Alright, after I finished transferring those entries over one-at-a-time, I’ve gotten to the point where it’s time to get into new material. Be it laziness or preoccupation, I hadn’t actually written anything for the next three sessions. Going back and writing three full-length articles, one for each entry, is simply not going to happen because I don’t have all the dates written down and Skype Call Recorder didn’t record the second game session.
Rather than do that, then, I’m going to write one article talking about all three of the sessions and the things that happened between them. It’s not as fresh in my mind as the events that happened in the practice dungeon were when I wrote them, but here we go:
First of all, Miranda’s friend David joined us on the first gaming session of the campaign. Miranda had told him about the game right before the second gaming session of the practice dungeon, but he couldn’t join us for the third gaming session because of his work schedule. He chose to play an eladrin wizard named Palias. Dave, I think, would have made for a better gamer if he was familiar with anyone in the group. On the first gaming session, Miranda couldn’t make it due to work, so Dave was stuck talking to five other people whose names he didn’t know, and really knew nothing about. Understandably, he was withdrawn for the most part, and he talked very quietly.
So. We had a new member that wasn’t talking much, and we were missing one of the original five members. I told Miranda that I’d think of an in-story reason for her to join the party, but neither of us were really pleased with the excuse I came up with. I’ll get to that later.
Before I continue, it’s probably best for me to provide a dramatis personae for the late-comers to the blog and anyone who has the same kind of trouble I do with names:
Miranda – A razorclaw shifter ranger named Acacia.
Anto – A half-elf cleric of Moradin named Solerisa.
Fio – A human druid (elementalist) named Ameranthia.
Gaby – A half-elf paladin of Pelor named Viera.
Sam – A half-orc paladin of Pelor named Caleb
Dave – An eladrin wizard named Palias.
Dara – A razorclaw shifter avenger of Melora named Bion.
Dan – GOD!
Though most of the members of the group had played together already, the practice dungeon, as I told them before, was non-canonical, so even though Acacia, Solerisa, Ameranthia, Viera, and Caleb had fought together before, this was their first in-story meeting, and with the exception of Solerisa and Viera, who were sisters in-game, they knew each other about as well as Palias did.
The game started off with Viera, Ameranthia, Solerisa, and Palias sleeping on a boat, sailing for the town of Portstown, for their individual reasons. Viera and Solerisa (sisters both in-game and out of game) were heading there in search of a way to lift a curse afflicting Viera, Ameranthia was going in order to find the remnants of the dragonborn clan that adopted her and was scattered during a dragon raid, and Palias was searching for a mage of much-renown to study under. Caleb, meanwhile, was not on the boat: he had been asked by the mayor of the province’s capital, Locksley Farpoint (he held a dual role as Count of the province, Locksley), to spend the night in some ruins south of the city exorcising ghosts reputed to be haunting the ruins.
The party on the boat awoke to the loud sound of wood shattering, and after feeling the boat lurching underneath them, the hull snapped open, and they were flung into the water. Most of them managed to avoid getting hit in the head by jetsam and taking damage, but two – I think it was Solerisa and Palias – took damage and were dazed. They washed up on shore to find a confused Caleb, who, being right next to the shore, had seen the ship breaking up from afar. On the beach, they made their introductions and began to contemplate what happened. The two who had been hit by the debris succeeded in their saving throws to shake off the daze during this time.
The conversation eventually turned to why Caleb had been on the shore when the ship crashed (everyone but Caleb drawing the conclusion that the Count had tricked Caleb into the ruins either to keep him away from the city and out of trouble for the night, or in the hopes that something would make a nice soufflé out of him.), why the ship had crashed (strong, storm-force winds likely pushed it off course and into the shallows, where it ran aground and was ripped apart), and for some reason not wondering if something worse would happen.
I didn’t say anything for a while, and when I did, I was either ignored or not heard, because the players didn’t acknowledge anything I said. At one point, I was tempted to start humming “Never Smile at a Crocodile,” because as they were talking, I was looking at my watch and counting down. Right in the middle of their conversation, I hit them with a big-lipped alligator moment
It was also a big-toothed alligator moment..
