I mentioned this particular game last week. We were trying out the new Man-O-War career, and I wanted to test some career pairings with the Doom Reaver career. We ended up with a Man-O-War Drakhun, a Man-O-War/Man-at-Arms equipped as a shock trooper, a Doom Reaver/Cutthroat, and fatefully, Will Shick’s mounted Doom Reaver.

You’ll notice the lack of a significant, if not vital, ally to a pair of low-experience Doom Reavers: a Greylord capable of keeping the fellblade-toting lunatics in line. I hasten to add that this was not an omission but a conscious decision to see if the Berserk ability was functioning the way we wanted it to. Boy, did it.

This unusual group of characters was instructed to eliminate a scouting party of Nyss that had been striking supply lines in northern Khador. Vital supplies taken by the raiding Nyss were to be recovered and the raiders themselves dispatched with impunity. Unfortunately, this meant the player characters would need to follow the Nyss’ tracks up into the snowy wilderness, where the terrain would favor the Nyss’ hit-and-run tactics. I had the players make Tracking rolls as they pursued the raiders into the wilderness, and eventually I threw down the map.

The characters found themselves in a long, narrow valley full of trees, with the Nyss holed up on high ground to the north. There were two broad paths the riders could take, but most of the map was filled with a dense cover of black pines. Once they rolled initiative, the player characters were confronted with a significant force of Nyss archers and swordsmen, subjecting them to an uphill slog under a hail of accurate arrow fire. Commanding the Nyss was an ice sorceress who wielded her magic offensively, slinging ice bolts at the advancing soldiers.

The Man-O-War pair weathered the brunt of incoming arrows ahead of their more vulnerable allies. My Nyss were lucky to get a point or two of damage through their armor, but half the time they attacked the Drakhun his warhorse shrugged the shots off! A Man-O-War Drakhun is one of the most durable characters in the game so far, to say nothing of the ability it has to bring the hurt to a target with its impressive weapons.

Eventually the Khadorans made it uphill to the Nyss camp. The archers continued to fall back while their sword-wielding allies made a desperate attempt to fight off the Khadorans. That’s when the Doom Reavers—especially Will Shick’s Doom Reaver—turned the forest into a killing field. It began about as you’d expect, but eventually Will ran out of enemy targets.

I have to specify “enemy” because he still had plenty of targets in the form of the other three player characters. From horseback, Will whipped his fellblade down on his fellow Doom Reaver and left him coughing blood in the snow, then he turned and hacked deep into the Man-O-War shock trooper, and finally he wheeled around to face off with the Drakhun. The Drakhun, seeing his comrades downed by a bloodthirsty Doom Reaver gone berserk, did the only logical thing he could do: he charged in an attempt to put the madman down.

What happened next was one of the least-expected playtest encounters thus far. With the incapacitated characters’ players making bets on the outcome, a bloodthirsty Doom Reaver faced off with several hundred pounds of steam-actuated armor. I’m not normally one to encourage intra-party violence like this, but it was a playtest game and I was as curious as anyone else to see who would come out on top. It was like the end of a boxing movie, where you want to know if the down-on-his luck guy from the Bronx is going to take down the giant Russian superman.

The two made great use of their horses’ mobility, shifting away from the fight and running through the forest, each in an attempt to get a charge against the other. They jockeyed for position, making several Riding rolls to leap clear of obstacles in the thick woods before setting themselves up on the path. When they finally clashed, it was apocalyptic. The Drakhun cut the Doom Reaver’s horse out from under him on the charge, and so on foot the Doom Reaver responded in kind, whacking the head off the Drakhun’s horse with his fellblade. The two traded blows back and forth, the Man-O-War’s armor the only thing keeping him in the fight as the fellblade cut huge gashes through it, while the Doom Reaver’s DEF (and some lucky Walk It Off rolls) kept him going against the steam-armored warrior.

Eventually, though, every fight needs a victor. The Man-O-War, broiling alive in his armor from a ruptured steam pipe, brought his annihilator blade down to finally drop the out-of-control Doom Reaver in the snow. Barely able to get free of his armor before it cooked him alive, now left standing alone in the bloody forest and likely to freeze to death, the Drakhun had at last emerged victorious.

This remains one of our most unusual playtest games. Did it teach us much? Other than “Beware Will Shick,” probably not, no. But was it awesome?

Without a doubt.
–M