5e - Defend the Village

[nakedonmyfoldin]

Howdy!

I think my PCs will find themselves defending a rural village from a Duergar surface party led by a Durzagon (reskinned Cambion) and his amassed army of undead.

I see these moments in my head of innocent villagers trying to escape to the central monastery while being pursued by ravenous undead led by Duergar steeder-riders who are burning and pillaging the farms and houses.

I can see some innocents trapped in a burning house, I can see the PCs making difficult choices, or even commanding some militia to defend certain points.

I was really just hoping for some input regarding ways to flesh out these encounters. Is there anything I can look into for inspiration? Has anyone run or played in a situation like this? What was memorable and what was not as fun as promised?

Thanks for your input! Cheers!

[sithlordnergal]

So first, what level is the party? A high level party has a lot more options to deal with an army, and properly prepared high level parties with the right classes could hold out almost indefinitely .

[nakedonmyfoldin]

So first, what level is the party? A high level party has a lot more options to deal with an army, and properly prepared high level parties with the right classes could hold out almost indefinitely .

Ahh yes, they are a group of 5 level 4 players.

[Sigreid]

Conan and a variety of other 80's fantasy movies start with just such a raid. Crank up Amazon or Netflix and pop some corn.

[8wGremlin]

What is the reason for the attack?

If they are there for slaves, then I can imagine they would attack from one side to drive the villages into prepared capture nets on the other side of the village.

Encounters,
* defend the church, or get them out the back whilst defending the front.
* lead them down alleyways to get them passed enemies
* break through capture nets
* go back and rescue those that got caught in nets
* go back and get people out of burning building

[sithlordnergal]

Ahh yes, they are a group of 5 level 4 players.

Ok, that's about the same level I was at when I did a similar adventure. From what I remember:

1) Give the players some time to set up a few defenses. These could be pit traps, earthenworks, or trying to build a defensible wall. Then make use of them, make sure the players know their efforts didn't go to waste.

2) Have the main force come at them from above land, and occasionally have strike units burst out of the ground. This will give the PC's a nice little distraction and force them to choose between fighting the main force or dealing with the strike units.

3) What is the win condition? Make sure that is clear from the start. It could be anything from destroying the entire enemy force to just holding out long enough for reinforcements to arrive. The strategy of the players will likely be very different depending on what sort of scenario you give them.

4) I really do enjoy the idea of the townspeople running around and the PC's having to aid them. Make sure you add some extra dangers, like occasionally a boulder flies in and crashes down near the party. Maybe have some spell casters raising zombies from the dead guards and villagers

[nakedonmyfoldin]

So the Durzagon has made an alliance with a foreign power in exchange for the promise of governance of these newly conquered territories. He managed to hit an NPC Paladin with a contagion, but the Paladin's steed was able to retreat the paladin to safety. The Durzagon is prideful and doesn't want to allow the Paladin to live, so he follows the pally to their hometown.

I think his goal is going to be to finish the job and kill the pally, with some side stuff being to gather prisoners and slaves. They have some use for live prisoners, but his necromantic abilities also allows him to make use of their corpses as well. So he, his boys, and his dead boys will attack under cover of darkness, burning, pillaging, enslaving, pushing their way towards the central monastery to finish off their mark.

I think the force will be too large to outright destroy, but if the sun rises, the forces will retreat (makes sense to me since duergar are sunlight sensitive and undead/fiends would probably be averse to sunlight as well).

I definitely like a lot of these ideas i've read so far. Excited to hear other inputs. Particularly like the underground assaults - reminds me of Chrysallids in XCOM.

[Wuzza]

Ok, that's about the same level I was at when I did a similar adventure. From what I remember:

1) Give the players some time to set up a few defenses. These could be pit traps, earthenworks, or trying to build a defensible wall. Then make use of them, make sure the players know their efforts didn't go to waste.

2) Have the main force come at them from above land, and occasionally have strike units burst out of the ground. This will give the PC's a nice little distraction and force them to choose between fighting the main force or dealing with the strike units.