This whole time, the party was standing in or right next to the water, oblivious to their surroundings, when a crocodile jumped out of the waves, completely surprising them, and lunged at Solerisa. It missed its initial bite attack, a lot of screaming ensued, and Dave rolled highest on the initiative roll. Palias stepped back out of range and began to fire magic missiles at it. Hearing that Caleb was a paladin of Pelor, Viera had gone to ambush him with a truckload of questions due to also being a paladin of Pelor. When the crocodile attacked, then, the two of them were right next to each other, and since they rolled numbers that were close to each other, they both ran up to the side of the crocodile and began to assault it with axe and sword. Solerisa either rolled higher or lower than both of them, but she didn’t roll last. Her first action was to get out of range of the crocodile’s shiny teeth and hit it with a ranged attack. Ameranthia, not wanting to hit her allies with an area-of-effect attack like she was wont to do in the practice dungeon, decided to Storm Spike the croc.
It was a noble sentiment.
Flame Seed is an area of effect attack filling a 3x3 area with fire. She refrained from using it again because she accidentally hit one or two allies with it in the practice dungeon, and she walked away with some valuable experience regarding friendly fire. Storm Spike is just a ranged attack that deals lightning damage. Normally, Storm Spike only hits one target, but there were extraordinary factors in play here. See, Storm Spike does lightning damage. The crocodile had just jumped out of the surf, and as a result, the whole area was drenched in salt water, an excellent conductor of electricity. Viera and Caleb were in close slicing and dicing the crocodile as best they could, so when she hit it with a Storm Spike, not only did I have her roll damage for the crocodile, I also rolled damage for Caleb and Viera. They all also took extra damage for being wet.
Lessons learned: water conducts electricity, and the DM is sadistic.
That little jolt was sufficient to attract its attention, and the crocodile switched its attention to Ameranthia. It caught her in its jaws, and on her turn, she managed to escape, but it gave her a kiss to remember it by and left her in considerably worse shape than it found her in. After a few rounds, the party finally managed to inflict enough damage to the crocodile to hack off one of its legs and then stab it to death. I’m sad that nobody thought of using the leg as an improvised weapon; wouldn’t have done any extra damage, but Fio is planning on drawing the adventure as a comic, and it would have made for a funny image.
EDIT: She informs me that I've given her an evil idea.
The party spent the next hour discussing how they would cut up and divide the remains of the crocodile, what they would do with their pieces, and how they would store the body parts they all took away. Everyone was covered in blood by this point, either from the crocodile thrashing around and getting blood all over the place from its stump or from everyone who wasn’t too squeamish pulling out one of those copious numbers of daggers they accumulated in the practice dungeon and skinning it, carving up some of its meat for dinner, plucking out its teeth as trophies, or whatever insidious things they did to the remains. By the end of it, Viera, the animal-lover, was the most bloody. Oh how things would not go her way…
I made an oath to keep this game PG-13, but we have this tendency to slip into Quentin Taurentino territory with the gore.
The party decided against bathing in the water, both because the water was bloody from the crocodile dying in it and they didn’t know if there was going to be another crocodile jumping out at them while they were unarmed. Instead, they went a little farther inland, into the middle of the supposedly-haunted ruins, to make camp. They crossed a rope bridge, only to discover that the commotion of the fight and the shipwreck had awakened some of the local fauna. An Ochre Ooze (slime creature) had been trying to get up some fallen rocks at something just out of sight, but once it detected the party, it instead came at them. After fighting it for a while and “bloodying” (read: reduced to half HP) it, the Ochre Ooze split into two pieces and attacked different opponents. At the same moment, sensing the tide had turned, three Fire Beetles, man-sized insects that could shoot fire, emerged at the top of the rubble the Ooze had been barking up, and opened fire both on the party and the Ooze.
Now. Viera was positioned in a not-so envious position, in the middle of the melee, with the Ocre Ooze halves behind her and the insects in front of her. As the party behind her killed the oozes, they exploded violently, sending orange marmalade-tasting jelly flying in Viera’s direction, coating all of her back-side in a gelatinous mess. The beetles, which propelled the fire by some kind of sphincter explosion, also detonated upon death, either by her Terror Bastard Sword or the other party members’ ballistic weapons. They pretty much all exploded in her face, coating her in bug guts.
