The Encounter

The Encounter

I GMed a Pathfinder group for several years. With one exception, the players were all new to the game, and to tabletop RP in general. At least when the campaign started. This encounter took place a year later. I'd been playing D&D and other RPGs since Advanced 2nd.

This won't be a long story -- I hope -- just a story about a single, random encounter I whipped up to flavor a session. What happened though was the craziest and most entertaining combat I've ever had the privilege of running. First, some background.

The party:

J - J was a monk character, prestige-classed as a homebrew ninja. He was the party's tank.

C - C was the party's bard. C was a solid fighter and good spellcaster. Good with the ladies, too.

H - H was a dwarf cleric who ostensibly was supposed to be the party's primary healer but everyone commented her player never bothered healing anyone. She (both the character and player) was the weakest link the group, and her player had a poor understanding of the cleric's role in an adventuring party.

K - K was a ranger, and a damn good one. K was a hell of an archer, and a voice of reason in the party.

A few background tidbits:

This was a homebrew campaign. Half the campaign map was a high-tech, low-magic civilization that were somewhere between Renaissance and steampunk. The other half was traditional low-tech, high-magic, high fantasy. It is here that our storied encounter takes place.

This is a fairly high-power campaign. While the characters must have only been around level 4 or 5 at the time of this encounter, they are very powerful specimens of their respective character classes, and each has several high-power and exotic magical artifacts at his or her disposal.

One of the neater, homebrew solutions I came up with was a set of wooden coins gifted to each of the characters. Using these coins, they could place their steeds in pocket dimensions within the coins. A horse head would appear embossed on the coin's obverse side, indicating it was occupied. This saved on stabling fees, etc. and gave them a place to conveniently store their horses when they went dungeon crawling in some abandoned mine or another. Thing is, H never bothered to take her horse out of her coin, and I never said they were in suspended animation or anything. While the rest of the party remembered to feed, water, and care for their horses, H left hers in her coin for the better part of a week. When she next summoned it from her coin, a stinking corpse fwumped to the ground at her feet, much to her terror. She quickly put the horse back in the coin, not knowing what to do. J asked if he could keep the dead horse coin, and she quickly agreed, wanting to be rid of it.

Sessions with this party of players usually involved a lot of bickering and in-fighting (what campaigns don't?). It wasn't everyone, and it wasn't all the time, but it got so that when they were in combat they would sync up like a tight-knit unit but out of combat they would crumble and fracture. We'd had many conversations about this, and they had been working hard at coming together better as a team.

As I said, the session in question was about a year or so into the campaign. The party were asked to provide escort and safe passage for a delegation of twenty dwarven nobles from point A to point B (the dwarves' home). There were two horse-drawn carts with two horses each, and the dwarves sat ten to a cart, with H sitting in what I will now call Cart One. The rest of the party had encircled the two carts on horseback and were riding guard.

I decided it would be fun to have the party face a random encounter on the road, just to see how well they'd come together as a group after so long working at it. I searched the bestiary and as they were traveling a well-worn road through dense forest, chose a pack of four mandragora. It's a small, plant-based creature with the ability to burrow 10' per round and shriek once daily causing nausea. Their slam attacks also cause fatigue and confusion.

Here goes:

It's a bright, Autumn afternoon. The sun is warm, and there's a cool breeze coming off the sea somewhere to the not-so-distant east. A north-south dirt road, well worn and rutted from decades of frequent travel, stretches over the gentle rolling hills. Much of the hills in the immediate area is surrounded by close elm and oak trees, and the ground is thick with undergrowth, this being the tail end of a rather dense forest that stretches off for miles to the west. The sound of polite, cheerful conversation in the otherwise guttural tones of the dwarven tongue is carried on the wind as two carts full of nobles, drawn by four well-trained geldings, enters the scene.

Ahead of the carts a human male, on the back side of middle age sits astride a tall mare, his vestments marking him as possibly a traveling monk or priest. His long, unkempt white hair riffles in the breeze. Beside him sits a tall, lithe elven beauty with carefully layered and immaculately polished leather armor over her simply-cut but still elegant peasant dress. She has flowers tied into her long and flowing hair. An oiled leather quiver hangs at her waist and a recurve elven bow rests comfortably in her left hand.

Behind and to the side of the carts rides a half-elf with shockingly bright and colorful garb, a lute slung across his back. He wears a sort of armor too, but only through careful inspection might one notice it among the folds of his elegant bard's clothing. There's no mistaking the lethal looking rapier hanging from one hip, catching the glint of the sun as he rides, nor the well-worn bull-whip hanging from his other hip. Like his companions at the van, the half-elf's eyes constantly scan the horizon in all directions, wary of highwaymen.

