Tabletop Fun

[Jay 2K Winger]

D&D Adventurers League at my usual store has been on hiatus for a couple of weeks. The store announced it was going to no longer handle the scheduling of AL games (they had taken over this and charged $5 a head to secure a seat at the table) and the DMs would take over scheduling again, but the DMs said they wanted to take a couple of weeks to reorganize and determine how to handle it.

Minmaxer, who had become a DM earlier this year, messaged us on Discord to explain the situation. The person who ran the AL schedule for the store was let go, and apparently there was drama involved. I did not ask for details (and Minmaxer did not want to get into it). But the basic gist was the DMs were planning to shift AL night to a different store, starting this week. But Minmaxer won't return to his Descent into Avernus AL campaign until next week, as he's out of town this week.

Which works out for me, since this week, the same night as AL, a different TTRPG group is hosting a "DMs' Pitch Night" event at the store where my other campaign plays. Basically, DMs will "pitch" their campaigns for folks and try to recruit new players. Since I'm down for playing with more groups, and even to try out other systems, I figured I'll check it out.

Mysteries of Albia--

Fun little interaction as we were leaving the museum after we concluded our case. All of our PCs are variously covered in blood (some of it our own), and my character Charlie is still clutching a heavy crossbow bolt that's lodged in his side. A newspaper reporter walks up to us--

Reporter: "Can we have a word from the Maculatum Society about what's just happened?"
Charlie: "You can 'ave two words-- Not. Now!"

[Nunavut Pants]

Showed up to a very poorly-attended game night at the local Elks' Club last week. I observed (and helped a little) a game of Rummikub with extra joker tiles. I thought they detracted from the game, rather than adding it. One of the players then wandered off, so the other person and I played Splendour. It's a game about gem shopping with discounts. Since the other person had never played it before, I won pretty handily, but then she suggested continuing to play until we ran the deck out of cards. It was a little different that way, but it did bring the scores closer.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Forgot to mention one of the things that came up in last week's Mysteries of Albia.

So when we were doing the Red Jack case, we were introduced to a character from Charlie's backstory, who now works as a bookie, taking bets on, among other things, dog races. Caradoc, our Fey Druid, saw an Opportunity here to fix some dog races through use of his Wildshape ability. Surprisingly, our religious Fighter, Beckett, was all for this and the two started scheming about ways to make some money through the dog races. Nothing has yet come of this.

Then, during the Tasha's Madhouse case (which was canonically only a couple of days later), the party was confronted by a Fey creature that offered to let them pass without a fight if they each offered up one of their memories. Those that did would receive a different memory in exchange. Beckett was the only one who accepted, and received a memory of the recipe for the "best coffee in all of Albia." Except the recipe requires halfling tongue.

Then, while we're running around in this Kemetian afterlife realm killing giant scorpions, Beckett and Caradoc start talking with our Gnome Artificer, Annie, about starting a coffee shop business using Beckett's recipe. Annie has the ability to create a sort of "endless" amount of the coffee by artificing a magic container, and she seemed all for joining in this venture, which would get its seed money from Beckett and Caradoc's dog racing scheme.

The whole coffee discussion was happening while fighting the scorpions, which Caradoc was doing by using Summon Beast and summoning a pack of elk to stampede over everything. While my character Charlie wasn't part of the discussion, me the player suggested they name their business "ABC Coffee" after their initials. But, with the elk rampage going on, they wanted to somehow incorporate that into their name or logo, and sort of tangentially built off of antlered creatures, and since we tend to nickname the druid's forms by punning off his name (Caradoc turns into a bear? Bearadoc. Caradoc turns into a moorbounder? Carabounder. etc.) they landed on "Carabou Coffee."

[Jay 2K Winger]

Mysteries of Albia--

Our case continued with the team still in the Kemetian (Egyptian) afterlife realm and needing to pass through a Necropolis to reach the next trial. Step one, answer a sphinx's riddle. The DM read off a riddle mentioning the "hollow and empty words" of a "stone head and feet" and no one else at the table seemed to get the reference, and I had to say, "Me the player, I know the answer, but would Charlie, the character, know it?" I rolled high enough on a History check to be able to pass my meta knowledge off. (It was a reference to Ozymandias, aka Rammeses II.)

Then we basically had to do a bunch of little side quest jobs to help people in the Necropolis to earn "soul coin" for the toll into the Great Tomb of Osiris for the next trial. Part of this was taken up by the DM and some of the players playing a version of Senet. There was a little bit of RP going on in the middle of this, but we did briefly have some fun side-jokes when Jesse made some crack in the style of a news reporter about what was going on. I joined in by doing my own take on it and quipping, "This report is brought to you by Sand-- it's EVERYWHERE! (Get used to it!)" And we just diverged into doing our own various newscaster voices for a couple of minutes. ("And now, the weather-- it's sunny. It's always sunny.")