It was decided to end the session there for the night. They went a couple dozen feet to the north, out of the ruins and within spitting distance of a small shrine, and made camp for the night, with Viera crying her eyes out due to being covered in the bodily fluids of animals.
Now, immediately following the gaming session, I signed on to Yahoo! Instant Messenger. I’m an active member of the Wotch forum (they may have changed it to the 910CMX forums, but to me, it will always be the Wotch forum), and there’s just about always a chat active for Wotchers. Not long after I signed on, someone (probably Trip) invited me to it. Not too long afterwards, we got to talking about Dungeons and Dragons, and I mentioned that I had just finished DMing a gaming session. I also put up the links to the journal entries about D&D that had been completed at the time, and it got kicks out of some of them. One of them dubbed Gaby’s action at the end of the second gaming section a “Critical Moon.”
This all attracted the attention of one Daracaex (pronounced dare-uh-cay-ex by him, pronounced dare-uh-cay by me, and pronounced dare-uh-cakes by pretty much everyone else), who had been out of a game for a while and was currently looking for one. After I told him that Sam (known as Elijah Sight on the Wotch forums) and my Sith apprentice Miranda (not a Wotcher, but informally known to some of the Wotchers as Fluffles due to a few pictures I drew of her avatar) were participants, and that it was being played over Skype, he asked if he could join. I said yes – hey, the more the merrier.
So, some time passed before we started our next gaming session, and in that time, he made up his character. Bion, a razorclaw shifter, was an Avenger of Melora, and carried a fullblade. I’m not too sure of how he looked: it never really came up beyond a beastly humanoid with “cloth” armor and a giant sword.
So, the next gaming session, Miranda was able to make it. Everyone else was also there, so we had 7 player characters, which we would come to realize later would cause some problems, but at the time actually proved beneficial, because it gave me the opportunity to rework some things story-wise. Originally, to explain how Acacia joined the party, I was going to end the gaming session by having the party sleeping in the inn, and then have them roll a perception check. If they failed, then they wouldn’t wake up, and in the morning, they would find Acacia waiting for them in the tavern downstairs from the inn, and she would ask to join them in their travels, wherever they may be going. If they passed the perception check, they would wake up to find Acacia going through their belongings in the middle of the night and stealing things. A scene would have ensued where they interrogated her and found out that the Count asked her to “inspect” the party to find out some miscellaneous information on their activities, because he had suspicions that they might have some ulterior motives for being there. After all, they brought Caleb back, and the ship they were on was missing. She would then somehow convince them to let her join their party, and on to the next adventure they would go.
There were a few problems with this scenario. First of all, Miranda didn’t like it. Acacia would not go around stealing other people’s belongings in the middle of the night, and Miranda didn’t think she would do it just because the Count asked her to. Second, the party didn’t go to sleep in the inn. I had thought that the party would go on to the city and that’s what I based the scenario on, but I underestimated how long the two fights would go on for. We ended the gaming session before they could reach the city. Instead, they camped just outside of the ruins, a couple hundred feet south of the city walls. This meant that the Count didn’t know where they were sleeping and couldn’t send Acacia to “inspect” their belongings and “confiscate” some of them. Third, it cast the Count in an unsavory light. I want his alignment to be mysterious for the time being, and sending a thief in the night to look through and steal some of their belongings automatically makes him unaligned at best.
So, the premature ending to the gaming session and the addition of a new character gave me a problem to address and a way to deal with it. Instead of the previous idea, the ship that was carrying Palias, Ameranthia, Viera and Solerisa didn’t show up in Portstown, and none of the goods arrived via the main road to Locksley Farpoint by 6:00 AM. He began to grow concerned, and the Count sent out anyone willing to search the coastline for signs or news of the ship. Bion and Acacia were two of the people requisitioned for the job, and they were sent south of the city, the same way the Count had sent Caleb the previous day, incidentally. This meant that, at 8:00 AM, Bion and Acacia arrived at the entrance of the ruins and stumbled upon the party’s campsite.
