Against the Giants: Session One, Part Two
July, 2009Where were we...? Most Unfortunately, we lose our trail on the party thief shortly before we reach the Giant’s Hall.
As an anecdote on our thief: We have other character thieves in the party but their player’s only show up sporadically; they just ‘hide in shadows’ until their players show up. Thusly, we are forced to rely on this chaotic neutral Halfling, who draws a sword on anyone if they dare to call him a ‘thief’. He insists on the term “Gentleman”. He is very useful to have around, but is a complete headache to the rest of us. He goes off on his own, hits on female orcs whilst slaughtering their husbands and sons, frequently passes notes to the DM on taking party treasure (we’re all Communists in the classical sense… with the exception of the “gentleman”) well, you get the idea.
So the DM takes the guy playing the Gentleman off into the other room, whilst leaving instructions on how large the structure is. We draw it out on the map while they’re talking; and eventually the DM comes back, but without the player. We all ask what’s going on, and apparently the Gentleman has completely disappeared, and the DM is now going to work with the party and him separately.
So, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth, we weigh our options on how we’re going to tackle these Giants. Having ambushed a small party of them in the mountains, we know they’re Hill Giants.
The cavalier eventually just says “screw it” and picks a door. We all follow and manage to get it open, and it immediately becomes apparent that we’ve chosen some kind of stables or kennel, as the inside is covered in droppings and clumps of fur.
Our cleric manages get off a spell of silence right before we see what’s been using this place as an outhouse: Dire Wolves.
A whole pack of em bears down on us; the fighters all rush in and the battle-line is formed.
Several Wolves manage to break through the melee and charge right for the line of squishy wizards. A color spray and two Burning Hands manage to keep them occupied long enough for them to be hacked to bits.
Our first giant of the night sticks his head out on a door to the right; the guy playing the Gentleman yells something in the other room and the DM goes to investigate. When he comes back, he’s muttering something fierce, and just says: The giant topples dead.
We come in to investigate and are greeted by our Gentleman, who is not acting very gentlemanly by torturing the orcs in the room for information and trying to seduce the giantesses here. Apparently this place is some sort of store room.
The Gentleman comes in and an argument ensues. For some reason he thinks he can get it with the giantesses while he's poking the eyes out on the orcs. We eventually convince him that all their throats should just be slit. The cavalier has a fit about killing the females, though so we just bound and gag them.
After a couple more fights with a giant or two we manage to find the stairs down. All of the fights we've had were extremely short and quiet, we're pretty sure that we've managed to remain undetected. The other elf manages to catch songs and laughter coming from further inside, so we assume there's a party of some sort going on. Good.
We assemble a new marching order, grab torches and lighted stones, and head down.