Five Leagues From the Borderlands: The Tale of Reggie's Lads

[Tom]

The roadside battle with the Roving Fiend and their master:



There were only actually two fiends plus their master on the table to start, but more were lurking in outflanking and as an unknown enemy token. The Lads set up obliquely opposite the unknown enemy, those with ranged weapons getting high ground and the rest forming a mob to push down the side of the table.

Turn 1: We're off to an excellent start as the mob bundles into the closest fiend and Saek chops it down in one. Jubilation is short lived however as the outflankers arrive and add two more fiends to the battle. Thankfully on the opposite side of the table to where the Lads are.



Turn 2: The so called Master Thief (in the doorway) finds himself thoroughly surrounded and fails to find the mark when he slings a dagger at Rivali.



Turn 3: Whilst the thief is looking around in desperation Geriel takes careful aim from the roof of the ruins, cracks his skull from behind with her sling and he drops dead.



Rivali dashes for the centre of the table to complete the investigation mission, but triggers the unknown enemy counter into three more fiends. Along with the outflankers moving up he's looking pretty surrounded himself, though shortly after this picture was taken Helga takes the closest one out with another bow shot from the roof tops.



Saek moves to distract and split the pack but the one he's trying to get the attention of just runs away instead.

Turn 4/5: Everyone with ranged weapons misses and runs out of ammo as the fiends close in on Rivali. Saek lures a couple away but two still bundle into the swamp and drag Rivali down despite Bruno's best attempts to support. Bruno himself is soon fighting a retreat.



Turn 6: A fluffed initiative roll looks like bad news for Saek as he's caught alone by two fiends he's trying to kite away. Not that that worries Saek, he fights off one and then downs the other! The remaining three lose their nerve and scarper and the field is held. The Lads first full victory and Reggie wasn't even there to see it as he convalesced back at town.

[Tom]

Post battle:
- 3 Adventure points for a successful patrol and downing a unique foe.
- Rivali is in recovery for 3 turns.
- Geriel advances from a Follower to a Hero. A fitting reward for downing the enemy leader.
- Bruno gains the Battlewise skill.
- Loot is minimal, camping gear and some spices we can sell for a single mark.
- Returning to Camp Beastival we somehow end up with the task of delivering a letter to the monastery town of Monkton. There's a mark and an adventure point in it for us of we do and no time limit so sure, why not?

Campaign turn 8:
- A town crier calls out a job, if we can negotiate a deal with someone in Stroud and a couple of guys in the Night Market we can get 3 marks. We have 5 campaign turns to do this.
- Help the town guard to cover costs.
- Hugo is only one xp short of a level so spends some training to get over the line. Gains a point of Will.
- Another negotiation job comes up. This time in Monkton and the Night Market for 1 mark and the guy promises to be our friend! Party friends link into a few things on the story side it would be good to get one.
- As we seem to be the post service now we'd best get riding out, to Monkton we go, it should be fairly safe.
- It was not safe! We are waylaid by foes on the road. We must fight a defensive battle against Infamous Maruaders. 8 of them plus a sergeant.

You know what, with only 5 guys in action this seems a very bad fight. You get a short list of once per campaign powers to wrest a bit of control back over the story, I'm using up one of them here to re-roll that travel roll.

- Miserable weather, that seems much less likely to kill everyone. We're waylaid and have to camp in the wilderness.

[Tom]

Campaign turn 9:
- Rivali sleeps badly in the wet and loses a recovery day. Lady Ophelia is recovered.
- We hunt for food to offset upkeep costs and attempt to scout the road ahead but don't achieve much.
- We almost get lost in the woods, but manage to travel to Monkton.
- News reaches us of another hidden monster lair out in the wilds.

[Tom]

Campaign turn 10:
- A kindly local gives us some travelling rations along with our reward for delivering the letter so for once we don't have to work for dinner and have some more free time.
- Everyone is recovered form their injuries.
- We meet partial success on some of our contracted negotiations. We can still pull this back with the last contact.
- Attempting to study at the monastery is fruitless, but Rivali trains up the last xp needed for a level and gains a Will point.
- We ride on to the Night Market, but get stuck in the rain again.

