Tabletop Fun

[Kit-Ginevra]

Three more last-place finishes. I'm getting to where I can mostly hang with the other players up to the midpoint of the game, but then things fall apart for me just as everyone else's "engines" start really producing VPs.

VPs Virulent Pox? Violet Pustules? Venomous Potion? Violent Puking? An engine that can do that would be...worrying...

[Nunavut Pants]

A couple more three-person games of Terraforming Mars in.

Apparently I'm not very good at this game. Of course, I blame it on the cards that I was drawing. Not at all on the several "clever plans" that I made that turned out to be unworkable for one reason or another (like, me mis-reading the card). Nor on the fact that the game end conditions keep surprising me with how quickly they are achieved. No, no--it's the cards fault, not mine!!

Three more last-place finishes. I'm getting to where I can mostly hang with the other players up to the midpoint of the game, but then things fall apart for me just as everyone else's "engines" start really producing VPs.

[Jay 2K Winger]

So Nephew Uno has gotten into playing cards now, and he wanted to play cards with me and his dad while we were all visiting for Xmas.

We started out with a three-way game of War. Uno wanted to play with the joker cards, but BIL and I said no. Uno, being the competitive scamp he is, was claiming he was going to crush us. He did not, as he was the first out. I hung on for a lot longer than any of us expected because I managed to hold onto an Ace, allowing me to keep winning rounds and get some face cards back. But eventually BIL managed to snag my ace and then my other face cards, and I lost out.

Next, we played Go Fish. Once again, Uno was claiming he'd win. While it took me a minute to get the hang of playing (I haven't played Go Fish in probably 35 years), I eventually came out on top and won with 6 sets to BIL's 5. Uno was again in last place.

Finally, we played Crazy 8s. We all had the basics down pat, and again Nephew proclaimed he would win. This time, it actually happened, as he ran out of cards before I or BIL could, and naturally, that was the last card game we played that day.

[Nunavut Pants]

A member of one of the gaming groups has found an open-source software version of Terraforming Mars, and put together a server. You play it through a web browser. He has two instances of it running, with friends of his from all over the US as players. (They range from his cousin out on the East Coast to me in Hawaii!)

I've played two games with the same three opponents so far. Lost both of them, the first one really badly. I started decently strong in that, but after the first plays I got really bogged down, and could not make much headway in terraforming actions or gaining VPs. I was the EcoLine corp, who is able to play greenery tiles to the map more easily, but I couldn't get more plant production to make that happen faster. The cards to do that just weren't showing up for me.

The second game was a bit different. I had a different starting corp, who got extra VPs when cards with plant or animal icons on them were played by me. I only wound up with a few of those. I think, judging from the scoring graphs, that I started from just a little behind everyone else. I was closer to the rest of the group, but one player managed to really pile on the points in the last two "generations" (rounds of play). I was last again, but not by as much as the previous game.

We'll be playing more in the coming days.

There's also a solo play mode that's available on another quasi-public site, and I've been playing that quite a bit. In the solo mode, you're trying to complete all of the terraforming goals (which triggers the end of the regular multiplayer game) in 12 generations. Decent practice for multiplayer, but not perfect as you're ignoring VPs to concentrate on temperature/O2/oceans. I'm able to beat the game in about 25% of my attempts.

[Nunavut Pants]

I did in fact go back for another games day the next day after my previous entry--but I didn't get a chance to post about it due to lots of busy life stuff.

We started out with Sparkle Kitty, which is a silly take on Uno. We're all different princesses, trapped in towers made up of four face-down cards. We have hands of five cards which have a color, a word, and a symbol on them. There are two common face-up cards (more or less) on the table to start, and on your turn you play a card that either matches the color or symbol of one of the two cards. You have to say that word and the word on the other face-up card as the "magic spell" you are casting on this turn. The words are silly (stuff like "gooey" and "pretty" and "'splosion" and such) so there's a lot of laughter. If you can't play you draw a card; if you don't say the spell out loud you draw a card, etc. If someone has a card with the same word on it as was just played, they can say "double [word]" and drop their card on yours regardless of turn order. If you run out of cards, you take one of your "tower" cards and four more from the deck and keep going. There are special cards that have special effects, and with some of them you have to say the word on them as a prefix to any spell you cast--or draw a card.

T won, which was not inappropriate as she was the only teenage girl there.


Next, I was in the group that played Spirit Island. This is a cooperative game where you are the "guardian spirits" of a land that is being invaded by Europeans. You are trying to drive the invaders out with various powers that your spirit has. These powers are on cards, and you start the game with four cards. They cost you energy to use (though some cost 0 energy) and have various effects. You get energy income each turn. You raise your income by expanding your presence on the board (by moving tokens from your player mat to the board) and those give you bases for taking actions on the board. Your basic turn involves choosing to place two tokens on the board, or to place one token and gain a new power card (from either the Major or Minor deck; Major ones cost more to use), or to shuffle your used cards into your deck so you can use powers that you have already used. Then you play your cards and pay for using them.

The game automatically places explorers, villages, and cities on the board during the "expansion" phase, and damages the land during the "ravaging" phase. You can mitigate the damage by using cards to "defend" an area, and also if there are native huts in the area they will help to defend it.

