Averlorn Campaign - Adventure Module X1 The Monks Finest Hour: Fists of Fury!

RECAP from 10/13/2012 Averlorn Session

I have to say that was the most enjoyable battle we've had since switching over to AD&D - it was very cool. I was thinking about it a bit today and Amul really made the difference in that fight - first, he rolled a 20 to catch an arrow in mid air and knocked another one out of the air away from him while still in the entry tunnel after the two fighters had charged up the stairs to the left of the tunnel to engage the archers. After realizing that the arrows were poisoned, he fired the one that he caught from his bow and hit one of the tribal leaders that was charging towards the rest of the group at the tunnel entrance. This warrior failed his save and his eyes rolled up inside of his head and he started frothing at the mouth and dropped to the floor twitching and spasming in convulsions. Shortly afterwards, Amul finally turned invisible from the potion of invisibility he had taken previously, and ran up the stair with Narsil the Elf and Tobin's Ranger heading towards the archers on the balcony above. Before the two armored fighters even made it up the stairs they got swarmed by the warriors on the floor from below and had to turn around and fight them to fend them off. Since Amul had finally turned invisible when the natives reached the stair, he managed to quickly slip away from the fight up the stair past the two fighters onto the middle of the balcony overlooking the large room below. He fired his bow and managed to kill one or two of the archers on the balcony and became visible while the rest of the archers repositioned themselves further down the balcony and around the corner so they could get shots at the rest of the group and at the monk. 

In the following round, Amul realized that the shaman on the bottom of the stairs was about to cast something really nasty on the two fighters (Tony told us later it was hold person which could have been game over for those two guys if they had failed their saves since they were being swarmed by warriors) so he picked up a quiver of the poisoned arrows from the archer he had just dropped and fired two of them at the Shaman! The first one missed but the second one hit its mark before the spell was completed, and all of a sudden the shaman went all glassy eyed and dropped onto the stair with white froth coming out of his mouth and started twitching convulsively! Meanwhile, the battle below raged on with the two clerics in plate mail holding the hallway against a large group of warriors with Lorinar the Elvish Wizard behind them. Lorinar managed to cast his sleep spell and dropped all of the natives on the floor outside of the tunnel (including Skeorn, our Thuggee Cleric), except for the ones that charged our guide Quoyoga who suddenly turned visible in the middle of the room next to the central firepit as he was trying to cast sleep on the rest of the archers on the balcony! 

As if Amul hadn't already done enough to swing the battle in our favor, he was left with a stark choice - go through one of the doors off of the balcony to get out of site of the remaining ten or so archers on the railing, and effectively withdraw from the battle, climb down to the floor and risk being peppered by poisoned puffer fish venom arrows, or engage the remaining archers on the balcony in hand to hand by himself so they couldn't shoot him with their poisoned arrows! And wisely, he chose the latter option and luckily for him initiative was tied on that round! So instead of his usual two attacks with his fists of doom, since his weapon speed was 1 and their weapon speed was 4 (they were using clubs) he got to make four attacks in the round against the four guys around him! (when there is an initiative tie in AD&D you use the difference between the two weapon speeds - in this case it was 4 - 1 = 3 which meant that his attacks were three times faster than the clubs so he got two extra attacks!). And of course, one was a crit so he did damage and rolled his stunning attack and stunned one guy right before killing him, and the other three hits resulted in three more archers going down! It was like Bruce Lee just opened up a can of whoopass on a bunch of mooks and they were dropping like flies! 

Meanwhile, Rollo joined the fray on the stairs after charging the mob of natives there that were attacking the fighters and kept them from fleeing while the two fighters kept pounding on them from above on the steps. Narsil and the Ranger eventually managed to slay their leader after a fierce melee - Tony said he was a 7th level fighter after the battle! Meanwhile, Amul, I mean Bruce Lee, started Karate chopping the rest of the archers on the balcony and a few more went down and the rest started climbing down the large demon head statue at the end of the balcony to the floor below to get away from his fists of fury. Prior to that, the guys that had ganged up on Quoyoga had him outnumbered five to one and managed to drop him since he became visible in the center of the room before he could get his sleep spell off (he was lightly armored like our opponents). Seeing his plight, our Thugee War priest Skeorn, who Lorinar had awakened, single handedly charged them to try to save our guide. Two engaged him in melee and the other three started climbing up the rope to try to make it out through the hole in the ceiling along with some of the archers that had climbed down to the floor by this point.

Lorinar fired a few times with his bow and missed but Amul decided he was going to try to bring the lot of them down in one shot and aimed for the rope! It was a thick rope so it wasn't an impossible shot (Tony gave it an AC of 2) and he managed to hit it with one of his arrows! Then Tony figured out the rope's hit points after it failed an item saving throw to see if it actually took enough damage to break, and Allen rolled maximum damage or close to it and it did! Then Tony rolled to see how many guys took a d6 damage from the fall (they probably had less than six hit points) and he rolled a six! So one guy sprained his ankle and the rest of them were killed in the fall! Afterwards it was mop up time and Lorinar managed to kill one of the guys fleeing down the face of the statue with his bow and finally, the rest of them, seeing the futility of the situation surrendered! All of their leaders were gone, their children had managed to escape up the rope but the remaining archers, women combatants and warriors (only about 15 left out of 40 initially) had had enough and laid down their weapons seeing that they could not prevail. 

After the battle we found a +1 spear and a +2 longsword amongst them and a bunch of gems, a potion of flying and a nugget of Corbitimite around the leader's neck on a string! We asked the survivors where they had found that and they said that only the leaders knew where the corbitumite vein was located but if we could find it and successfully mine it, we would all be rich! Corbitumite is the fuel that powers the fires that drive the Dragonships and is a very valuable commodity. So we brought our prisoners back to the island and the villagers of Mantru were astonished that not only were their enemies not demons like they believed (they were all wearing scary demon masks), but they were in fact humans like themselves, and they were even more amazed that we managed to prevail against them and bring what remained of the tribe to them for judgement! So after they debated their fate, they had the remaining evil men amongst their enemies summarily executed (they were evil cannibals after all) and kept the women as slaves. We went back to the island afterwards and searched the big central room which served as their lair and found a couple of secret doors. Also, there was a tunnel leading through the big statue's head in the main chamber opposite the entry hallway that went straight for a ways and then turned to the right but since it was late we called the session there.

All I have to say is that Allen had the game of his life playing the Monk who was in his element against numerous low level lightly armored foes. That situation was really the best kind of fight for a mid level monk who is fast and has multiple punch attacks. I'm pretty sure he single handedly killed or poisoned like 15 or more of them out of the 40 (poisoned leader down below with arrow, killed another archer on the balcony with his bow, poisoned the shaman, killed another six or so archers by himself on the balcony, shot the rope that killed another six!) and I may have missed one or two in the count - it was a really fun and eventful session... 

TO BE CONTINUED...