Warning: Potential spoilers below for the adventure, Lair of the Vermin Lord, from Triple Ace Games.
[This entry is from RJ. For some reason, he believes that paragraph breaks are a plot by Thyrm to expand the Hellfrost and so avoids using them. I know, RJ has issues. As usual, my comments in brackets and italics.]
We are at the store… we have a 300 gold scield credit with the owner; we decide to buy winter clothing, and two “firelance” devices. We decide to head back to the inn, there is a party going on. The three thugs that were here for the job are celebrating. They went to a ruined tower to the south and found some treasure. The party was for us, but since they are paying for it, the villagers are happy to congratulate them as well. We head up to the room…later that night there are some screams, the mayor’s aide comes and asks us to come down. We find the mayor and he shows us the greed- and perhaps magic-addled farmer, Penda, who is dead. It looks like he was killed by rats, which investigation shows chewed through the roof of the stone hut Penda was being held in pending his trial. There are rats all over town. We find a trail that leads to the town walls; we go out and follow the trail about a mile out. There are some humanoid tracks coming south then heading back north–we think they represent buck-tooth and two orcs, but the snow is quickly covering them up. We head back to town and the inn and sleep the rest of the night out of the bitter cold which had already begun to chill Lia and Cuthbert. We awaken early in the morning and start heading to the abandoned tower north of town. We follow the road north and break off to the right just where we were ambushed a few days earlier. We see the tower and we see movement at the top. Some of us react and start running towards the tower. Cuthbert starts to climb the tower where there was movement. Skuli runs to the gate, and the rest are a few steps from behind. A swarm of rats come out of the gate and swarm over Skuli. Cuthbert gets to the top and finds no one there. He starts to head down. The rest try to help Skuli, the firelance is employed but almost all of the rats jump out of the way. Wulf tries to reach Skuli but can’t and he is wounded, Skuli goes down in a sea of rats, and then the Master of Granaries goes down as well. Cuthbert finally arrives and helps to stomp out the swarm. We get healed back up and head into the ruin. We find a tunnel going down, two statues guarding the tunnel; one damaged beyond repair and the other with its head cut off. We realize that this is a temple of Ertha. Wulfwynn puts the head back on and its constituent stone seems too seal the head back on. Wulfen starts to change color, she seems to have been granted stone skin armor as a boon from Ertha in return for her gesture of respect. We head down the staircase, with Skuli leading the way. We all get down, there is a chamber with two natural columns of stone that goes off to the right. We head down that way and when the light hits down that tunnel we hear more rats and they start coming toward us.
[Let’s see…the party, yes, the three thugs that RJ references are the ones that had attempted to “intimidate” the party out of the original job to transport the grain from Dunross to Dalsetter. Unsuccessful at their intimidation attempt, they had stormed out of the Four Sheaves that first session we played. Apparently, they had some sort of “treasure map” related to a ruined tower in the south that turned out to pan out big time. The thugs were tossing around gold like no tomorrow. One thing RJ forgot to mention was that the thug leader had been wounded in their adventure. While wading through some water in the caverns under the tower, something “stung” him in the leg. The thug’s leg was numb and they believed it poisoned. Hmm…no, no, daHeadRat never does any kind of foreshadowing about anything…
Ah, the Tower…let’s just say that the response to arriving at it was a bit overenthusiastic. No scouting or intel-gathering happened (e.g., skirting around the whole compound to look for other entrances) and no care was really taken in approaching it. Unfortunately for Skuli, the manner in which the party spread out left him a prime target for a bunch of angry rats (normal and pony-sized) to swarm all over him. Even more unfortunately, Cuthbert’s tower escapade turned out to be both fruitless (i.e., he found no one) and removed one of the better fighters from the battle for a few rounds.
The players are also still learning how Savage Worlds’ combat plays out. The Giant Rats were able to almost completely surround Skuli gaining some pretty hefty bonuses from Ganging Up. I think folks still have something of a mindset that they can kind of stand and swing, stand and swing, stand and swing and survive (say like in D&D). That’s not going to work given the SW system…we’re still learning though (and shaking off some long-ingrained habits) and so I expect the group combat tactics will get better over time…or else the beatings will continue!
Wulfwynn was also badly injured during the battle and, as the party’s only healer, had some significant difficulty getting everyone healed up. The double whammy for wounds on Healing oneself is pretty damn tough. If I were a nice GM, I’d probably gently suggest that the party either have someone else take the Healing skill or think about looking for some alchemical/herbalism healing stuff to use when Wulfwynn is badly injured.
Oh, RJ forgot to mention that although Wulfwynn was eventually able to heal Skuli’s wounds, via the blessings of Eostre, she was too late to aid Ulfwyn. He joined with the rest of the village of Dunross in having been slain by Vali’s vermin and added another soul to the list that needs to be avenged. The party did use the rotted gates of the compound to create a funeral pyre for Ulfwyn and prayed that Eostre’s herald take him to the afterlife rather than the Hall of Echoing Screams. This was before the party continued on into the compound.]
