Session 2 Recap: Operation Gatefall
General Summary
THE CHRONICLE
What follows is the account of the second watch of the night of 5 Ches, 1487 DR — as the strike team pushed deeper into the heart of Suzail.
I. The Decision at the Stairs
The party had surfaced from the sewer beneath the prisoner barracks square with a plan, six armed soldiers, and an eight-and-a-half-foot Gith standing quietly in the back. Hans and Onataro had already scouted the square and confirmed a single patrol unit — three Magistone troopers and one unit commander — guarding the entrance to the barracks. The rest of the party waited just inside the sewer stairwell, ready to move on word.
The consensus was quick. Carver readied a Grease spell in case things went wrong. Onataro took careful aim at the unit commander. The rest of the party staged themselves just out of sight. Hans stepped out into the square.
II. The Performance
Hans Ashvain, still wearing the face of a decorated Imperial officer courtesy of his Disguise Self, hyperventilated briefly to manufacture the correct level of breathlessness, and broke into a near-sprint toward the patrol.
He cited the name of General Varric Althorn — the man who had taken command of Suzail's defenses when Lord Gaius defected — with the casual authority of someone who had been in the same briefing room as the general not an hour ago. He told the soldiers that Althorn himself had ordered them north. That a skirmish was beginning on the wall. That he had been personally commanded to watch the prisoners in their absence.
The soldiers, already fatigued, already rattled by weeks of siege and dwindling rations, did not question it. They left at speed. The deception roll was a 25. At level 2.
Varsen, who had been coiled like a spring behind the corner the entire time, watched them go with an expression that managed to convey both respect and mild disappointment that no axes were required.
III. The Barracks
The barracks door was unlocked. Carver pushed it open. Inside: seven beds, nine soldiers, all of them shackled to their bedposts by wrist irons. Several had untreated wounds beginning to fester. The room smelled of a long captivity. Nobody had fed them with any regularity.
Varsen assessed the scene for approximately one second and began methodically cleaving through chains and bedposts with his greataxe. He worked quickly and without commentary.
Gustav moved behind him with his healer's kit already open, working from bed to bed with a competence that his general affect does not particularly suggest. He had treated four men before he reached the ninth bed, where the reason the soldier had not stirred became apparent. The man was cold. Rigor mortis had already set in. He had been dead for at least six hours.
Gustav closed the soldier's eyes, said a quiet prayer to Bast — that his last moments had held some pleasure, and that the plane he moved on to held only more of it — and turned to face the room.
"There is no time for a proper burial. We must remember this soldier and move on."
Varsen did not argue.
"Get them on their feet. Get them armed. We go."
Sergeant Gage was already upright. He snapped his men to attention with a word and accepted the weapons and armor Carver distributed with the efficiency of a man who had been waiting for exactly this moment. The two most badly wounded soldiers — Blythe and Fisher — were sent back through the sewer with a civilian family Varsen had encountered and persuaded to leave an adjacent house: a young man, his wife, and two small children who had opened their door to a scarred, shirtless dwarf with a greataxe and decided the rebel encampment sounded safer. Eight soldiers remained combat-ready.
IV. The Search
With the soldiers armed and staged, the party took a brief sweep of the surrounding courtyard. The alchemical shop yielded the most useful finds — Carver knocked the lock off with a light hammer after Onataro snapped a pick in the mechanism, and Gustav identified four Greater Potions of Healing among the simmering vials inside. Carver located a Potion of Invisibility. Neither man commented extensively on the fact that these items were being appropriated. War requires pragmatism.
Jasper examined a pair of ornate leather-bound books in an adjacent shop, determined they were a minor lord's family history, and put them back.
An adjacent house yielded a locked door and a voice behind it saying it was loyal to the Crown. Varsen opened negotiations. After a natural 20 persuasion check — and the sight of a dwarf with an axe making what appeared to be a reasonable offer — the family inside agreed to leave with Blythe and Fisher through the sewer.
The artificer's shop across the courtyard had two chests that Carver inspected thoroughly. He found unrefined Magistone crystals with research potential, but nothing of immediate tactical use. He noted the location for later.
V. Back Through the Sewers
With the barracks cleared and the square swept, the party returned the way they came — back down the stairwell and into the sewer, following the tunnel toward the second ladder Carver had identified during the initial reconnaissance. The one that came up in the green space northeast of the harbor ward, just south of the armory.
Nobody particularly enjoyed being back in the sewers. Gustav had exhausted his perfumed rag. He endured it without complaint, which may have been the most heroic thing he did all evening.
VI. The Green Space — Onataro's Scout
The ladder came up through a narrow cylindrical well into a small park — a patch of grass and old stone tucked between the harbor buildings and the armory's southern wall. It was quiet. It should have been empty.
Onataro went up first. He was, after all, the stealthiest member of the party by a significant margin, and nobody thought to question this despite the fact that he is eight and a half feet tall.
He made it out of the well, got his feet under him, and immediately fell sideways through a bush.
From around the corner of a six-foot fence, a silhouette — one Imperial guard, alone, jumpy — straightened and called out into the dark. Onataro demonstrated the acrobatic capabilities that his size does not suggest, folded himself back down the well before the guard rounded the corner, and landed in the sewer below. The guard walked the green space, heard nothing further, muttered something about the shadow being too large to be a man, and retreated.
Onataro relayed what he had seen: one guard, apparently alone, patrolling inconsistently, currently spooked but not alarmed. The party came up.
Jasper tripped on a stone at the edge of the dais as he emerged. He took Hans, Gustav, and Varsen down with him in a single spectacular cascade. The resulting clatter brought the guard running at speed.
