A Mountain of Gold - Session 2 GM notes
See the session summary eventually by Sticks here, and my session preview here
Remaining dwarves: 95
Chainmail was fun! I made up or guessed at a few aspects. I let the Dwarven heavy crossbowmen get longer range since they were shooting down hill, notably, which made them powerhouses.
I used chainmail itself and not FMC for referencing. I need to learn the rules a little better but it played just fine. I want to run more games as a combo of od&d and chainmail. I like big fights like this.
I told the players to pick weapons for their dwarves. We assigned 20-odd of them as heavy crossbowdwarves, and I let them build earthworks beforehand since the dwarves are so good at digging dirt according to ready ref sheets.
I didn't count, but I think the dwarves killed 40-50 troops, mostly light foot and archers, with many cavalry who were killed with rocks dropped by dwarves on pegasi, plus like 4-5 heroes.
The bandits were unorganized, which was my excuse for learning the game as we were playing. The players have such a good position that it was quite the slaughter, but we did lose 5 dwarves from archer fire.
We could have used a ruler (which has to be possible to make in TLDraw, right? Just size it to the grid we have and hope we don't resize it accidentally?) but otherwise counting squares was fine. In a perfect world, I'd also have a drawing of the fort from the side so we can see the shooting angles but I'm not doing that.
Again, it's so fun giving the players a strong position and tons of magic items but limited lives. There will be no more dwarves, so every death hurts. They have all the money in the world, but there only so much they can do with it.
We're running od&d next time, as the newly named Clan Warguard attempts to kidnap a wizard.
We'll award xp for the od&d game, and hopefully some dwarves gain some fighter levels, perhaps. It'd be good to have back-ups in case the two heroes die.