Savage Wednesday: Battle at the Slave Camp
We completed session three of The Kids’ Game campaign this past Saturday. The session began with the heroes attempting to interrogate Devris Poyer, the doppelganger assassin captured at the end of session two. Since we’re all learning the rules, I decided to treat the interrogation as a Dramatic Task. Lander Foxglove, fearsome rakashan warrior, took the lead on the interrogation. It was less dramatic than it was a resounding failure. A club suit card came up on the second action, and the player’s dice proved most treacherous. The heroes discovered too late that Poyer had concealed a poison capsule in his mouth. He died after choking out, “You’re too late. They’ve reached the Valley of the Dead by now.”
As I noted last Savage Wednesday post, the fight against Poyer was way more one-sided than I imagined it would be, in part because of my remarkable run of bad dice rolls, but also because I didn’t pay a bit of attention to the guidelines about balancing conflicts using Combat Ratings. I decided to remedy that latter problem this session.
The heroes raced toward the Valley of the Dead. The sun was setting by the time they reached the general area. The road heading north had dwindled to an overgrown path, and the trees’ branches intertwined overhead, blocking out most of what little sunlight remained. (Nota Bene: Remember lighting modifiers for heroes who can’t see in the dark.) The heroes heard an angry shout and a scream of pain. They left the trail and soon found themselves atop wooded hill looking down into a small slave labor camp.
Overseen by three goblins, more than a half dozen poorly clad humans labored in a large pit, exhuming bones which they piled up near one corner of the pit. Two larger tents and two small tents stood to the south of the pit. Light shone from one of the larger pits, and more angry shouts and sounds of violence were heard from that tent. The heroes split up. Haldir of Elveim moved toward the smaller tents. Foxglove stalked toward the lit tent. Dark Halo skirted the camp to come up on the near the other larger tent and close to one of the goblin guards.
Haldir made the decision about how events would progress by stepping out from behind cover and shooting an arrow deep into the heart of a goblin guard, who dropped with nary a sound that could be heard over the slaves’ labors in the pit. Foxglove burst into the tent to find a massive orc beating a human man whose tunic bore a constable’s badge. Foxglove roared and attacked.
During the ensuing battle, Dark Halo took out the skaven alchemist and a skaven warrior. Haldir dealt with the other two goblin guards and a second skaven warrior. Foxglove found himself alone in the tent facing a foe whose Combat Rating was a bit more than twice Foxglove working solo. The fight did not go well for Foxglove. The constable attempted to aid Foxglove, and he did help a little. By the time Dark Halo entered the fight against the orc, Foxglove was seriously injured. The orc put his Sweep Edge into play. Foxglove, then the constable, then Dark Halo all succumbed to their injuries.
The slaves revolted, charging the orc in a suicidal bid for freedom. They managed to delay the orc long enough for Haldir to make two Called Shots. The second arrow to the head killed the orc.
At the end of the session, more than half the slaves had been killed. The constable was dead. Two-thirds of the heroes were unconscious and seriously battered, one with an injury to the guts, the other with an injury to an arm. Remarkably, Haldir was unhurt. Haldir made Dark Halo and Foxglove as comfortable as possible. The slaves told Haldir that the constable was a regular visitor to the slave camp. He’d been cahooting with the orc, who had the slaves digging for some sort of tablet that was part of a map to something called the “Chalice of Possibilities”. The orc had grown impatient with the perceived poor quality of the constable’s information about the tablet’s precise whereabouts. The skaven were assisting the orc in exchange for the bones and the corpses of slaves who died during their labors. The bones and corpses were taken an irregular intervals by skaven deeper into the woods in the direction of the dreaded Caves of Chaos.
And so we ended the session after a considerably more challenging fight and now faced with the slow rate of healing in Savage Worlds. Both Dark Halo and Foxglove are out of action. (Haldir blew the Healing rolls.) With Vigor rolls for healing permitted every five days, Dark Halo and Foxglove are suffering some degree of injury for possibly weeks. None of the heroes can perform magical healing.
The lengthy recovery time isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It does take a long time to recover from serious injuries. That said, it certainly doesn’t seem cinematically heroic. I hesitate tossing in convenient healing in the form of potions or what not. So, what I am considering it tweaking the healing rules so that they are less applicable to Wild Cards. I’m not sure exactly what this might look like. Making everyone a Fast Healer is a possibility. Reducing the time between Vigor checks to heal for Wild Cards is another. What I’m leaning most heavily toward at the moment, however, deals more directly with the nature of the campaign.
Foxglove, Dark Halo, and Haldir aren’t really Foxglove, Dark Halo, and Haldir. They’re really rather ordinary middle school students from Miami, Florida, who have found themselves thrust into a strange fantasy world in which they become heroic members of the Guard. The heroes have yet to find out what the book given to them by Mr. Sutherland does. The book opens portals between worlds. So, next session, I could have Haldir figure out how to use the book and return the children to Miami and their normal forms, at which time they’re all conscious. The session could then deal with the aftermath of the attack at Mr. Sutherland’s home.
