Dungeons and Dragons Revival

I said that, for the grand re-re-opening of my blog (back up to acceptable updating standards), I would make a new post about our DnD campaign, as we recently played a session after a century long, unplanned haitus.

There is only one problem...

pff, figures

No no, don't worry, I still plan on writing about DnD, but I went back to see when the last time I had updated about our campaign was, and, well, I remembered that was another thing I had dropped the ball on.

We had several short play sessions since my last post, prior to the most recent one, and a decently important chunk of things happened. I cannot in good conscience simply omit all of that information.

But wait, it gets worse!

of course it does

I can't exactly remember all of the details, but... I don't want to just list off key points that I remember unentertainingly.

This will be a challenge, so, get ready for...

Chapter 5 - in More or Less Hopefully Entertaining Detail!

Lagoon: Land of Druids

At the local game shop with a small group yesterday, I was contemplating how I wish I had more board games, but also how I didn't want to spend money on one. I opted for the first option when I saw this game, Lagoon: Land of Druids.

If you couldn't already guess, it had gained 70% of my favor for simply being druid based, so I looked it up on my phone for a few minutes before deciding that it had a seemingly positive enough reaction on the internet and made up my mind. We were looking at some other games, but "land of druids" won, not to mention the how gorgeous the art is.

small sampling of the tokens and game pieces, it's just dang pretty

Chess and Dungeons and Dragons

We finally finished our three session dungeon two weeks ago. I left off after we defeated a giant skeleton and opened a stairwell behind a spooky statue.

not exactly this

We entered a room with five circular discs in a pedestal and no exits. After we clarify that they are just blank discs, I decide to pick one up, and a picture of a castle materialized on it. I put it down and pick up another one, but nothing happens. Our ranger picks one up and a picture of a very royally dressed, fancy woman appeared. Our paladin picks up a different disc, and the DM says "a picture of a regal bishop- oops."

"Oh, duh."

Dungeons and More Skeletons and No Dragons Yet

our campaign so far in picture form

We finished off our most recent dungeon in our D&D campaign. Just so there are no surprises, this is not the final episode of this dungeon! I will conclude it in the next D&D post after this one.

I left off with how we freed all the prisoners and were starting to work our way into the rest of the dungeon to reclaim the evil book that we had for about a minute before it was stolen back from us, all the way at the beginning of our campaign.

So, we were faced with the difficulty of having about 55 freaking people with us, most of them weak, battered prisoners. We armed about fifteen of them and had our cleric and some other guy we had met (probably should have kept the cleric in hindsight though) bring the other 40 people back to the castle town. We had kept one of the prisoners, the guy who helped our assassin defeat the lion with his bare fists, and our DM actually rolled up stats for him and made him a character. He is known only as "The Pugilist" and was played by the DM, who actually made him kind of a nutjob.

Dungeons and Dungeons and Skeletons

and dragons

We've had two play sessions since my last D&D post. We left off having escaped from being captured, buying supplies in town, and getting in a bar fight.

We had planned with the king and queen of the castle to more or less find the secret headquarters of the evil skeleton dude cult by having one of our own get captured on purpose - the assassin - and then following him and his captors to the dungeon.

This worked out great for our DM - since we had escaped earlier when we weren't supposed to - because now he was able to use the plan he had made in the first place for the previous session. He kind of orchestrated this on purpose, since he was RPing the queen and king anyway.

We brought some invisibility potions, along with a fanciful assortment of other things, and planted our mole with some concealed tools in a poor village outside of the castle town. In the night, it was attacked by some humanoid henchmen, and after a short battle, we started to follow the prisoners and their caravan through the woods.

Dungeons and Dragons and RNG

We played our second campaign of D&D yesterday. After having already played once, we had a good grasp of our characters, and so were able to roleplay better with more cohesion.

I am Galstaff, Sorcerer of Light!

The experience of adapting to your character and others' is interesting. You already have relationships with your friends where you understand each other's behavior, but when you create characters you have to learn how they will behave, unique to the game. But, simultaneously, you're still figuring out how you will behave, while you get used to your character. Even if you plan out your character entirely - I had four pages in my notebook detailing my character - things pop up that you didn't think about or suddenly something just works.

Druids and Dragons

For Christmas we got a board game called Mice and Mystics. It's a game where the players work cooperatively to win against the story and plot laid out in basically a guide book of instructions.

We called it D&D Lite - it comes complete with game pieces, map tiles, playable characters and 'character sheets', and instructions on what to fight and how the dungeon is supposed to be played out.

After completing the first chapter of Mice and Mystics, some of my friends wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons. We had an experienced DM, but the rest of us had never played. Aside from me, none of them had even really been exposed to it before. Over the last week or so, we made up characters, our DM created a campaign and we played for the first time a few days ago.