The Battle for Polip

 This adventure was originally made as a direct sequel to this adventure, although this one probably won't matter much to a party who has not gone through several adventures in service to Polip before.

The Setup

    After finding out that the kobold invasion of Polip was coming, the day has finally come. Hopefully, the party has had enough time to gather forces and prepare defenses, because the kobolds outnumber the people of Polip 6 to 1. It is unknown what direction the kobolds will attack from, how their forces will be divided, or what they will be armed with, so whatever was done to prepare will have to do.

The Battle

    When the battle begins, about 1/3 of the kobold forces will be above ground, barely visible in the distance, and then the other 2/3 will come out of tunnels in the ground about 100 feet from the walls of Polip. The kobolds are armed with spears and swords, but they are highly determined to take back the valley they view as their ancestral homeland. The kobolds will most likely fight to the last man unless one of their leaders can be convinced to negotiate. 

    Run this battle using whatever mass combat rules you are comfortable with. I ran mass combat rules that only barely gave the effect I wanted, so I don't really feel like sharing them here. What is important is that the goal of the battle is to defend the town from the enemy forces. I gave the town walls and the town itself hit points and if both pools got depleted I would've considered that a win for the kobolds. The party was able to build extra defenses and do special training to get various bonuses during the battle, but that was highly improvised based on what the players came up with for defenses.

Running Notes

    When I ran this adventure, I ran it basically as described above. The party had been able to gather several groups of allies that they could use to fight the kobolds and was able to prepare several different defenses that added to the hit points of the wall and gave their allies bonuses to things like perception. I also ruled that characters could train with their armies to give the troops better stats during the battle. As I said, I wasn't super satisfied with the mass combat system I used for this, but I think I could tweak it for a better experience. I'll make another post if I ever do run a more effective mass combat encounter.