Tabletop Fun

[Jay 2K Winger]

Spelljammer--

Confronting the big bad, championing our ally, we get thrown into a battle against an aberration called the Zodar.

We learned real quick-- You Don't Mess With The Zodar.

This thing had an AC of 20, +15 to its attacks, legendary resistances, and an ability called Forced Teleport which our DM used frequently. Forced Teleport allowed it to choose any creature it could see within 60 ft (oh, and it has blindsight, so you can't hide from it) and teleport them to somewhere else within 60 ft, and causing them to take 4d10 force damage. It was f**king MEAN.

Found out after we defeated it and the session was over that the fight was practically intended to be a TPK. The DM was impressed we managed to survive. He was also having fun because he finally put an actual challenge in front of us.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Oh, I forgot to mention this-- our Spelljammer DM has basically agreed to do a Level 20 one-shot after we finish our Spelljammer campaign, in which we'll go tarrasque hunting. Some of us may be playing different characters (I won't be using my Warlock, given that tarrasques are difficult to affect with pretty much any attack spell), and the DM has admitted to trying to think of ways to make it difficult for us to fight it without just camping on a flying spelljammer vessel while taking ranged attacks.

DM also said he was trying to think of a name for the one-shot, and I suggested Tarrasic Park.

[Nunavut Pants]

Nicely done.

My own games have been much simpler. As in, Trans America and some Love Letter. With a few sessions of Chinese-style Mahjong thrown in. Not that exciting.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Curse of Strahd--

Paladin is still trying to be the moral center of the party, but that doesn't mean he can't be plenty f'ing mean.

We had to pass by Krezk on our way to our next objective, and we discussed trying to stop a potential plot going there which would bring Strahd's anger down on the town. Paladin was all for stopping it, but the rest of the Party was ambivalent about trying to stop it. The meanness came in when he argued they (the party) didn't want the death of another town on their conscience-- though the party argued the previous town wasn't their fault-- and then he turned to Sorcerer, whose backstory includes her PTSD from a dragon attack which destroyed the orphanage she was protecting, and said, "You don't want the deaths of more children on your conscience."

The entire table, DM included, went "Whoa!"

I did point out-- one, Paladin had expected Sorcerer to back him up, and two, Oath of Conquest Paladin means I'm not always going to be very nice.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Glad to hear that at least one other person is enjoying these!

Curse of Strahd--

We did this one at a game-themed tavern instead of our usual game store, because Strahd had invited the party to Castle Ravenloft for dinner. So we could have dinner at the tavern, while our characters had dinner in-game.

Strahd, being the villain he is, spent the dinner more or less picking at everyone, pushing at their buttons, clearly trying to get a rise out of us. We didn't rise to the bait, though my Paladin did somewhat return fire, after discussing his own past-- his elder brother will inherit the family title and estate, his elder sister will take over the family smithy business, and Paladin admitted to jealousy, but that he channeled his anger by becoming a holy warrior-- when Strahd tried to commiserate with him, but Paladin just replied, "I may not get along with my siblings all the time, but I love them, and I wouldn't try to kill my brother again out of jealousy."

All the other players noted, as I somewhat intended, that I had stated, "try to kill my brother again." As this was the most backstory about Paladin I'd ever divulged, they were very much "Wait, what?!"

[Ghel]

I love these stories. I've played in campaigns where druids and rangers refer to their animal companion as their Pokémon.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Spelljammer--

We're heading into the finale of our little mini-campaign, flying in with the resistance fleet against the evil Xaryxian Empire, and we find ourselves flying toward the imperial flagship. We start taking potshots at it as soon as it's in range, when suddenly Wenbin & Githyanki's players come up with a crazy idea. They even warn us it's a crazy idea, and our reaction is basically, "Crazy ideas have worked for us so far, why stop now?"

Githyanki is a warlock with a genie patron, and has a ring that serves as his genie vessel. Gith can take up to five willing creatures into the vessel (ring) and then release them when he wants. So he takes all of us into the ring, apart from Wenbin, who uses Dimension Door to basically teleport onto the enemy ship with the ring. And he aims for the enemy admiral we'd injured with our potshots, landing on his shoulders and knocking him down before Gith releases us all from the ring.

DM asked Gith's player how it visually appears, and Gith's player read it out of the source book, that basically they appear out of a beam of light.

I went, "So basically it's a Pokeball?!"

Answer: Yes. Yes, it was.

