Session 3: The Gate Falls
General Summary
Here it is:
SESSION 3 — THE GATE FALLS 5 Ches, 1487 DR — The Western Gatehouse & The Dawngate District
What follows is the account of the third watch of the night of 5 Ches, 1487 DR — the hour the western gate of Suzail fell, and what came after.
I. Commander Gerrek Holst Enters the Fray
The party had been holding the Promenade before the western gatehouse — two Magistone troopers and an elite soldier still standing, the Radiant Frame reduced to cooling slag, the rebel host crashing against the outer wall somewhere beyond the sound of cannon fire. The battle was tilting. Then the door to the gatehouse slammed open.
He was exactly what the intelligence had failed to adequately prepare them for. Close-cropped white hair. A face carved by decades of hard service. Eyes like cold violet fire. His dark plate was trimmed in gold and draped in deep purple, a commander's cross on the chest. He planted himself at the threshold of the gatehouse, sword drawn, and swept his gaze across the line of his men.
"They will not take this gatehouse. And if somehow they do, they will spend the rest of their short lives wishing they hadn't. We hold here. On your lives, we hold."
Carver, who had spent two years on the opposite side of every engagement this man had ever commanded, recognised him immediately. Commander Gerrek Holst. The architect of the Radiant Frame shock campaign that nearly crushed the rebellion in its infancy at Arabel. The fact that he was on the ground fighting — not commanding from a tower, not directing from a map table, but standing in a doorway with his sword drawn — told Carver everything about how desperate the Imperial position had become.
Holst called his remaining soldiers to form a defensive line between the party and the gate. They obeyed. A shrinking line, but a line nonetheless.
II. The Line Holds — Briefly
Hans opened proceedings by pointing out, at range and in considerable detail, that the commander's men were doing what they were told like obedient children. The commander's wisdom save failed. The words stung.
Carver had already identified the tactical geometry. Jasper put electricity through two of the remaining troopers simultaneously with a twin-spelled Sorcerer's Burst. Both missed, deflected by a soldier who planted his feet and redirected the arc into the cobblestones. Varsen, experiencing what could generously be called a moment of tactical recalibration, screamed in the face of the nearest soldier at sufficient volume to constitute an action. The soldier shook. Varsen considered this a productive turn.
Gustav attempted a Sacred Flame at the elite soldier. The soldier succeeded on his save. The flame found nothing. Gustav noted this with the expression of a man who has filed it under expected outcomes and continued moving up.
Holst responded to Hans's opening mockery by advancing on the frontliners and delivering a multiattack that reminded both Carver and Varsen that whatever else the night had cost the Empire, it had not cost this man his sword arm. Nine points across Varsen's chest. A further blow to Carver's clavicle. Clean, measured, deliberately placed. The commander was not swinging wildly. He was working.
III. The Sleep Spell
Hans, assessing the situation with the calm of a man who has been hiding behind a wall for several rounds, stepped out and cast Sleep across a five-foot radius centered on the tightest cluster of remaining Imperial soldiers.
The 2024 version of the spell is considerably more elegant than its predecessor — a wisdom save rather than a hit point threshold, which meant the effect did not care how healthy the target was. It cared only whether they had the willpower to resist. Two of the three targets in range did not. They dropped mid-stance, unconscious before they hit the cobblestones.
Commander Holst failed his save. He then used his Legendary Resistance to succeed instead. He did not look at Hans while doing this. He did not need to.
The battlefield shifted immediately. Two soldiers incapacitated. One elite soldier rolling saves at the end of each turn. Holst holding the line alone, defending a gate that his men could no longer protect. Carver positioned himself for flanking. Varsen moved to cut off any retreat. The unconscious soldiers were not going to remain that way for long — but long enough.
IV. The Breakdown of the Imperial Line
Onataro put a round through the Magistone trooper in front of Carver. The man fell. The elite soldier beside Holst, still fighting through the fog of Hans's Sleep, swung at Varsen and missed by the margin that men miss by when their body is making decisions their mind has not yet approved.
Jasper's Sorcerer's Burst found purchase on a second trooper — electricity crackling through armor, the smell of scorched flesh joining the general atmosphere of the Promenade. The man died on his feet and then fell.
Hans, from behind cover, informed the commander that he was letting young men die for his own pride. The commander acknowledged this was probably true, and that he would die here or at a gallows, and that given the choice he preferred here. Hans took this as meaningful character development and continued playing.
