RPGs, board games… anything I do for fun, with other people, with clothes on.

22nd of Eleint (still), 1372
North of Adzo, ruins of Zhougal Keep
Attending: All

So, like I said - CLIFFHANGER! (In case you’re reading this slightly later than immediately-after-the-last-recap, you should probably read this first.) “We are the last, lost,” chants the misty form in the center. “We will welcome you in the end.”

“Roll initiative, homes,” was the best thing we could come up with on only seven days notice. Stupid deadlines! Unfortunately, the early goings made it look like we should have been less ast-fay with the initiative-ay. You see, a party bearing no magical weapons is likely to have difficulty hitting the incorporeal guy who’s tossing out CON damage like he’s a Mardi Gras float captain and we’re a nude… oh hell, you get the idea, we were clearly going to get our asses handed to us. The company had minimal damage sources at its disposal: Lu Tse could generate fire on his hands thanks to his newly-discovered abilities, but that only worked once without disengaging to recover; Grapthar had a couple expenditures of his positive energy ability left, which were mild but useful; oh, and Seydlitz MacGuffin turned out to have magic powers! With a shout of some incomprehensible tongue, fire shot from his hands and landed on the shadow-y dude. Unfortunately, it was only somewhat effective, and we were all soon left with no useful resources and an angry shado- oh fine, Rahil eventually figured out he was a wraith.

Another day, another door, another death?

Fortunately, Anniel gave up on her bow and the mace she’d scrounged up and went rummaging through the rest of the room. “Surely Fate, that bald, 6′3″ god of chance and destiny, wouldn’t just put us in here to die” she thought. Next to an overturned giant chair (or throne, perhaps?) she comes across an old backpack and a large battleaxe made entirely of metal. It is etched with the writings of a tongue she does not know, and when she hefted it she heard a gruff voice grunt approvingly, although there’s no one else around. “Nobody bothers to write on a crappy weapon,” she thought before wheeling about and charging the wraith. One mighty swing (and one max-damage roll) later, the wraith is rent and destroyed, leaving a scorched mark on the paving stones. Relief abounds. The axe, being of dwarven make, didn’t actually hold any interest to Anniel, who soon passed it over to Grapthar; when he grasped it, he heard the same gruff laughter. “That’s a female!” he exclaimed. Examining the weapon, he found a single comprehensible word, likely the name of the blade - Jorthundaul.
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22nd of Eleint, 1372
North of Adzo, in the shadow-y keep
Attending: All

The Keep

As described last week, the company decides that restocking the spell-casters is critically important to surviving this accidental expedition, and so barricades are erected on both entrances to the room using the cauldrons that were already here; nothing spooky about them, nossir! Setting a rough watch rotation, everyone does the best they can to rest in this most disquieting of locations. Shockingly, we have nightmares. Actually shockingly, the nightmares seem to be related to one another. Much to the chagrin of the DM (I’m betting), we don’t actually dig all the way to the bottom of this particular strangeness, so eager are we to get out of the keep before (we fear) it dissolves into nothing, taking us with it.

[You gotta hand it to us, we've put ourselves on a clock that may not even exist. We're the easiest party to entertain ever.]

We ponder which direction to go, and quickly decide that we want elevation to get a better view of our surroundings - thus, we want to head around to the tower at one end of the keep. We listen to the appropriate door, through which Grapthar had heard scraping noises hours ago, but nothing now stirred. “Let’s go then,” said Lu Tse, and the door was opened. Stepping in with a torch, a series of combat practice dummies are revealed, along with several dead bodies on the floor. “I’ve seen this movie before,” thinks every single member of the company as the bodies rise up with a series of rattles and hisses.
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(Note: this session was a huuuuuuuuuuuge infodump. It was fun, and informative, but it doesn’t make for a snappy read so I’m going to be brief.)

The previous session ended with the party beginning its descent to level 12, the bottom of Cyrran Shelter #3. There was, I forgot to add, a repeat encounter with some shadows. They did not pose a serious threat but during the fight we learned that Guard, who had been happily immune to any and all threats on his home level (that’s level 6, yo) was susceptible to stat damage just like the rest of us anywhere else. Good to know. We proceed the rest of the way without incident and come to level 12, where we face a classic fork in the path. Left or right? One way houses the Red Queen, Guard tells us, and the other is home to the Living Document… whatever the hell that means. We choose left.