One of the possible jobs that was listed was debt collection, which we all referred to as the "Sopranos" job, and we naturally did end up taking it. Basically a cloth merchant had given this woman several dozen rolls of fabric and she hadn't paid him. He wanted her to pay him back and apologize publicly. She refused to do so, so we ended up having to fight a couple of elementals she'd summoned as protection. (Turns out a brown bear (our wildshaped Druid) can suplex an earth elemental. Who knew?) Once we'd taken out the bodyguards, our bear-druid literally skull-dragged her back to the merchant, while Charlie and Vash strolled alongside, hamming it up while expounding about how "in this neighborhood, we pay our debts!"

[Jay 2K Winger]

Adventurers League, Descent into Avernus--

Minmaxer was back from a vacation so we could resume our Descent into Avernus campaign through D&D Adventurers League. He'd DM'd an Acquisitions Incorporated one-shot last week (his table filled up before I could grab a spot) and admitted to me that he brought back Camille Santiago as a cameo NPC during the adventure.

Most of our adventure this week was finishing clearing out the catacombs beneath an evil noble's manor in Baldur's Gate, largely taking out various fiends that were turning up. Amusingly, a newer player at the table tried to use Firebolt and Fireball against some of them, only for us to gently explain to him that-- as devils come from the Nine Hells-- they're immune to fire damage. But Minmaxer explained he can re-spec his magic and whatnot between sessions. He also kept wanting to find non-violent solutions to combat situations, and we complimented him on trying, but also noted that in AL, most of those solutions aren't really that viable. I jokingly told him, "In AL, it's okay to be a murderhobo."

At one point, we found some prisoners that the evil noble's cult had imprisoned-- a snooty old noblewoman, a spy from Candlekeep, and a half-elf woman. The half-elf was actively trying to pick her cell's lock when we spotted her, seeming pretty defiant to the fiendish guard, and just sort of shrugged when the guard looked her way, stopped picking the lock, and when we surreptitiously offered to free her (we were able to get into the room thanks to Newbie's casting Friends on him and bluffing), she just said "I'll get out of here eventually." And then Minmaxer described her as leaning back, "and pulling her hat down over her eyes."

I immediately looked at Minmaxer in realization, and while he does a great job at keeping a straight face, I could see he was trying not to smirk. Sure enough, in the distraction of our party fighting the bearded devil guard, the half-elf had somehow escaped her cell and slipped away, leaving behind a note signed "C." It was none other than Camille Santiago again. I just shook my head and went, "This is gonna become a running gag with you, isn't it?"

By the end of the adventure, we'd discovered that the missing High Overseer of Elturel-- who had vanished before said holy city was literally dragged into the Nine Hells-- had made some kind of deal with Zariel, Lord of Avernus. So we accompanied the spy back to Candlekeep so he could report in, and so we could get some assistance with a puzzlebox we'd found. Said puzzlebox contained the contract of the aforementioned deal, giving proof, and it was determined that he'd been in league with the evil noble to help her ascend to rulership of Baldur's Gate to repeat the process there. We had a companion with us who had been a sworn defender of Elturel and feels drawn to return to it to defend it still, so our next step was getting a nearby wizard to Plane Shift us to Elturel, which is now in Avernus.

Next session-- welcome to Hell!

ETA: Forgot one little joke that we made. Our "investigation" of the evil noble's manor came about because we'd been effectively conscripted into the Flaming Fists, this mercenary company that had been charged with instituting martial law in the city. So we'd been "deputized" and given this job, and when we confronted the evil noble and were beating on her, I pointed out we were effectively like cops shouting "Stop resisting! Stop resisting!" while whaling on her with nightsticks.

[Nunavut Pants]

This month's games day with one local group wound up with seven of us playing word games.

The first game was "Blank Slate", which is a competitive guess-the-word game. A card is drawn with a word and a blank on it, and every player writes down one word to fill in the blank. A player gets three points if their word matches exactly one other player's, one point if it matches more than one other player's, and zero if it doesn't match. First player to 25 (I think) wins. I didn't do great--I think I was fifth or sixth out of seven--but it was fun.