My Spirit didn't have any defending cards, but it had some useful ones. There was one that allowed me to move some of the "bad guys" around--and another player had a Spirit that would "eat" any bad guys that fell into the ocean--so I pushed quite a few in for him! Another let me give another player extra energy, which was nice.

We played on a relatively easy difficulty, and won pretty handily. J, whose game it was, said he has never seen it won so quickly!


We finished up with a favorite, Betrayal at House on the Hill. There were five of us playing. We got a decent amount of the house explored before the haunt was revealed--it was J who was the traitor, and the haunt was about letting specters in through the windows of the house. The rest of us had to perform five exorcisms before the windows were open and the specters killed us all. (They were very powerful in combat!)

To perform an exorcism, we either had to go to one of a few rooms and perform a particular skill check, or use one of a couple of items and perform a particular skill check. (The exact skill depended on the room or the item.) We had lucked out because we had one or both of the necessary items, and most of the necessary rooms were already on the board. I had an item that allowed me to pass any one skill check, but it was a one-time use. I quickly used that to do one exorcism. Another player had one of the items, and it took them a couple of tries to do the exorcism. Another player was able to do one more before the specters got to her and killed her, and the last player (T) did one fairly quickly and was later able to take a couple of tries to do the last. I ran interference for T at the end so the specters attacked me and very nearly killed me. But we managed to pull it off!


And that was the end of another good gaming weekend.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Eric's Exandria What-If? One-Shot--

Eric is a big fan of Critical Role, so when another need for a one-shot came up, he offered to do this Level 20 adventure for us, saying it would be set on Exandria-- the world of Critical Role created by Matt Mercer-- and was "sort of a what-if story," wherein "what if Vox Machina failed to defeat the Whispered One?" The Whispered One is CR's name for Vecna, the ultimate evil lich of D&D lore, who was the final BBEG at the end of Campaign 1. We were all Level 20, allowed 1 Legendary Item, 1 Rare Item, and 2 Potions of Greater Healing.

Our party consisted of a Bard/Warlock "German lawyer" or "Diplomancer" as I dubbed him (Bob's character), an Echo Knight/Assassin who could make his shadow fight alongside him (Me), basically Gilgamesh from Fate/Zero (Jesse), and basically "actually" Legolas. (Mike)

After an initial introduction where things seemed rotten in the otherwise celebratory Whitestone during the Winter's Crest Festival, we found out that in this version of Exandria, after Vecna defeated Vox Machina, he has several of the BBEG's of Critical Role helping him lay waste to the world, including the vampire Silas Briarwood (BBEG of the Whitestone arc of Campaign 1), the massive ancient red dragon Thordak the Cinder King (BBEG of the Chroma Conclave arc), and "an unknown player." (Lucien Tavelle, Campaign 2's penultimate BBEG)

We managed to defeat Lucien easily enough, and then were advised by an ally NPC to try to turn Thordak against Briarwood. We orchestrated a plan to lure Thordak and Briarwood close (the latter was riding the former) to our location, where Thordak couldn't fit, and then basically trash-talked Briarwood's dead wife (who had contracted with Vecna to return him to life before later being executed herself) until he got pissed and leapt off to engage us. Bob's plan was to then teleport onto the dragon to persuade him to flip on Vecna, and he was literally in the process of describing his character doing that, when I saw that Eric was in the midst of describing Thordak's reaction to Briarwood leaping off his back, and described my character holding up a hand to Bob's. "Hold up. Let him cook." Which is precisely what Thordak did, as he chomped Briarwood out of the air and then torched him.

Only it turned out Thordak was actually a Wildshaped Keyleth of the Air Ashari (Marisha Ray's PC from Campaign 1), the sole survivor of Vox Machina, who had disguised herself as the Cinder King to bide her time for an opening to turn on Vecna. We had formulated a plan to acquire Vecna's Reliquary (necessary to make sure he couldn't revive himself later) from the bottom of the Nine Hells, and Keyleth left us to deal with Vecna.

So we did. Bob, with his mastery of D&D fuckery, had built his character to be really good at a lot of different things, and he was just expertly counter-spelling a lot of Vecna's attempts at magic. Jesse's Basically-Gilgamesh opened up the "Gates of Babylon" by dropping a Meteor Swarm on his head, Actually-Legolas kept firing arrows at him with crazy damage bonuses, and I'm hacking away at him with my vorpal sword. We finally manage to defeat Vecna, and then--

--we wake up back in Whitestone, in the middle of the festival, surrounded by Vox Machina, including a very angry Grog Strongjaw, yelling at us for having a drink from his cask of special ale.

The whole adventure had been basically a bad trip after we got drunk on Grog's special grog.

I wrapped up the adventure by lifting my drink cup and just going, "...same again?"

[Nunavut Pants]

Saturday game day happened. There were only four of us, but that is a quorum. J brought his daughter T. Apparently it's been quite a while since I've seen her--she was the one driving them home after gaming was done!!

Anyway, we started with a "player summoning game". In this case, it was [uurl=https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/41/cant-stop]Can't Stop[/url], which is an older roll-your-dice-and-push-your-luck game. J won and nobody realized it; one or two people took turns after he had gotten three pieces to the finish line.