Ameranthia was on watch duty at the time, so she was the only one awake when they arrived. Having fought for their lives a couple times the previous night, she was naturally wary and was ready for a fight. The hostilities didn’t go far, though, and after some hails and greetings and somesuches, Ameranthia woke the party up and the two shifters learned that everyone except Caleb had been on the boat when it sank. Viera, as a character quirk, has a deep love of animals, and seeing the fluffies (she called them furries, but... um... no), had to be forcibly restrained by Solerisa to keep from tackle-glomping them. Acacia and Bion told the party that the Count had asked them (and others) to look for signs of the ship, the others confirmed that the ship would definitely not be arriving in port anytime soon (that is to say, unless the forces of Chaos were to reanimate the bodies of drowned sailors and have them man the ships at the end of the world and tilt the balance of Law and Disorder in favor of Disorder. Anyone who gets the reference gets a cookie.), and they decided to take the others back to the city to give word of the accident to the Count.
Everyone headed for the city together, and after arriving at the south gate, they talked to the gatekeeper, a dragonborn soldier in plate armor, through an eye-hole in the gate. When the gatekeeper realized that Caleb was in the party, he closed the eye-hole in the gate, and everyone with a sufficiently-high perception check heard him yell something along the lines of, “Aton-bay own-day the atches-hay, boys! akKrug-May is ack-bay!” None of the party members got it, but after they contemplated what the heck he said (partly because I was trying to effect the accent of an Australian pirate) for ten minutes, I told them that it was imperfect Pig Latin for “Baton down the hatches, boys! Mak Krug (Caleb’s last name) is back!” A few moments of commotion on the other side of the gate later, and the gatekeeper returned, sorry about the wait. They talked some more, and the party told him that the ship had sunk and that there were survivors of the incident in the group. He then opened the gate and let them in.
First off, Ameranthia inquired if the gatekeeper was a part of her old tribe. As per of her backstory, she’s trying to seek out the remnants of the tribe that-adopted her, and she asks that of pretty much all the dragonborns she comes across. The answer came back no. This might have been obvious in retrospect, because people tend to have the accents of the people who raise them, and Ameranthia did not grow up talking like an Australian pirate, but I digress. After that, the gatekeeper told them to either wait there or go in the tavern, The Prancing Chocobo, and get something to eat while he fetched Count Smackal.
One of the good things about this blog is that it gives me as much space as I need to talk about things like how come I named someone “Count Smackal” and why he has a tavern/inn called The Prancing Chocobo in his city. Everyone who’s interested, read on. Anyone who would roll your eyes, skip the next few paragraphs.
Caleb can't swim. Back when I was coming up with a reason for Caleb to not be on the boat when it sank and deposited the party on the beach, I was talking to Sam about if Caleb would go along with what the Count told him about spending the night in the ruins and exorcising them in the name of Pelor. When informed that the ruler of the region was a count, he asked if his name was Count Dracula. I didn’t have a name for him at the time, but I told him no; he’s decidedly less vampiric than that. Moments later, he asked, “Count Smackula?” It was too good not to use, so I told him that I would have to find some way to include it in the campaign. An adjustment or two later in Microsoft Word, and it became Count Smackal.
The Prancing Chocobo, the Prancing Chocobo, the Prancing Chocobo. This should be obvious. If not, go read or watch The Lord of the Rings and then play any Final Fantasy game for more than two minutes. If you don’t want to, or you did and still don’t get it, here’s the drift: in The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf told Frodo to meet him at a specific date at an inn in the nearby town of Bree. The inn was called The Prancing Pony, and they would proceed from there together to Rivendell to talk about how they would deal with the One Ring of Power. Gandalf was forcibly detained by Saruman, and Strider showed up in his stead to take the hobbits instead. Since then, The Prancing Pony has been the inspiration for how parties get together in pretty much every fantasy RPG ever made. When I was thinking about how to start the campaign, right off the bat, the first option I nixed was, “You all meet at the inn.” I intentionally held off on it until the second gaming session (fifth, when you think of it) and started out with the ship breaking apart under most of the party, because I’ve never seen it done before, and it would provide a better excuse for the party to stick together in the beginning.
