Tabletop Fun

[Nunavut Pants]

Two more games of Terraforming Mars, yet another loss.

And? ANOTHER WIN! I WIN I WIN I WIN!!

This last game, I started as the corporation (Terralabs Research) who only pays 1 for each playable card. Which is nice, because you can sell them for 1 each, meaning there's pretty much zero reason not to buy every single one you get. My two "prelude" cards gave me a production of three energy and six money (though the latter cost me six money up front to get the extra money production). I was able to leverage those to pick up two Milestones, the "have six energy production" milestone and the "have ten production of any one resource" milestone. The ten production was money, of course.

I also early on played a card that gave me money for every card I had played with a Science tag on it. I could do that every turn, which was bonus money and quite handy as you might imagine. Especially as one of the Awards available was "have the most Science tags", and I had a number of them already. I funded that award fairly early, trusting (hoping?) that my opponents wouldn't be able to play a ton of Science cards.

In the mid-game, I played a card that let me decrease my energy production by 1 to increase my Terraform Rating by 1, every turn. TR is victory points, and the base for your money production, so it is very valuable. And I had a lot of energy production, and was getting more as I could. Later on, I played a card that let me turn in 8 of the heat resource for 1 TR. So I was more or less getting 2 TR for free every turn. Especially because the Temperature track (which you can trade 8 heat to raise and get one TR) maxed out pretty quickly from my opponents' activity.

I also played cards that let me trade three energy (not production, just energy!) for one step on the Oxygen track, which gives one TR. And one that let me turn 5 heat into three steel, which gives a discount on any cards with the "building" tag. I also had discounts on any cards that had world-state requirements (e.g., minimum temp, minimum O2, minimum oceans, etc.) and one that was just a flat discount on everything. (That one is called "Anti-Gravity Tech" and requires SEVEN science tags to play; it doesn't get played that often.)

Toward the late game, I funded the "Magnate", which rewards whoever has the most green-colored cards. Which I had played quite a few more than anyone else.

Even later, I got tired of waiting for either opponent to play the 8th ocean, so I did with a Standard Project. That allowed me to play my Penguins card, which is worth 1 VP for every penguin on it. I had earlier played a card that kept anyone from removing my plant or animal resources, so those were secure VPs. You basically added one every turn. Plus I played a card that added two animals to any card of mine I chose, which was more VP. I also played Pets, which added one animal to itself every time anyone placed a city, and each two of those was a VP. I knew I was going to try to place at least one or two more cities, so I was pretty sure it would pay off.

It definitely did on the last turn; my opponents placed five cities and I placed five more. I made sure to put them next to at least two forest tiles so they were worth 3 VP on their own (one for the city, one for each adjacent forest) and they racked up my Pets VP. I had played a bunch of cards worth VP on their own throughout the game, including a number of the ones that gave me energy production I could use to do the trade-for-TR action mentioned earlier.

One opponent had a lot of ways to delay, so in the last two turns she wound up with a lot of money after the other two of us had passed so she could play her cards without us getting in her way. I was way out front at the end (over 120 VP) but wasn't sure if she (about 100 VP) was going to catch up--but I was out of actions and out of money, so all I could do was hang on. It turned out to be enough, as the scores wound up 124 to 115 to 102. With me in the lead.

This game went to 12 turns ("generations") which is somewhat longer than most, which tend to end around 10 generations. I had taken the lead by the end of the 3rd generation, and never lost it. Though the second place opponent certainly made a good try at the end.

[Jay 2K Winger]

D&D AL: Rime of the Frostmaiden--

So, I'd forgotten that the running gag of Brian's character Boron continually confusing my character Rhoric for any class other than his actual class wasn't completely down to Brian's sense of humor. Boron did first mistake Rhoric (a sorcerer) for a warlock, but later, DM David kept the fun going by having an NPC admonish Boron for it. "You keep calling this man a warlock, when he's not. He's clearly a bard!" So Boron (being a moron) latched onto that and started in on that vein.

I, in turn, have started leaning in on Rhoric looking for any excuse to inconvenience, embarrass, or endanger Boron. Such as suggesting that going in against some dangerous enemy might be dangerous, "One of us could die!" And Boron going, "You think so!?" Which led to this exchange--

Boron: "If I die, will you sing a song about me?"
Rhoric: "♪♫ Ding-dong, the idiot's dead-- ♪♫"
Boron: "That's very mean!"
Rhoric: "Yes. And?"

Later in this week's session, we came across the spirit of a deceased wizard, who tried to possess Boron, who resisted the effect, but then, as we were negotiating with the spirit for information, the spirit revealed that-- in the brief moments it was trying to possess him-- she had seen his memories, and revealed to the party (not the players) that Boron wasn't actually exiled from his homeland. Boron, however, insisted he had been, and it wasn't him lying to people to make a sympathetic backstory, he is just that stupid.