What followed was basically our party just cutting our way through the entire crew of that enemy ship, commandeering it, getting chased by a pair of enemy solar dragons, before managing to convince said dragons to spare us (it helped that we had a macguffin to do this with) and then turning back to sail toward the imperial citadel to try to rescue the princess, defeat the new emperor, and save the world.

But that's for next session.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Did some non-Spelljammer D&D this week, just some Adventurer's League one-shot. Our party were among the only survivors of our caravan in the Frozen North (us + 3 NPCs) and we took refuge in a cave. While exploring it, we came across two gazers (lesser beholder-kin) guarding a gemstone. What transpired next was a brief, stupid conversation as they argued with the party (largely just me, the Barbarian) and told us to go away.

Gazers: Who are you? What are you doing here?
Barbarian: What are YOU doing here?
Gazers: We're guarding the eye!
Barbarian: What eye?
Gazers: This! [gemstone] It's shaped like an eye!
Barbarian: YOU'RE shaped like an eye!
(Cue table breaking down laughing, including me.)
DM: They look slightly offended.
Gazers: Never been so insulted!
Barbarian: Maybe YOU should go away!
Gazers: Maybe we will!
Barbarian: All right then!
Gazers: Fine!
Barbarian: Good!
DM: (beat) And they head out of the cave.

Not quite as epic as Wenbin the Magnificent successfully convincing a pair of spectators to race one another to determine who was more worthy to guard a macguffin, but I still felt quite accomplished for managing to avoid a combat scenario through RP while playing a fight-happy barbarian.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Spelljammer--

Nothing like helping shorten the boss fight we found ourselves in by rolling a Nat-20 on your Witch Bolt and destroying a third of the boss's health in one go.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Spelljammer--

Two of our players-- our Artificer and Wenbin the Magnificent-- couldn't make it due to illness and/or time constraints. But we pressed on anyway. This part of the campaign involved traveling out of the wildspace system that is Realmspace (basically where all of the Forgotten Realms are located) and into the Astral Sea, where things behave a bit differently. For one thing, how fast/far you (your character) can move is based not off one's walking speed, but off of your character's INT score. Most of the players at the session had characters with an 8 or 9, versus my Warlock's 14. It was explained that because thought and willpower are part of how things work in the Astral Sea, it comes down to belief. Even gravity works weirdly there.

This led to some table-talk about how the characters aren't getting swept off the deck of their spelljamming vessel because it moves faster than them. I conclusively summed up the DM's explanation: "As long as you don't think about that happening, it won't." Then I added, "...and because I have an Intelligence of 14, [Warlock] suddenly starts moving backward and has to grab the railing to keep from getting swept off the deck."

The trip across the Astral Sea still took three weeks of travel, so to pass the time, the DM let us take part in some activities with some of the ship's crew. The ship's owner, Commodore Krux, gave us some training with firearms. Another ship captain traveling with us played "Dead Man's Dice" (Liar's Dice) with us-- and we the players actually played Liar's Dice against one another. The winner, our Paladin, handily beat everyone, then got challenged by said captain to a one-on-one game, which Paladin won also.

Then we went Astral Fishing, catching a three-eyed space minnow, which got fed to our Ranger's drake companion and promptly made her sick. When we tried fishing again, we spotted another space-shark, which got disintegrated by a beholder that turned up and led to some combat. While the DM played the beholder fairly smart-- the beholder got most of our spellcasters in the field of its anti-magic cone-- our Gith warlock and Paladin together managed to prevent it from doing anything on its second turn, as Gith cast Darkness on his ring and got behind the beholder, preventing it from seeing, and then Paladin successfully trapped it in a net, so it couldn't move or fire its various eye-beams. Between the damage piled on by the martial characters (Ranger and Fighter) and my Warlock using Hexblade's Curse + Witch Bolt, we destroyed it.

And then we arrived in Doomspace. A wildspace system with a black hole at the center. We headed for one of the moons, to meet up with a potential ally, finding it's covered in plateaus and dense jungle-- and that the jungle is home to multiple tarrasques. (For those who don't know, a single tarrasque is an apocalyptic-threat kaiju.) While some of the players were excited at the prospect of taking one on, ICly even, I had to have my Warlock repeatedly tell them, "No. No. Do not engage. DO NOT ENGAGE!" (She eventually relented and pointed out, "We kind of have to save our homeworld first? Maybe once we save it, we can come back and hunt one." And we all pitched the idea of doing that after the campaign is finished, and the DM was all for it.)

Just to further add to the dread, Gith's player pointed out the tarrasque's physiological features. Armored carapace, tusks/horns, the spiked tail. "These are defense mechanisms. Prey features. What the hell preys on this?!"