From there, we moved on to Mystic Vale, which I had never seen. It's a bit of a deck-builder like Dominion, but instead of buying more cards for your deck, you buy clear plastic overlays for your existing cards. There are three locations on the card (top, middle, bottom) and the overlays will put the addition into one of those three slots. You can only have one thing in each slot. A press-your-luck mechanic determines how many cards you can draw from your deck. T absolutely ran away with the game! Her score was evidently the highest that she or J had ever heard of. She got some early cards that gave her much better odds for the press-your-luck part, so she was able to play many more cards than the rest of us in almost every turn. I'm talking something like a dozen cards when I could play from three to five most turns.

Next, we played A's new copy (and new edition) of Big Boss, which was described as "Like Acquire but different". Which helped me not at all, because that is one of the classic board games that I've never played. Anyway, it's a game about buying and expanding companies and buying stocks that never go down in value. A won by dint of doing a merger between two companies and using the proceeds to be able to place his "tower" on the merged company, which gave him a better score at the end of the game. I think I may have been second or possibly third; I had some initial success but got bogged down later in the game.

There was a final game whose name I can't remember. There were four suits, with cards from 1-18 in each. The tableau started with a blank card of each color, and on either side of each one of those was a numbered card in gray. When your turn came, you played one card to one side or the other of one suit. If anyone had a card of that suit in between the value of your card and the other number for that suit that was showing, they'd call out something and discard that card and you'd get a card from the deck. One card for every card that was in that range--yes, you could have multiples. The object, naturally, was to run out of cards. I think that I won that, mostly through luck.

All in all, an enjoyable day. And I'll be heading back over again tomorrow, when more people are supposed to be there!!

[Nunavut Pants]

That's pretty unhinged, indeed!


I finally got to a game day!

Three of us played "The Crew: Mission Deep Sea". This is a trick-taking game with various random conditions that have to be met (e.g., one player taking exactly as many Green cards as Pink cards; one player only taking the one of trumps and no other trumps, etc.) and something of a story line that ties the rounds together. We progressed through four hands, though there were a couple we failed and had to re-play with new objectives and new cards--one of those, more than once! I definitely need to flex those mental muscles more...

Then, as a wrapping-up game, we played "So Clover". I have probably mentioned this before, but it's a word-guessing game where you get four square-shaped cards with words on each edge, and place them randomly on a clover-shaped board in a 2x2 grid. Each edge of the board has two random words on it, and you have to think of a single-word clue that will lead everyone to guess those two words. You write that clue down just outside the area where the cards are. Repeat for all four sides of the board. But there are 16 words, and each card can go in each location in four different ways, leading to many possibilities... Plus, there's an extra card added that you shuffle in before showing everyone the cards and clues! So the players have to put the four correct cards on the board in the correct spots in the correct orientation...

Things went pretty well, though I had one instance where I put down the cards and board and realized I had misread a word on one card. The other players allowed me to pick up everything and re-do that one clue, while the rest continued playing. I had thought the words were "Avocado" and "Eye", so my clue was "Pit". But the actual words were "Advocate" and "Eye", so I wound up with "Witness". Not the best clue, but the words that were on the sides of the card fit with their clues that way better than any other way, so it worked out.

Looking forward to next weekend, when there will hopefully be more games!!

[Jay 2K Winger]

Jesse's Fun Shot One Shot Part 2--

As Bob, the DM of our Dragonlance campaign, was out of town this week, Jesse stepped up to run a one-shot for us. Actually a continuation of one we'd done a couple of months ago, all of our characters were basically a pack of edgelords, from an Aberrant Mind Sorcerer who'd been experimented on by a cult and had split personality issues, to a fire genasi Evocation Wizard with severe burns all over her body, to my shadar-kai Hexblade Warlock who, when asked what he does, bluntly replies, "I kill things for money."

The first one-shot had been an "audition" to work for this crime boss in Waterdeep, who revealed her goal was to effectively decapitate the ruling structure in the city with a magical bomb so she could exploit the power vacuum. This one-shot (now including Eric, who missed the first one, with an Owlin Death Domain Cleric, or "harbinger of death" as he called himself) involved our party needing to steal the bomb from a gnome artificer (or at least steal his schematics), and first we needed to get close enough to meet him. So we're brought to fight in a gladiatorial pit, to impress the crowd and draw the artificer out. Went pretty well, and after every turn, we had to do a Performance check to see if we were getting the crowd behind us. Most of us did-- I was the only one who wasn't able to make it work-- and so most of us got our equipment back. Since the only thing I really needed was my armor-- as a Hexblade, I could summon my sword to my hand at will-- it wasn't too much of a problem.

After winning the fight, we got a long rest before meeting with the artificer-- and we all at the table had to stop from laughing as Jesse portrayed him with a very pronounced lisp-- and then realizing a few things. One, the bomb we had been told to steal wasn't some hand-held thing, but something about the size of the table we were sitting at, with its main component being a massive crystal of condensed wild magic, currently being kept stable by a tamed Beholder which was using all 8 of its eye-stalks to keep it stable. Two, the artificer was aware of our client's plan to assassinate the leadership of the city. Three, he thought said plan wasn't going far enough, as he intended to blow up the entire city with the equivalent of a magical nuke.

