Category: D&D

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From Russell

To answer Rachel, I guess the Sunday game was on hiatus for wedding-related reasons the last two weeks. I came back to visit Josh this weekend, and ran a second Hero-Cities adventure.

The group was Eldor, the slacker elf sorceror (Doug); Rolly, the indestructible dwarf wizard (Paul); Bronwyn the Dostoevsky priestess (Josh) [I think he means Tolstoy (War and Peace) — Josh]; and a new fighter who adopted the nom de guerre “Bob” (Mike). We had some important character insights this game. For example, Eldor’s bad French accent is the result of a contagious disease that Bronwyn caught during the course of the adventure, but which mutated into Spanish, probably in Rachel’s honor. Rolly speaks fluent pig Latin. Mike names all his character’s WEAPONS but not his character.

Plot summary: A recon mission sent to spy on the gnolls has gone missing in Yaga’s Forest (aka, a bad place to be after dark). Since Belaphon the naiad couldn’t locate them by scrying, their commander concluded that they were probably in one of the entrances to the Armory, which is magically protected against divination. Our quartet volunteered to be one of several groups, each sent to look at an entrance. In fact, in Bronwyn’s words:
“Ooh! Ooh! Since we’re the PC’s, we volunteer to go to the entrance where they ACTUALLY ARE!”.

Each group is given a supply of healing potions for the people they are saving, and a few other supplies, like a whispering wind scroll to summon help from the officer corps. They go together to a few miles of the Armory, then split up. A wild boar and a few healing potions later, they find that as usual Bronwyn is correct. A trail of blood and consumed healing potions leads them to the entrance to the tunnel. As they are about to reach the tunnel, they are ambushed by two gnoll trackers, but Rolly puts one to sleep and “Bob” and Bronwyn beat up the other.

They find the tunnel, which is marked with the sign of the Hikitami cult in mud fingerprints. Since one of the MIA’s was in that cult, they decide to use the scroll to report success. But it will take up to half an hour for an officer to reach them, so they go inside the tunnel. “Bob” (very luckily) finds a trip-wire, and the group avoids it. A few hundred yards later, he finds a pit-trap, but not so luckily, he finds it by falling inside. A few healing potions later, the group is on the other side,and has reset the trap just in time to hear “Snap! Aaarggh!!!” from back down the corridor. Another group of gnolls has entered the tunnels, and got caught in the arrow trap the PC’s avoided.

Two gnolls appear in view down the corridor. They rush towards the party, just in time for Eldor to summon magical grease, on which they slide right into the pit trap, landing on their heads. But it’s not over. The boss gnoll is behind the cannon-fodder. “Bob” valiantly if not too cleverly jumps over the pit, sliding on the grease [Actually Eldor cancelled the spell — Josh] towards the boss. He takes on the boss in single combat, but gets some magic missile support from the magicians. The boss decides to flee, but is shot full of arrows by Eldor and Bronwyn as he turns to leave.

A few healing potions and a net trap later, they find the missing party. They use up the last of their healing magic getting that group conscious — Rapsel the Hikitami cultist was the only one functional. She had found, disabled and then reset the tunnel traps to ward off the gnolls that had been following their group. The druid officer Lilamir arrived, in the form of an owl, and escorted them back to the rendezvous, where they were congratulated and rewarded for their success.

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Guest GM report

I was guest GM at both last Friday and Sunday’s games. Both games are set
in my fantasy world where adventuring types are organized into hero-cults,
dedicated to deeds worthy of the founding hero (and drawing power from the
said hero). The Friday group consists of Bell the very good-looking paladin (Josh),
Erabod the elven wizard and cook (Mike), Duramir the dwarven warrior (Walter),
Ostiel the uninhibited ranger who speaks many animal languages (Mac), and
Haha al-Ish, a part-Jannii priestess of Rai-Nocturne (sun god, night goddess) (Beth).
They were looking for a worg that was spying on Rurik the Smith and his forge,
but never found it. I blame the drive down. After Philadelphia traffic, I must have
been subconsciously avoiding further confrontations.. I didn’t even know how to
react when Erabod asked an elderly hobbit druidess if he could look at her melons.
Was this an innuendo or did he have a devious plan to lure the worg
with canteloupe?

Anyway, i was about to burn my GM screen when I ran the Sunday game. This
was a blast, even if I didn’t get most of the in-jokes. The group was
Bronwyn, the priestess of Belic-Serene (war and peace, with a heavy
emphasis on WAR) (Josh), Soren of Molosh, a mighty and clever warrior
woman (Wendy), Eldor, an adolescent (very adolescent) elven sorceror
(Doug), and Rally the indestructible dwarven wizard (Paul).

The group encountered ghouls who had followed a path cut through
what is normally a defensive hedge on the border of the Haunted
Lands. After dispatching them, they followed the same path that
the ghouls had been following. They found a group of
merchants who had been robbed by bandits, then attacked
by ghouls, and was currently in sorry state. After bringing
them to safety, and a night of carousing, they hurried on their
way to their original destination, the town of Lillibridge.

