Wipeout!

Fucking vampires, man

I posted this image once, now I'm doing it again. Behold, a tradition is formed. TPKs have many reasons. I'll try to have a look at the roots of our particular wipeout. We are talking about a classic GURPS fantasy campaign with some unique features, about a year in the running. The focus of the campaign is on escorting a wealthy lady to a big tribal feast, through a rather wild and uncivilized landscape. While the traveling was an adventure in itself, the lady had some dark secrets.

During those travels, the group chanced upon a house of ill repute which promised warm beds and good food to a group of weary travelers far from the fleshpots of civilization. Of course we barricaded our doors at night - we had been ambushed at inns twice before and basically had a thorough drill for sleeping indoors. During our first night (you see were this is going) we were attacked by vampiric servants, and while we were able to some damage to them, we were only able to flee as a group because a priest sacrificed his health and youth to drive the master vampire off. Being big damn heroes, we decided to smoke the vampires out, but our first daytime attack was violently repulsed. We were close to being wiped out, and had to put in some healing time and and spend scarce resources, but we had the feeling that we had broken the vampires' strength.

We were thinking about our further approach, with "ah fuck it, lets get the lady to her feast" being one valid option, when we were surrounded by guards from the local fiefdom, a led by quite a formidable officer, charging us with attacking a law-abiding inn. We were able to convince him that he should be raiding the inn, and not hapless travelers, and consequently had him and his thirty guards at our disposal. The troops also had some healing potions on them - basically, the party was nearly back at full strength and supported by lots and lots of quite competent fighters. Combined with our impression that we had already weakened the vampires, storming the inn during daylight seemed a foregone conclusion.

Under the inn we found a surprisingly sizable cave system, with lots of brainwashed guards, traps and other monsters. We got ambushed a lot, by opponents who always had one or two potions at hand that turned them from adequate fighters into straight up murderers. Enhanced strength, night vision, smoke bombs to negate an invisible assassin on our side, their own invisible fighters...while we were able to chip at their strength, one or two of our characters were heavily wounded in nearly every encounter. All the while, we were able to husband our thirty redshirts - in fact, up to the final battle, we only lost two to sneak attacks, two others were sent away to bring news of this vampire nest to the king - the smartest thing we did all evening.

Finally, we decided to make a push for the center of the cave system, were the master vampire was rumored to live. We entered her sanctum with two of the original characters, one of them wounded, the others being on the surface (players were not able to make it that night), and my barbarian being in such bad shape that I decided to take over the officer for the duration. For this push (which we didn't think would lead directly to the boss-monster's doorstep) we took fifteen soldiers with us. The officer, full of righteous fury and a paragon of audacity, didn't even make it through the door. In the sanctum was the master vampire and two of her minions, while to other rather powerful half-vampires tried to attack us from the other side. The soldiers were cut down in about six rounds in the Sanctum while the lieutenant (my next take-over) and the last standing original character dealt with the two half-vampires coming up from behind. We already knew that this were devilishly hard opponents, with high dodge scores, magical armor and some undead invulnerabilities, as well as very proficient with their weapons, and, due to their potions, quite able to put down a character with two swings. We held them off long enough for the last ten soldiers to hear the noise of the battle, bringing my barbarian with them, although the lieutenant didn't make it. The surviving soldiers, and the two last characters then turned to the vampire and her last two minions, which were already weakened a bit. And then she killed us. It took about five rounds. While we hit her quite hard a few times, it just wasn't enough - according to the gamemaster, we were close, but no cigar. Two characters are still above ground (and one in another dimension after a teleportation fumble), but basically, this group of adventurers is done for. So, how did this happen?

This is just a side plot

On the metalevel, I thought that this was just a sideplot on our main quest, and as such rather straightforward and comparably easy to solve. I projected this assumption on the importance of this lonely inn on the perceived capabilities of its inhabitants, which probably led to a lasting underestimation of their abilities.

Nearly there

Even when we were shredded to bits again and again and had to retreat for days to get back some semblance of strength, we always thought we had broken the the vampires' power. "Okay, we got four of her elite, she cannot have much more of those, can she?" All the while, our own power was degrading.

She plain ripped our heads off

The last encounter was obviously above our pay grade. "27 cutting" isn't something you hear very often in your standard GURPS fantasy campaign. Indeed, she landed two hits and killed two ~140 point characters. She was no slouch concerning taking damage as well, with two cutting hits doing each 12-13 base points to her leg leading to increased grimacing, but no crippling injury. She also took hits to the torso, but those just fell into a bottomless pit of vampiric unkillability.

Better tactics?

Maybe. But stealth was not really an option with those invisibility-nixing smoke bombs, and while smoking out the sanctum with burning oil might have sounded like a good idea, she probably would just have come out like a bat out of hell to decorate her lobby with our innards instead of slaughtering us inside the sanctum. We were able to ambush the half-vampires only in one case, and that surprise didn't really turn the fight.

The plan nobody followed

Just getting on with the main mission. At one early point of crawling the - for want of a better word - dungeon, we even retrieved the stuff we lost during the first night. We could have told the soldiers that we had other obligations and then got the hell away: This would have been quite sensible from a roleplaying point of view. This inn is not our problem - this possessed noblewoman is. She paid us, we have been escorting her for months, her fate seems to be entangled with our fate. But tonight we seemed to be bent on showing a sideplot who's boss.