Stones Over Sandpoint, Part 2 (Tuesday, Kuthona (XII) 24th, 4707 AR)

The heroes had less than a day to prepare the town for an assault. Not enough time to orchestrate an evacuation of the town.

March of the Giants

The giants launched their assault on Sandpoint at dawn. On the morning of the raid, Shalelu and Bruthien's familiar were out and about at sunrise - they spotted several humanoid silhouettes standing atop the nearest tors of Ravenroost, lit by the rising sun. The size of these shapes left little doubt to Shalelu and Bruthien's familiar - the giants were there!

Once the sun rose, the giants moved down quickly from Ravenroost and approached Sandpoint, using the woods and the cliffs alongside the Turandarok River to mask their approach. Since the heroes noticed the giants, they had about 10 minutes to prepare.

The Raid Began

A thunderous crack of stone against stone rang through the air - one of the giants throwing a boulder at Sandpoint's north wall. As Sandpoint woke and discovered itself under attack, screams and cries of terror mingled with the growing howls and roars of the attacking giants. Shalelu rang the bells of the cathedral in warning.

The attacking warband consisted of 12 stone giants, three dire bears, a red dragon, and Teraktinus. If Teraktinus were a better tactician, or if the giants worked together in this raid, they'd likely be unstoppable. Fortunately for Sandpoint and the heroes, the young giants split up, falling into small groups that assaulted the town with little attempt at coordinating the timing of their efforts with one another. Since the giants approached initially from the northeast, the first events of the raid occurred there, while additional attacks began to appear further south soon thereafter.

The first assault occurred at the northern wall - the giants there took some time to taunt and harass the guards frantically trying to defend the wall. The heroes ended up getting distracted or taking too long to deal with each group, so they found that two or three more had began an assault and had to pick and choose which threat to answer and which to allow to run its course. Unfortunately, the brave guards of Sandpoint were ill prepared to face foes as deadly as giants. 

The Northgate Siege

Three giants dressed in thick pelts hefted huge rocks pulled from the ground. Periodically, one hurled a rock against Sandpoint's northern gate. The iron-reinforced oak timbers splintered and cracked as the stones hit it, but so far, the gate held.

Once the youngest of the three giants saw a human moving around on the wall, he tossed a rock. Although they had revealed their presence, the three giants waited until they saw the red dragon's opening strafe of the town before they made any real attempt to take the wall.

When Bruthien's familiar first arrived at the scene, the giants were about 200 feet up the road from the gate, calling out taunts and jeers in broken Common to the terrified guards who cowered behind the wall and frantically moved wagons into place to help barricade and reinforce the gate.

Since the giants were left to their own devices, they started demolishing the gate and walls. The heroes ignored this group entirely.

Chaos at Tanner's Bridge

The east side of the town was poorly arranged for defense against giants, with no city wall to speak of and only the languid flow of the Turandarok River to slow attackers. The river itself was only 10 feet deep there, shallow enough for stone giants and dire bears to wade through just south of the northenmost bridge into town.

When the giants to the north started throwing boulders, a pair of stone giants using the trees in the swamp on the north side of the Mill Pond as cover emerged onto the road on the east side of Tanner's Bridge. The heroes opposed and killed them.

Dragonfire Inferno

The red dragon didn't follow the giants on foot as they approached Sandpoint; he reached Sandpoint less than a minute after the initial attack on the northern gate.

Once he arrived in town, the dragon gleefully swooped and flapped over Sandpoint. He spent as much time roaring and periodically landing on the roofs of sturdy buildings to glower and menace as he did actually breathing fire or gulping up fleeing citizens. First, he swooped in from the north and breathed fire on the Sandpoint Garrison - the building was mostly stone, so it weathered the attack better than the dragon's next target.

The dragon wheeled and circled, swooping in to breathe fire on a new building. His next target during the raid was the Sandpoint Cathedral. While the northern wings of the cathedral caught fire quickly, the southern section was relatively fireproof. The red dragon alighted on the roof of the cathedral to roar and mock the town. The citizens of Sandpoint organized bucket brigades that could contain the fire, but they could do little to save the buildings the dragon targeted directly with his breath weapon.

Mill Pond

As giants with huge tree-trunk clubs reached through second-story windows and pulled citizens out of their homes, knocking some over the head and shackling others together with leg irons, a pair led by Teraktinus lumbered through the streets. "More prisoners!" they yelled as they made their way through the town. "Bring us your fat, greedy merchants, and we will spare your miserable lives! Ignore us and you'll burn in dragon fire!"

Teraktinus and his two bodyguards made their way through Sandpoint. When the heroes got in his way, he proved quite creative at finding things to throw at his enemies - chimneys, pieces of buildings, and wagons worked as well as thrown rocks in a pinch. In any event, foes brave enough to stand in his way annoyed him to such a degree that he tried to kill them. When he realized that the heroes were particularly powerful foes, he used his war horn.

Beer or Death

Bruthien's familiar saw two giants shouting threats at Two Knights Brewery, their voices booming and insistent. "If you don't give us all the beer, we'll smash you flat! shouted one of them. Another threw a stone at the building. "Beer or death! Your choice!"

These two stone giants were late to the raid. When they arrived, they approached from the southern Lost Coast Road. Seeing the raid in full swing, they barreled across the bridge but were immediately distracted - by the delicious smell of beer wafting out of Two Knight Brewery.

Their voices, booming and insistent, carried well over the chaos of the raid. As one shouted, the other ripped up from the ground the "Welcome to Sandpoint" sign - mirror and all - and flung it at the Brewery.