Gnoll Sappers | Patreon Weekly #231

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m going to share some details on the second enemy for the gnoll caves quest: the Gnoll Sapper!

A Quick Gnoll Recap

v2.2 is looking pretty solid with the recent release of v2.2.1 (just one patch this time!), so I’ve started moving on to working on the caves quest again.

As a quick recap, the second quest variant that I’ll be adding is one that focuses on gnolls and collapsed terrain. The gnolls have been experimenting with earth moving magic, which results in lots of closed off walls and fallen boulders. Of course, using this terrain to your advantage will be important.

The first and most common enemy in this region is the Gnoll Guard. Guards are weaker than brutes overall, but do have extra attack range thanks to their spears. They also deal heavy bonus damage If they can attack you at a distance. The best way to fight them is to try and force them into close-up combat, as they have trouble attacking around terrain like walls and boulders.

The region’s boss will be the Gnoll Geomancer, who is the source of all this earth-moving magic. The geomancer will be the last past of this quest variant I implement though, coming before that is the region’s less common enemy: the Gnoll Sapper.

Gnoll Sappers

Gnoll Sappers don’t have any magic of their own but do have access to various earth-moving gadgets that the geomancer has provided to them. They won’t be nearly as proficient with them as the geomancer is with its magic, but they’ll still pose a notable threat. Each sapper also comes with an accompanying guard, and you’ll want to try and use the sapper’s abilities to your advantage to get the upper hand. While I don’t have these fully implemented yet, here’s a quick rundown of the sapper abilities that I’m planning:

Firstly, each sapper spawns with a few things:

• One guard, who has rock armor granted to them by the sapper. This armor makes them extremely hard to kill while the sapper is alive. Additional guards can spawn nearby the sapper and possibly help it, but only one guard gets the armor.
• One to three barricades spawn next to the sapper, which protect any adjacent creature from rockfall based attacks.
• Two or three nearby rockfall traps, which drop rocks in a 5x5 AOE and have a high chance to generate boulders.

Sappers will then prefer to keep their distance while the guard attacks you, and they have a couple of abilities to aid them:

• Sappers are capable of generating a rockfall on a slight delay, in a similar manner to DM-300. Because of the looser rock here, this rockfall attack can generate boulders too.
• Sappers can also hurl a nearby boulder toward you on a slight delay. The boulder will keep flying until it collides with a wall or another character.

The general idea of the fight is to pick a good angle of approach, position carefully, and avoid the sapper’s attacks while using them (and/or the traps) against the sapper and guard. There will be 3 sappers overall, so each of these fights will be over pretty quickly if you get the upper hand.

Of course, I have to actually implement these abilities now, so we’ll see if things change up a bit after some playtesting.