Naturally, we decided that, since the job spec hadn't required the artificer's survival, we were going to kill him. Which didn't take long at all. Hazards on the field included little rifts of mostly-stable wild magic in the air-- entering the same square as them, or affecting them with any magical effect, would cause a roll on the Wild Magic Table, causing some random effect-- and the Beholder's anti-magic field extending in a cone from its cental eye. After the artificer went down, our wizard hit the Beholder with a spell, causing one of its eye-stalks to 'detach' from its work and begin using its eye-beam effects. Everyone basically decided at that point that we were just going to kill the Beholder, and then figure out what to do about the unstable magic nuke.

And then our Cleric got disintegrated by the Beholder. And then the Sorcerer got petrified by the Beholder. And then my Hexblade got zapped by the Beholder's death ray.

The Wizard finished off the Beholder, and then her player decided to just set off the bomb by blasting it with her magic until it went off.

And that's the story of our first TPK, and the story of how we nuked Waterdeep.

After the session, Jesse turned to me, laughing, and said, "You know how I said earlier that I had a Part 3 in mind for this party? Yeah, not anymore..."

Next week, Eric runs a Level 20 one-shot for us. We'll see how unhinged things can get there...

[Jay 2K Winger]

Dragonlance--

As restrictive as DM Bob's table rules can be-- which largely just comes down to limiting what source books we could use to create our characters or build out our spell lists and so on, though he's restricted a couple of other things like how certain spells work-- I've decided I like him as a DM because of how he's clearly adapting out the setting to fit how our characters developed backstories and such.

We had an IC bit of backstory revelation about Evrouin's father, Sir Willem. Our group, the Misfits, spoke with him in his study about our recent adventures, and then he took us into a secret library (behind a hidden passage behind a bookcase no less) where we learned about some of the NPCs identified in the macguffin letters we'd received the previous session. But we also learned that Sir Willem had been an adventurer himself in his younger days, until his elder brother's death forced him to return home to take over leadership of the house etc. And Sir Willem's team had much in common with ours.

• Group layout (A human knight, an elven wizard, a kender handler, a gnome artificer, a nomad barbarian-- his group had a dwarven fighter as well, the closest we had was Duggan and that barely counts)
• Group name (His group was called the Rejects; Ours is called the Misfits. Same circumstances too-- signing an adventuring company charter, they had to come up with a name on the spot, and their elf wasn't present for the signing either.)
• Early adventures (The Rejects had been hired by merchants to hunt down bandit raiding groups that were harassing trade routes between the cities, and later got pointed in the direction of an evil city that they knew they couldn't reasonably take on by themselves. Ours was the same, but at sea, and instead of a city it was a man-o-war crewed by wizards and clerics.)

And then after all the lore stuff was done about the enemy NPCs and other events going on around the continent, we had 3 in-game days before Evrouin's knight-promotion conclave was going to happen, so we each got little vignettes sort of letting them all show off a bit or study up or research, and some of us got actual benefits out of it.

Cogburn, my gnome artificer, was allowed to access Willem's gnome comrade's personal effects. Said comrade, Spanner, had died in battle and had no family to bequeath his belongings to, so Willem had kept it in the attic. Cog discovered that Spanner's Life Quest had been to develop a "replacement for horses," and had models of mechanical horses as well as plans and schematics. Cog was able to figure out how to make it all work, and Bob rewarded me with a bonus invention (read: spell) that I could use. It was a version of the D&D spell Phantom Steed, which summons a sort of quasi-real horse for a period of an hour. Except the normal version is a 3rd level spell (which I wouldn't be able to use until Level 4), whereas this spell Spanner's Mechanical Steed (as I dubbed it) is a 2nd level spell (available at Level 3) and basically lasts until it doesn't. (And since we all advanced to Level 3 at the end of the session, I got an extra spell for use in my book in addition to the two other 2nd-level spells I get at Level 3.)

Justinius, our elven wizard, spent his three days in the library, not without an attempt at cajoling Willem into parting with at least one of his books so he could try to trade it for access to the Great Library in Palanthas. But in studying up on how the Orders of High Sorcery had combatted the dragons being used by the enemy in the Third Dragon War, he did gain a permanent feat-- Advantage on any skill checks related to how High Sorcery (aka wizardry) works against dragons.

Runa, our barbarian, was only interested in training in the yard where the knights and knight-aspirants trained. She was allowed to spar with the Master-at-Arms for Brightblade Keep, Master Tarly, who Bob described as a huge guy in full plate armor with an equally huge greatsword. Though all of the sparring was done with wooden training weapons (so non-lethal), Runa still managed to roll pretty well on her first attack against Tarly, for a total of 21. Which Bob noted, "That just hits him." So Runa got two hits on him before he retaliated with two strikes that instantly downed her. But she persisted on training with him for all three days, for which Bob awarded her a feat of her own-- a +2 to her Armor Class when facing heavily armed opponents.

