The Battle of Paintleopards
King Zultan, naturally, led the attack. His counterpart, Thob Coalmind, was the original source of this necromantic blight, making a deal with some dark god long ago to obtain the powers of life and death, all the necromancers in this areA are his apprentices or apprentices of those apprentices. King Zultan was able to come up with an extremely clever plan which gave us an advantage: Kill them all.
I have no idea where these names the squads give themselves come from, I had told our crew members simple things like "you are part of the raiders" or "crew squad 1" for my organizational convenience. It seems that under the surface they still stuck with the ancient dwarven practice of coming up with ridiculous names for themselves. It should also be noted that although King Zultan is named mostly the other named crew members are part of his squad he is simply named as the leader every time all of them do something.
After some small amount of cannon fodder standing guard was destroyed, first the necromancers sent forth their Dark Slayers, resurrected creatures that retained the faculties of the living but were under thrall of the necromancers. At first the crew of the Lionfish cut through them with little trouble.
Our information said this tower was populated by approximately 100 beings, however it seems this was incorrect as after the initial dark slayers were dealt with the necromancers unleashed their swarms of lesser creatures, the reg's warriors, able to still wield weapons and armor in an imitation of their previous living forms are used as basic warriors in great numbers, as seen in the sieges back at the drydock. The unspeakable other creatures are made from various animals such as dogs and horses, with horrible arms and legs added. The crew was hard pressed by over a hundred of them!
Although cutting many, by sheer virtue of numbers one of our crew, Fatcat, was overcome and fell to those accursed abominations of nature. Although dozens of undead creatures had fallen at this point, even a single dwarf is a significant loss to our force. Emboldened, the necromancers sent forth more dark slayers increasing the pressure. Through heroic effort they were again struck down, but the far more numerous mindless creatures surrounded our force.
things seemed grim as another member of the crew fell, and the creatures pressed in all around us. Our greatest warriors, Zultan, Smoot and Delphonso were still seemingly unharmed however, and the damage being done to the undead was terrible indeed.
Perhaps at this point the necromancers, or at least one specific necromancer, Reg Bellswet, became overconfident, seeing the desperate stand the dwarves were making. In any case Metruption and his marksdwarves had accompanied the force, and Reg, seeing the damage that Metruption was no doubt doing to the undead, joined the fight personally and attempted to reach him. Metruption did not hesitate to defend himself, they say it only took him a single bolt to kill Reg stone dead. Reg Bellswet was no minor apprentice, and he was obviously the creator of the dread Reg's warriors and Reg's dogs, and also it turns out Mistakes of Paintleopards which assailed us from all sides, so this kill gave hope to our embattled crew.
The situation was still dire however, and another crew member fell. Any creature described as a disaster was indeed proving disastrous to us. Our dwarves were only equipped with a patchwork of what armor we departed the drydock with and what we've been able to make from melted down loot, although the undead were using low quality equipment every Reg's warrior was armed and armored.
Given the amount of slaughter that had been inflicted on the undead so far it seemed high time for their numbers to thin, the enemy groups became smaller and it seemed there weren't many Dark Slayers left to fight. Smoot's famous axe Frecklemark continued to swing, sending severed limbs flying with each movement.
At this point in the battle, the Supreme Necromancer Thob Coalmind showed himself, using his dark powers he made a vicious attack against Cog Twinklelanced, but he was able to dodge out of the way. sieizing on his distraction another member of the crew brutally set upon his apprentice Anur Wanderglides, slaying him.
Desperate now, Thob sent the remaining Dark Slayers to prevent the crew from reaching him, but King Zultan and Smoot among others proved the grit of dwarves, still able to cleanly take them down after such a prolonged fight.
The few remaining creatures were unable to put up much of a fight, the crew of the Lionfish now crushing them easily.
As our dwarves fought our way towards Thob his minions made their last desperate attempt to throw themselves in the way, but to no avail. Our ship's doctor Zulban Ruleblockade landed a hit with the Iron Lash he's so fond of using, despite having an injured hand at the time! Presumable he knows where to aim, even on a necromancer. After Thob was dealt with a handful of other undead creatures were defeated and driven from the field ending the battle. At this point the tower still stood untouched, but our forces exhausted as they were, and an indeterminate number of defenders remaining we retired from the field to lick our wounds.
My deepest condolences for Fatcat, I am well aware they had asked not to take part in raids, however as I recall Fatcat was calling for the assault on the tower fairly vehemently, so I can only hope they were willing to give their life for it. Perhaps we shall make some kind of suitable memorial in the ship
I thought it only fitting we take a closer look at the dwarf who took down the head necromancer:
perhaps some kind of nickname is in order? Gravekeeper or something like that?
And here is an update of the kills of the other dwarves. Calvert and Maloy managed not to kill a single thing in this epic battle.
Even the cook managed to get one! I just hope he doesn't serve that.
We have cut the head of the serpent, Thob Coalmind, and killing Reg Bellswet was another great achievement, especially since we weren't even aware that he was present at that tower.
It's unclear whether or not it's better to send the small, more experienced squad of raiders to fight what they can and retreat, instead of sending our entire force at once, and while killing more potentially suffering more casualties?
The question is do we attack again to finish the tower off? We have no real way to know if resistance will be less if we attack again.
If not which way do we steer the ship?
There are some human hamlets to the north if we want an easy time, or the major human town of Faircradles just to the east (far larger than Guiserings was) we could also potentially raid.
Or I suppose we could even steer back west to the rich human lands in that area?
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Topic: SeaMenace, A community Ship - Back to raiding (Read 25284 times)