Still, there had to be an inn scene somewhere, and I had half the name already in mind. I didn’t want to use the name The Prancing Pony verbatim, but it had to be The Prancing something. Thus we come to the topic of chocobos. In the Final Fantasy games, you’ll occasionally come across a horse, but they’re largely superseded in the roles of mount and beast of burden by the chocobo. A chocobo is an ostrich-sized, flightless bird that looks like an overgrown, yellow chicken. It’s big and strong enough that it can handle most of the same duties as a horse, and some others beside, and it’s one of the icons of the series. Hey, that sounds roughly cognate to a pony!
So, what does one do when he wants to make an in-joke involving two franchises he and most of the people in the campaign have undoubtedly enjoyed? You make a pun at both franchises expenses, and then you apologize profusely for it. Self-flagellation is optional, but it helps with the atonement. At least there isn’t a permanent, unnatural storm just off the coast harboring monsters and demonic creatures, making travel through the region impossible, otherwise the self-flagellation would have to be enforced by angry WH40K fans.
So, after the gatekeeper left, Viera grabbed both the furries (FLUFFIES, DAMN IT! WE DON’T TALK ABOUT FURRIES AROUND HERE!) and dragged them into The Prancing Chocobo with all the energy of a hyperactive six-year-old, and with time, everyone else went inside, not seeing much point in waiting around (though Solerisa decided to go in only after the Count got there.). They ordered breakfast and started to eat when Count Smackal showed up.
He took an unoccupied chair and ordered a small breakfast, and the whole group talked for a while. The whole time, I tried my best at doing an English accent, and I failed miserably. At one point, Sam asked something to the effect of, “Is this town populated by pirates?” and at other times, everyone else commented, “I don’t understand a word you’re saying.” I finally gave up and talked normally, because I needed to actually have the party understand what I was saying.
The gist of it went that after they told him about the ship sinking, he told them how business in the city and surrounding area had been drying up because the weather has been growing rougher over the course of many weeks or months, and ships can’t dock at Portstown as easily as they used to. The fact that the ship Solerisa, Viera, Palias, and Ameranthia were travelling on sank the previous night is evidence of that. What ships try to make the journey have instead opted to sail around the peninsula, adding as much as a day or two to the journey, to dock in Fords, to the north, inside of a fjord. A lot of the city is closed off due to the lack of business a drop in imports causes. A caravan is also shortly going to be leaving the city for the 12-mile journey to Fords, and they’re due to leave in the next few days to catch a boat out of the province of Locksley for various destinations on the other side of the island. The caravan is waiting for members of the militia to return from border patrol, because the caravan is essentially carrying the collective material wealth of the province and there have been muggings and even some killings along the roads recently.
Because the militia is out on border patrol, there aren’t any state troops for the Count to send out on an errand he needs done, and offers the party some money if they’ll do the job. The mention of a hundred decis (1 gold piece = 1 deci) perks up some of their ears, literally in the case of everyone with oversized ears. Some weeks ago, Count Smackal commissioned dwarven contractors to begin construction on an outpost about seven miles east-northeast of the city, and their report is a day overdue. He wants the party to head up to the site and make some inquiries related to how the project is going and find out why they haven’t reported back yet. They agree, and then the following exchange occurred between Caleb and Count Smackal:
“I’z beginning ta think dat yooz don’ like me very much.”
“No, no, whatever would give you that idea?”
“Yooz always trying ta get rid of me!”
Also at about this time, a successful perception check revealed that what patrons were eating at the tavern had begun to slip out of the bar as inconspicuously as possible. After asking what their problem was, the Count (somewhat shakily) told them that the lack of business has everyone antsy, so they’re all high strung. I tried to give everyone the impression by the way the Count was talking was that he was lying about the patrons being high-strung, but nobody called him out on it. The real reason involves Caleb’s reputation as a humanoid typhoon preceding him, and the patrons wanting to not be there when the trouble begins. Not much else came up over the course of the discussion, and the Count stood up to leave once he finished his breakfast.