After the knightly conclave concluded, which mostly involved Evrouin giving an account of his adventures in Palanthas and then at sea, with testimony from both the nobleman we'd saved as well as the rest of the party (there was some brief political stuff; there's two factions in the knighthood and the other faction made a token attempt at discrediting our testimony purely because we were outsiders or non-humans-- which got promptly shut down by the head of the knighthood, who quoted volume and chapter of what amounts to legal precedent at the dissenter, effectively pointing out that non-humans once saved one of the dissenter's ancestors) Evrouin got knighted and received his own plate armor, his spurs and lance, as well as his horse.

And then we all advanced to Level 3, which is when Bob revealed that with that advancement, all of our signature items also effectively leveled up. This was something he'd mentioned to us back during our Session Zeroes, that the signature items would have various features and the like pursuant to our characters' classes and growth, and that they would also "level up" at various milestones. Level 3 was the first. The other two won't happen until some point in Tier 2 (Levels 5-10) and Tier 3 (Level 11-16), and even then he's implied that there may be specific quests tied to them. I was especially happy that Cogburn's trusty wrench-- which mechanically uses a club's weapon properties-- now lets him use his INT modifier (+4) for attack rolls, instead of his very basic STR modifier (+0), on top of its other features.

Bob throwing in the little parallels between the Misfits and the Rejects, and the vignettes leading to actual tangible benefits for our characters, plus the signature item thing... I love it.

Side note, I've joked with my roommate Road, who loves RPGs and D&D, needs to join the table. He likes playing dwarves, and I've joked that if he were to join up with a dwarf fighter, we could complete the Misfit/Reject parallels.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Dragonlance--

Our band of Misfits went out to sea as privateers to go hunting pirates, and .... things did not go well.

The first pirate ship we came across was crewed by nine orcs and captained by a minotaur (dubbed the Bull), and despite DM Bob nerfing the orcs for us (we're all level 2), it almost went into a TPK. While Runa the Barbarian kept the Bull occupied for a couple of rounds, the orcs swarmed the deck of our ship and ganged up on Evrouin the Knight and Cogburn the Artificer. Four orcs attacked Cogburn, dealing a total of 12 damage when I had a max of 10 HP, instantly downing me. A couple of rounds later, I came back to consciousness thanks to a Nat-20 death save, putting me at 1 HP. But Runa went down against the Bull and ended up rolling all five death save rolls across five rounds-- 2 fails, then 2 successes, and then the final roll almost ended her permanently with a Nat-1 but we had "Table-spiration" to burn.

See, DM Bob was impressed with the table's "restraint" during Mike's One-Shot last week: when we rescued the wizard-in-the-bottle which was the point of the whole adventure, none of us had done the OOC call-back by asking her, "Bitch, you okay!?" So he gave us Table-spiration, which was Inspiration that anyone at the table could use, provided everyone at the table agreed to let them use it. Inspiration allows for the person using it to re-roll a d20.

So Runa used it to pass the final death save and stabilize at 0 HP, unconscious but no longer dying. But the Bull and the orcs (even as the latter were being winnowed down by Catt the Rogue and Evrouin) kept downing people. While we managed to kill them all, Catt was the only PC that was still conscious by the end of combat.

Thankfully, we got an immediate long rest afterward to recover, and we found some things on the Bull's ship that were clearly tied to longer-term plot stuff-- enough arms and armor to equip a regiment, a regimental banner, as well as letters being delivered to someone-- the recipient's commission as Colonel in the "Blue Dragon Army" and his orders. We already didn't like the sound of that, especially after the earlier encounter with the evil wererat cleric who had similarly acquired/stolen arms and armor with the intent to equip a not-small group of fighters.

We didn't have much time to ponder over this, because as we were sailing back to port with our prize ship in tow, we were set upon by a massive three-masted man-o'-war, a black ship with black sails, crewed by a massive group of dark-cloaked figures, including at least one black-robed wizard (though the others were probably also black-robe wizards), who hit our ship with a Fireball. We had no hope of outrunning the Black Ship, even if we cut loose the prize ship, and we were hopelessly outgunned and outnumbered.

Then our ship's first mate, the dwarf Duggan Deepdelver, went to Evrouin, revealed his true name was Pikel Truesilver, and gave him a letter and a signet ring, asking him to return them to his , Pikel's, father in Thorbardin. Pikel said he and the ship's crew would hold off the Black Ship as long as they could while we escaped in the lifeboat. So we did. But everyone on our ship is assumed dead or worse.

We rowed back to shore over a couple of days, landing on Sancrist, which was where three of our party are initially from-- Mt Nevermind for Cobgurn and Brightblade Keep for Evrouin. We stopped at Nevermind first to get proper rest, then went to Brightblade Keep where Evrouin met with his father. In the midst of relating his adventures, Sir Willem revealed that word of Evrouin's exploits in Palanthas had reached him, and that by protecting merchant ships at sea, rescuing civilians (and one nobleman) in the city, and defeating the wererat, Evrouin had met all the qualifications he needed to petition for full knighthood. So we have that to look forward to, as we all agreed to testify at the conclave for his petition.

