The Fall of the Brown Wizard — Part 1
A play report for a Horde Wars game I played on 12/28/23. This is a continuation from my first play Horde Wars play report found here if you scroll past (or read) my review on Horde Wars!
Character Roster
- Phillip Bronswick the Human Thief / Brown Wizard (me)
- William Ward the Human Mercenary / Grey Wizard
- Oogrim Firefist the Orc Blade Master / Red Wizard
Going into this game I was expecting just some dungeon crawling and some monster shanking; a fun little outing, you know?
However, since all the players here were half wizard, we got offered a special job which took us on a wild ride.
Report
We arrive in the city of White Haven at the behest of Archmage Galen, a grey wizard known for his medical skills and author of Galen’s Compendium [HWB pg. 164].
I [Phillip] get accommodations at a local inn, somewhere to clean up before I go and see an Archmage. While walking around the city, I notice that there are groups of people with either white or red wrappings around their swords. So I ask the bar keep at the tavern what’s going on with that.
He tells me that there’s some political upset between the local governor and the king, red wrappings are in support of the king and white for the governor.
There are 2 more important pieces here:
- The nobles aren’t in support of the king.
- Galen recently claimed the Archmage title.
This one we knew, but went over our heads.
Red Flags
After everyone had a brief city scene, we met at the castle where Galen has his tower. We are then escorted to the tower for the meeting, being expected.
Now.
What follows are numerous red flags that we, as a group, did not contemplate until much later.
Galen greets us, we notice his staff. It’s Archmage Archelaus’ staff, the head of the blues. Perhaps the former, but we don’t think much about it.
Getting down to business, Galen tells us that he has discovered that there are another set of Archmagi robes.
This is big news because there’s only supposed to be five, one for the Archmage of each order.
Galen says that they just have to be retrieved and he offers us the opportunity to go after one. He says he wants to build a new order of Archmages.
This is also a red flag, but again, it sounds more compelling than alarming to us.
He has two leads:
- There’s a tower in the swamps of South West Franconia. An Arch Lich lives there, but that’s where one of the robes is supposed to be.
This sounds like a bad time to us. - The other is in the abandoned dwarven city of Karnak Sul. Why is it abandoned you ask? Well that’s because Korvash the Nightfire drove all the dwarves out and now lairs there. Cool.
There’s more? Yeah. Karnak Sul is in the hill country of Brigmar, East of here. If we were to go by land we would have to pass through Eastron land. Barbarians.
This also sounds really rough.
We chose Karnak Sul. Why? Somehow, it sounded more appealing to us.
Galen offers some crowns up front and then more on return (lol, yeah right, return). We do some negotiating and end up with 150 crowns up front and 400 upon delivery of the robes. Each.
He also grants us access to his library of scrolls. We were allowed to purchase what he had in stock. Scrolls are cool in general as it broadens your arsenal if you’re trained in the magic skill, you don’t have to be a wizard. What was even cooler was that he had some higher tier spells, stuff that’s available in the unreleased Advanced Edition of the game.
There were no red flags to see at this point, just really cool spells that we could get our hand on. So we did, we loaded up on some big boy scrolls.
I bought
- 2x Rampage scrolls. These allow me to transform into a beast with 60 or less HP. Normal Brown Wizard transformation is a beast of 24 HP or less.
- 1x Acid Storm. Big area of big acid damage, very handy!
The others picked up
- 2x Aesir’s Bridge scrolls. This would let us teleport to any known location.
- 2x Magic Mirror scrolls. This would let us see any named location.
A pretty sweet combo.
I don’t recall what else was bought, but we burned through our up front cash almost immediately. Each scroll was 50 crowns.
The Plan
While in the castle, we decide to take advantage of their library, read up on where we’re headed to see if we can get any insights on how to pull this off. The only real tidbit we get is a rumor. A band of orcs came from the north and stole some of the dragon’s treasure.
It’s perhaps a bit flimsy, but maybe there’s some credence to it. There’s a Franconian town we can check the rumor at, sort of on the way. It’s something.
We didn’t want to go by land for this trip. The Eastrons just sounded like a bad time. White Haven is a coastal city, so we had the option of boats.
The idea was that we’d go north up the coast and then cut East and hit up that Franconian town and maybe hire some people to get into Karnak Sul. Once in we’d look for the robes and take what we could and then use our scrolls to get out in an instant.
E-Z
Right?
We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Boat
We blew about all our crowns on cool scrolls. Between us we still had a bit of money, at least from prior adventures.
There was a nice selection of boats and crew as well. Unfortunately, we could only really afford the fishing boat crewed by a father and his son, and barely at that. It was going to be a long trip and there were promises of payment made with a bit offered up front.
The scrolls were really cool, guys.
We set out.
Now, the Advanced Edition is where the maritime rules are, but one of the creators is playing with us. Essentially, if you travel along the coast in the shallows you’re gonna be rolling more frequently for encounters but they’re easier encounters, on average. If you go further out, you roll less often, but the encounters are a lot spicier.
We chose the deeper water.
Why?
That’s a good question.
Anyway, we were sailing and rolled up 2 encounters. The first one was some deep ones at night. This was not an easy fight, pretty brutal, really. It was the middle of the night and no one had their armor equipped.
We got banged up pretty bad, but managed to defeat them. Nasty guys to run into, but it could have been worse, there could have been more!
We had rolled 4 of a possible 12 deep ones.
Our second encounter was more dramatic.
We’re on deck and behind us we notice a huge fog cloud, it’s approaching us pretty rapidly. Except it’s not fog, it’s steam.
“What’s one of those doing so far south,” the captain says.
One of what?
An arctic wurm. A creature that superheats its body to burrow through glaciers. It’s chasing us and it’s hungry.
Crap.
We do not have a lot of long range options, so we do what we can to help the captain maximize our speed. It just isn’t enough, though. The wurm is advancing on us. William is shooting arrows at it to some effect, but this thing is massive.
I decided to bust out the scrolls. I use Rampage to transform into a Blackstone Wyvern and I engage the wurm.
This goes well, initially. Mostly because the guys on deck are still distracting it, but I’m getting some good hits in. During the fight, the wurm blasts fire on the boat and slams at its occupants, turning the captain into paste on the deck.
We get this thing down to half health, it’s starting to feel like we could pull this off! Then, it turns its full attention on me and in a single round of attacks it drops me to 0 health and eats me.
Thus ends the Brown Wizard.
At this point DM Blackwall rolls to see if that’s enough to satisfy the wurm or if it wants dessert. As it turns out, a wyvern was enough to sate its hunger and the wurm swims off.
The end of part 1.
You can pick up Horde Wars here!