Heedless of any potential dangers, an additional dwarf sits with the nobles in the westernmost cart, laughing and carrying on with her kinsmen. Like most dwarves she is short, stocky, built like a brick shithouse. Clad in gleaming mail armor, she carries a wicked looking mace on her hip and the holy symbol of the god of dwarves stitched into her tabard.

With little warning, the four geldings drawing the carts whinny in terror and come up short, two of them attempting to raise up on their hindquarters with little success due to the straps binding them to one another and their carts. Conversation is cut off abruptly as a slithering, skittering sound catches everyone's attention both before and behind the party of travelers. From in front of the party, two toddlers come half-crawling, half slithering from the underbrush. Their mouths twist and contort in what appears to be painful attempts to mimic human speech. Their skin is pallid, splotched, and greenish-white. Tubers and vines seem to erupt from their midsections, propelling the children forward at an alarming speed as though they were extra limbs. The children's hair isn't hair at all but moldy leaves matted to their heads. Two more of the abominations slither onto the road behind the travelers, blocking them in.

---

So that's the setting. From here, I'll stop penning this like a bad short story and just tell you how the combat goes. Mandragora are CR 4 creatures in Pathfinder, with a 17 AC and 37 HP. Totally manageable. One round of combat in Pathfinder is as it is in D&D: 6 seconds of in-game time.

Round 1 is a surprise round in which all four mandragora use their Shriek ability, sickening half the party and most of the dwarves. Those that aren't puking over the sides of their carts, on each other, or from horseback, quickly rally to the defensive. The two mandragora in front use their burrow ability to dig 5' down and begin approaching the horses drawing the carts. Unaware of just what these creatures in fact are, none of the party are quick to dismount and fight them on foot, preferring to stay mounted. Unfortunately, not one of them knows mounted combat. This should be interesting.

During round 2, a mandragora burrows under the horses pulling Cart Two and digs out the space under the horse's front hooves, snapping one like kindling. The horse falls screaming to one side, pulling the other horse to which he's tethered along for the fall, and turning Cart Two onto its right side, spilling out the ten unarmed, frightened dwarves. K's horse is also ankle-snapped by a mandragora, spilling her onto the ground. J hops down from his horse to do battle and is hit with a slam attack. He fails his save and is confused for four rounds. This round, he attacks and severely injures K.

H, in an attempt to be a hero to her people, gets this far in her thinking: "These are plant-based. Plants hate fire. Cool." She then summons two fire elementals to combat the plant creatures. A decent attempt in theory, except I asked H's player where the elementals were placed and she said, "One here, between the cart I'm in and the closest approaching monster. The other, here." She then points at the cart she's standing in.

"In the cart?" I ask, expecting her to correct herself immediately.

"Yes."

A hush falls over the table.

"You're sure." The doubt in my tone was ample final warning. The whooshing sound heard around the table was the warning going right over her head.

"Absolutely." Complete confidence in her decision. No take-backsies.

"Alright. H summons a fire elemental. On a crowded cart full of innocent, flammable dwarves."

"Oh shit," I hear her mutter. The rest of the player shake their heads in disbelief.

"A... wooden... cart," I continue slowly for maximum effect. It works.

"God dammit," she half-laughs, half-shouts.

The party is now quickly divided in two. One is confused and I get to roll on a random table to see what he does for the next few rounds. Another is too busy trying to undo her fiery mistake to actually help matters. The bard and the ranger must now fight off the four mandragora on their own. To their credit, they do rather well.

It's round 3.. maybe 4. This was a few years ago and I don't remember the exact turn order or any of that nonsense; just the highlights. H forgets that since she's the one that summoned the creatures, she could just as easily dismiss them. In fact, it's a free action. And she has the Create Water spell that could put out the flaming dwarves easily. One of the mandragora climbs up into the flaming cart (int of 8, not the brightest creatures, and now there's barbecue to be had!) and rips the throat out of one of the dwarven diplomats. H commands her elementals to grapple and pull the beast out of the cart. Then in an effort to get rid of the fire problem without thinking things through again (noticing a pattern, yet?), she sends them westward with a shooing gesture.

"You're dismissing them?"

"No, I want them to carry that thing away from the dwarves. That way."

"Just so I'm clear, you want the fire elementals to leave the road going west with the creature?" Another whoosh. C's player tries desperately to interject but it's too late. She answers.

"Yes."

"Alright," I sigh with a dejected note. "H's fire elementals move west. Into the dense forest."

The collective groan at the table was punctuated only by H's player shouting an obscenity.

"Moving on," I said, trying hard as hell to maintain a grave, serious tone for the combat. It wasn't easy; I wanted so much to bust up laughing, but I knew there would be time enough later for that.