3) What is the win condition? Make sure that is clear from the start. It could be anything from destroying the entire enemy force to just holding out long enough for reinforcements to arrive. The strategy of the players will likely be very different depending on what sort of scenario you give them.

4) I really do enjoy the idea of the townspeople running around and the PC's having to aid them. Make sure you add some extra dangers, like occasionally a boulder flies in and crashes down near the party. Maybe have some spell casters raising zombies from the dead guards and villagers

Pretty much all of this. I also did a similar thing around the same level for my group, although mine was an orc warband.

I had the villagers be able to defend themselves to a degree. From memory there was a diversionary push at the rear gate, the villagers called for aid for an encounter (trolls breached the walls). a 60ish orc push on the main gate, (the villagers handled the mop up once about 1/2 the orcs had been killed, was fun to see the Barb and Sorc do the "kill count" competition on this), then the Necro BBEG had the Mayors house under siege.

It worked really well giving them specific tasks/encounters to do, like you've described, rather than them having to take on absolutely everything.

[Sigreid]

Aren't 4th level paladins immune to disease and therefore contagion?

[SirGraystone]

This situation is somewhat similar to the introduction adventure for Hoard of the dragon queen, Greenest under attack.

The story is like this (spoilers for those who haven't play it yet)

- Players get in sight of Greenest which is burning.
- Find NPCs attacked by kobold and help them get to the keep.

From the Keep the Mayor have missions for them.

- First clear the escape tunnel leading to the river (so the PCs can enter and exit the keep)
- Save the Mill from fire
- Rescue those trap in the church
- Protect the Keep's gate
- ...

Between each missions they can return to the keep to recover, even take short rest. But you can keep tracks of the time and how many missions they succeed or fails (or lack time to do) before dawn.

[Lupine]

I think the force will be too large to outright destroy, but if the sun rises, the forces will retreat (makes sense to me since duergar are sunlight sensitive and undead/fiends would probably be averse to sunlight as well).

I can recommend that you --after the raid-- give the players horses, and send them on a mission to gather reinforcements from the nearby lord. Your evil duergar leader will be loath to let them gather those reinforcements, so the players have to choose between slow and undetectable (but high risk of not getting there fast enough. Your choice if you make it back in time. :smallbiggrin:) and fast and obvious, drawing the Duergar forces to them (but if they survive, the town will probably be fine.
Then, once they bring back the men, they defend the village (if it's still alive. If it is, this should be an even larger rush then before, challenging the players even more). No matter if the village is alive or not, they should probably be level 5 by now. The players will have some new abilities, and be itching to use them. So it is resolved: they're chasing the Duergar forces, and they WILL destroy them. This leads to a villain fight in a big cave, where you can build in TONS of fun environmental effects. Slowly whittle down the player's allies through a series of ambushes and traps until they get to the final remnants of the Duergar.
>Giantbattle.exe

That should get you a few sessions after the event.

[HappyDaze]

I think the force will be too large to outright destroy, but if the sun rises, the forces will retreat (makes sense to me since duergar are sunlight sensitive and undead/fiends would probably be averse to sunlight as well).

Just remember that in D&D the characters are likely to think in "combat time" and waiting a few hours for the sun to rise might be thousands of combat rounds. You'll need to do something to break up the fight into waves, possibly even with one or more breaks long enough to allow short rests (but make them come at a cost).

[Damon_Tor]

The scope of a large scale battle is easy to get lost in. As a DM, tracking the initiative and relative hitpoints of an army is going to drive you nutty.

Instead I suggest letting the players choose objectives, smaller more managable battles within the framework of the larger fight. For example, maybe there's a catapult that's launching burning pitch into the village, and your PCs can assault and destroy that catapult, which is guarded by a reasonable encounter's worth of enemies for your party. Or maybe your party learns enemy sappers have dug into the catacombs beneath the village and are going to try to collapse the walls from below, so your PCs can go stop them. Sure you players could defend some stretch of wall and pick off invaders as they attempt to affix ladders or get battering rams into position, and it's fine to have them doing that between "encounters", but they should have more interesting tasks than "That's another dead duregar, only 83 left to go!" Eventually have the PCs learn the location of the enemy commander, and have them lead a sortie to defeat him and his elite guards, cutting off the head of the army and breaking their morale, sending them crawling back to their pit.