This session (and possibly the next two) involve our party venturing into the heart of the eternal winter that is plaguing the Icewind Dale, to confront the winter goddess causing it. We've already seen numerous animals and even people that have been frozen solid by presumably her magic. All of which tracks and isn't too surprising... but when we saw an ancient white dragon frozen solid (and white dragons are immune to cold damage), that set me on alert, and I even commented on it. "Well that's very alarming..."

[Nunavut Pants]

Hosted a games afternoon earlier this week. A small one, only half a dozen people. Brought out "Just One", and everyone enjoyed it. We didn't bother playing anything else for over two hours! We had a lot more successes than failures, which is nice.

Another Terraforming Mars game--and back into last place again. Oh well. We had one person way out in front, and the other player caught up in the last turn, actually tying the other player's score at 111! Tiebreaker was money left at the end, which that second person had, so they won it.

Currently in the middle of one, and it's not going particularly well. We'll see where I end up.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Dragonlance--

No combat encounters this week. Camilla, who plays Catt the Kender, couldn't make it due to some neck pain flare-up, so we played around her absence and will backfill her scenes later.

But the session was in the City of Dragons on the moon of Solinari, as the party went around to the various wards and talked with people, while waiting for the big conclave to happen. Most of it involved getting some cosmetic work done on weapons and shields and whatnot, but when they visited the "silver ward" where the silver dragons lived, the party met my new character, Gavin of Erol, along with his wife and children (wife and kids are all silver dragons that take human form), and ... well, some of it involved catching Gavin up on things he'd missed in the world since he left it to live with his wife on the moon some 1200 years previously. When he was told about the Cataclysm-- when the gods smote the city of Istar with a meteor the size of a mountain and shattered the continent, and since when the gods had turned their face from the world-- Gavin exclaimed, "What did you do?!" (Meaning, what did you (mortals) do to offend the gods so much?!)

But, hearing that the chromatic dragons had returned infuriated Gavin. He was a childhood friend of the legendary heroic knight Huma Dragonbane, had fought alongside Huma, and had been there when Huma defeated the evil goddess Takhisis and forced her and all of the chromatics to banish to the abyss, binding them to oaths to depart the mortal world. Huma had suffered a mortal wound in the battle, as well. So, as Gavin put it, "Huma died to banish them. And now they've forsaken their oaths. There will be a reckoning for this."

There was also a visit to the "bronze ward," where the bronze dragons patterned themselves off the gnomes. Here, when the "bronze gnomes" learned the party had once included a gnome (my dead artificer, Cogburn), and that his life quest had been to build a rocket to travel to and from the moon, the bronze gnomes asked to see his notes. After studying them intently and very quickly (as the DM put it, these are all the equivalent of 20th level artificers) the bronzes were able to build a rocket in about an hour's time. Then, brought the party along as the bronzes flew it to Mt Nevermind (where Cogburn had been from). While most of the party recovered from the g-shock of the flight, Runa the Barbarian took Cogburn's notebook and trusty wrench to his old guild, where they reverently enshrined them, and after seeing them glow on the shrine, revealed that it had been decreed that Cogburn's Life Quest was hereby fulfilled, and his spirit would be allowed to move on to the afterlife.

After the bronzes returned everyone back to the moon, the party held a brief ceremony atop a tower in the bronze ward, bidding farewell to their fallen friend. They got a brief glimpse of a road forming amid the scattered ashes in the breeze, with the silhouette of a gnome walking down it. And heard a cranky voice snapping, "Hurry up, Cogburn, you've kept us all waiting!" and then him hollering back, "You've been waiting this long, you can wait a little bit longer!"

And thus, did Cogburn get a sendoff.

The conclave went quickly in terms of roleplay, but it was during this part that we the players (and characters) learned that the Draconians (the "black cloaks" we'd been fighting) were actually made from the abducted eggs of the metallic dragons, corrupted through dark magic. It infuriated the metallics, and while the party (now including Gavin) already had a mission to start forging new dragonlances (they just needed to find dragonmetal to do it), they were asked to go into the evil city of Neraka (capital of the BBEG's new empire) to rescue the metallic dragon eggs, as their safety would allow the metallics to take action against the chromatics.

After being returned to Thorbardin to witness Hornfel's coronation as King, Justinius the wizard was approached by two blacksmiths, asking for his help. They were going to be making weapons for the dwarves' new army, and wanted to enchant them. Neither of the smiths could do this, and wanted his help. He agreed, which is mostly to explain Jesse's absence at the table for the next couple of weeks as he goes out of town.