Then we tried out a game called "Just One". It is a cooperative guess-the-word game. In this one, the "guessing" player draws a card with a word on it but doesn't look at the word. Everyone else writes down a one-word clue, then the guesser hides their eyes or leaves the room, and everyone compares their written-down clues. Any clues that are duplicates are discarded, then the guesser has to guess from the ones that are left. It's interesting because you have to pick a clue that's useful, but not one that's too obvious. The one husband-and-wife pair that were present definitely thought alike; they had more "clue collisions" than any other players. We wound up getting 21 words correct, and 11 incorrect. Everyone seemed to enjoy it, which was good.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Forgot to mention something else that was a running joke through last night's AL session-- during the "explaining ship terms and whatnot" section, there was a brief tangent about sleeping arrangements, beds etc., and someone (might have been Troy) asked something like "Are these the beds where you get tied into them?" (as in, "tied in to keep from falling out during rough seas") And the DM said, completely IC, "[Client] isn't paying for that kind of service." (as in, a different kind of "tying to beds")

From then on, the "tying you down to the bed" joke kept popping back up, especially with all the spiders we kept fighting. And then, when one of the players asked about whether the derelict had a "boom boom room" (i.e. black powder storage) we naturally joked about it. ("Yeah, that's the room with the tie-down beds.")

[Jay 2K Winger]

D&D Adventurers League--

So I joined up at a table where the DM was running a piece from the "Ghosts of Saltmarsh" adventure, brought along my level 4 light domain Tiefling Cleric, Lucent, instead of Seb. I already knew we were going to have some shenanigans at the table, since I've played with all but one of the players (DM was new to me as well) and two of the players were also DM's for the store's AL nights, including DM David.

One of the other players was playing a Bullywug Fighter. Bullywugs are basically frog-people (I wasn't aware they were playable races), and he revealed that his bullywug was named Jeremiah. And yes, it was literally so he could make the "Jeremiah was a bullfrog" joke.

Anyway, the adventure was for the party to sail out to a derelict ship to retrieve the owner's treasure chest, which contained a great deal of his wealth. He was providing us with a ship and crew that would sail us out to the derelict, and there followed a brief discussion of ship terms and whatnot, with one of the other players (Troy) RP'ing his Eladrin Fighter asking repeated questions about ship stuff. And once we started out to sea, Troy goes, "As soon as we're underway, I'm at the railing, just vomiting." At this point, I went IC and joked, "All right, who had him getting seasick in the first hour?" And David laughs and says, "Pay up!"

Once we got on the derelict, Troy's Fighter goes up to the ship's wheel and starts spinning it about (it had been knocked free of the rudder, so no issues with that) and shouting out nautical stuff, so I go (ICly) "All in favor of demoting him from captain?" And his status as so-called captain became a running joke through the first third of the session, until we sort of voted for the other sometime-DM's character to become captain instead. She leaned into it. The game's DM had passed around little dry-erase nametags for everyone to put their names/pronouns on, and she erased her name and wrote "Captain Ravadi" on it instead. Later on, between combat encounters, she joked about needing to determine who would be filling in the other roles on her theoretical ship's crew. Troy's character went "Well, as former captain, I think I'm a shoo-in for first mate." Jeremiah volunteered to be ship's cook, and my character,

There was a lot of bad rolling in the first half of the adventure, too. People barely managing to hit the enemies and only doing tiny amounts of damage. There were so. many. spiders on the derelict ship, and after the first battle against a giant spider ended with our "captain" slicing it open on the ceiling, causing its guts to splash all over two characters, including Troy, he followed this up after our second encounter by doing the same thing above her and someone else. So naturally later, the Rule of Three applied when they decided to make sure that Lucent got splashed. And when we realized there was still one character who hadn't gotten goo all over them, we all gave 'em a big group hug.

Still good fun.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Mysteries of Albia--

Our fifth player Camilla (who played our Warlock in Strahd) is back! She's been focusing on her schoolwork, studying to be a radiologist or something like that, and she's only back for about a month before she needs to hiatus again to prep for her boards. As we were still in the middle of a case, she couldn't bring in her actual character, but that NPC Tabitha we rescued last session is a bard-in-training, so Mike the DM gave her the stat block and she was able to join in and RP with us. She later admitted this let her learn some of the current team dynamic so she can better adjust for next week.

Bob's Druid also showed off his new party trick-- Conjure Animals. He conjured up a herd of eight and had them basically stampede and smash up a kitchen full of humanoid animal fey cooks. He noted that despite being large creatures, they count as 1/4 Challenge Rating, so he was allowed to summon eight of them. It led to some joking about summoning a blue whale, and jokes of "Imagine if we'd used Conjure Animals against Strahd?" To which I pointed out, "Don't even bother summoning blue whales in a fight, just conjure 'em in the skies above Castle Ravenloft and-- BAMMM, colony drop it." When the laughter died down, I added, "What is a Strahd? A miserable pile of goo under a pod of blue whales!"

