A New Journey

 Ooooph no updates since 2019?  Welp a lot has happened since then around the world!

Our previous party has long since retired to the afterlife.  The very next adventure took them out though sadly I have lost all the photos and sepcifics of that fateful journey.  Once of our own ranks actually passed (RIP Rob) and we miss him very much.  This very much took the wind out of our sails for over a year none of us wanted to touch the game even after going through covid playing with him over table top simulator (good memories).

We've finally decided to get back into questing with a fresh start and a much expanded game.  Norsca is now a finshed and HUGE expansion, even the dark elves got a small expansion resulting in a ton of new monsters, quests and even a few new warrior types.

So here we are with a new player, new party and ready to explore the old world again.  As usual no warriors are given a name until they earn it by leveling up!  Let's try not to get attached to this possibly cursed party...

As always the rules we use are freely available here please check them out and let us know what you think!

Our intrepid adventures are made up of a Dwarf, Swashbuckler, Outlaw and Kislev Shaman.  We'll go over the warriors in a bit more detail in the next episode.

The warriors were already staying in a town but as per normal in the Old World, Monsters have decided to take up residence and invade.  Now the obvious choice is to beat back the monsters, take back the streets, and divvy up the treasure!

The settlement is represented by a line of streets with 1D2 doors on each passageway.  We start off rolling one doorway under maximum so there are plenty of buildings to clear and all the chances to fail!  Being a starting quest there aren't supposed to be any really challenging monsters to fight and the worst thing we are supposed to encounter is a single minotaur (que forshadowing)...

The first house on the block is the Well of Doom which only contained three orc archers.  The outlaw failed every single ambush roll (not all just because the blog writter forgot about that rule...) throughout the entire adventure.  The shaman opened up by summoning a wolf which would aid us substantially up to a point.

It didn't take long for us to slaughter the poor archers with fairly average rolls and the wolf om-noming on them!  Afterwards we gain a cloak of shadows to protect the outlaw from both missle targeting and giving him a magic resistance 4+!

The dwarf opened up the bloody door with khornate symbols (what is wrong with this town?!?!) to reveal a chest in the next house.  There could be anything in there!  There could be a mimic (no really there could).

This time we only encounter 3 goblin bowmen. They did not take long to chop through.  The swashbuckler failed to wreck face dropping a goblin just to one wound but the dwarf jumped in and cleaved through all three with deathblows!

The goblins were kind enough to provided a venom blade for the swashbuckler which doubles damage after modifiers are applied such as toughness and armor.

The outlaw greedily opened the chest to find within....

GOLD!  But not just any amount of gold a usual roll for gold treasure roll.  After rolling 6 dice a single one came up and the whole roll was lost as per usual...

So with a nice magical weapon and a sack empty of gold we head further down the streets to clear the next hovel of these unwanted squaters!

You may have noticed we use special features such as the chest in dungeons.  Each dungeon room contains a chance to have some kind of feature in it, this time the monsters have errected a baricade to stop our progress.  These blocades can be attacked over as if we had reach 2 (meaning we attack a single space further than normal) however since we are on the attacking side of the barrier we suffer a -1 to hit while doing this.  Moving over the baricade will require both an empty sapce on the other side and full turn of movement.

To add to the party the shaman's den layout requires the orcs to be on a literal level above us causing a further -1 to hit penatly!

The Buckle Swasher started out by leaping over the baricade into a level ground gaining a major advantage, and promptly tickling the orc to near (but not fully) death whil dispatching another.

It didn't take long before we could establish a foothold into the room and surround, then utterly destroy the last orc archer.  Nice try with those baricades guys but no dice! We did manage to get a healing scroll and moved onward clearing the streets from the green skins!

Onwards to door number four!  Seems like we may be unstopable at this point...

Apparently the idea is that if they keep trying the baricade trick it has to work eventually!  

Sure we took a little bit of damage but in no way were we challenged by this one.  By this point we were getting a little cocky.  We thought the orcs had a treasure trove of gold however after failing a roll it turns out there was nothing at all.

Strolling down the streets, humming happily to ourselves and sure that absolutely nothing could go wrong, we approach the next house.

This may look like an obvious trap only because the room feature is labeled as such.  Since it's so obvious we know something is up before going in.  We can expect a trap AND a monster encounter at BL2!

Being overly sure of ourselves we march right in isntead of doing the smart thing of clearing the other rooms and gaining possibly useful treasure...

Time for some humble pie, the trap rolls up a single monster on BL3 table which is asleep in the room.  This turns out to be a giant scorpion, which is terrible at level 1 with toughness 6 and 2D6 damage!  The good news is that as long as we don't roll a 1 or 2 while moving it won't wake up!

The monsters that were rolled up however are not asleep and consist of 5 plague bearers!  These guys are nuts at Lvl 1!  Two attacks, plague (which permanently removes toughness if you drop to zero wounds) and daemonic.  We only have a single magic weapon, no magic spells that damage and three out of four warriors rolled minimal wounds (yes even rerolling 1's!). 

The shaman quickly used his were-wolf form but still failed to damage the plague bearer,  The Swashbuckler got lucky and one shotted a daemon while injuring another.  This would be the most productive turn we have for a while.  The dwarf failed his fear roll and without a magic weapon is at -2 to hit.  Only the Swashbuckler had a magic weapon and this was looking grim indeed.

The noble yet insane dwarf volunteered to take the hits for the team by taunting, round after round.  Doing this all the plague bearers were concentrated on him.

The wolf fell quickly and as the were-wolf form wore off the dwarf continued to drop to zero wounds for multiple turns.  Eventually with a LOT of luck and a dwarf dropped to 1 toughness permanently the plague bearers were finally defeated.

With the daemons defeated after much debate we decided to wake up the scorpion through a brisk stabbing!  Doing minimal damage t he battle began in earnest.  As long as the scorpion couldn't get his sting attack off the dwarf wouldn't start losing strength as well whilst taunting and we were able to keep healing people and stop from having anyone drop permanently.

After a number of rounds we whittled the 20 wounds of the scorpion down and emerged victorious! onward we went with the dwarf crippled permanently but still alive and much heavier sacks of gold!

The next room found us fighting a much more manageble ambush of 10 snotlings!  Though the dwarf went down at least these weren't nurgle based snotling and he just got back up after being healed.  

After the plague bearers and scorpion there's no way we were going down to a few snotlings and quickly hacked our way through them before moving on to the last room.

The circle of power was the last room however only atrap with a thief stealing the shaman's fur cloak!  We finally cleared the town of the menacing monsters, now I think it's time for our dwarf to retire, healing him at the temple would cost more than we can begin to afford!