Welcome to Doomspace.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Curse of Strahd--

Sooo... after the werewolf thing, we had to abandon Vallaki and go deal with some evil druids at the local vineyard (cuz we need to get into the next town, which is closed to outsiders, but the town will let in the regular deliveries from the vineyard, which are behind because of aforementioned druids), but after doing so, the Vallaki innkeeper and his family arrived, with their 11yo son dead. This kid had been regularly shadowing us across Barovia (they're wereravens) and Sorcerer had gotten kind of close with him. So we're all upset to see this, Sorcerer is distraught (found out later that she had been the sole survivor of a dragon attack that wiped out her military unit which had been protecting an orphanage) and then suddenly Warlock gets a message from her patron. She thinks about it, and then suddenly casts Raise Dead on the kid-- a spell that's a much higher level than she should be able to cast.

Kid's alive now, but Warlock's arm now suddenly looks rotted and zombie-like, though still feels normal to her. And the poor kid is now afflicted with a kind of madness, and has this haunted look in his eyes, very different from the sweet kid he'd been before. Which just further upsets Sorcerer.

Our next mission involves stopping a druid ritual at a nearby hill, and while the situation is serious (Strahd himself is there), table circumstances just made it way more fun than dramatic. The wereraven father was with us and in hybrid form during combat, and when Sorcerer-player tried to do his hybrid form voice, it came out sounding like Hulk Hogan instead. So we started riffing on that ("Lemme tell you something, brother!") and then it sort of morphed from Hogan into Macho Man Randy Savage instead, leading to more riffing.

Ranger, who didn't really actively dislike Strahd like the rest of the team, hates running up the hill and tries to provoke Strahd into getting closer (and thus in bow range) by saying something like, "Are you just going to sit there and let us come to you?" And gets Strahd just bluntly saying, "Yes!" And this finally gets Ranger to dislike Strahd. We all joked at the table that Ranger hates him now because he made him do cardio. ("Nobody makes me breathe my own air!")

On top of all this, while everyone else in the team is dashing up the hill, so is my Paladin, but as a dwarf, he has a lesser walking speed, so he's slower getting up the hill while everyone else, with their ranged abilities, is attacking the druids and their berserker guards. Paladin finally gets there just as things are starting to wrap up, but he does manage to kill a couple of berserkers more or less single-handed. But for the whole thing, while they're attacking the enemies, I'm there just roleplaying like Paladin is just still running and like "Just wait till I get up there...!"

[Jay 2K Winger]

Curse of Strahd--

We fought werewolves. They didn't really stand a chance against our silvered weapons and magic. But our Warlock did get bit and contract lycanthropy. We all could see her player seriously considering whether she should tell our Cleric (who has Remove Curse and could cure her), or to keep it to herself. I joked that this would be the start of her villain arc (first teased/joked about earlier during the Death House), but we all pointed out that he is a Cleric of Selune, who notoriously hates lycanthropes, and hence so does he.

Warlock was smart, and told Cleric, who removed the curse and cured her.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Instead of Curse of Strahd, this past week we did a Level 20 one-shot, since one of the players was gone for a wedding. Nothing like rolling up a Level 20 Paladin-Sorcerer with a Holy Avenger Longsword and a Belt of Giant Strength (rolled with Hill Giant, traded for Storm Giant in-game) to be a damage-dealing tank. Especially since we were fighting undead storm giants, giving me extra damage with both the sword and my Divine Smite.

[Jay 2K Winger]

No context quote from Spelljammer yesterday--

"We all take 1d6 math damage."

[Jay 2K Winger]

Our Curse of Strahd campaign got back together, after a three-week hiatus. Our adventuring party finally decided on a name, dubbing ourselves the SWAT Team. (Smiting Whatever Asshole Talks) This came after, in some table-talk, comparing ourselves to a SWAT team after smiting three hags in short order.

There were quite a few jokes being thrown around, which was probably because it had built up after three weeks' break, until our sorceress' player was joke-complaining that he could barely breathe. One of the jokes that set him off was, while hearing some lore about a temple that contained fragments of Dark Powers, that Strahd had slaughtered the temple guardians, when I commented, "Well, now we know we shouldn't mess with Strahd, if he took out some temple guards. We remember how badass those guys were from Legends of the Hidden Temple."

I made another meta joke that got us some Inspiration--

Someone Else: (IC) "It's just been a long day."
Me: (IC) "Yeah. Today felt like it lasted three weeks."
DM: (pause, smirk, awards Inspo)