The fire elementals created a raging inferno of a forest fire that would end up decimating dozens of acres of woodlands, much to K's absolute horror. Meanwhile, I rolled to see what J would do that round and it came up, "Acts normally."

"Okay," I told J's player. "You've got a few rounds left of confusion. But for now you get to act normally. What do you do?"

He smiled. "I don't want to hurt anyone else, so I need to take myself out of the fight until this is over. Remember H's coin?"

Confused looks are exchanged around the table.

"Y...yeah." I wince, not knowing where this is going.

"I flip it directly up into the air above me and summon her horse."

"The dead one." I'm so proud of him. I know where he's going with this. I love when players come up with creative solutions. He's getting extra XP for this one. Not much, but it won't go unrewarded.

"Yup." He grins.

"Okay," I smile. "A horse's corpse appears ten feet above you in midair and comes crashing down on you, pinning you to the ground. It may be decaying, but it's still a hell of a lot heavier than you are. You can't move."

Combat continues fairly normally, with the cleric casting Create Water to douse Cart One and put out the burning dwarves. Those from Cart Two that spilled out are now witnessing the haphazard chaos all around them and realize how incompetent their guards are, so they go running eastward toward the coast (it's about a mile away), out of the combat, and toward more potential dangers. The party have now lost more than half their charges (10 fleeing from Cart Two and 1 dead in Cart One). Everyone left alive is badly burned, moaning, and screaming.

The two remaining party members have managed between them to dispatch the rest of the mandragoras but during the round immediately following his ingenious move to pin himself under a half-ton animal, J's next turn on the random action table reads, "Attacks nearest creature." The book doesn't specify whether said creature must be alive.

"J," I say, smiling openly now that most of the combat is over, "you expend the rest of your ki points for the day in a single attack."

"Holy...." He groans. His face goes pale. He thinks I've had him escape and attack his friends again. And with something special enough to burn all his remaining ki points (not something as a PC he's capable of doing in a single attack on his own).

I explain. "Well it says here you must attack the nearest creature. And since the nearest creature, living or dead, is currently crushing you... you execute a Bruce Lee-style one-inch punch that launches the horse two hundred feet into the air." Laughter all 'round.

As the combat winds down, H remembers she can dismiss her elementals and does so, then abandons the charred dwarves to go burn through all her potential healing spells for the day casting Create Water in an attempt to put out the forest fire she started. Now out of rounds, J's head clears. He sits up and surveys the scene, wondering what he missed. C's pretty badly banged-up. So is K. There are two flailing, screaming horses with snapped ankles in the road, another horse panicked out of his mind but lashed to one of the injured, and two others stamping the dirt nervously over the whole affair. Half their charge are gone without a trace and the other half are charred and dying. The forest to the west is a towering inferno. The healer has abandoned the party. He smells of rotten meat but can't remember why.

Gravity reasserts itself.

The funny thing about putting a living being in these homebrew pocket dimensions until it starves, suffocates, or otherwise perishes is that there's enough oxygen and moisture only to cause some decomposition but not enough to... well, to dry out a corpse. Not a tremendous amount of time had passed since the discovery of this poor, dead animal. H's former faithful steed was, therefore, still juicy.

This fact quickly made itself plain when the horse came ragdolling back to earth at break-neck speed. I tossed a d10 on the map to see where the horse would land. It landed on the upturned cart, and well... there wasn't much left of the poor thing to identify it as a horse. Just a massive amount of red and brown mist. The stench of blood and decay was everywhere.

The blood smell in such high quantities was too much for the two horses lashed to Cart One. As nobody was at the reins, they were free to do what came natural: they ran. At a full gallop and with a round or two head start, they were far out of reach for everyone save J, who had a base speed equal to that of the horses and with a feat or two that multiplied his full run speed. He went dashing after the cart.

The little patch of road looked like a war zone. Here's the best part: it happened in eight rounds. That's 48 seconds of in-game lunacy. In 48 seconds we went from the idyllic, picturesque traveling scene like something from the Shire in the opening scenes of the Fellowship movie, to the following: Two party members severely injured. One party member suffering from exhaustion, stinking of rot and decay, and with some broken ribs, who sprinted away in pursuit of a runaway cart full of badly-injured innocents. One party member who abandoned her friends and her charges. There's puke everywhere. Ten innocent charges fled on foot to gods know where. Dozens of acres of forest fire ablaze. A screaming horse with a snapped ankle. Another screaming horse with a snapped ankle. One innocent charge with his throat ripped out. Nine innocent charges with third degree burns over more than 60% of their bodies (most died later of their wounds IIRC). Everything... EVERYTHING covered in reeking, rotten blood.

I wanted to know how well my party had gelled as a unit. I got my answer. In eight rounds.