. They plunged into the cave, hoping to find a back door. And they did, and there was a cave bear!
This was an unsubtle fight: the bear waded in and started clawing, while the PCs flanked him (twice) and stabbed from all sides. The bear flubbed a lot of roles early on, and missed four attempts to recharge his "maul everyone in the room" Claw Frenzy; but then he got it out twice in a row and the PCs were hurt. Still, they nicked the bear away without spending daily powers and taking too many hits.
A word on this cave bear: when I put him in the encounter, I wanted a bear, but the 1st level PCs weren't really strong enough for a 6th level elite. I let it go and hoped they would be 2nd level or have gotten some good treasure or something before they got to him. But this dungeon was open-ended, lots of ways to anything, and the PCs decided to start with this back-door entrance. I was pretty sure the cave bear had been eratta-ed, but didn't have the file downloaded when they announced that they were going into this room... so I let it side. The PCs faced a bear doing 1D8+5 damage, when the corrected bear, I know now, should have been clawing for 2D8+5. That would have killed some people, I'm pretty sure, so a good typo all around! They don't get off so lucky when they meet an Ogre Savage...
We ended things there, two encounters and about 250 experience points (but no treasure for the night! Another hazard of the free-form dungeon approach). We'll play again in two weeks.
Casualties:
1 Hobgoblin Warcaster
1 Gray Wolf
2 Goblin Warriors
1 Goblin Backblade
1 Cave Bear
15 Beers
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