[Tom]

Campaign turn 11:
- We spot an interesting unexplored location in the woods we could check out later.
- Hunt up lunch and manage to scout a safe road onwards.
- Travel safely to the Night Market.
- News reaches us that while we've been playing postie and trekking town to town, the Duke has raided the Oldest Kin in the area and their threat rating is reduced.

[Tom]

Campaign turn 12:
- A town crier is out with the contracts again. Reggie's ears perk up when he hears someone needs rescuing from a location nearby as that sounds a bit more heroic than all this delivering and negotiating!
- That said, we complete one of the negotiation contracts successfully and gain the permanent friendship of Bert the villager! The true riches were the friends we made along the way.
- We bin off even starting the negotiations for the other contract as we'll never make it in time if we're doing the rescue mission.
- Help the guards for living costs and buy another sling.
- Reggie does some training as he's falling behind and is meant to be in charge of this outfit!
- We ride off to the rescue, and find monster tracks! We manage to track it to its lair (using another one of those once per campaign powers to pass a test and gain the skill involved).
- However, though we manage to track it to a cave system nearby we then fail to find the right cave and need to camp and try again tomorrow.

[Tom]

Campaign turn 13:
- Bruno manages to damage a dagger while pitching his tent.
- Hunting and training.
- Successfully find the monster lair! The monster table has some really nasty stuff so I'm going to work my way up this one sequentially and start with an ogre.

[Tom]

Monster lair setup, the person we need to rescue is placed in the centre and three points of interest scattered around.



A monster lair start with sending in a single scout, they sneak around try to scout out the points of interest and catch the monster unaware. Rivali is by far my fastest party member so goes on.



He takes advantage of the quiet to free the captive.



As they head for the exit the ogre is spotted, and huzzah he's asleep!



The captive makes their escape while Rivali checks the rest of the points of the interest in a futile hope for treasure. With the ogre still asleep the rest of the gang moves in.



A successful sneaking means we gte to line up nicely to spring the trap. A hail of arrows and sling shots all bounce harmlessly off the ogre's thick hide as he moves in.



Reggie steps in to screen his comrades trusting to his armour save him from the brute, and is flattened.



Rivali manages to wound the ogre with a sling shot and Saek charges in does some damage with his axe.

With a man down Ophelia summons a beast to distract and blunt the ogre's assault.



Hugo's bow runs out of arrows so he tries to charge in. It doesn't go well.



The summoned beast fights a desperate defence and Saek charges in, almost gets himself battered pulling back from being stunned a couple of times, but manages the killing blow! Ogre down.

[Tom]

Wash up from the ogre slaying:

Spend some adventure points to reduce the Oldest Kin threat in the area.

Reggie has an extremely lucky escape (needs to spend his luck point to avoid death!).

Bruno was just knocked out and is fine.

Sake and Helga level up and gain a will point and a combat ability respectively. I've now got a bunch of people on combat +1 but still nobody with +2.

Loot! 4 marks, map making kit, camp gear, bastard sword. Man, I keep rolling boring mundane stuff.

As the day ends and the lads count their gains, a message from out friend Bert the Villager (who we did the negotiations for) arrives with a new proposition. It seems he has a friend also needs rescuing! No material rewards but helping friends is nice and will give us a story point (the narrative rules breaking ones). I was thinking it was about time we started on this quest we have, but we can't let Bert down.

[Tom]

Campaign turn 14:

Reggie's Warhammer turns out to be damaged, must have been that ogre... goodbye to some money to repair that.

More deal negotiating work comes up (we've got a reputation it seems), we'll see if that fits in with plans.

The party set out for the rescue and find a ruin crawling with Dust Hounds, 8 of them lead by another Master Thief. To note I've started doing the suggested thing of working my way sequentially up the encounter lists rather than straight rolling to give better escalation of difficulty.

My first dungeon crawl next time then.