Let's Play Hell's Rebels: The Many Steps Monastery, Part 4

Intro

This post is part of my solo Hell’s Rebels campaign.

We’re finally arriving at the end of the first adventure of Hell’s Rebels. Our players cleared out the entire Many Steps Monastery of pesky diabolists, and the only ones left are Nox and her dog, which await in room F7 just beyond their current position.

[Player] Boss Fight! Boss Fight!

No looting bodies or searching for treasure. Jania drinks one of Urist’s Paut potions, topping up her FP. Art drinks one of his own Minor Healing potions, healing the damage he sufered from the tar devil’s fumes last session. Urist’s Armor spell expires, and he casts another one o Arcturus instead, and then uses his Paut to replenish the lost FP.

Jade fishes out a Blessed Paper from her pack and uses it to imbue her sword with holy power. The group lines up at the entrance to the room, and go in.

The garden is a big chamber with a domed ceiling painted to look like the morning sky. Magical sunlight lamps provide illumination and nourishment to the grass and flowers planted here. There’s a shallow brook running through it, coming in from some subterranean source and returning to the depths afterwards. A short bridge over it allows crossing.

Nox awaits on the other side, and she’s been getting ready to fight just as the PCs have. She is fully armored and has her glaive in one hand and a throwing hatchet in the other. Her pet hell hound Mephiry stands ready to attack these new enemies as well.

There’s little in the way of banter. Nox says “I’m not surrendering.” Jade says “That’s fine by me.” And then the battle is joined.

Nox positions herself at the far side of the bridge from the PCs, waiting for them to get within reach. Mephiry, the hellhound, moves to stand alongside its master. Arcturus moves along the southeastern part of the chamber and then jumps into the stream. He’s a bit disappointed that it’s only about half a meter deep, but still it won’t impede his movements as he fords it.

Jania also moves to the margin near Art, while Jade, Rosalia and Urist decide to use the bridge. As they approach, Nox nails Rosalia with her throwing axe, gravely wounding the bard and nearly causing her to pass out. Urist halts his advance and runs towards Rosalia to render magical aid, while Jade charges across the bridge and engages the enemy.

Nox proves to be an adept fighter and avoids Jade’s blade while she readies her own weapon. Urist heals Rosalia with a spell, but her and Jania’s attempts to hit Nox with ranged attacks either miss or fizzle.

With Jade taking up most of Nox’s attention, however, Arcturus manages to run up to the hellhound, grapple it, and more or less break it over his knee. Before Nox can retaliate, Jade’s sword finally manages to find a gap in her heavy armor and wound her in the arm. The touch of the blessed blade proves to be the demon-possessed warrior’s undoing, causing her to momentarily burst into flame and fall down writhing before losing consciousness. A quick thrust by the same blessed sword quickly finishes her off, granting our heroes their victory on this day.

[GM] Fight Analysis

This fight took a surprisingly short three rounds, and went a lot better for the PCs than I imagined due to my luck in rolling for Jade’s last attack, which was a critical hit.

Nox suffered 3 injury from the penetrating cutting damage, and another 3 as a follow-up since the sword was (temporarily) Holy. That wouldn’t normally be enough to cause any additional effects, but the critical hit table told me to treat the attack as a major wound regardless of how much damage it did. And then Nox rolled a 18 on the HT test to resist knockdown and stunning, immediately falling unconscious.

I looked up the rules for major wounds and unconsciousness as the attack happened. It turns out unconsciousness is nasty business in GURPS. Recovery from it is much more complicated than the simple HT rolls for Stun.

Nox can recover automatically if she heals back up to full HP, and normally her diabolical Regeneration would take care of that in seconds. However, she can’t use it to heal those last 3 HP of Holy damage.

As there is no one around to help her, Nox will have to recover naturally. Since she has more than 1 HP we use the best-case scenario for that. It means she wakes up automatically after 15 minutes. There’s nothing she can do to wake up before that.

Now, I gave her a contingency back in [part 2][2] of this delve that would summon a pair of lemures when she got stunned. I could certainly activate it here, but that would lead to our full party against a pair of lemures and we already know how that’s going to end. And lemures don’t have the smarts or the resources needed to wake Nox up. The PCs won the day!

This is why I love GURPS. You can end up with an awesome story like “the villain was so unholy she was vanquished by the mere touch of a blessed blade” just by following the rules.

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