[Nunavut Pants]

Just finished the next game of Terraforming Mars: NOT LAST again!

OK, it was third place out of four, but I'll take it!

[Jay 2K Winger]

D&D Adventurers League: Rime of the Frostmaiden--

Brian, one of the players at AL, is someone I've mentioned before. He loves to create characters with deep (and utterly irrelevant) backstories and likes to jokingly have them start to explain said (utterly irrelevant) backstories to anyone, whereupon the rest of the PCs at the table tend to immediately wander off when he starts to do this. Brian is one of many D&D players at AL that will rarely pass up an opportunity to make a terrible pun, frequently drawing facepalms and groans from people. (I'm not averse to making puns myself, but I go for quality over quantity, myself.)

Brian's character for this AL campaign has been Boron, a high elf ranger of noble birth, who was supposedly exiled from his homeland after losing a duel to his brother. It's transpired that said duel was literally rock-paper-scissors, which Boron lost because he kept throwing scissors, while his brother just kept picking rock. Boron treated this like it was some kind of sheer impossibility, and the character is frequently depressed over not being able to return to his homeland for another 100 years, and is constantly searching for elven wine to drown his sorrows. He makes frequent insulting remarks to anyone that isn't an elf, and views drow (dark elves) as basically only half elven, to the point that he calls our drow rogue and my half-elf sorcerer the equivalent of one elf between the two of us.

Boron does not have many friends, if it weren't obvious. He's also a complete idiot, frequently getting information wrong, assuming that people are cultists even when presented with evidence to the contrary, and frequently confuses Rhoric, my character, for a warlock, and then later a bard. Naturally, Boron and Rhoric bicker a lot.

This was our final Tier-2 adventure, though there are still a few more adventures in the module to go. We're all Level 10, so we know what we're doing and have a lot of capability of rolling very well. As we're infiltrating this duergar fortress (duergar = dark dwarves), we need to make some Stealth checks, so Boron casts Pass Without a Trace. This adds +10 to all Stealth rolls. Ordinarily, this shouldn't be too much of a hindrance to the DM, since his NPCs still have to make Perception checks...

...except we all rolled very high and he rolled very low. Boron actually rolled a Nat-20, which together with his crazy stats, gave him a total of 43. Everyone was gobsmacked, including the DM, and someone at the table quipped that Boron just disappeared to the party as well. When that happened, I dropped into character and went, "...are we free?!"

This set off the table laughing, and Brian laughing the hardest, unable to stop for nearly five minutes. We actually had to pause play to give folks a chance to stop giggling and laughing, partly just at Brian's reaction. I had to remark I've never broken anyone quite so hard at any table I've been at, and that's including my notorious "Am I going to have to smite this pie?" from Curse of Strahd, or breaking the DM with some of barbarian Seb's verbal musings on ticket price inflation. ("Why would you wanna blow it up like a balloon though?")

There were a number of Nat-20's at the table last night, and continued poor rolling from the DM, who kept throwing his d20s in dice jail for rolling so terribly. That Pass Without a Trace trivialized a lot of the session, as we avoided attracting attention from the duergar and were able to quickly get to the duergar warlord and take him down without having to deal with three of the monsters he'd had brought up from the Underdark to guard the fortress.

We got some good loot, made an ally (sort of) with a different duergar that had been opposed to allying with the warlord, and now we'll be moving into Tier-3 with the next adventure in this campaign.

[Nunavut Pants]

So, several more games of Terraforming Mars down. Mostly finishing last in them.

A recent one started reasonably well for me, and got better in the mid-game. My corp allowed me to turn up to 4 of the heat resource into up to 8 money, and I got a card early on that allowed me to turn one plant resource into seven money. The income boost was very handy for letting me play cards!

At one point, I said on Discord "I think this is my 'where it all went wrong' moment." I was in the lead by a modest amount, but did not see any good path forward from my position. I was able to put together a few things, but I dropped to second place in the "most steel plus energy production" award that I had funded, costing me 3 VP, and one opponent really piled on the points in the last two "generations" (rounds of play). Despite one good card right at the end giving me 3 VP, I still finished in second by almost 10 points.

Still, "NOT LAST!"

I think I'm going back to my old form in the current game, though. I don't see any good synergies in the corporations, preludes, and project cards that were available to me. No clear path to the Milestones or Awards, and no good "engine" setup to build.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Dragonlance--

So the King's Tomb was a combat-less session, as we were mostly exploring the very large and blinged-out tomb. There were traps only in the sense of "do not touch this artifact" and "you're cheating at the test," but nothing that would overtly seriously harm us. A couple of lore things (Duncan XIV was a BAMF - he 1v1'd a King Ogre, something that took an entire party for us to do) and some healing potions and whatnot were found. Also, some Spectacles of True Seeing, which can see through illusions and similar. (I dubbed them the "Ruby Specs" because of their ruby lenses.)

