Let's Play Hell's Rebels: The Many Steps Monastery, Session 3
Intro
This post is part of my solo Hell’s Rebels campaign.
Our intrepid rebels continue their raid of the Many Steps Monastery, aiming to clear it of its devil-worshiping occupants and score a blow against the fascist rule of Barzilai Thrune and his bosses who watch from both central Cheliax and Hell.
Our previous post was entirely dedicated to preparing the remaining two fights in this adventure. In this one we’ll hopefully get through at least one of them.
[Player] Continuing the Delve
Our last position was room F4, and our last turn number was 19.
Turn 20
The heroes take a passage to map-east, entering a short corridor that has one door in a wall to their right, and one at the very end, both closed. Urist knows the side door leads to a lecture hall, and the end door to the common room.
They open the lecture hall door and see that the place is a mess that smells strongly of sulphur and dog shit. It’s probably where Nox’s hellhound sleeps, though it’s not here right now. Surely it will be ahead.
They lock this door and proceed to the common room one.
Turn 21: Combat!
The party still remembers their conversation with Yiliv back at the start of the raid, so they know there are still a bunch of redactors in here and that they’re all aware the group is coming. There’s two chambers left before they clear the whole place, so they’re in for some heavy fighting right about now…
Urist casts a 3-point Armor spell on himself, and the party forms up with Urist and Arcturus in front and the other three as a second line. Then Art kicks the door in!
They immediately a pair of burly devils with swords ready to fight among a group of tables and chairs filled with books and other documents. Just behind them are three hooded weirdoes. It’s a fight!
The party charges in, aiming to engage, but two additional hooded weirdoes who had been waiting just out of sight ambush them as they run past! Jade manages to parry the stab directed at her, while Art takes the hit on his armor, escaping unharmed.
Things devolve into a somewhat complicated scrum after this, as two of the hooded weirdoes prove to be spellcasting diabolists instead of rank and file redactors, and the devils this time are able to … secrete tar nets into their hands to toss at our heroes. Jade spends the first few turns of the fight entangled by one such net, though the devil it’s tethered to can’t get close to her first because Urist is in the way, and then because Rosalia stuns it with her Song of Humiliation.
Art dodges the net thrown at him and proceeds to heroically charge at the devil responsible for it, taking damage from its aura of hot stinky tar but eventually managing to wrestle it to death. A nearby adept keeps trying to ensnare him in a Dark Tendrils spell, but the Atlantean is far too beefy to let that stop him.
The regular redactors once again show themselves to be annoyingly nimble, as one manages to slip past Rosalia and try to stab Jade. Jade however, is still able to act at a penalty (since we’re using Fantastic Dungeon Grappling) and stabs him to death after he gets stunned by Rosalia. Urist downs another one, and Rosalia the last despite some close calls attempting to parry their knives.
Jania eliminates one of the spellcasters with a well-aimed and very large Ice Dagger to the chest, and Art choke-slams the other into oblivion after dealing with his first opponent. Rosalia and Jade then stab the remaining devil to death just as he recovers from his bardic stun.
With this batch of enemies dealt with, our heroes turn to the passage leading to the underground garden, the final chamber here in the monastery. Nox awaits.
[Player + GM] Analysis
This fight took me about three sessions to run, each taking between 1 and 2 hours. They were spaced over about a month as I got distracted by video games and dedicated much of my free time to them.
It does sometimes get a bit annoying to do things the Foundry way, since I’m the only player. When I attack I need to mark the target, select the attacker, roll the attack, select the defender, roll the defense, select the attacker again to apply damage, and so on. I imagine it must flow a lot better with more several different people playing. Maybe I can find a way to make a dual head setup here with one instance of Foundry running as GM and another as the player? Though that just might exchange one type of context switching for another.
The fight itself was fine. Nox did not intervene but I think the players sweated enough that she didn’t feel the need to. Also it was over in seven seconds, so there wasn’t really time for her to arrive even when it did start going badly for the forces of evil.
Coming up Next!
Boss fight! Boss Fight!