Our Heroes are assigned to clear out another cult location, in the spirit of religious intolerance. Death to the Gnoll Cult of Azkabam!
Encounter 10: Slippery Slope
Saribke and Mia are wandering in the cold underground catacombs of St. Coro's church when they stumble upon a thin chasm blocking entry to a large room, where gnolls stand ready to defend their hideout. Leaping over the chasm, Our Heroes charge into battle, and are able to catch the gnolls off guard with their incredible speed. The gnolls trigger a mechanical trap, causing the room to begin to fill with fast moving drifts of snow, in the vain hope of slowing Our Heroes down. The three gnoll guards are promptly wiped out, and Our Heroes rush up the stairs into the body of the hideout!
Result: Straightforward victory. The trap would have been formidable and perhaps tossed Mia and Saribke into the chasm, but between Saribke's teleporting initial attack and Mia's ability to teleport whenever a marked foe fell, the two handily stayed near the gnolls the whole time.
Encounter 11: Scuffle Hustle
Bursting into the main hangout area of the hideout, Our Heroes are greeted by four hyenas, two gnoll warriors, and a gnoll sniper. Saribke and Mia get the first strike in, and focus on the stronger gnolls. When the gnoll sniper takes a shot at Saribke, Saribke teleports all the way across the room and gets to grips trying to stop the sniper's exceptional marksmanship. Mia, left alone on the other side of the room, switches to killing hyenas in order to gain an immediate teleport and concealment bonus, making her way away from the threat of two gnoll warriors and their dogs towards Saribke. The sniper dead and Our Heroes reunited, the two make a stand in the corner of the room and narrowly fend off the gnoll warriors. After a bloody melee, the room is quiet, with only the sound of a cackling laugh from the room beyond. Our Heroes see a statue of a tentacled monstrosity, and Mia notices a compartment in it. In it is discovered a tidy sum of gold and a blob of what appears to be shiny spiderweb. Withdrawing the blob, it explodes, covering and merging with her clothes and starts shining very brightly: a Scintillating enchantment!
Result: Difficult bloody win. Our heroes get 600 gold and Mia gets a Scintillating +2 enchantment for her clothes. I suppose that's a good kind of enchantment for women's apparel to have.
Encounter 12: Echoes of R'lyeh
Making their way into the next chamber, Our Heroes encounter a tall Gnoll with a skull mask, flanked by 3 of his elite archers, with a yawning hole in the middle of the room. Growling some fierce sounding retort, the Gnoll Master raises a halberd againts Saribke and the two begin a duel as the Archers and Mia shoot at each other. Taking care to avoid the pit in the center, Mia and Saribke engage in a disciplined defense, picking apart the Gnoll Master and scattering the archers over the course of a minute. The Gnoll Master goes down after a fierce polearm duel with Saribke, and only one archer remains standing beneath the onslaught of Mia's powers. The last archer is slain, and the room begins to shake and rumble: a black tentacled mass floats out of the pit!
The slow, levitating mass catches Saribke off guard, grabs him, electrocutes him, and throws the nearly-dead body into the pit! A horrified Mia foregoes assailing the abyssal monster, hooks a grappling hook onto the end of her coil of rope, sprints towards the monster, and flings herself into the pit, the grappling hook holding fast against the rim of the hole as she quickly repels down to the dark chamber below. Saribke, clinging to life, is revived via Mia's frantic attempts to aid him, just in time for the hulking monstrosity to float down into the chamber, lit only by Mia's glowing garb. What followed was a highly-disciplined mobile defense, where dashing in and out of the entity's grasp eventually gave Our Heroes a hard-won victory, both near death when the shadowy blob of tentacles seized up and collapsed in a pile of dark goo. The gnolls' god was slain! Our duo collapse in exhaustion, but soon poke around the lair for treasure: none is found. The two climb up Mia's rope and leave.
Result: Very close call. Saribke was nearly killed outright between the three attacks and the fall damage, but Mia managed to pull him through with a lucky Heal roll. Once in the larger room beneath the well, they were able to maneuver enough to survive the Level 9 Elite. The light from the Scintillating clothes she had just received was actually very useful in the pitchblack room!
Analysis
The duo are a formidable force, and are indeed roughly equivalent to a 4-person party due to their damage output. However, the fact that they have half the hit points means that any one of them going unconscious is a crisis occurance. Should they fall to a swarm rather than a large solo creature, it is hard to see how they can reliably survive, particularly if Saribke's crowd control is lost. Mia has a useful 'escape' ability (teleport 3 and gain concealment) when she's hurt, used heavily in Encounter 11, means she's usually less likely to die than Saribke, who is a damage magnet. I think I will have Mia use her next few level ups to help the duo's survivability, and Saribke will try to put out more damage.
LOL.
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