Varsen brought his greataxe down on the elite soldier he had put down earlier — a critical hit on an unconscious man. The soldier survived it. Wounded, waking, howling in pain, but breathing. Varsen addressed Commander Holst over the man's writhing form.
"You're really going to march these kids to their deaths just to keep yourself from facing justice?"
He then looked at the young soldier to Holst's left — barely old enough to be in armor — and made a persuasion check. A 13 on a -2 modifier. Somehow it landed. The soldier began to back away. He stepped out of Holst's range. Holst struck him as he fled — fourteen points of damage, dropping him to one knee, grievously wounded.
"There will be no desertion in this army. Fight. Or die. Or perhaps both."
The rebel siege artillery chose this moment to contribute. A massive piece of masonry cleared the wall and slammed into the top of the gatehouse, scattering rubble across the Promenade. Everyone within range scrambled. Jasper took four points of bludgeoning damage. He noted that his own brother had apparently betrayed him.
V. The Telling Blow
Hans stepped out from behind the wall, walked directly up to the elite Magistone soldier who had been trading blows with Varsen all night, grabbed the man's face in both hands, looked him in the eyes, and delivered the following:
"Your children. They will be ashamed of you and the cause that you are dying for."
Vicious Mockery. Wisdom save at disadvantage. He failed. Two points of damage. The man believed every word. Every muscle in his body simply gave out. He collapsed, and Hans released his face and let the corpse fall with the unhurried composure of a man who has just finished a sentence. The soldier was dead. Hans had talked him to death.
It was, by reasonable consensus, the finest killing blow of the campaign so far.
VI. Jasper at the Door
While the front line held Holst's attention, Jasper had been watching the gatehouse door. A wounded Imperial soldier — the same man Holst had gutted for attempting to desert — had muttered something during a lull in the fighting. There was one man on the winch. Far side of the room. A switch. Pull it, the gate opens.
Jasper dashed for the door. He pulled it shut behind him. Inside: the gatehouse mechanism room, a second locked interior door, and on the other side of it, the sound of a man who was already done with this war.
Jasper called through the door. He told the soldier inside that Commander Holst was down. That the battle was lost.
He rolled an 11 on deception. Then used his DM-granted inspiration to reroll. Then rolled a natural 20.
The soldier inside said he would not open the gate himself — he would be a dead man. But he would not interfere with whatever Jasper chose to do in the room. The door between them was locked. The soldier on the inside attempted to help — produced a dagger, slammed it against the mechanism, and failed to shear the lock. He was trying. It was not enough.
Jasper crowbarred the door. Athletics check. A 17. The door flew open. The soldier inside, caught by the sudden force, stumbled backward into the turning mechanism of the gate. There was a scream. Then the sound of machinery working considerably better than it had a moment before. The soldier had become, in Jasper's subsequent assessment, a structural lubricant.
The lever was there. A bonus action. A failed attempt. Then the bardic inspiration from Hans — a d6 added to the roll at the moment of maximum need. Just enough. Jasper threw his body against the lever and the gate groaned and shuddered and gave.
VII. The Gate Falls
For a moment there was only the shriek of iron and the rush of cold air.
Then they came.
The crimson cavalry poured through the breach like blood from a wound — a tide of red and steel that did not slow, did not hesitate, did not stop. Hooves thundered against the cobblestones of the Magistone District. Banner carriers rode at the front, crimson standards snapping in the cold air. For one single breathless moment, the Imperial soldiers on the other side froze. They understood what it meant.
That moment ended. The cavalry crashed into the Imperial line. Formations that had held for hours dissolved in seconds. The shouts of commanders were swallowed by the roar of hooves. The infantry poured in behind them, flooding every alley, every doorway, every gap between buildings.
Commander Gerrek Holst was impaled by a cavalryman's lance and carried off down the street, still screaming. Hans watched this and immediately began composing a title for the resulting ballad. His working title was Commanding Penetration.
Somewhere in the chaos, a cheer began. Ragged at first, then fuller, then enormous. The voices of people who had stopped believing this moment would ever come.
VIII. The Party in the Aftermath
Each member of the party processed the moment in their own way.
Carver walked immediately to the thermobarically melted remains of the Radiant Frame and stared at it. He had no thoughts about the rebellion or the gate or the city or the war. He had thoughts about the machine. About what it could have been. About what it now was.
Hans was already putting together verse structure.