[hellgrammite]

The most inspirational thing I found was in a Night Below module (2ed). Basically at one point you have to cause the collapse of a whole city.

Below is the tool they use to run the multi-session situation. Basically you get social collapse points if you do certain things, and accumulating them has effects on the city. You could do something similar for a large battle that takes a long time, in which the adventures do certain things that could slowly turn the tide of battle.

https://i.imgur.com/5n2NNd4.png

[LordEntrails]

Actually this is pretty similar to how I started off a campaign of mine. I only ever published the first module in the campaign and the characters are level 1 and the army starts out with goblins, but very similar otherwise. https://www.dmsguild.com/product/180749/Balance-Disturbed-BDC1?affiliate_id=432258

I run the initial village assault as one massive battle, but all the villagers are non-combatants. So I only have to keep track of the ~20 goblins and their leaders and the party. And the goblins unless engaged by the party generally move to the closes non-burning house. Any villagers in it they take 2-3 rounds to kill them. Then they take 2 rounds to light it on fire. Then they move on. Once a villager reaches the walled tavern courtyard, they are safe.

Depending upon the PCs background, they might start in one of the houses (if they are a local) or in the tavern (if they are not local). And then they get to chose if they go out to rescue villagers, turn to fight the goblins, or just flee.

Then, after that fight, they are sent to get help from the king's soldiers in a town a few villages away. They have roleplaying opportunities to convince the other towns to flee, get attacked by scouts/vanguard or maybe even caught in a siege if they try and defend one of the villages. All depends upon what choices they make.


I can recommend that you --after the raid-- give the players horses, and send them on a mission to gather reinforcements from the nearby lord. Your evil duergar leader will be loath to let them gather those reinforcements, so the players have to choose between slow and undetectable (but high risk of not getting there fast enough. Your choice if you make it back in time. :smallbiggrin:) and fast and obvious, drawing the Duergar forces to them (but if they survive, the town will probably be fine.

I like this idea (again, similar to what I did). But I suggest you have a timeline of when the bad guys do what. This way how the players interact with the bad guys depends upon where they are in the timeline. This way players have agency and what happens depend upon how the players act. i.e. if they hustle and risk exhaustion, the goblins scouts don't catch them. If they travel at night or have a campfire, the goblin bat riders find them and attack. etc.

[Sorinth]

If you have access to the old Tome of Battle sourcebook there's a lot of useful info about how to run battles/wars. But as mentioned by others you basically want to break the battle down into a series of smaller encounters.

Generally you will want to plan out how things would turn out if the PCs weren't there, then figure out how the enemy will react if the PCs change the course of the battle by winning a battle that the enemy was going to win. Basically create a flow chart and/or timeline of events.

So a simlistic battleplan might be, they send a bunch of zombies at the main gates, the villagers are able to hold the gate, but a group of steeder riders launch an attack somewhere else which overwhelms a section of the walls and they start to make their way to the gate to try and force it open for the rest of the forces. The villagers abandon the gate and have a fighting retreat through the village towards the monastary, the monastary holds out against the first wave of attackes, but falls to the 2nd wave.

With the PCs there, you have branches for what happens if they spot the steeder maneuver and reinforce that section of the wall and keep them out of the village, or manage to otherwise deal with the breach while the gate holds. How does the enemy react? For the fighting retreat you want to judge how well they did, if they were able to save most of the militia it might make the fight at the monastary easier. Then at the monastary decide on the number of waves of attacks, and how long the rest is before the next wave. If they can hold them off long enough dawn arrives and the enemy retreats.


For larger grand scale battles you can consider a point system where doing different things earns victory points, and they need to reach a certain number of victory points to win the battle.