Now we also have this long term quest he's picked up, to return word of Duggan/Pikel's fate to his father in Thorbardin, the home/capital for the mountain dwarves. The problem is, Thorbardin sealed its gates more than 300 years ago, before the great Cataclysm that broke the continent and everything, and no one living today knows where Thorbardin is, or if it still exists.

That's a later problem, however.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Dragonlance Mike's One-Shot--

One of our players was not available this week, and rather than run three straight weeks without a session (two weeks ago we ended early when a player failed to show up; we couldn't continue without them as this was literally the kick-off of the wider campaign), Mike offered to return to DM duties for a week. We agreed, and he gave us the basic rundown of we were getting hired to investigate an old sorcerer's tower near Neverwinter in the Forgotten Realms. He let us make Level 3 characters.

I decided to keep it simple and just ran an Orc Rune Knight Fighter called Uthakk, while Bob brought out an Elf Swashbuckler Rogue called Wesley, Eric ran a Tiefling Grave Domain Cleric called Enigma (and he literally made up the name on the spot when he realized he'd been so caught up in building the character he hadn't named him), while Jesse brought along a Tiefling of his own... an older Tiefling with a limp, a Fiend-Patron Warlock called Pimbley Grib.

We knew we were in for an interesting game when Jesse revealed that Pimbley spoke almost no Common. In our first bit of roleplay as our party of adventurers met with the client hiring us, after explaining what the job was and asking if we'd take the job, we all agreed, until it got to Pimbley, who was silent for just long enough to be awkward before saying, in a slightly too-loud accented voice, "Yes!" And later when he was asked a more direct question that required a more complex answer, Pimbley just nodded and repeated, in the same way, "Yes!"

I immediately compared him to Borat, and Jesse started laughing because I'd picked up on some of the vibe he'd intended.

I hadn't put much thought into what Uthakk's personality was going to be like, but I just fed off Jesse's Pimbley energy and promptly gave Uthakk a thick Slavic accent of his own. Not quite full Borat in my case, but it definitely contributed to the wild, chaotic energy at the table.

We had a lot of fun, and afterward, Mike said it was the "least hinged" we've ever been, but he really wanted to do future one-shots with that crew.

[Jay 2K Winger]

D&D AL: Death House Halloween Special Two-Shot--

Since several of the Adventurers' League DMs will be unavailable on the actual Halloween Thursday, AL won't be running that week. So they decided to do their Halloween Special as a two-shot the past two weeks, running the "Death House" module from the Curse of Strahd setting. Everyone had to create fresh, Level 1 characters with some restrictions (only specific books were permitted for creation) and the understanding that we would not be able to use these characters after the adventure was done. (As the titular Death House is inside Barovia, a land trapped in the Mists of Ravenloft, and which don't allow people to leave afterward.) The house is called "Death House" for a reason, as it can be challenging for Lvl 1 characters.

I had initially signed up for one DM's table, but was asked if I would be willing to switch, since another DM's table had had a few people back out due to RL reasons. I agreed, and had prepped two characters-- a Fighter and a Cleric-- to meet the needs of the table. It was a good thing I had, since we had two Rogues and a Warlock at the table. And it went rough... I was the healer, but ended up nearly dying twice, burning one of my limited abilities to heal myself back up, and then a spell slot to heal someone else before the end of session 1. But I wasn't the first to die, as it turned out-- that honor went to DM David (playing for one instead of running the table) at another table, whereupon I found out that the DMs had pooled together and bought three special gold-painted dice-holders, on which they'd attached a simple plastic plaque reading "I Died First in Death House - D&D Adventurers League '24." Every table had one.

By that point, I was almost eager to be the next to die, but that honor went to Brian, a relative newcomer to AL (though not D&D), when his dwarf rogue got killed by a zombie. He jokingly noted, "I never got to get into his backstory!"

In part 2 of the adventure this week, Brian brought out his secondary character-- as we were in a new session, the DMs ruled he could bring in another Level 1 character, while everyone that survived was allowed to reach level 2 (but no HP or spell slot or limited ability resets). He jokingly said this paladin was here to arrest his dwarf rogue from the previous week-- "I've been pursuing him for years!"-- and asked where he was. "I think we left him back in one of the crypts." He continued the joke by implying he was going to go into the dwarf rogue's backstory, only for all of us to basically, semi-IC, go "No one cares."

We managed to make it to the finale of the adventure, where we were fighting a shambling mound-- a very challenging fight for four level 1-2 adventurers. Things only got more challenging for us because our rolls were terrible, and we just couldn't land any significant hits on the shambler. That didn't mean that it was messing us up, however. Our warlock had Pact of the Chain, which in the current 2024 rules allow him to cast Find Familiar without spending a spell slot. His warlock kept his familiar-- a cat (actually a Sphinx of Wonder, but flavored as a cat) called Asmeowdeus-- out at all times and had it do all the attacking for him. So Asmeowdeus would draw aggro on the shambler, doing some damage, get attacked and sometimes downed and engulfed, but as a familiar, it would just puff out of existence on death, and the next turn, the warlock would just summon his familiar again and have it draw aggro again.

