Man, We Suck at Being Evil

So we begin the session in the midst of chaos, an enormous battle unfolding as the final fate of the town is decided. This did take a while to get off the ground, because painfully reassembling the exact locations from last week was not an easy task. But then it began the fight for guts and glory, and before the days end there were a lot of guts.

So the first focus of the action is on the ogre and the engineer dueling, one with a large stick, the other with an even bigger stick. There was an experienced fighter, but he lost a large quantity of his face to the first hit, so was quickly taken out of the fight. The engineer would have easily been brought down and killed, if not for the timely intervention of the High priestess, healing him for as much if not more than he was being damaged. This fight was joined by the totemist, three heads flailing, dealing a moderate amount of damage to the ogre. This fight lasted for a while, and a particularly strong hit from the ogre brought the engineer down to unconsciousness, though he was quickly revived by the priestess. The final blow was an enormously powerful hit from the engineer, severing the ogre in twain, giving the engineer a better, heavier, messier weapon.

On another side of the battlefield the party warlock ran into some trouble with a bear. This bear could climb, and climbed up to where he was, mauling him for significant damage. The warlock fled, as one does, and managed to evade the bear, leading to him landing right in the middle of the two other fronts, read to maul any who came near.

This leads us to the tale of these two fronts, one of wolves and one of humanoids. Be aware these are all zombies, and fast ones at that, think 28 days Later not Night of the Living Dead. So the samurai, with a cleric, fighter, and warrior try to hold off the five wolves, which is made difficult as their barricade is destroyed by fire. This was the result of an ineffective molotov cocktail, and led to just about everyone but the samurai being killed. The wolves smashed their way through the barricade, dealing fairly major damage to all present, excluding the cleric, and then proceed to systematically kill all but the samurai, who is a PC. One critical hits and eviscerates the warrior, another slowly rips apart the cleric, and the fighter is pursued by one as he attempts to flee. This is compounded by the bear.

The bear actually took its time getting down, enabling the other front to be defended for a small while. Six zombies versus a monk, hexblade (The PC), cleric, and warrior. The warrior is the first to go down, right at the same time the bear arrives, clambering over the barricade. He was ripped apart by one of the stronger zombies, after being healed by the cleric, just to hang on a little longer. The hexblade now maneuvers his way over to the bear, and attempts to damage it. These attempts are largely unsuccessful, missing at least twice as much as he hit. Once the monk went down over here it really started to collapse, as had the front line and main defence.

See the front line consisted of sword and shield guys at the front and longspeared commoners at the back, a decent plan, but their first action is to charge the zombies, two of them getting ones and falling or dropping their weapons, and the others missing completely. The zombies responded a bit better, doing significant damage and that was simply the warm up. When the peasants came in is when the real meat grinder started. With no PC backup they were fish food, even with the captain of the guard, he just didn't take up that much room. So the zombies managed to slip around and feast on these commoners, as well as batter down the front line, leaving little left alive. At long last the ogre was slain, and the totemist came to help, but it was pretty much over by that point, only the captain was left alive.

So this looks bad for the heroes, having defeated at most 1/4 of the zombies, and having lost most if not all their NPC help. But all is not lost, as the bear falls due to everyone concentrating on it, eventually simply swarming it, though the hexblade did lose consciousness, he was again brought back up, through all the healing concentrated on him. The zombies were also fairly easily defeated once the main threats had been dealt with, namely the ogre and the bear. So their was victory in the end, at the cost of 3 clerics, 5 commoners, 2 tavern owners, and 5 warriors.

The town leader, high priestess, one lower order cleric, and all the PCs manged to survive. And they leveled up, so all was happy in the end. Though there was still a little something to deal with... Oh right, the necromancer. But that will have to be left until next session, as the week comes to an end, as do the lives of many a brave man.