Dungeon 8 Turn 4
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Cordy joins the bandits in finishing off the lone merchant, who is largely unable to defend herself. Cordy sacrifices 1 HP to grow a fourth mushroom, and sends this one to Lara since she’s the only one left without a pet at this point.
The merchant group drops a heavy shield (which Cordy takes), plate armour (for Lara), warhammer (left on the ground for now because it’s heavy), and five gold coins (Ricki’s favourite). Lara wants to talk to the bandits, but they can’t converse right now since they used their turns to attack. However, after the battle, one of them tosses some kind of stone token to Cordy.
“Thanks for the help. I guess you guys are okay. Show that token to any of our gang around here and they won’t fight you.”
Ricki then opens the chest nearby, where she finds two boxes which are presumably what everybody is fighting over. The bandits seem content to let her carry them, so she does so (after dropping her venom gland). They could easily be opened to see what exactly is inside, but if Ricki turned over a bunch of stuff outside of its containers, the bandits would probably assume she’d kept all the best stuff for herself. Better to leave everything in the boxes if she plans to turn them over later.
Kamau (after dropping two longswords) walks over to the group of bandits below and loots another box of stuff. The second group doesn’t seem to have figured out that he’s on their side, so they attack him on the way, but without dealing any damage.
Ricki helps everyone get past the floor trigger safely so they can all meet on the empty second floor at the end of the turn.
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BANDIT TOKEN
Consumable
Lets a group of bandits know you’re with them, making them docile.
Weight 1 (Stack 5), Cost –
BOXED GOODS
Tool
A container full of unknown cargo which is desired by a third party. There’s no way to know what’s inside without opening it, but once opened it can’t be repackaged.
Weight 1, Cost –
WARHAMMER
Weapon
Atk +3.
Weight 2, Cost 9
I wonder how many boxes we need to give to the bandits to make them happy. “All” was never the requirement, so we actually might be able to open one or two. Not now though. Just a loose idea.
10 boxes. We know there are less than 20 boxes tho.
And I would still be surprised if we don’t get some benefit from turning over all boxes.
100% agree!
We have precedent in the farm for going above and beyond being rewarded.
Plus, it makes perfect sense: The more goods we bring, the more our new friends’ operation become efficient and the better our cut of it becomes. My theory is that the discount % is based on the number of goods we give the bandits.
Also we now know those merchant jerks tried to scam us. No way opening 10 boxed goods is worth less than 25 gold lol.
Also, the discount being based on number of boxes has precedent as the number of items we brought back from the farm factored into the discount for building garden and coop. Of course we did not get much of a discount, because we chose to bring more valuable items back instead – that is the same tradeoff we face opening the boxes, but this time it is raaaaandom.
*Glare intensely at the consumable tag*
Ugh, I guess we’re better off saving the token for now until we meet a very strong bandit group.
Glad everything turned out well though.
I love how grateful these bandits are for the help, with how they let us take the battle loot and the boxed goods they’re after without even knowing our mission. Quite a refreshing difference from the asshole tavernkeep from dungeon 2.
I guess they don’t often get some friendly help after the empire pushed them to banditry to survive.
Things to note down for the future:
Talking cost an action for the target NPC too, we can’t talk to busy people.
Friendly NPCs fighting on our side will not request a share of battle loot.
Feel free to input any lessons learned at https://bit.ly/dungeon-eyes-mechanics 🙂
Plan to beat up eagles while Kamau interpose:
Ricki: Point out the pressure plate trap to everyone, including our new friends, so they all avoid it. Then move a room right, point out the pressure plate trap to the party so they all avoid it then add 2 boxed goods the the one the eagles are guarding then stab the left eagle.
Daisy: Bite the left eagle
Kamau: Move right with Ricki, drop 1 boxed goods and 2 shields between the eagles, then interpose them, noting how hard they hit.
Lara: Talk with the bandits, fill them in on our mission, in particular about the incoming wolves on turn 20, recommending them to use the weapons on the ground and get the bottom bandits group to join them in making a better stand against the wolves. Then, move right with Ricki. Drop plate armor and cigarettes in the middle of the eagles.
Cordy: Move right with Ricki then drop a heavy shield between the eagles then punch the right one.
Little mushrooms: 1 attack the left eagle, the remaining ones attack the right eagle
Battle loot: Lara get all 1 weight items she can, except cigarettes. Kamau get plate and heavy shield, both in Molly. Cordy gets everything else.
Explanation:
The actions themselves are pretty straightforward, but we’ll run out of inventory space soon if we don’t do some inventory management, which is more nuanced. Here’s my inventory objectives for the current plan:
-We put extra heavy items on Molly and 1 weight items out.
-We want Ricki to have space in case we have to loot locked chests and we want Kamau to have space in case there are guarded chests to loot without fighting. So their boxed goods should go elsewhere
-This should result in a perfect final inventory for Lara we shouldn’t have to touch again, filled with items we want to bring out yet don’t want on Molly.
-This use the combo of “dropping is a free action”, “picking up battle loot is a free action” and “items dropped on monsters are guarded and added to battle loot”(ex: dropped tomatoes were added to potatobeast’s battle loot in the farm) to do the management fast.
We never tried this, but it work in theory. If it doesn’t work, we can just have Lara and Kamau spend their actions to pick it up later, which is still the least actions used to complete the inventory management possible, faster than trading.
Oh hey, just make it explicit that each character avoids the traps Ricki pointed out to them – just pointing out may not be enough.
Okie, done!
You sure that’s needed, though? The how to play on “Pointing Out Details” seem to imply pointing out traps makes characters automatically avoid them.
Better safe than sorry. Costs us nothing to specify, and we have had trap surprises at the Manor, before.
I don’t think this will work as described because we’ve been warned before that dropping and picking up in the same turn counts as trading, which takes an action. LSN indicated we could get, as an example, a thrown spear as a free pickup at the end of combat, but I think trying to stretch that logic to also include items we dropped on purpose is super unlikely to work.
D7T39 indicate drops on monsters become part of their guarded items, and is not limited to thrown weaponry. Indeed we got them as free battle loot pickups on D7T45 upon defeating the monster.
Yes, and battle loot are free actions. I think trying could be super useful.
This isn’t nearly as good as the true free trading we had before LSN hit us with a nerf bat; we can’t be trading over half our inventory every other turn like we did in the Warrens since this needs a battle and can’t be used on equipment we’re using in the battle.
But if it works? This will still greatly reduce the amount of boring turns spent messing around with inventory that nobody likes. Maybe LSN wants it to take more turns and call Rule Zero to say no, but trying is worth it.
And if it doesn’t work, we needed to drop those items anyway to be picked up by the right character later so no risk here.