Additionally, our surviving rogue threw a vial of alchemist's fire at the shambler, setting it on fire. While it was resistant to fire damage, that fire couldn't really be extinguished, so every round of combat, it was doing 1-4 points of damage. Given how poorly I was rolling, and how after the first familiar death, Asmeowdeus wasn't getting a chance to attack and was just there to draw aggro, we not-so-jokingly claimed that the alchemist's fire was doing more damage than any of the players. Especially after Brian's Paladin went down in the first round of combat and took enough damage to instantly die.

Brian was handed a stack of pre-generated characters and told to pick one, and if the party was still alive after three turns, he could re-enter with a new character on the same initiative count he'd had before. So in he comes with another paladin, and he managed to survive a few rounds, putting in some significant hits, before he too went down. And the cycle repeated as we were basically cherry-tapping the shambler and kiting it around. Brian returned with a kobold sorcerer, but we weren't able to kill it on his round, and then the shambler was left with 2 HP.

Suddenly, we went, "Wait. Is the alchemist's fire going to actually kill this thing?!" Top of the round, it's the shambler's turn, so the rogue rolls the d4 to see how much damage it would take-- and it only took one. The rogue held his action, wanting the fire to kill it, but on my turn I insisted on making an attack roll despite their objections, since-- after how poorly my dice had been behaving-- it would have been so appropriate if they came in clutch now. Alas, they didn't, so it comes back to the shambler, and it finally dies to the alchemist's fire!

Now we had to run and get out of the collapsing house. Fortunately, we'd found a shortcut staircase with a trapdoor that led up to the parlor, so we didn't have to run through the whole house to get out. We managed to avoid getting poisoned by the choking smoke filling the first two rooms we were trying to get out of, and then had to pass DEX saves to get through the doors (now whirling frames of scythe blades) without damage. We managed to get out the door, but Brian's kobold sorcerer took enough damage in the last door to drop to 0 HP.

I did say my cleric stabilized him, but then the rogue and warlock's players shared a look, and went, "We start stabbing the kobold." I laughed, and gave it some flavor, "Yeah, there we go. I'm like, 'Okay, he's stable.' Stab, stab, 'Nooooo!' And the camera pulls out and back through the Mists, fade to black."

All in all, it was fun, and even Brian had fun despite dying three separate times.

One fun quip at the table--
While Brian's first paladin wanted to heal the rogue with his Lay on Hands ability, the rogue's player said, "You have my consent." And the DM nodded, "Consent is key when you Lay on Hands."

[Jay 2K Winger]

D&D AL: Rime of the Frostmaiden--

I hadn't intended to join this Adventurers League campaign, since DM David had explicitly meant it to be for some of the newer members of the league, in particular those who hadn't played D&D very much. But before the first session, he messaged me on Discord and asked me to join it, so he'd have at least one experienced player at the table to explain mechanics to the newbies. I agreed, and rolled up a half-elf sorcerer called Rhoric, with a vague backstory of a Waterdavian noble that had to leave town in a hurry. Our second session, Wizards of the Coast released the new 2024 edition of the Player's Handbook (PHB) and pushed it out onto D&D Beyond, causing the app to default to using the 2024 version of PHB for everything, while AL was still using the 2014 PHB. And then a couple of weeks later, without giving any kind of prep time, AL as a whole (as in the overarching organization, not our local chapter) forced everyone to start using the 2024 edition, which changes up a number of things. So it's been a learning experience for everyone.

At any rate, Rime of the Frostmaiden is set in the Icewind Dale, the grim up-north of the Forgotten Realms setting, which is locked in a sort of perpetual winter. We've been basically taking on jobs as they come along, and while in the town of Easthaven, we participate in a seance and commune briefly with a local spirit called the White Lady, who gives us answers about happenings in some of the towns we've visited, including Easthaven, telling us that "invisible gray dwarves" have been stalking the streets. I knew-- though didn't reveal my outside-game knowledge-- that this meant we were facing duergar, sort of corrupted dwarves, who have the ability to shrink or grow giant, as well as turn invisible.

We boarded the local, ice-stranded, ferry where we suspected the duergar were hiding, and got attacked by one who was standing lookout. Though he got in a couple of nasty hits on me, we laid into him, and as he got low on health, we decided to try to defeat him non-lethally so we could question him. But when he tried to escape by shrinking down and running, our War Cleric hit him with a Nat-20 Guiding Bolt spell, dealing upwards of 40 damage. Generally when an NPC gets reduced to 0 HP, they die unless non-lethal is specified-- and the DM did state we killed him-- but some of the other players tried to argue that it might still be okay. So then I looked up the rules on "instant death," a mechanic that applies when excessive damage is dealt-- if extra damage past the 0 HP threshold meets or exceeds the creature/character's max HP, they die instantly without death saves. So that duergar got reduced into a smear on the floor. We sort of dubbed him "Floorstain" for the rest of the session.