Success! We enter a large room with a dias on the far end. On the dias stands a humanoid figure composed completely of gently swirling paper. Sadly, the Living Document’s predisposition is to treat visitors as hostile, and so it unleashes an enchantment that leaves several people befuddled, listless, and incoherent… okay, more than usual. The rest of the group manages to maintain its composure and talk to the thing, rather than pay it back in kind. They keep a fight from breaking out, but the Living Document demands that we show our marks. Our what now? A brief frisking of ourselves later, it turns out that all of us except the Kalashtari have small tattoo-looking marks somewhere on our bodies. These being displayed to the Living Document, it explains that it is prepared to answer any three questions that any markbearer asks it. As an added bonus, unlike the stereotypically adversarial stance of, say, a djinni in granting wishes, the Document is happy to explain when a question is pointless and/or unanswerable without it costing a question. So why even have limitations? “Because that’s the way it is.” Dammit.

Funnily enough, while three questions doesn’t sound like much, we actually know soooooo little about our situation that we don’t even use all of our questions in one sitting. Nevertheless, the picture does get clearer. In no particular order: [click to continue...]

22nd of Eleint (Sep), 1372
North of Adzo
Attending: all -Anniel (character played by committee)

When we left off, the scraggly outcropping of rocks that the Nar(f) were camping in had exploded in a torrent of dirt and rock that resulted in a surprisingly-complete Keep of Evil(tm)(c) surrounding the company and the Nar(f). We pick up this week with a fuller description of what ails us – we’re all in a courtyard that has several doors leading away from it, as well as a giganto double door that, ostensibly, leads to our freedom. In the center of the courtyard is a gigantic statue of a demon (a glabrezu to be precise, although I don’t think that anybody’s character knows that) and scattered about the courtyard are about a half-dozen skeletons. This being a fantasy game and not just, you know, life, the skeletons are as upright and mobile as the rest of us.

A fight breaks out! The company faces both barbarians and skeletons, but they aren’t allied and many of them are fighting each other. Sephora rushes forward and stands protectively over Seydlitz MacGuffin (such an ironic last name!). The skeletons are heard to hiss things like “forgotten” and “lost” and “forlorn” and “loss” and “sorrow.” At first the fight goes almost too easy, as many skeletons are dropped by a burst of positive energy from Rahil while many of the party’s attacks focus on the Nar(f) – Lu Tse figures that only they have a motivation to get the boy in particular, so they have to be dispatched first. Then the other shoe drops and more skeletons are spewed up out of the ground. From there it’s a pitched battle of skeletal attrition as skeletons drop and occasionally are reinforced – by themselves, it turns out later, or at least the same undead souls powering each collection of bones that rise up. No individual skeleton is particularly threatening to the members of the company, but they just. Keep. Coming.
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I don’t remember if I actually said this before or not, but I’ve gone from not playing any D&D to being a player (non-DM, even) in two different games! <- exclamation point indicates excitement… On Saturdays, my old group has been ably taken over by another player, who has set us down in the Eberron campaign setting; as far as I can tell, one other person has minimal knowledge of the setting and the rest of us are n00bs. In order for our real-life ignorance to flow smoothly within the game, he has integrated a combination of memory loss and stanger-in-a-strange-land displacement right into the story. To wit:

We have a cold opening (no warm-up or background) of our characters waking up to find themselves drenched in goo, standing in the midst of giant, broken glass(ish) tubes. Each of us is dazed and disoriented, but we can spend little time asking questions because there’s a more immediate problem. In the center of the room, several goblins are dead or dying at the hands of a pack of shadow-y undead. Not just shadow-Y, shadow-shadows! Right into initiative we go, where we discover that whatever we may not remember, our inherent skills and abilities are still right at our fingertips. Wallace Worthington V, a sneaky little halfling, plays dead and riffles through the pockets of the goblins, but the shadows don’t buy it and he gets whapped for ability damage. Meanwhile, Mekashtari (a human-ish woman who later tells us she is from Kalashtar) channels divine energy to force the shadows to flee, Corn (my human swordsage/warblade who is sure that that isn’t his actual name) tries to stab them without much luck, and Lucius Deveraux Minster (”you can call me Buck¹“) draws his pistols and shoots one dead. Wait, what?
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The village

21^st of Eleint (Sep), 1372 - The Autumnal Equinox
Present this week: Anniel, Grabthar, Lu Tse, Rayhil, Sephora (that’s everybody)

The curtain rises on the village of Adzo, a bare blip on the map hard on a lake in the lands of Rasheman. There’s a harvest festival going on, the same as in villages all across the Realms at this time of year. Accounting for our heroes: Anniel, an elven ranger, is going about her mundane business, trading with the four sisters (as they’re known in Adzo) who trade in herbs and poultices. Lu-Tse, a wisened old human who looks to be from Shou and has never spoken a word to confirm nor deny it,  is seemingly comatose, as always, on his stump in front of the village common house. Grabthar, a dwarven bard with the aspiration (if not the talent) to be an actor, has returned to Adzo to provide entertainment for the festivities. Jayhil is a woman of the village (and priestess of Selune) and is simply going about her routine; currently she is mending fishing nets. Sephora has come from out of the village to deliver a message to the Fyrra, Tadmek Adzolev.