Jasper was observing whether blood made a viable long-term lubricant for gate mechanisms. His preliminary assessment was no, but the short-term results were promising enough to note.
Onataro polished his gun. He said: another job done. He meant it.
Varsen looked at the blood drying on his arms, at the scars reopened and the new wounds that would become scars, and thought about one specific person somewhere inside this city. He said nothing. He began walking.
IX. Lord Gaius
He came through the smoke like a man who had walked through worse a hundred times before. The measured sound of armored boots on cobblestone, cutting through the chaos. The crowd parted. Lord Gaius emerged and stopped, and his eyes moved across each of them — slow, calculating, the gaze of a man who has spent a lifetime measuring the worth of others.
Something rare crossed his face. Not warmth, exactly. Something adjacent to it.
"What you accomplished here tonight — I will not pretend I was certain you could do it. The gate is down. The outer district is ours. You have done what three companies of my regulars could not manage in a fortnight of planning. And yet you did it in a single night. You have my thanks. All of you. Genuinely."
His gaze moved, almost imperceptibly, to where Creed stood. Something moved behind his eyes. Pride, perhaps. Relief. The kind a father buries quickly before anyone notices it.
"And for seeing my son through it. That is not something I will forget."
A beat of silence. A bell tolling somewhere in the distance. The softness gone — tucked back behind the walls where he keeps such things. The commander returning.
"The gate was key. Castle Shadow is now the door. Inside the castle walls there is a man — something wearing the shape of one — who will not stop what is coming simply because we've opened the city's throat. The gate bought us time. Castle Shadow ends this tonight before the hour turns."
He produced a folded parchment from beneath his cloak and held it out to the group. A second objective. There was always another objective.
His voice dropped to something only the six of them could hear.
"What comes next — the gate will seem like a warm-up."
X. General Varric Althorn — New Objective
Gaius spread a soot-streaked tactical map across a supply crate and marked three entry points in crimson ink. The target was the Dawngate District — a commercial promenade on the eastern edge of the city, a rectangle of storefronts and covered markets that had become, in the chaos of the night, the last holdout of General Varric Althorn.
Althorn was not merely a field commander. He was the architect of Crownspire's current defenses — inner gate redundancies, active warding networks, emergency access corridors, command-only escape routes built into the palace district. His family were an ancient line of Suzail stonemasons. He knew every hidden passage in the city. The belief was that he was searching for one right now — a way to reach the Crownspire Ward and extract the king and other surviving nobles before the net closed entirely.
Gaius was clear on one point: if Althorn got back inside the palace, the clean victory became weeks of brutal street-to-street fighting.
He handed Jasper a device — something resembling a thickened monocle with dual lenses. The reticle for the Azure Lance. A magistone ballistic barrage weapon — effectively a precision artillery strike. It would level the building and anyone in it, along with a meaningful portion of one of the city's most historic districts. It was the option of last resort, held in the hands of the party's wild magic sorcerer, which everyone privately noted and nobody said aloud.
One hour to rest. Dawnstones distributed. Varsen downed his in approximately four seconds and was already walking toward the eastern district before anyone else had finished swallowing.
As Gaius departed, he pulled Perrin and Creed aside for a word. Perrin was immediately heard attempting to brief the Lord Commander on Hans's conduct during the mission. Gaius said: later. He did not look back.
Hans called out to Perrin's retreating back that he loved him and that he had not meant any of it. Perrin turned, very red in the face, and deployed both hands in a gesture that required no translation.
XI. The Approach — Dawngate District
The party moved east through streets that were already changing hands — rebel infantry flooding every corridor, civilians emerging from doorways to press food and wine and roses into the hands of soldiers who accepted them without slowing. The city was not yet won, but the city was changing. The sound of it was different. The fear was draining out, street by street.
They reached the western entrance to the Dawngate District and attempted to move in quietly. Most of them succeeded. Onataro did not — his footsteps on the cobblestones producing the particular sound of a large heavily armed creature attempting to be subtle. Jasper tripped on something at the threshold and managed to alert the single guard posted at the choke point, who turned and began heading inside at speed.
The party had one action each before the alarm was raised.
Somewhere in the northern rectangle of the district — the Dawngate Plaza — General Varric Althorn and his personal guard were waiting.
The gate is open. The city is changing hands. But the night is not yet over.
— The Chronicle of Operation Gatefall, 5 Ches, 1487 DR
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