20210413 - Run 6

Guess we’re in a fight now.

Chad looks at the things that are happening, and in the sudden darkness, since he’s next to the doors out of this room, he moves to try to keep the doors from closing and shutting us all in. Nyla looks at the lamps moving around and decides that since they are moving, they are valid targets for eldritch blast, but missed the one she was shooting at. Caleb pulls his sword and gets ready to attack owlbears if they show up. I move up next to D.va and toss a dart at the lamp that pushed her off the dais, and then the real fight starts.

(meta: GM says “roll for initiative”. Everyone rolls in the D&D Beyond dice tracker game log. Everyone’s initiative rolls are monotonically increasing. GM comments on how if we could just keep making it easy for him he’d appreciate it, before the last initiative roll is resolved. … Last initiative roll is a natural 20.)

Caleb notices things are closing on us in the dark; the hoot-roars are still happening, but whatever is closing on us is not what is producing the hoot-roars (which we kind of assume are fkn owlbears, but whatever). Caleb says whatever’s coming towards us sounds like it’s galloping or trotting, like it’s got 4 legs, but nobody really continues speculating on what kind of exotic red meat food is going to come try to fuck us up. Some conversation occurs about how maybe we should shut the doors, but we don’t decide just yet to shut off our only path of escape from Lamptown. Nyla continues to not manage to hit anything with her eldritch blast and I try to tell her to embrace the totality of her surroundings, including the part where she’s half our size and so hitting anything should be easier for her, but apparently she still can’t hit shit.

The lamps on the shelf above us move and look down, one at me and one at D.va, and spit some kind of foul-smelling liquid at us. They somehow both spit on both of us, because of geometry. It pretty much just takes off all my recent rapid-growth hair, but D.va doesn’t do so well dodging the second. I try to use my spear to do a pole-vault up to the two lamp things that puked on me, but I end up face-planting into the wall and then the floor. I get up, get ready to dodge more vomit, and call on my ancestry to get hairy.

Chad decides that we are going to be fighting lamp people today and gets ready to close the door we came in. Then, 4 spots on the walls of the room we’re in start lifting - the whole section of the wall slides up about a foot and a half, and there’s a sound of marching feet from the corridors revealed. It looks like these corridors are filled with eight-inch tall terracotta soldiers, and they all march into the room a full five feet before stopping and levelling their spears and pikes at us. 

Somehow I figure these toys are going to suck to fight.

D.va: “Do I try to blow up some soldiers or do I try to blow up some lamps?”

Dr. Castle: “Well I don’t know. Did the soldiers knock you off a table?”

D.va: *goes back up the wall and Thunderwaves the lamps off the table*

So D.va manages to knock the lamp I stuck with a dart off the dais she just scrambled up. Well, it’s teetering.

Caleb keeps staring outside and finally I yell out ‘close the door’, and then there’s a tremendous SLAM which reverberates. And for a bit I think maybe that was a fuckup. And then there’s some massive amounts of scratching and snuffling at the door, and I’m suddenly OK that we’re in here with the lamps.

Nyla tries to hit something with her eldritch blast again, but carefully selects the one lamp that managed to endure D.va’s thunderwave to spare her ego, because she figures she’s going to miss again.

And she does.

The teetering lamp falls and shatters on the floor, its head skittering past me as I’m sitting on the floor trying to not get hit. There’s nothing inside that would have produced any sort of acid. The lamp that wasn’t teetering, on the other hand, punches D.va in the face. Twice.

I step back, center myself and then leap up the dais and stab the lamp-creature attacking D.va.

(party: “We’ve got 3 off-healers.” Cassie: “Yeah, but I’m also area effect damage.” Dexter: “dual fuckin use.” Jim: “like Iran’s nuclear program”)

Chad shoots at the lamp creature harassing D.va, hitting it - it’s not looking too great. The tiny terracotta soldiers now form up into ranks - 50 of them … turns out there’s 100 of them total … but 50 of them are facing me and D.va, and 50 are facing Nyla, Chad, and Caleb.

They’re so tiny and so cute and if we manage to get killed by 8-inch tall soldiers that’s not going to go well on an epitaph.

D.va somehow stabs the lamp-creature that has brought her to the brink of death off of the dais. I think that’s probably the cat nature, where she can knock shit off of other shit. I was all worried for a minute but then the cat knocked the lamp off the table.

Caleb mutters ‘don’t start none, won’t be none’ under his breath while glaring at the tiny terracotta soldiers forming up on Nyla. He moves up behind the 5-by-10 phalanx squaring up against Nyla and gets ready in case they try to do anything. 

The hoot-roars start up again outside, but I’m not really sure we care, right? Nyla looks at the tiny terra-cotta mans that are pointing their pokey sticks at her, and she just kind of tries to shimmy around the side of them, and readies an eldritch blast at anything that tries to come at her.

The two lamps on the lower level decide to start doing shit now, and both point at Chad and puke on him. So that’s a bit shit, we probably should have broken those lamps earlier. 

I decide to fix that and rush one of the lamps, but don’t manage to totally kill the lamp; Chad comes up from the door and finishes it off. After that, a squad of terracotta soldiers swarms Chad.

D.va stands up from her spot on the dais and shoots a lightning bolt into the last lamp-creature. 

Caleb then uses his psionic power of telekinetic movement to, as they say in the goliath tribes, ‘yeet’ young Master Chadwick up to the very bottom of the stadium seating. (meta: GETCHA HOT DAHGZ HEAH! GO BRUINS!)

 Nyla notices that the tiny army mans that were just surrounding Chad are now very disappointed at the altered tactical situation, and one or two of them have taken some incidental damage from improbable events. However, they were hostile to the party, so she moves into a position where she can frag a shitpile of tiny mans with a thunderwave and, well, does so. 

All the tiny terracotta soldiers near her shatter into bits. She also managed to piss off the one remaining lamp, which comes over and punches her in the face twice. I go up and stabilate that dude to death and then also lay the Hand of Mercy on Nyla’s shoulder before moving up to provide a target that isn’t one of the few party members that can inflict area effect damage.

Chad pulls himself up into the stadium seating, casually yet subtly touches himself for a bit of healing, and then looks around a bit as though the rest of us didn’t just see him shove his hand down his codpiece. 

[There’s a wonderful digression into the architecture and what a vomitorium is, but frankly I’m too drunk to remember it.]

Chad calls out that there are some things up there with him, but they haven’t moved against him yet.

Since I stepped up to block the next group of 50 tiny terracotta mans, they decide to try to attack me. Some of them move up into my space, and the others stab at me with spears for quite a bit of damage.

D.va is all “but if I thunderwave you I’ll hurt you” and I’m like “fuck that these tiny little shits are stabbing the hell out of me just do it” and then I heard something really loud and everything tasted like floor.

Apparently Caleb lifted up my thunderstruck body and punted me up onto the dais so that D.va could heal me or some shit.

We got done and killed everything. We took a bit of a rest. [We have not resolved a Short Rest; need to do that at the beginning of the next run.]