TOEE - the ogre

After taking out the zombies with relative ease, I have to admit that I was feeling pretty good about myself. I had been caught in an ambush but, with some quick thinking, had managed to deal with the situation quite handily.

Now, if I was a DM and felt that the players were starting to feel a bit cocky, then I would introduce something nasty to bring them back down to Earth. At least, I would if I were a dick. Considering that we've already established that this DM is a dick, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to find an ogre waiting for us behind the next door.

The ogre hasn't seen us yet

I tried to cast a sleep spell and get an easy kill. Alas, it was too high a level and the sleep spell had no effect. With no other option, I engaged in melee. In hindsight, considering that the ogre's strength gave it a +10 to its attack roll, this may not have been such a good idea.

A breakdown of the ogre's bonus to attack

Although it missed its first attack, it wasn't long before the ogre started to hit. And when it did, it hit hard!

24 damage on 1 hit!! Smeg me!!

With such massive damage output, I wasn't able to heal my fighter quickly enough. A couple of hits later and Sir Galahad fell. Permanently. :(

Alas, poor Galahad

Luckily for me, Sir Galahad had managed to hold out long enough for the my party to badly damage the ogre. Shortly after Sir Galahad fell, Jaheira was able to deal the killing blow and the ogre toppled to the ground next to my knight.

I have to admit that I seriously contemplated reloading. However, I had a scroll of raise dead and in the end, used the scroll to raise him instead. Ultimately, our party had done reasonably well and I decided to let the dice lay where they had fallen.

In a way, its lucky that Galahad is dead otherwise the ogre toppling on top of him would have really hurt...

TOEE - turning undead

The main benefit of having a cleric in the party is the healing spells. Without the clerics ability to cast healing spells, the progress of your delve effectively slows to a grind as you have to take a major rest between each combat.

The second benefit of having a cleric is the access to divine spells that the cleric gets - some of which are pretty awesome. Particularly as I have a good alignment cleric, I get to pick the divine spells as normal and just convert them to healing spells at the time of casting if I need to do some healing instead.

The third benefit of having a cleric is the ability to turn undead. Which, to be perfectly frank, isn't actually all that useful in most cases. All this ability does, in practice, is it extremely annoying for you to have to go hunt down any remaining undead who ran off in fear. With that said, there are times when having the ability to turn undead can be helpful.

Encounter with the dead
After taking care of the bandits on the top level of the old castle, our party decided to venture deeper into the depths of the castle. And it wasn't long (no, really - it wasn't long. In fact, you can still see the stairs in the screenshot.) before we encountered a group of zombies still feasting on the last party of adventurers to wander through their domain.


ewww - gross!

Bear in mind, TOEE uses 3.5e rules so the game is still modelling blunt vs slashing damage. Which basically means that my arrows really aren't doing much damage. I guess we will have to get up close and personal so I put my party into a defensive formation and start readying actions to deal with the zombies impending charge.


Despite rolling a decent 6 on my damage roll, the zombies slashing resistance means it only takes 1 damage

Alas, we are ambushed by two cleverly hidden slimes who drop down from the ceiling into the midst of our party! So much for my defensive formation.

I have to admit though - I really like this encounter. Up until this point, my tactics had been fairly standard. I would generally setup in a defensive formation with my fighters readying actions to attack anything entering our threaten zone. This way, I forced all the monsters to take on my tank while funneling them into a kill zone. The sudden introduction of the two slimes completely shook this up and forced a rapid tactical rethink.


eep! Where did those slimes come from!

With two slimes and five zombies in attack range, and more zombies charging in, I needed a bit of breathing space. This was the rare situation in which a turn undead would actually be useful.


Desperate times call for desperate measures

Amazingly, all five zombies cower before the might of Moradin (my dwarf's patron deity). The zombies run away in fear which gives me a little breathing room to deal with the slimes.


Result!

And with the slimes taken care of, mopping up the remaining zombies is easy work. Particularly as I have an awesome Holy Sword +1 (which I got for marrying Meleny - if you can recall that far back)


18 damage! Awesome sword is awesome!