Had the first session of the massive battle, and it went well.
Much like Red Hand of Doom, my players have a few resources to call upon during the battle. They can get 5000 gp worth of consumable magic items from the DMG, from the 'strategic reserve' the Hathran had held back: wands, potions, and scrolls.
They can call upon the help of four 6th level Rashemi Barbarians (Wolf Berserker trippers) and four 8th level Geat Barbarian/Fist of the Forest//Scout/Berserks. Any that survive can be used in later encounters, and they can call upon as many or as few as they want.
They have a former player's character helping them out, who is a 9th level Barbarian/Runescarred Berserker//Warlock.
The party consists of:
Half-Elf Barbarian 11//Beguiler 10/Mindbender 1
Human Rogue 11//Wizard 6/Incantatrix 2/Iot7FV 3
Human Druid 10//Sorcerer 10//Arcane Hierophant 1 (the AH level takes up both "sides" of the level)
DMPC Half-Elf Druid 11//Scout 5/Ranger 1/Wizard 1/Master of the Yuirwood 4 (former player character kept around for story reasons; I intend for him to die during this battle).
I shamelessly stole an adaptation that someone posted over at Giant in the Playground. He wanted to streamline the Battle of Brindol, and so created four "Crisis Points" that encapsulated two of the encounters the PC's were originally supposed to deal with, as well as introducing two more encounters. The PC's could act as generals for a bit, and decide which allied troops to deploy to deal with these situations that arose. He altered a few other things, such as using Deadborn Vultures from the MM4 (MM5?), and added a wave of mook skeletons at the beginning. Depending upon which troops the PC's sent where, each set of troops would either rack up a "win" or a "loss," and each loss would add one complicating factor to the Streets of Blood encounters. You can read more about the "Crisis Points" set up from the horse's mouth
here.
I didn't want my PC's to fully miss out on dealing with the Skullcrusher Ogres (my replacement for the Hill Giants), nor did I want them to miss out on fighting the Nycaloth (which will be a tough battle). So, I merely increased the number of Ogre units, so the PC's still had to deal with one of them, and I luckily rolled the % chance for the Nycaloth to summon another Nycaloth (the Nycaloth is my replacement for the Red Dragon), so the allies can be sent to deal with the summoned Nycaloth, and the party can deal with the real one.
Just after 1:00 PM the first wave of invading trolls and tanarukk make their way up to the wall under the effects of
obscuring mist cast by Trollwife warlocks (the Breath of the Night invocation functions as obscuring mist in my game, not the gimped version in C. Arcane). The party runs to the wall to watch and assist, some of them being a bit obtuse and wasting a fly spell to get to the wall faster. (More on that later - one of my players blew through a WHOLE bunch of spells tonight). They get to the wall, the Druid//Sorcerer in eagle form, and witness five groups of fog approaching. The groups avoid the smooth-looking, hallucinatory terrain-covered pits, as the PC's did not succeed in finding all the spies in the camp, nor did they defeat the Night Hag spy that escaped, and has since been inspecting things from the ethereal plane, and told the army about the pits.
The clusters of fog-shrouded trolls and tanarukk approach the difficult terrain to either side of the pits, and the party hears clattering and clanking of wood. The groups continue forward, and there are a few yelps of pain as they encounter the
spike stones effects. The trolls then pick up the ladders, and the tanarukk ride the ladders, so only the trolls take damage from the
spike stones. The trolls will regenerate the nonlethal damage taken, though they will still be slowed for 24 hours or until magically healed. The ladders rise out of the fog, and the tanarukk make their initial assault on the wall. They start to wound the wall defenders enough that they may actually make it up onto the wall, but the Iron Lord (and the PC's agree) sends the Rashemi Runescarred Berserkers to reinforce the wall defenses.
This initial crisis point was not meant to be something the PC's got actively involved in, as they are the strike force to be sent to deal with issues others can't, but the PC's decided to get in the fray a bit anyway. They didn't eat up too many spells here, though, using reserve feats to damage the ladders, and using strength checks to topple the ladders (which was quite a feat, given that each ladder was being held in place by two trolls - the Barbarian//Beguiler rolled two Natural 20's to topple some ladders. By this point the Runescarred Berserkers are upon the wall, and fight off the tanarukk successfully. The wooden clunking noises the party had heard was the tanarukk dropping off piles of wood into several large wood piles about 50 feet from the wall. The party decided to light these with dropped torches and flaming arrows, figuring it would be good to be able to see out in front of the wall. They even chucked some more wood out onto the burning heaps about two hours later when they had burnt down to coals.
