World of Warcraft: the RPG: Trigger-Happy Ogre

Yesterday, we ran another session of our World of Warcraft: the RPG campaign. Last time, the players had taken on a job to go check on a tin mine in the hills and find out why it wasn’t shipping any tin to Darkshire, so I set up a random encounter.

Having already included wolves, giant spiders, worgen and the undead, I figured I should use the last remaining form of mob that’s native to Duskwood in the video game, namely an ogre. Since the players had just hit level three and a single ogre was thus a level-appropriate encounter for them, it seemed the thing to do, especially since ogres – especially the two-headed variety that keeps arguing with themselves – are one of the more iconic Warcraft elements. Who can forget “BUUUURP!” “He did it!” “No, he did it!”?

Since I also wanted to include some steampunk elements, I armed the ogre with a blunderbuss and had him lying in ambush on a ledge above the road the players were walking. However, since starting the group within the blast radius of a blunderbuss seemed overly cruel (those things pack a punch!), I also made the ogre’s heads prone to talk to each other, so the players could make him out with a fairly easy Listen check.

A certain amount of back and forth followed as the players tried to figure out just what was waiting ahead of them. In the end, the Druid sent her wolven animal companion to scout (the ogre threw a rock at him for 1d4 damage to make him go away, poor thing) and then used her daily Speak to Animals domain power to ask what he’d seen. The Mage climbed up to the higher ledge and went to spy on the ogre while the Druid and the Tinker tried the same and fell on their asses. They eventually made it up by means of a Summon Nature’s Ally hippogryph, but by that time the Mage had already failed to divert the ogre and was fleeing back towards them.

The ogre appeared before them, huffing and puffing, and unloaded the blunderbuss! The Mage went down with negative HP, and things looked decidedly dicy for a while there. But the Druid managed to heal her up, and a combination of crossbow bolts from the Tinker, Arcane Missiles from the Mage, and a black bear courtesy of another Summon Nature’s Ally from the Druid dropped the ogre while he was still reloading the blunderbuss.

I swear, this rule set is not great for my nerves! Every single fight seems to have the potential to turn deadly. Maybe it’s because I keep trying to make the baddies stack the odds in their favour? I mean, I take a pride in not having fights take place in a featureless white void, but if the Challenge Rating system assumes a featureless white void, that might be the reason. Giving the enemy the ability to strip the entire group of players of something like half their HP was probably a bit excessive…

Yeah. That’s almost certainly it, now that I think about it. If the ogre had just charged them with its greatclub across a plain field, they’d have fared considerably better. I should keep that in mind – trying to be cute means making things more unpredictable. Pity, though. I want to get to the cool stuff already. I love playing low-powered games, but when GMing I want to enable some heroics. I’d have started the players out on a higher level here, but it seemed inadvisable since we’re none of us used to the system and things get more complicated the higher up you go.

Anyway, having survived the ogre, the players strongly considered retreating back to Darkshire, but eventually decided to just make camp and try to heal up some more. I sort of hinted ominously that there might be random encounters in the night, but my actual plan is just to have some disgruntled workers from the mine, that my original plan had them meeting on the road, stumble on their camp instead. Maybe one of them will try to steal from them? Either way, I’m not going to start any more fights. I don’t want to actually kill them, after all.

All in all, I guess the session went pretty well. Certainly the players seemed to relish a hard-won victory… and the Tinker is already thinking of mounting the ogre’s blunderbuss onto the automaton pack mule they got as a reward from their last quest. We’ve got a new session scheduled for this week. More later, hopefully.