Hans, still wearing the face of a decorated Imperial officer, stepped in front of the heap of his companions and told the guard — who had rounded the corner and frozen at the sight of an entire squad of people — that these men had volunteered to scout the sewer entrance for security breaches, and that his standing orders were to go down and guard it himself.
The guard stared at him. Stared at the eight-and-a-half-foot figure standing behind him. Began to process what he was looking at.
Varsen, who had been dusting grass off his chest with the expression of a man who did not just fall over and would like everyone to proceed on that basis, waited until the guard's eyes moved back to Hans — and cold-cocked him across the temple with a closed fist.
The guard staggered forward, concussed and bleeding. Carver, with the timing of a man who had been calculating exactly this geometry for the last thirty seconds, tripped him neatly as he stumbled — and the guard tumbled headfirst back down the well with a sound that ended abruptly.
Varsen looked at the hole for a moment.
"I was just going to throw him in a bush. But that works too."
Carver looked at the hole. The hole offered no comment.
VII. The Armory
The armory was a block north. The party covered the distance with varying degrees of stealth — mostly none — and arrived to find the guards inside had rolled a natural 1 on their perception and remained entirely unaware of the approach. Varsen duck-walked along the wall beneath the arrow slits, waited for everyone to stack up behind him, and kicked the door open.
Inside, three Magistone troopers and their unit commander turned to find a dwarf with a Faerie Fire device already charging on his wrist, a berserker with an axe already in motion, a bard in an absurdly tight outfit, and an eight-and-a-half-foot gunman in a poncho standing in the doorway. The unit commander shouted for his men not to let anyone near the Ember Horn and died mid-sentence as Varsen's greataxe bisected him from collarbone to sternum.
The combat was not long. Carver's Faerie Fire outlined two of the three remaining soldiers in phosphorescent violet. Hans opened with Bane — the tune was The King's Hemorrhoids, the insults were in German, the effect was a -1d4 to every attack and save they attempted. Gustav blessed Carver, Varsen, and Onataro with the favor of Bast, which manifested as a warmth at the back of the neck and a sudden sharpening of the senses that everyone agreed felt pleasurable, though some were more vocal about this than others.
When the last two troopers dropped their weapons and put their hands up — one barely nineteen, the other younger still — the combat ended. One fainted outright at the sight of what Varsen had done to their commander. Varsen did not spare the commander who had tried to flee toward the Ember Horn. Gustav ensured the man's final moments were as painless as could be managed, which involved a needle, a precise vertebra, and a quiet word in the dying man's ear. Varsen watched this, considered it, and smirked.
VIII. The Ember Horn
The Ember Horn was exactly what the intelligence dossier had described and somewhat more impressive in person. Eight feet of shoulder-fired magistone warhead delivery system, its charge a compound of Sundered Ore — raw Magistone ground to powder and suspended in alchemical resin, laced with iron oxide and copper dust. Inert until impact. On impact: pure, focused, catastrophic heat. No concussion. No debris. Just a thermite burn that would melt through virtually any metal ever forged.
Carver and Jasper examined it together and confirmed it would function. They also confirmed the loading mechanism had been damaged — one shot. That was all they would get.
The debate over whether to use it on the gate or the Radiant Frame was brief. Varsen closed it: assess when they arrived and decide then. This was, everyone agreed, correct.
Onataro shouldered it without difficulty. He was built for exactly this sort of thing.
IX. The Signal Stone
They had everything they needed. The soldiers were armed. The Ember Horn was shouldered. The gate was one block north. The time had come.
Varsen took the Signal Stone, looked at it once, and threw it skyward with the full force of a man who has been waiting all night for something to do without restraint. It climbed two hundred feet into the dark air above Suzail, and for a moment there was silence.
Then it strobed — faster and faster, a cascading pulse of multicolored light that burst across the sky like a second dawn — and the sound that answered it from beyond the walls was the sound of ten thousand soldiers breaking into a run. Hoofbeats. War cries. The grinding crash of siege lines engaging.
The Cormyrian Civil War was, at last, deciding itself.
The party turned north toward the gate.
X. The Frame Falls
The Promenade before the western gatehouse was no longer quiet. Imperial forces were converging from the east — Harmonic Legion soldiers, psionic-linked and coordinated, moving in formation. And in the gatehouse courtyard, the Radiant Frame — assessed by intelligence as offline — was not offline. Two techs were on their knees beside it, working frantically at something in its chest cavity. As the party rounded the corner, one of them found the wire.
The Frame stood to its full ten-foot height.
Varsen was already running toward it.
The techs who had reactivated the Frame did not survive the encounter. Varsen reached them first.
Onataro assessed the situation, unslung the Ember Horn, sighted on the Radiant Frame's chest cavity, and fired. What followed was not an explosion. There was simply an extremely concentrated, extremely brief event in which everything above the Frame's knees ceased to exist. The arms fell. The legs buckled. The threat was eliminated.
Carver stared at the cooling puddle of metal for a long moment. He had designed the Ember Horn's predecessor. He said nothing, but the expression on his face conveyed a comprehensive grief that words would not have improved.
The remaining Imperial soldiers — shaken by the signal blast, hearing the rebel host crashing against the outer wall, watching a Radiant Frame get vaporised by a hippo with a bazooka — found some of them willing to surrender and others less so. Combat continued as the session reached its end.
The gates are one block north. The rebellion is at the walls.
— The Chronicle of Operation Gatefall, 5 Ches, 1487 DR
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