Also, Kharas (the dwarf who basically made the Hammer of Honor) was ...still alive? We encountered him standing watch in the tomb's trophy chamber, apparently having been in some kind of trance. It was unusual that he was still alive, since while dwarves live longer than humans, they don't live that much longer. And then when we found the tomb chamber itself... we found Kharas's body, dead. We were all quite confused by this, but we the players were dumb and didn't try to Insight check alive-Kharas about it.

We retrieved the Hammer, rang the bell and caused the tomb to descend back to the ground, but as it descended, we saw that a lot more Theiwar thugs were flooding into the City of the Dead, but Hylar warriors were riding down to join us. But there was also a young Red Dragon flying down from the mountaintop, with a pack of Draconians as well.

That's where the session two weeks ago ended. We had a one-shot last week (as Camilla was going to be unavailable), and this week's session would pick up with this impending "boss fight."

We had a minute of in-game time to prepare for the fight, so folks were popping healing potions (if needed), or applying buffs to themselves. Cogburn took cover behind a column in front of the tomb, and used this deployable cover shield to give himself some more cover as well. We rolled initiative, and the Red Dragon went first... flying around to flank the party and unleashed its fire breath on four of us. I failed my DEX save, meaning I would take the full damage instead of half--

Cogburn took 63 points of damage. Cogburn has a max HP of 30. Cogburn died.

In D&D 5e, if the amount of extra damage you take after being reduced to 0 HP is more than your max HP, you instantly die. No falling unconscious, no death saves. D-E-D dead.

The rest of the table was shocked. I... wasn't. I had a feeling from the end of the previous session that I was probably going to die in this encounter. Granted, not that quickly, but I had a feeling anyway.

Bob the DM told me not to put my character sheet away yet, "We'll resolve your final moments on your turn." When my turn came up in initiative, he told me that Cog would have time for one final action before being consumed by the flames. I promptly used my one 4th-level slot to unleash a Lightning Bolt on the Dragon, it failed the DEX save, and took maximum damage for 54 points of lightning damage. Cogburn was reduced to a pile of ash and half-melted slag of artificer's gadgets.

It was nicely poetic and narratively appropriate that the rest of the party rolled extremely well, with multiple critical hits, after Cogburn's death. I joked at the table, "I took the bad luck with me!" and later, when the Dragon attempted to Fireball the Barbarian, Bob rolled terribly on the damage and only dealt 15 points of damage-- reduced to 7 thanks to the Barbarian being resistant to fire damage.

After combat was finished, there were some somber moments as the party mourned their fallen friend. They did try to see if what they thought was some kind of magical pool in the tomb might restore him, but it didn't. Justinius the Wizard collected some of the ashes in an empty vial, promising to take them to the moon for him. (I was touched by that, genuinely.)

Some levity at the table was restored when I half-joked that Cogburn was now hanging out with the Barbarian's Ancestral Guardian spirits (her mother and grandmother), and Bob thought that was so funny he declared it canon. Runa could now hear Cog snarking from beyond, and when folks put on the Ruby Specs, they could see Cog also (though they couldn't hear him), and Cog would also snark and argue with the spirit of a wizard that was bound to Justinius's staff.

After all of that, the party returned to Thorbardin with Kharas and the Hylar, who were themselves in mourning; Thane Hornfel's last son, Arman, had died in the battle. He was distraught upon hearing of it, and then furious after hearing of the Theiwar's treachery. He re-summoned the Council of Thanes, marched straight up to Raelgar, the Thane of the Theiwar, grabbed him by the throat, and skull-dragged him to the overlook. "Traitor! Treason! My last son!" He forced Raelgar to watch as the entire Theiwar clan was slaughtered by the Hylar, intending to execute him himself afterward. Justinius beat him to it, saying, "You may have the clan. But this one has a gnome-sized debt to pay." And killed Raelgar himself with an Inflict Wounds spell.

Yes, in case you mis-read that, there was some genocide going on.

Evrouin the Knight was most displeased. Catt the Kender was horrified.

The party was emotionally drained when they returned to their quarters for the night. Catt went running off, needing to be somewhere else. Evro went looking for her. This left Justinius and Runa alone, as they both mourned Cog's passing. Justinius admitting that while he bickered with Cogburn frequently, he had appreciated the gnome's intelligence and would now miss having that intellectual peer. Runa was distraught that another person she was nominally supposed to protect had died, because her Rage had overtaken her in the moment. Runa and Justinius ended up spending the night together, largely because neither wanted to be alone at that moment. It was surprisingly tender, and furthered the bond that had been slowly developing between the two.