I have no idea why she did it, but on a whim, Fio felt like trying to make Ameranthia a few decis richer. Maybe she didn't like him. As Count Smackal stood up and turned to leave, Ameranthia also stood up and snuck up behind him. She proceeded to try pick-pocketing him. She rolled high on the thievery check, but the Count wasn’t a Level 0 NPC. I rolled a little lower than her for his perception check, but his skill modifier was sufficient to beat her thievery check, and he noticed as she reached her hand into his pocket. He smacked the hand away and pointed a finger at her, and (rather calmly, all things considered) informed her that she was not going to be getting the same payment as everyone else. Fio is assumedly going to be drawing a comic based on the adventure, and she’s decided that she’s going to rewrite that incident so she has an excuse for Count Smackal not paying her as much as the others that doesn’t involve clumsily trying to steal from the commander in chief of the militia and protector of the realm.
After the party finished eating breakfast, they took off on their new mission. The trek to the excavation site took about two and a half hours, and once there, they saw rubble, mounds of dirt, and other signs of a construction project. Most of the site was enclosed by a wooden fence, and the areas not covered by the fence were difficult terrain. When they got close enough to look through the fence, they saw that the whole site was swarming with kobolds. The game session ended as the kobolds screeched out and prepared to attack the party. I would have gone on to the next encounter, but the game session had already lasted for a good number of hours, and we called it there.
From that session and the weeks that followed it, we learned three of the major problems in having seven people in a party online. First, because there were so many people in the group, it took longer for combat to be resolved. It would have been less of a problem over a table, but on the internet, with everyone having to ask where everyone else is, where the monsters are, where they are, and a dozen other questions that could be solved by looking at a map with miniatures on it and then to tell me which square they were going to move to and then have me do it for them on my own map, it took far too long. All of it could have been done with a glance and one move of the hand in real life.
The second problem wasn’t so much with the group as it was with me as the dungeon master. The Dungeon Master’s Guide tells you how to set up encounters and what your XP budget should be, but the book is assuming that you’re playing with 5 party members. You can bend some rules for 6 players, but it doesn’t contain any information for what to do with 7 players. I would have to adjust all the charts for XP rewards, quest rewards, treasure quotas, and a slew of other things just to get a balanced encounter, otherwise there would be little challenge and little payoff.
The last problem, and undoubtedly the most imposing one, was scheduling. It’s hard enough to find out the free times of five other people and then sync them up with your own free time, especially when you’re scattered over three time zones. It would be worse if we were Russian, because if I were in Moscow and Miranda was in Siberia, we’re talking about a difference of 11 time zones. With the numbers we had, it might as well have been, because the windows of opportunity dropped exponentially with the addition of two other players. Scheduling for 6 people is difficult, 8 is nearly impossible.
The first and third reasons were noticed by pretty much everybody, so when I eventually broke the news to Daracaex and David that I had to drop them from the campaign, nobody was too surprised, and nobody was too upset by it. David is in the middle of moving out of town for college, and Dara informed me that he’d been contemplating a campaign of his own, so he likely won't be without a game for too much longer. Hopefully that will take off. He’s thinking of also doing it online and involving some Wotchers. So if you’re reading this and you’re a Wotcher, and you want in on a game, quick! Spam his PM box for all you’ve got!
I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to explain Bion and Palias’s disappearances. Fio wants to have them suffer redshirt deaths in the comic, but I’m resistant to the idea, because even though I had to let them go, they’re on the waiting list. If someone drops out of the campaign, then I’m going to invite David back first (since he asked to join first) and then Dara, so if they do return and they want to use their old characters, then they won’t have been rashly and unceremoniously killed off.
Moving on.
I scheduled a gaming session for a few weeks ago, and it was just going to be Miranda, Gaby, Fio, Anto, and Sam again, back to the core group. We hit three problems right off the bat. First, forgetting about the game, Gaby had gone on a trip to visit her parents in Missouri, so she would be away from home when we were supposed to be playing. Second, Miranda was going to Illinois to visit her mother and grandmother, so we had to have the game before she left, or we wouldn’t be able to play for at least a month after that due to the chaos of school starting up for everyone. Third, the night before the game was set to start, I reminded Sam that the game would start at 10:00 Pacific time. What I had forgotten to do was attach AM to the time. So, he assumed we were starting at 10:00 PM, which was reasonable because we’ve started that late before, albeit we were dead tired in the aftermath.