The next little encounter wasn't even supposed to be anything beyond a narrative happening, but my PC's stopped me and argued that they would have seen the fliers coming in, and wanted to go deal with them, so an extra encounter ensues. At each wall, both north and south, three half-fiend trolls fly up to just do an aerial reconnaissance and each drop two beads from a necklace of fireballs. The PC then interjected as I said before, and dealt with two of the three half-fiends approaching the south wall. They succeeded in getting the necklaces to blow up in the faces of those two, and actually succeeded in killing one of them. The other escaped, while the four the PC's didn't deal with dropped their payloads and returned to their respective horde camps. Again, the PC's succeeded in doing most of this with reserve feats, so it didn't really drain them too much, though the Druid//Sorcerer did throw out a Sound Lance at one of the half-fiends. Shortly after this, the sun set at 1:37 PM, though dusk would hang on until 3:24 PM.
With the duration on Control Winds, the party urged the Iron Lord to have them deployed about one hour and twenty minutes before the ritual, so it would last all the way through the ritual, and a bit beyond it. So, at about 5:00 PM, the Druid//Sorcerer Hathran cast fly upon herself, and flew out to the planned points and cast the 15th-caster level spells from a scroll, placing them to the sides of this natural stone bridge and above, but with approximately 10 feet of vertical distance between them, so there were gaps the party could use to exit if need be, but the bad guys wouldn't know about (because control winds has no visual manifestation).
Just a few minutes after the control winds spells were deployed, the Druid//Sorcerer PC noticed a cracking noise from the south. He went to investigate, still in eagle form. By this point, the wall defenders had deployed some
Daylight shining objects out near the bonfires as well (Daylight provided by some of the relative plethora of 5th level Ethran present), so with Low-Light vision he was able to see about 300 feet out from the wall. He flew out and investigated, hearing the cracking noise some more, and eventually he saw it: small boulders hitting the top of the Control Winds, which was directed to blow upwards, and though they didn't bounce off the spell effect, the wind effect slowed their momentum enough that they fell well short of the wall.
The rocks stopped, and the druid returned to report what he had seen. As the party was discussing this development with the Iron Lord, a Listen check clued them in that the wind was slowly dying down. The players were quite confused at first, "what could be killing all the control wind effects?" While reading control wind in the PHB, the Druid//Sorcerer players also saw Control Weather, and figured it out. The Hathran that had cast the Control Winds spells from the scroll offered to head back out (to get in range of the spells) and concentrate on them again to bring the wind forces back up. The PC's thought this was a grand idea, not realizing that control winds allowed such a thing. So the Hathran flew out, under the effects of invisibility, and made the circuit of the six control winds spells, ramping each one back up with a mere thought. They started to die down again, slowly (control weather takes effect over the course of 10 minutes), and so the Hathran just continued to make the rounds. No one could see her of course, but the winds were staying near hurricane-force the whole time.
This carried on for several minutes. Then the Hathran was attacked. All the party saw was a large green demon appearing (the Nycaloth) as it grabbed something (improved grabbed the Hathran, which it could see with at will see invisibility), folded its wings, and just plummeted down toward the ocean below. Again, this was merely supposed to be something that happened; a narrative part of the battle. But the Barbarian//Beguiler (who has a Feathered Mask), and the eagle-shaped druid decided to take off after them.
The plan was for the Nycaloth to free-fall while grappling the Hathran for 9 rounds (2550 of the 2640 feet in a quarter mile), then teleport away, giving her almost no time to stop the free-fall before she smacked into the ocean. (Someone in a free-fall must make a DC 20 Reflex save to pull out of it, though this is generally more for winged fliers than magical fliers). By the time the PC's got to the edge, the Nycaloth had been free-falling for two rounds, or 450 feet. The Beguiler cast Haste, and the eagle-form druid dove after the demon. He calculated that he was actually going 100 mph (controlled dive; [2*[4*[80+30]]=880 feet per round as a run action]), which means he caught up in no time. Here is where he wasted a WHOLE bunch of spells, though. He tried to cast Baleful Transposition on himself and the Yugoloth; he failed overcoming its spell resistance of 24. He tried to cast the same thing the next round; he again failed to overcome SR. I forget what he tried the round after that, probably something like Wing Bind, but again failed to overcome SR. By this point, the hasted Beguiler had been catching up at 60 feet per round (90 foot fly speed, doubled for descending, taking a double-move action for 360 feet per round), and was in range to fire off a medium-range spell. He placed a Solid Fog beneath the grappling pair, which cushioned and nearly halted their fall. The nycaloth then started to sink in at 5 feet per round.