Both felt somewhat guilty for the death for not being able to better protect him. Eric, Runa's player, admitted to me later he'd forgotten that Runa has an ability through her subclass that would allow her Ancestral Guardian spirits take some damage for an ally; it wouldn't have negated the full brunt of the blow, but it would have prevented instant death. I absolved him of it, and even he agreed that Runa-- who had a hatred for one of the dragons that wiped out her tribe-- wouldn't have been thinking clearly enough in the moment (her Rage) to try to protect Cog like that.

Camilla, Catt's player, needed to leave at that point, so the emotional scene that would happen between her and Evrouin will take place next week.

But the hits kept coming. Figuratively speaking. The next morning, Kharas came to the party and asked them to follow him, he had something to discuss and something to show them. Taking them to an isolated courtyard, he revealed that he was actually an Ancient Gold Dragon, named Evenstar. He asked for the Misfits to accompany him to meet with his people (the good-aligned Metallic Dragons) to corroborate his testimony that the evil-aligned Chromatic Dragons had broken oaths by returning to the mortal world, to spur the Metallics into action. Evenstar hadn't been able to take his true form during the fight against the Red Dragon because of oaths that Evenstar had sworn, and because the Chromatics had found the Metallics' eggs and were holding them hostage. To take his true form would have allowed the Chromatics to destroy the eggs.

The party agreed, and rode on Evenstar's back to Solinari, the white moon of Krynn, where the City of Dragons had been established on the far side of the moon more than a millennium before. On the way, the party asked if they could inter or scatter Cogburn's ashes somewhere on the moon, even if there weren't cemeteries or mausoleums or memorials per se there. Reorx the Forge-god didn't have a presence on Solinari like that. But the party decided to try to make a shrine to Reorx for Cogburn, and to have a little ceremony for him there. (Cog's spirit was most appreciative of the thought they were giving to this.)


At one point in the session, while the party was preparing to use Speak with Dead to interrogate the corpse of the dead Red Dragon, Bob got up to smoke a cigarette and asked me to join him, "We need to have a discussion." And that discussion was what to do next. He admitted the party would get the opportunity to use a True Resurrection spell to try to bring back Cogburn-- and was fairly certain the table would try it-- but Bob was going to use some dice-rolling to determine if the spell would succeed. He asked my thoughts on this, and while I initially was all for it, I had another thought about it, and decided it was better narratively if Cog did not return to life. Seeing the emotional effects that Cog's death had had already felt so dramatically important, and bringing him back might undo some of that.

So, Bob asked if I had any thoughts on a new character. At first, I suggested a Ranger, but he instead recommended a Cleric. I only hadn't thought of it because Clerics had not been on offer at Level 1, but once he suggested it, I immediately agreed. The party needed a stronger healer on side, that wasn't always in the front-line like Evrouin. We later talked on the phone over the weekend, as I'd settled on playing a Human Cleric of Mishakal (the goddess of healing), and Bob then pitched the character and his backstory to me. He opened with, "You are 1278 years old." The cleric (whom I eventually named Gavin) had been alive during the Third Dragon War, alongside the hero Huma Dragonbane. Indeed, Huma, his friend Magius, and Gavin had all grown up together. While Huma went off to become a knight and Magius a wizard, Gavin had joined a holy order of healers and essentially became a combat medic. It was during this time that Gavin met a healer's assistant named Gwyneth and the two grew quite close and fell in love. Then Huma returned from some of his adventures with a woman named Silvara, and Silvara and Gwyneth both revealed themselves to be Silver Dragons named Heart and Dream.

The war raged on, Gavin and Gwyneth (Dream) continued to aid in the conflict, and Gavin was there when Huma returned with the Dragonlances to turn the tide against the forces of Evil, and when Huma defeated Takhisis (the goddess of evil) and forced her and all Chromatic Dragons to be banished to the Abyss. In the aftermath, Paladine and the Gods of Good had the Metallic Dragons swear oaths of their own to depart the mortal world, and not wanting to be separated from Gwyneth, Gavin went with her to Solinari, as Mishakal granted him ageless immortality. (Gavin can't get sick or grow old, but he's still susceptible to injury and death by such.)

The discussion was very productive, got my brain fizzing, and I can't wait to see where things go at our next session.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Dragonlance--

So this week's session had us having to deal with (sigh) politics. Dwarven politics, no less. I channeled some of my inner Pratchett by remarking about how "you could stick two dwarves in a room and they'd come out with three different opinions," and the collective noun for dwarves was "an argument."