Many of the party hears thunder, despite the clear morning that has blessed this feast day. Soon they realize it’s the sound of many hooves, approaching from the North. Not long after that, a shriek is heard from the same direction, then a discordant horn is blown. Pushing through the treeline is a band of nomadic barbarian raiders, all screaming “Naaaaar!” Apparently, they’re the Nar. Or from Nar. Or both. Naaaaar!

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Pathfinder beta rules -free!

Sadly, the Wednesday game didn’t happen this week, because yours truly is still carrying PLAAAAAAAGUE!!! and nobody else wants to catch it. Shocker. Still, that lets me play a little catch-up and describe my character and what I know about the campaign.

First of all, we’re using the Pathfinder beta rules. This is brand new to me, so it’s taking a little getting used to. Not that it’s that different from D&D 3.5, but that’s the problem - just when I assume I know something, I find out it’s changed. Take skill points - I blithely multiplied my starting skill points by four and started looking through the skill list. “Uh, no” I’m told. Whoopsie. Still, the classes seem to be better balanced than in days of old. Ah, 2000, when we were young and dumb. =p

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m almost completely unknowledgeable about Forgotten Realms, so my character concept needs to accomodate my own stupidity. I know, we role-play characters who can do things that we can’t all the time, but there’s a certain fundamental understanding of my character’s abilities that I expect of myself. So, my options as I see it are: young, dumb, or brain-damaged. I’ve pretty much given up playing young characters, although playing a VERY young character (say, 10; no, not for laughs) is still on my docket of unused PCs. Dumb doesn’t appeal to me, at least not at the level required not to know fundamental geography. So, brain-damaged; in this case, amnesia.

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The flip side from my Tuesday post (the shutting down of my DMing after 7 years) is that I’m suddenly geting to play D&D, as a player! Not just in my good old Saturday group, either - my newer group of friends that get together on Wednesday are starting a game this week. And I’m not running it. W00t! (You long-time DMs out there know exactly why I feel this way…) So, with a fresh start in mine, I’ll be posting about these new games with the giddyness of the new kid in school, ignoring the overwhelmingly negative connotations of that analogy.

I really crack myself up sometimes…

Tonight is the first session with my new-ish group. There are three male-female couples in it, which I realy like; it’s been a long-time since I’ve played in an all-boys game, but if I remember correctly I really prefer the energy of a mixed group. One couple we’ve known for years and years, and they live right next to us (literally, like 100 yards), and the men share a similar sense of humor and the women are very alike… so of course, we’ve rarely made the effort to connect with one another. Sad, really, but hey! We’re hanging out now! The other couple are the people I met at Half Price books in another post awhile back; the man is DMing this go-’round. Interestingly, L and I have played with the 1st couple before, and I can’t say that it went well. We liked each other fine, but I’d say our styles of gaming were very different, so it’ll be interesting to see how we mesh this time around. I suspect there’s a strong will in place to make this work, which should help.

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So, a few weeks ago, I suspended my D&D campaign and quasi-resigned the DM’s chair. “Quasi”, because it may be a temporary move. I know campaigns come and go all the time. But this is more than a little bit traumatic for me. My circle of friends in Seattle for practically my entire time here - almost 8 years now - is composed almost entirely of the people who have played in my game. There have been hiatuses before, and the occasional guest DM when I was feeling particularly burned out, but this is different. The new DM, a *GREAT* DM in times past, has an open-ended mandate to run for as long as he wants. If and when I pick it up again, I don’t know that I’ll pick up the Ptolus campaign where I left off. In other words, I’m done.

We started at the Wizards of the Coast offices, where I posted a want ad in Local-U.S. (an Outlook discussion group for general postings that went to everyone who subscribed to it (which was practically everyone in the company)), looking for folks interested in trying the then-new Wheel of Time d20 game. When we stopped meeting in the WotC conference rooms (gaming in conference rooms after hours was pretty common) and moved to living rooms, a couple more joined. From there, it’s been an ebb and flow as boy/girl-friends came and went and the occasional drop-out was replaced by “a guy I know.” We switched to a D&D game that went for about 5 of those years, and recently switched to another - the Ptolus campaign I’d started posting about.

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