Also, after the session was finished, Mike got to show off something he'd commissioned for us. In a follow up from the official inquiry from the Red Jack case, Mike had scripted a brief six-minute audio file with a couple of voice actors, from effectively a Parliament session with the Premier and then an Opposition spokesperson speaking about the official conclusion of the case. The Premier backing up our conclusion, but then the Opposition-- who turns out to be a former comrade of my character's-- speaks against it, calling the Maculatum Society (the detective agency we work for) fraudulent and charlatans, and decrying how the team that solved the case had two members who were foreign (Vash and the Druid) and that the Society had managed to dupe a "fine, upstanding war hero" like Charlie.

It's got all of us excited to see where things go next.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Adventurer's League--

I was at DM David's table again. I've played at his tables many times at AL, and like any player/DM he has his quirks of playing. One of his tricks is to roll for damage, then ask the player "you can either take what I rolled, or [average]." He refuses to say what he rolled until you give your answer and mark the damage down. Twice during last night's session, the party's (level 1) wizard got attacked, and when prompted, the average was always either at or more than the wizard's max HP. I advised him both times, "Just take the [average]. If the options are possible death or certain death, take the possible death." (It paid off the first time, but not the second.)

Anyway, as it happened, the module David ran last night was one I'd played in with one of my other characters, but this time I was playing with Seb, my half-orc barbarian. David was very happy about this. (Seb turns out to be a popular character among the DMs at AL.) David thanked me for not metagaming, which wasn't too difficult since I was just doing what Seb would do, and Seb's a good dumb barbarian.

We also had an observer. This girl wanted to sit in and spectate, since she didn't know how to play but was curious. So every so often David would aside to her and explain some of the mechanics. At one point, as there were some NPCs that spoke Druidic (which none of the party could speak), David tried to explain what Druidic was like as a language, that it was especially used in Druid magic, so I added, "It's like, Wizards cast their spells by speaking Latin, Druids cast their spells by speaking Celtic."

After we finished the main module, since we still had some time left before the store closed, David offered to run a bonus encounter-- one which would have no bearing on our experience/loot-- using "an NPC I like to bring out whenever I'm in Icewind Dale." We all agreed, though I had a suspicion about who it would be. We took a brief break so people could stretch and grab a last snack or something, and when we came back and began the encounter, David brought out Frostclaw, a notorious awakened owlbear. And I went, "Oh, no."

While there were a couple of Level 4's in the party, there were also several Level 1's. And Frostclaw fights dirty--she will target weak party members, prioritize the spellcasters, and even try to use the environment to her advantage. During our fight, which was on a partly-collapsed bridge, she tried to throw Seb off it, but I passed the STR save. We managed to deal enough damage that Frostclaw retreated, but it was still a brief, tense encounter.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Nah, the boy was just a bit stunned at the amount of food put in front of him. Beckett's a big guy (we routinely describe him as "six-foot-four and built like a pro wrestler") and has a big appetite.

[Ghel]

I was half expecting the boy to be a necromancer, shown out because he refused to eat the food Beckett gave him. But if that scene happened before you investigated the village and explored "Tasha's Madhouse," I suppose that wouldn't make sense.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Forgot to mention a fun little interaction from Mysteries of Albia two weeks ago.

At the start of the session, we dealt with the aftermath of the Red Jack case, as there was an official inquiry. The reason was because our report had stated that the murders were perpetrated by a vengeful ghost that was possessing people, but official (state) church doctrine says that deceased spirits don't linger on the material plane without someone performing necromancy. Prior to our reporting to the court to testify, Charlie met with his old commanding officer, Major Walken, who reminisced about the war, before giving Charlie his old service weapon, a +2 revolver. (The DM had suggested he would be doing something like this, to help offset my "lackluster" efforts in combat situations, which are mostly down to my bad luck with the dice gods.)

Later on, the young boy who brought the case to our detective agency's attention was generally down and miserable when we spoke to him, and Beckett gave him some food. And when I say "gave him some food," I should note that we went to the briefing room to speak with the kid directly from a big celebration party, and several of us grabbed food before going into the briefing, and Beckett had piled a plate high with it. He never touched it as we heard the kid out, before Beckett gave him his food. (This, along with Beckett being a devout acolyte of the state church, is why Charlie's dubbed him "Saint Beckett.")