Basically, in order for us to get the dwarves of Thorbardin to accept the 800-some refugees from Pax Tharkis, it required a royal decree, but there hadn't been a King of Thorbardin in like 250 years. Selecting a new king required someone to forge a "kingsword," but you couldn't do that without the Hammer of Honor. The Hammer had been sealed away in the last king's tomb, and the tomb had been magically raised some 7000 feet up an air shaft in the middle of the mountain. Getting into it required we go into the City of the Dead, the necropolis in the deepest parts of the mountain, where the tomb had originally been located. Dwarves were forbidden from going into the City of the Dead outside of funeral processions, but as none of us were dwarves, this law technically didn't apply to us. But we still needed permission to go there, so we had to speak to the Council of Thanes.

This was where the politics applied. We had the Thane of the Hylar on side (we'd brought back word of his son's death, honor dictated he do this for us) and an allied thane alongside. There was the Thane of the Theiwar, who was a traditional rival of the Hylar, who would vote in opposition to the Hylar, and there was another thane who tended to vote in opposition of the majority due to sheer contrariness (later claimed to be "to keep balance" when we talked to him). We mostly had to make sure we could keep the other two thanes on side. One of them, the Thane of the Aghar, wasn't too much of an issue, she was pretty stupid and voted in the same way as whomever voted immediately before her (which would be the Hylar), but it was the Thane of the Klar who we really had to work on. The DM also noted that the Theiwar thane had a whiff of sulfur about him, which we associated with the Draconians (the "black cloaks"), but when we tried to bring this up to Hornfel (Hylar thane), he noted such smells were not unheard of in mining.

The Klar, as a clan, had delved a little deep, and had gotten hooked on a drug they derived from ground-up mushrooms, dubbed "spice." (This was not a Dune reference, but a reference to Critical Role's Campaign 1, where the bard Scanlan got bamboozled into spending a significant amount of money on spice, thinking it was a name for a drug.) The council adjourned so the Klar's rep could "consider his vote" (he was really just jonesing for a fix), and while Justinius and Cogburn (the two smarties) tried to see if they could get the "contrarian" thane on side, this left Runa and Catt to go talk to the Klar, who wouldn't talk to them about voting until he knew he could trust them, i.e., to take a hit of spice. Which, naturally, was snorted up the nose.

Our barbarian, and the kender. Taking fantasy cocaine.

Catt failed the CON save and basically became paralyzed for an hour, while Runa got a one-hour buff to her STR and DEX rolls, but an eight-hour debuff to her INT and WIS rolls. But it worked, and when the council reconvened, the Klar voted to allow our party to go into the City of the Dead.

We had one encounter with a pack of undead dwarves down there, but they turned out to be decent enough, and the spokes-zombie was willing to talk. He'd been cursed for sinning against Reorx the Forge-god and wouldn't get to rest until 77 people had heard his sad tale, and he was at 31. We agreed to listen to his tale, which was long and dull (three hours long), and moved along-- which is when we got jumped by a dozen dwarven assassins. We managed to survive, but found the assassins were wearing Theiwar crests.

Finally we had to solve a puzzle in the tomb of Prince Grallen (the last king's son), noting that his statue depicted him in full armor with a shield and axe, but no helmet, and every armored dwarf we'd met had always worn a helmet. We found a helmet in Grallen's uncle's tomb, put it on his statue-- which became animated and spoke to us. We explained we were trying to retrieve the Hammer of Honor, which was in his father's tomb, which was 7000 feet above our heads. Grallen knew what caused it, but the solution to lower it was inside the king's tomb, so Grallen just opened a portal to the tomb for us.

Next week: the Tomb of King Duncan

Also, gonna be doing my first Tier 3 (levels 11-16) adventure in Adventurers' League this week.

[Ceir]

Got to sit down and play a few runs on one of the Final Girl modules I picked up, Haunting of Creech Manor. I definitely see why people have ranked it low on the list of season 1 films - in my post a few up from here, I did say I knew it was pretty RNG swingy, but dang. I like it thematically, and yet - one run I found the Possessed Kid in short order, and two moves away from where I needed to go, boom, done; another, I never found her despite my best efforts, the Poltergeist murdered everyone else and finally splatted me; and in yet another I didn't even get a chance to look for the kid because the Poltergeist went from zero to a hundred in about a turn and a half and just blitzed me. Part of it I can chalk up to learning the map and mechanics, part of it is my luck with dice at any given time, but part of it definitely is the mechanics that are harder to mitigate.

Despite all that, I'm not too disappointed, it's just the less-fun of the season 1 sets I own. And I can definitely think of a couple mix and match combos that would possibly fare better. The "find the kid" gimmick is tied to the Poltergeist killer, not the Manor location; and there are definitely killers I want to try in the Manor map because it's so much denser and interconnected, and locations I want to try the Poltergeist on that would make the whole gimmick a little easier to plan and mitigate.