So. We were down two players, which meant only Fio, Anto, and Miranda alone would make up the party. I stalled for more than an hour hoping that Sam would sign on early enough, but he didn’t make it. This is the part where being the DM sucks, because I had to make a decision. Cancel the game and not play again for more than a month, or go ahead and leave Sam and Gaby out of the loop? In the end, I determined that the show would go on.
Gaby hadn’t brought her character sheet with her, so all of her statistics were there with Anto and Fio back in Texas. The two sisters considered talking to her over the phone and then relaying everything she said to me, but that would have been horrendously unwieldy and probably exceedingly expensive, so the idea was scratched. Instead, after getting permission from her over the phone, Anto and Fio jointly controlled her character and rolled for her. I’ve mentioned Mark the Red from the movie “The Gamers,” and how they dealt with his absence from the playing group. His character would be standing there, but he wouldn’t do anything, and nobody would attack him. We decided to do something similar for Caleb. Seeing as his god was Pelor, the god of the sun, a shaft of sunlight came down and struck him in the face, and he entered a kind of dream while the battle went on around him. I pulled off his accent a few times to indicate that he was still there and just removed from the fight, at one point commenting that he saw a flower that he’d never seen before, and decided to name it after himself. Not sure if that will remain an official part of the game, or if we’ll just say it was me trying to think of what he’d say if he was there.
On the other side of the wooden fence was a pit, and in the middle of the pit was a shaft leading down into darkness. There were a total of 11 kobolds on the other side of the fence, some with javelins, some with swords, and some with slings. When I told them of everyone’s positions, something clicked in everyone else’s head. I’ve never played Fire Emblem before, but something about the way the place was laid out made them all start talking about tactics they used in Fire Emblem, and eventually, they decided to go for a “plug” tactic. I’m not sure exactly what that meant, but the gist of it involved having Viera break a hole in the fence and then stand there to block the kobolds from passing through, plugging it. Being the defender in the group, she would soak up the damage (if the kobolds could get past her armor) while Ameranthia, Acacia, and Solerisa hit those kobolds with ranged attacks behind the safety of the fence. It was so simple and rehearsed that nothing could go wrong, right?
Ah, my lovely little arsonist...
Ameranthia used a Flame Seed on two kobolds standing off in the distance, enveloping them in flames and killing them pretty much instantly. However, the kobolds had been standing right next to the wooden fence, and it just so happened to lie within the area of effect. It caught fire, and the fire began to move towards the party at a speed of 3 squares a round. Everything in the squares touching the fence would receive fire damage.
So, sadly, they couldn’t utilize the plug tactic for as long as they would have liked, and after killing a good chunk of the enemies, ran in through the gap before they could set themselves on fire. One of the kobold slingers jumped down into the shaft before the party could close in for melee combat. The fighting after this point is fairly unremarkable, because a lot of the enemies went down in one hit, and there weren’t too many actions of the Critical Mooning caliber. Eventually, the party fought its way down into the pit and discovered that the kobolds had lain mines down in random spots, which hit Viera for a good chunk of damage and knocked her prone. This didn’t aid the kobolds much, though, because by the time they activated the mine, there was only one or two kobolds left, and a few ranged attacks finished them off in short order.
So, that’s pretty much where we left the game. I didn't continue for two reasons. One, I didn't want Sam to miss out on more of the dungeon, and two, it was starting to thunder and lightning in Missouri, so Miranda had to sign off then and there. When we resume, whenever it is, Caleb will emerge from his vision from Pelor to find the fence on fire, the bodies of 10 kobolds strewn all around, the other party members looting the corpses, and wondering where that eladrin wizard and shifter avenger disappeared to. I’m not sure when the next gaming session is going to be due to the chaos inherent in school starting up again, but I’m hoping it’ll start up sooner rather than later. Given that I don’t know when the next game will be, there won’t be a gaming report for another while. Until then, I’ll probably make posts concerning the history, geography, and political disposition of the Adventure Island. I’ll probably also make a special post when I actually think of an official name to give it, because Adventure Island sounds like the kind of name you give a theme park.
Next journal entry – probably talking about the monetary systems used on the island. Let’s just say that my take on the elf-dwarf conflict is probably at least a little different from other fantasy writers out there.
Best/Dan
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