We finished up the (gentle) questioning of the boy, and were preparing to leave to go investigate his village. At which point I said, "Before we leave [to go to the village], since he now has this fancy new gun, Charlie is going to leave his old gun with the--" and before I could finish the sentence ("--armorer"), one of the other players jumped in with, "--with the boy!?" This broke the table, even as I quietly fumed at the assumption, though I did crack a few jokes along with everyone else about that image. (A lot of Southern accents popping up. "You're a man now, boy...")

[Nunavut Pants]

Two days of gaming this weekend! Each day involved a short "player summoning" game, and a longer more involved game.

Both days, the "player summoning" game of choice was "Just One", which I may have mentioned before. It's a cooperative guess-the-word game, where one player picks a card at random with a word on it, and shows it to everyone while they don't see it themselves. Everyone then writes down a one-word clue, while the guesser leaves the room (or at least closes their eyes and stops listening). Clues are revealed, and if any clues are duplicated then all duplicates are removed. So it is possible to wind up with no clues to guess from... On Sunday, one of the words was "Venus"; two people wrote "second" as a clue and three wrote "planet". All five clues gone. One wrote "goddess" and I wrote "deMilo". (Which may not really count as a single word, but they were willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. I figured "Willenberg" was too obscure and didn't think of "armless" until today.) Fortunately those two were more than good enough.

The long game on Saturday was "Terraforming Mars", which I have written about before. One member of both of those groups is quite obsessed with it, and always lobbies to play it. (In previous years, she was much the same way about "Puerto Rico".) I wound up last in that game, after starting out fairly mediocre and then gradually falling further behind every generation (turn). The winner started with a good "Corporation" and very good initial cards to go along with it, while my initial cards had absolutely nothing at all to do with my Corporation so I couldn't gain any extra advantages that way...

The same gal showed up on Sunday and got a Terraforming Mars game going there too, but I didn't feel like playing two days in a row. Instead I played "Outpost", which I had only played once before and most people there were very familiar with. It's an economic production game, where the object more or less is to build your economy to make money to build your economy--and most of the parts of the economy you build are worth victory points at the end of the game. Your income is never static, as you draw different types of cards that are worth varying amounts of money (e.g. the ore cards are worth 1-5, the water cards are worth 4-10, and so on). You pay the total cost for things but don't get any change. Some things you just buy outright, while other things you bid against other players for. I came in last, again, to the other person who had only played the game a couple of times. The difference was one point. The winner was pretty obvious by about mid-game, when he was able to pick up two very good production units for relatively cheap. Still, it was interesting.

Next game session won't be for a while, and it will be back to simpler stuff. The group that I'll be hanging with doesn't like complex games.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Mysteries of Albia--

The DM had given us some "homework" in the three-week absence we had after the Red Jack case, prompting each us to tell him about a choice our PCs had made that they regretted or wished they could go back and do differently. I related to him something from Charlie's backstory in his time in the war, when he and his scouting partner discovered a massive enemy force was moving toward both their forward camp and the army's fort, and they didn't have time to warn them both. They split up to try to do so, and Charlie went back to the fort. The fort was able to fortify and repel the enemy force, but the forward camp (and Charlie's partner) was wiped out. Charlie was seen as a "hero" for getting the message back to the brass, but he regrets it because he lost all of his friends.

In our new case, a village had disappeared-- only one young boy had escaped disappearing and gotten word to the police-- after a traveling jester came to town. All of the villagers had walked into her wagon and never came back out. We went in, and found ourselves entering "Tasha's Madhouse," some sort of fey demiplane. One of the doorways led into a hall of mirrors, which showed reflections of "alternate selves," related to those choices. Knives, the violent alter of our rogue, saw Vash, her regular alter, in the mirror. She touched the mirror, and they swapped places-- but then the DM told Vash, "Knives isn't there anymore." He passed Vash's player a note, and Vash's player read it and looked shocked. The reflections spoke and basically intimated that the jester running the madhouse might give her back if we survived.

There were also short-term madnesses that some of the characters were afflicted with, and at one point, Beckett was hit with a compulsion to eat offal (organs) for several minutes. We rescued one of the villagers (the boy's sister) and killed a couple of monsters, and then Beckett started eating them while Vash and our Druid started investigating some of the magical items in the room. I let them do this for a bit, then interrupted to say, "While all this is going on, Charlie's going to go up to the girl and check on her. Because you all forgot about her, and I wanna be like 'Bitch, you okay!?'" (We've joked this may become our catchphrase.) She was fine, reassured that her little brother was still alive, and then, as Beckett's compulsion wore off and he started puking up the offal he'd just eaten, this triggered a chain of vomiting from the rest of the party, while Charlie just turned the girl away and told her, "You don't want to watch this."