On a non-FG note, loot get! I was finally able to source a To Boldly Go expansion for Star Trek: Attack Wing, so now I have a pretty good spread of Federation ships for my Alliance: Dominion War solitaire game; something a little heftier than a single Akira and Excelsior from the Part 1 starter. Plus, regardless of inaccuracy, this is the set with the nice silver paintjobs on the models.

...apparently I'm really hitting the solitaire games lately.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Crypt Wizards? Oh, you mean Necromancers!

No lie, Jesse made that same joke at the table, though he mistakenly thought I actually did say "Crypt Wizards."

[Nunavut Pants]

...I made a joke about "Blood Wizards" and "Crip Wizards," ...

Crypt Wizards? Oh, you mean Necromancers!

[Jay 2K Winger]

Dragonlance--

We opened with a brief rewind to before resuming our journey, so that Evrouin could have his own Serious Discussion with Justinius about his recent shift in alignment. Being that Evrouin is now effectively the party's cleric, he had Views about it. He's also the only one in the party to be aware of Justinius's encounters with Fistandantilus, and had Views about that as well.

But after that whole thing, it turned out the wedding we inadvertently crashed was between Goldmoon and Riverwind, and the wedding party included a group known as the Heroes of the Lance. As in, the central characters of several of the actual Dragonlance books. Timeline wise from those, this took place after the demise of the villain Verminaard. But there were some major conversations that took place between our band of Misfits and the Heroes...

Runa Firebrand, our barbarian, discovered that her desert nomad tribe was almost wiped out by the Red Dragonarmy, and that her mother (the chieftain) had died along with most of the tribe's warriors trying to fight off a dragon. She broke down over it, going into a bit of a Rage, but the spirits of her mother and grandmother appeared to her and encouraged her to keep going, and that the tribe needed her. Runa's still not doing okay, but she's shifted her drive from "riding a dragon" to "killing all dragons."

Justinius, meanwhile, found himself drawn into a conversation with Raistlin Majere, another one of the Heroes and another Red Robe wizard. Raistlin revealed that he, too, had been approached by and accepted the bargain of Fistandantilus, and warned about the side effects of such bargains. He was interested in when Justinius mentioned the banner of the Blue Dragonarmy that we'd acquired way back in our pirate-hunting days, and used this to Scry on someone, only mentioning "I'm coming, sister." He taught Justinius the Speak with Dead spell as well as the basics of "blood magic," to literally let him regain spell slots by temporarily casting from his CON score. (And yes, I made a joke about "Blood Wizards" and "Crip Wizards," leading to the DM joking that Snoop's gonna show up in Blue Robes.)

Sir Evrouin Brightblade met his cousin, Sturm Brightblade, who was being called "Sir Sturm" by his companions, and ... well, they had a private conversation where Sturm admitted to Evro that he never got knighted. Sturm had been evacuated from Castle Brightblade 30 years previously, and raised in the small city of Solace in the interim, before traveling with the others. He'd gone to the ruins of his family castle to reclaim his father's armor and heirloom sword (the namesake Brightblade), defeating a green knight to earn them, but then when he tried to apply to the Knighthood in Sancrist, he was blocked from doing so by Lord Derek Crownguard. But when Sturm rejoined his friends, they saw him wearing the armor and assumed he'd been knighted, and he hadn't corrected them. Evro, as the ranking knight present, had to pass judgment on this, and his judgment was basically, "Your heart's in the right place, but stop wearing that armor and under no circumstances call yourself 'Sir' or a knight until you've earned it." Sturm did so immediately, and they parted as friends and kin.

It came out during that conversation that Sturm had been traveling with Raistlin, his brother Caramon Majere, and their half-sister, Kitiara. As soon as I heard that name, my brain went ping, because I remembered that name from the letters we'd recovered from the pirate vessel we'd captured early in the campaign. Kitiara uth Matar is a high-ranking member of the Blue Dragonarmy.

We eventually moved on through the secret ways to find the gates to Thorbardin, the mountain dwarf capital. We'd been primed with the right verbiage to speak when we got them to open the gates, and were met by armed, boar-mounted guards, led by Arman Kharas, elder son of the thane we needed to see, and brother to the dwarf whose death we were bringing news about. We brought that news to the Thane of the Hylar, Hornfel, and then asked if he could perhaps give sanctuary to the refugees that were at Pax Tharkis. Hornfel was sympathetic, but said it would require the council of thanes to agree, and they hadn't been able to agree to even elect a new Highking in over a century.