The Druid//Sorcerer then tried another spell, which did nothing, and the Beguiler hit the Nycaloth with a Ray of Dizziness (which is a wickedly broken spell, by the way), overcoming SR, hitting its touch AC, and overcoming the 20% miss chance for the Nycaloth being in the fog (on the edge, so still targetable, but still completely within it). At this point, the Nycaloth teleported away, but the Druid//Sorcerer was ready for him to come out the bottom side. The Hathran then emerged, and the players assumed the Nycaloth got away. They all ascended back up to the bridge unmolested, and decided that the Hathran would just stay on the bridge near the center, and just keep the two top wind effects running for now, and would bring up the side effects when the main battle started.
Shortly after 6:00 PM a report came in from the southern wall that massive boulders were being thrown, and they were hitting the wall. The Iron Lord sent the Druid//Barbarian mercenaries to deal with the problem, and the PC's agreed with that decision. The Druid flew out to look, and saw these were much larger boulders than he was seeing being thrown before. They are still being affected by the wind, and some of them are falling short of the wall, but most of them are hitting.
Then a runner comes to report that there are more stones being thrown at the north wall. The Iron Lord tells the party to deal with the northern threat, and off the party goes. Our battle mat is long enough to represent about 200 feet, so I just started the party out that far, especially given how dark it is (new moon, mostly cloudy, only a little light present from the enemy camp behind the Skullcrusher Ogres), but the ogres were 950 feet out from the wall (Far Shot doubled their range to five 200-foot increments) By this point the wall sections had lost nearly 66% of their hit points (after factoring in hardness, each of the four Skullcrusher Ogre War Hulk 3/Feat Rogue 2's was dealing 16 points of damage each round).
The bad guys consist of four Skullcrusher Ogres that have two levels of Feat Rogue and three levels of War Hulk, as well as two Primordial Giant Half-Troll Draegloth, and one Primordial Giant Half-Troll Marzanna Hag. The primordial giants all could use invisibility purge at will, to prevent sneaky forces from approaching undetected. The War Hulks also had the Large and In Charge feat from the Draconomicon. The Half-Troll Draegloth were wielding battle axes in their smaller arms, and those axes had Purple Worm poison on them. Each also had a dose of sassone leaf residue to apply.
Just as in Red Hand, each of these foes is spread out such that no more than two can be caught inside the radius of any one fireball. This was quite unfortunate, and caused my Druid//Sorcerer to waste another spell, as his opening salvo was a scintillating sphere, catching the Marzanna Hag and one of the Skullcrusher Ogres. He failed to overcome the hag's SR 15, and the Ogre made his save, and evasion prevented him from taking any damage.
The party chose to bring two Geat Berserks along with them (the two flying barbarians could carry them over the spike stones effects, while everyone else flew either in wildshape or via a fly spell), and they charged out ahead with their impressive 70 foot speed. Most everyone else started to close with the 'trolls,' but the Druid//Scout/Wizard DMPC made excellent use of his new items, inflicting some pain with his +1 Giantbane Longbow and his (Giant) Enemy Spirit Pouch, and the Geats charged the other front ogre, one of them getting stopped by Large and In Charge. The next round was again spent closing the distance, while the archer again injured the same ogre with two bow shots, dealing an impressive 36 points of damage with a critical hit. The Geats full attacked the second ogre, hitting three times with their power attacking fists, bringing him down to half hit points.
The Beguiler//Barb and the Wizard//Rogue have buffed themselves with invisibility and improved invisibility, and move forward, both aghast that something negated their invisibility spells. I wryly inform them it is a core spell effect, and they couldn't believe it. The beguiler charms the nearest Half-Troll Draegloth, and as always tries to convince it that its friends are its enemies, which doesn't work (he never seems to learn); add to it that these are fanatics trying to assist the entrance of demons into the world... But still, it prevents this draegloth from doing much to the party until everything else had pretty much been taken care of.
And I'm going to pause here, because it is extremely late.