The painting is crude in execution, but an impressive variety of dyes have been used - some of which are very bright, and clearly brought in from elsewhere. A crude pentagram has been drawn in red ochre, and images have been drawn at the points of the star in bright colours: a drop of blood; some sort of flower with purple, red and blue petals; a chunk of what appears to be amethyst; what might be a bowl of water with a crude symbol above it; and a sort of red plant with purple leaves on fire. You have no idea what this ritual is supposed to signify, if it is one. Evidently the locals seem to think it important. Mikhail thinks it represents the belief in some sort of spell or incantation, presumably commonly known enough that the artists felt no need to describe what it was - they would already know.
You and your men head to sleep, and when you are woken rudely by Bronn, you thank the gods that a watch was set. Bronn looks deathly serious.
"Trolls," he says, and there are shouts of alarm as the men hurry to get themselves into their armour and weapons readied. Plans are quickly drawn up to hold the cave mouth, and you don your armour in time to see the foe approaching up the pass; thick-set creatures with grey skin, rope-like black hair, each one twice the height of a full grown man and half as wide, garbed in crude clothes of sewn hide and bearing throwing spears and clubs. Their heads are proportionally smaller than those of men, their eyes tiny and golden, and thick incisors stick up from their jutting jaws like tusks. There are perhaps thirty or forty total.
[Cave Mouth gives +1 to Defence per unit.
Ranged: 1v2, 1v2, 2+2v2, 2v2 (-1 Militia Morale) |
2+2v2, 2v2, 1v2, 1v2 (-1 Militia Morale) |
2+2v2, 2v2, 1v2, 1v2 (-1 Militia Morale) | Militia Flee
Flight: 2+2v2, 2v2 | 1 Militia Destroyed
2+2+2v2 | 1 Militia Destroyed]
The battle is brutal, and while your men use the cave mouth to their best ability, they don't even make contact with the foe - a barrage of javelins, each thrown with the force of a siege weapon, tear through the militia like a hot knife through butter. They rout, and the rout becomes a slaughter - two hundred men flee back into the caves and are butchered - and in some cases eaten - there and then. Both von Hoffenburgs, Mikhail, Longroth and a handful of men make it out alive, fleeing back down the mountain pass to New Sheepstead.
Author
Topic: Colony [RP] - Spring 382a (Read 3890 times)