Because, it turns out, choosing a new Highking of Thorbardin requires the candidate to forge themselves a "kingsword," which can only be done with a specific hammer, the Hammer of Honor, which had been entombed in the last king's crypt, which was currently magically suspended at the top of the mountain, at the top of a 7000-foot shaft. So now we have to work out how to get up there, get inside, and then get back out to return the hammer to the thanes.

[Ceir]

Made it to the FLGS board game night for a bit this week. Sat in on a game of Takenoko, I remain good at neither panda- nor garden-keeping.

They also got in my order of some more Final Girl stuff, and I splurged a bit. Got my order of Killer From Tomorrow (Terminator) and The Falconwood Files (Stranger Things) from season 3, both of them look gimmicky in interesting ways. Also picked up the season 1 Haunting of Creech Manor, which is their version of Poltergeist - as a killer, the poltergeist is definitely the most RNG-dependent because instead of defeating it directly you win by finding the obligatory Possessed Little Kid in the randomized inventory and GTFO'ing. Very doable, just very swingy; I think the writers learned from it because it's a thing the later seasons have moved away from. Quite happy to pick up the Manor as a module location though, it's a dense and interconnected map that will make several different killers play in interesting ways. The other things I grabbed are all three of the 'vignettes' mini-expansions, which are based around hordes/minions or weird gimmicks without a full-bore killer or map of their own, just add them to a location. They're all titled 'Terror From...' something; Above is The Birds, The Grave is any various zombies, and Destiny is Final Destination.

Fun stuff, looking forward to throwing some dice at things when I have the time.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Dragonlance--

Mike was absent, but this week's session covered our rescue of his character Evro. This was also our first Friday session with our new schedule to accommodate Camilla's new work schedule, now playing at Eric's house. Which means we can now have music playing in the background.

So the rod that Catt found and zapped Evro with was a Rod of Banishment, and had accidentally sent Evro to the lower plane of Pandemonium. Par-Salian, the Master of the Conclave, rather quickly cast Time Stop to catch us up to speed on what had happened and what we could do. He could send us there to rescue Evro, and give Justinius a medallion that would let him cast Plane Shift to get everyone back home-- but warned that mortals could only last about 3 days in Pandemonium before it would consume them. (Mechanically, every day we spent there would add levels of exhaustion-- but they would rack up more quickly than just one per day. And at six levels of exhaustion, you drop dead.) So we were encouraged to not dawdle.

Our trip through Pandemonium was basically a string of combat encounters, getting attacked first by dretches (lesser demons), shadow demons (tougher), and then a barlgura (a powerful ape-like demon), before we had to take a short rest to recoup some HP. The shadow demons in particular afflicted their victims with visions of their worst fear (Runa heard the roaring flames and screams again; Cogburn was plagued with the idea that he might not complete his Life Quest to go to the moon-- which I flavored as him having an existential crisis about a key fact about Pandemonium: "There's no moon-- there's no moon!"), but the barlgura was finished off when Justinius walked up to it and cast Inflict Wounds, causing the demon to just sort of shrivel up and die. Jesse noted that that spell was one that had been on his list of spells for a while, but this was the first time he'd actually cast it.

During the short rest, there came at least the first part of the Serious Discussion the party needed to have with Justinius, regarding what they'd seen him do during his Test of High Sorcery. Everyone's perspective was largely along the lines of, "Bro, what the fuck?" since he'd generally been more the abjuration wizard rather than offensive, and to see him suddenly stride into Demos's lair and kill him with a word was a rather shocking change. A defensive Justinius argued that since he'd joined the party, he'd primarily been working to keep them safe and protected with his defense magics, but they kept having problems going down, and then the knights they'd met in Daltigoth had died, and he'd realized the best way to keep them protected was by dealing with threats as quickly as possible. Cogburn was still troubled by it, but did say to him, "You've got one of the most brilliant minds I've ever seen, and to see you turning that mind to new and efficient ways of killing things is more than a little disturbing." By and large, our stance was it's going to take time to adjust to the new normal.

The final encounter was facing off against a greater demon called a Glabrezu, which had a comatose Evro suspended above a cauldron and was having him slowly lowered toward it. Fighting the glabrezu was difficult-- like most demons, it was resistant to fire and lightning damage (which comprised most of my offensive capabilities)-- but we managed to bring it down and rescue Evro, who was able to use his new divinely-granted magic to heal Runa (who'd been downed in the fight) before we plane shifted back to the Conclave Tower.

After a night's rest in the tower, we were transported back to the secret way leading to Pax Tharkis (the next stage of our journey to find the lost dwarf city of Thorbardin), and when we emerged out of it, we found ourselves apparently stepping out into the middle of a wedding party. We're literally wedding crashers.