In Lillibridge, they were suprised to meet the very same merchant
that they had rescued! The “merchant” acted in a suspicious
manner, and they eventually realized that he was actually a
disguised bandit, who had come to town to fence the stolen
merchandise. After failing to lure the group to his room, the
bandit snuck up behind Rally as he was interogating the bandit’s
assitant Corwin in the stable. The bandit hit Rally by suprise,
(twice!), but didn’t dent his thick skull. Once Eldor and Soren
ran to his aid, they quickly captured the bandit, just as
Bronwyn ran up with a group of guards to capture his accomplice.

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Thrunk goes Klunk

First fatality in the new (Jeff and Andy) campaign: Jeff’s character Thrunk Shillelagh got pinned in a corner by a trio of skeletons and hacked to bits. Andy’s character Link was running pellmell for the exit of the dungeon, and so wasn’t in any position to try first aid or to recover the body. Remember kids: In D&D always bring a Cleric!

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Russell sez

Buried in a comment that nobody but me will read, so I’ve copied here:

It looks like I’ll be running a few Sunday D&D games while I’m on the East Coast. Sunday night players might want to browse the game web-page at http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/users/russell/DND to get a sense of the world and to start designing characters. I tend to make a lot of world information available, so much that it intimidates some. Most of the information is just for my own benefit, although there’s nothing most PC’s wouldn’t know. So don’t be put off by the bulk, and just skim the parts you need for your character or that you find interesting.

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Corrupting the Youth of Athens

We introduced Jeff’s nine-year old son Andy to the joys of D&D over the weekend, and I have to say that it went remarkably well. He caught on very quickly, no doubt because of Andy’s vast exposure to computer games, including some RPG-ish games (such as Kingdom Hearts). Granted, it wasn’t a real role-playing challenge, just a dungeon crawl, but you have to start somewhere, and there is a lot to be said for a linear structure and concrete objectives.

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Alas, poor Nolan

we hardly knew ye.

My good friend Russell, who’s been playing RPGs with me for a little over twenty years now was with us last Sunday, and the group promptly abandoned his character Nolan to his doom. This was the first time Russell has lost a PC in one of my campaigns, which are notoriously hard to die in, in years and years and it shocked him a little. I mostly blame Rachel. <wink> Sure, the monsters they were fighting were probably too tough (even though I was confused about the rules, not having internalized D&D 3.5 yet , and made them much wimpier than their official stats would indicate), and I neglected to have the inexperienced young NPC who was tagging along play optimally which probably would have saved him, but it was Rachel’s character Pedro who first cut and ran, leaving the dying Nolan to get crunched. It’s entirely possible that Pedro couldn’t have helped, but what surprised Rusell was that he didn’t even attempt it. Of course, it was perfectly in character for Pedro; don’t let Rachel tell you that she never plays evil characters. Hint: if she’s playing a Rogue, that Rogue will be evil, no matter what the official alignment is. Stealing from party members, betraying their secrets to local criminal families, it’s all part of the job to her. Russell, however, was foolishly assuming an implicit “Band of Brothers” contract among the party members because that’s what he’s used to. This was foolish, because I’ve told him enough stories about this group of players that he should have known better; he’s even read this blog.

The game goes on: Russell’s already made up another character for next time we play, one that’s much more survival oriented. I kind of wonder whether a sniper with a cloak of invisibility isn’t too much of a reaction, though….

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Not the Sunday Group Game

but because it should be recorded for posterity, Scott recently broke his personal best record for shortest lived character when (in our friend Mac’s D&D game on Saturday) his character was PK-ed before the adventure even began. For some reason shortly after Scott’s character introduced himself Walter became suspicious of him and cast Know Alignment; upon finding out that Scott’s character was evil–I almost said Scott was evil, but that goes without saying–Walter and Mike refused to go adventuring with him. After a bunch of pointless argument, Scott’s character drew his dagger and had at Walter’s character, and a couple melee rounds later Scott’s character’s head was rolling around on the tavern floor.
Scott was understandably a bit miffed at this, and I have to confess that I was a bit puzzled, since I had thought that there was an unwritten group rule to the effect that players weren’t allowed to refuse to go adventuring with other players’s characters over something as trivial as alignment. I had certainly felt compelled by Mac and the group to continue to adventure with Rachel’s character Polly when she was obviously ripping off the party in her dealing with her criminal family (and my character was easily smart enough to figure it out)–granted when Polly died nobody expressed any great remorse or suggested that we try to figure out a way to raise her, but that seemed to be the extent of the reaction against her character’s actual transgressions. Why Scott’s new character’s alignment was such a sticking point I really don’t know; in fact, now that I think about it the same group had been happy enough to adventure with my previous (now deceased) character, who was also evil. Maybe the only difference was that they didn’t realize that my character was supposed to be evil, since he didn’t live long enough to do anything bad.
Of course, at that point, neither had Scott’s character. Interestingly enough, though Scott insists that he wasn’t playing the character as obviously evil and halfway suspected Walter of using Out-Of-Character knowledge in deciding to cast the Know Alignment spell, my character simply presumed that Scott’s character was evil but just didn’t care. I’m not actually sure why I supposed that, since I know that I didn’t have any OOC knowledge; either it was something about Scott’s manner, or maybe it was just that he got along with Rachel’s character….