The Trollfens: Food For Worms

Heroes

• Alys Raine (Marshall, Manor of Ravens)
• Lindel (Stalker, Crown of Destiny)
• Ravaella Lightfoot (Conjurer, Shadow of Nerekhall)

Monster Groups

• Bol'Goreth
• Zombies
• Plague Worms
• Merrod (open group)

Summary

And the quest continues!

The objective of this quest is to rescue at least one passenger from a sinking carriage, and keep them alive until you kill all the monsters. Each turn the Overlord grabs a fatigue token, or two if anyone is standing on the carriage. Once there are nine it sinks, and everyone inside drowns. After the carriage sinks the plague worms spawn, and if the red one escapes the Overlord gets a free card added to his deck.

I started out by having Ol' Bol' hop on the carriage so I could start racking up a few extra fatigue tokens, and using the zombies and merrod to try and hedge the heroes in. This ended up working really well, as I was able to keep Ravaella pinned on the sunken statue tile, and start clobbering the shit out of Alys with both Bol' and the merrod due to their reach.

Eventually Melissa was able to take out a few zombies with Ravaella, and use Lindel to lock down the merrod with both weaken and immobilize. This gave her some much needed time to knock Bol' off the carriage using a Might check (fifth time's a charm, eh?), smash the lock, and fish out three of the passengers before it finally sank. By then the merrod was dead, so the passengers had a safe haven up by the pond.

With the worms popped I started tunneling for the exit. I briefly entertained the notion of going for the passengers, but Melissa had Lindel book it over and start sniping them with ranged attacks. I was able to drop him, in some part thanks to their burrow action and the fact that she had capped out his fatigue, but after a six-heart, 2-fatigue recovery roll figured I should count my losses and just get the red worm out of there (luckily I had a pair of dash cards).

In the end Melissa walked away with 150 gp (three passengers and all of the search cards), and since she already had the relic from the first quest got an extra XP for each of her characters. This means we'll be doing Source of Sickness no matter what, but at least I can still try to stop her from getting the Immunity Elixir when we play Three Heads, One Mind.

We really thought the heroes were going to lose this one, as Melissa kept failing Might checks despite the fact that both heroes trying to shake the carriage had a Might of 3, and one of them even rolled two grey dice for checks. What made things worse is that she fatigued Lindel onto the wagon, hoping that he could fatigue back off since his weapon lets him spend a surge to recover fatigue. Of course he ended up botching his attack roll, trapping him on the carriage and netting me another pair of fatigue tokens.

But then her luck changed, and she was able to smash the lock and pull out a third passenger just before it sank. Passengers act after heroes, so they were able to flee, and since there was nothing by the pond she just ran them that way, using Ravaella to take out the few zombies shambling after them and Alys to pulverize Bol' (after she got the last search token).

I think that what she did was the best way to handle this quest given my setup. If I were to run it again, I think I would use something besides a merrod. Maybe beastmen, because making two attacks is awesome, or harpies so I wouldn't get bogged down by the water. I'd also try to keep them near the pond, so that as passengers are being freed they don't have an immediately clear, safe way to go.

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