Then, as we tracked the footprints of one of the other duergar through the town, we saw it had stopped and apparently thrown a rock through a window in the town hall. While we were looking at this, a woman came out of the hall and confronted us, asking if we'd thrown a rock through her office window. Suddenly, our War Cleric says, "No, that's my office." Cue everyone at the table looking at their player, and the DM had the woman identify herself as Captain Imdra of the town's militia. Cleric doesn't back down, and keeps trying to gaslight the captain, straight up lying, and doing rather well with their Deception rolls, but we eventually convinced her that the Speaker (mayor) had hired us to look into it. "That was quick, this was like an hour ago," the captain said. I just said, "Yes, well, time is money!" When the captain went back into the town hall to check, I just went, "Go, go!" and we hurried off.

The duergar angle didn't pan out too well. A few more windows had been broken in town, but with no discernable pattern. Just some kind of general nuisance thing, even if we'd found a map in the ferry where the duergar had mapped out the location of their outpost and their fortress deeper in the mountains. We did encounter another duergar when we doubled back to the ferry, but that one got away before we could stop him. We went back to Captain Imdra to report on it-- I had Rhoric tell the Cleric, "Let us do the talking," --but their player committed to the bit and kept trying to gaslight the captain before we sort of quietly pushed her out of the room. We reported on the duergar matter and showed the map as evidence, but then took a job from the captain to search for some missing fisherman.

We were given a skiff (a small boat) to go out looking for them. No one had any proficiency with water vehicles-- until I realized I'd forgotten to set some feats from my background (thank you, 2024 PHB update), and the DM allowed me to retroactively put the proficiency in my character sheet. (I flavored it as being from his noble background, experience on the family yacht.) We came across a cave on the shoreline and then got attacked by a flock of harpies inside.

Late in the fight, I tried to hit one of the harpies with a Chaos Burst spell, rolling a Nat-20 on the attack roll-- until the DM pointed out I was too close to the target, and hence had to make it at disadvantage. (i.e., roll 2d20 and take the lower roll) I was pissed because my dice (as usual) hadn't been very kind. My second roll was still good enough to hit the target, but as Cleric's turn came up after mine, and they used a Guiding Bolt on one of the harpies, I realized something: Cleric had hit my harpy with a Guiding Bolt on their previous turn, which also gives the next attack roll against the target advantage (roll 2d20 and take the higher roll), which means that it would have cancelled out the disadvantage, giving it a straight roll. The DM allowed it and told me to roll for the extra damage. (Critical hits such as Nat-20s mean that you roll twice the damage dice.) So I rolled for the damage, and it was enough to kill my harpy.

Still fun, all this, even if it meant I missed out on DM Minmaxer's final adventure in the Spelljammer set he'd been running.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Dragonlance--

Our first dungeon crawl in our new campaign! We'd been hired by Palathas' Department of Public Works to deal with a spike in the rat population in the sewers, with bonuses if we could determine the cause of the spike and dealing with the source if it was due to malfeasance. So investigations had turned up a break-in at a warehouse where martial supplies had been stolen (armor, swords, rope, etc) as opposed to mere food spoilage from rat presence, as well as some surprisingly large claw-marks... these along with some disappearances at several taverns across the past few weeks (all when the victims had last been seen going into the privy), and a strange rat-like man buying an "ooze whistle" (like a dog whistle that works on oozes) for a supposed tamed gray ooze... (Ooze whistles were only a thing because the Sanitation Department's sewer expert used tamed black puddings to clear waste.) We suspected the perpetrator was a were-rat.

One reason we were keen to get on the case and delve into the sewers immediately versus doing more investigating was that the latest disappearance was one of the keepers of the tavern where we were staying.

We had a couple of combat encounters against some rat swarms and Rodents of Unusual Size, with a couple of near-deaths. Our kender Catt got downed when one swarm attacked her and got a Nat-20, and escaped instant death by a hair. (In D&D, if you take enough damage to reduce you to 0 HP and the remaining damage exceeds your total HP, you die instantly, no death saves.) We were one room away from our target (we could hear him chanting) when the party wanted to take a short rest, so the injured could regain some HP.

I argued, in character, that we shouldn't wait. Every moment we waited, Elmira, the missing tavern keeper, was in greater risk of getting killed. Everyone else wanted to rest, arguing back that if the kidnapper intended to kill her, they'd have done it already, so one more hour wouldn't matter. Cogburn, my gnome artificer, grumpily consented to waiting. (The rest of the players did agree that Cog had a point, IC, and complimented my roleplay.)

Then we fought the villain of this arc, a wicked spellcaster (later revealed to be a cleric of an evil god) and his pet gray ooze. Whereas black puddings eat organic matter, gray oozes consume magic, so when the villain sicced it on us, it went after Justinius, the wizard, consuming two of his spell slots before it was destroyed. The evil cleric also used a couple of nasty spells, including Inflict Wounds, which downed Runa, our barbarian. He also used the Command spell to try to force the martial characters to grovel, but it didn't work on our knight, Evrouin.We were able to get her back up with a healing potion, before we managed to take down the cleric, with Evrouin dealing the last blow. ("I told you I grovel before no one!")

We were fortunate that none of the captives had been killed, and found out that the cleric had been planning to turn them into part of his were-rat army. We found the missing stolen goods as well, and for returning with all our evidence and witnesses, we got paid well and got Freedom of the City, effectively making us citizens. Elmira the tavern keeper also promised us a place to stay any time we were in town.

Next time, we set out to go pirate hunting!