Dungeons and Dragons

The dining table set up for January's game.

“O frabjous day!  Callooh!  Callay!”

she chortled in her joy.

I get to play Dungeons again today!

In January I got to play Dungeons and Dragons again after a dry spell of almost eight months.  I have missed it horribly.  The last campaign I was in came to a screeching halt in May, when my work hours changed from mornings and afternoons to afternoons and evenings.  We met on Tuesday nights for years, then, suddenly, I couldn’t.  The other members of our group, bless them, didn’t want to play without me, so we tried Friday nights instead.  That didn’t work out, and our group just disintegrated.  This was a shock as we’d played together, in various member configurations, for years.

 At the end of last year Frank, my oldest, taking pity on me, decided to try to run a few one-shots periodically on Saturdays, inviting other friends who play.  He also has been making models to use as terrain in other gaming things he does and wanted a chance to use them.  And show them off, I suspect, but who can blame him?  He made all the parts of the village in the picture above except for the graveyard and ruin, and the two non-pine trees.  I’ve seen him making these things over the past few months, but seeing them all together in a village took my breath away.  His attention to detail is amazing.

Our first one-shot was January 18^th.  What is a one-shot? you ask, at least those of you not familiar with the rpg  (roll playing game) world.  It is a single game, played start to finish in one afternoon or evening, or over the course of a single day.  Campaigns are played in a series of episodes extending over the course of weeks, months, and even years, with the players playing a single character in an ongoing, developing story. You have time to develop your character, gain experience, strength and knowledge, and loot.  Unless your character is killed; at which point you need to roll up a new character to keep playing.  Think of it as the difference between a short story and a novel, accompanied by die rolls.

As I said, our first short story happened in January.  Frank was our Dungeon Master, or Game Master, if you’d rather, since not all games take place in dungeons.  The GM creates the outline of the story, including the locale, non-player characters (NPC’s), villains, monsters, perils and encounters, adjudicates the rules, and rolls the dice to let the characters know how they are faring.  There were five of us players – yours truly, a Half-Elf Sorcerer named Astrid; Zee, my youngest, a frightened and tatterdemalion Elf Rogue named Eryn; Martin, an Aasimar Sorcerer named Gwen; Josh, a Human Cleric named Orvin; and Whitney, a Half Orc Barbarian named, appropriately, Aargh.  Martin and I, playing Sorcerers, also had familiars – Gwen’s a white owl, Astrid’s a weasel named Crowley.

(Crowley, quite frankly, I stole directly from Angela D’Onofrio’s Aviaro books, without permission, though I suspect she would find it amusing.  If you haven’t read her books, you should.)

None of us PC’s (player characters) knew each other, a cliche in D&D, before we shared a ferry ride across the River to the village of Riverfield.  There we ended up sharing rooms at the village’s one inn, since there were only three rooms to be had.  In the morning we found a mystery to solve.  Sometime in the dark of the night a strange boulder appeared in the middle of Riverfield.  No one heard anything and no one saw it appear.  Ominously strange, we thought, and set about trying to figure out what it was and why it was there, and if it was dangerous.

In the course of our explorations and inquiries we explored the forest, inhabited by hordes of squirrels, explored a mine, met a lizard man who lived in the River and supplied the inn with fish, and his elderly human gambling pal.    When we got back to town after exploring the mine, we found a cult had already developed, worshipping the rock. And – remember the scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian when Brian’s followers split into two factions? - it didn’t take this cult long to split into two factions either, though not as harmless as the Shoe and the Gourd.  One called for blood sacrifices to the rock.  And then a fight broke out, which turned into a brawl, followed by a riot.  The few members of the local constabulary were a bit overwhelmed, so, of course we had to intervene.  There were plenty of targets for all of us, and most of the cultists were slain.  The bloodbath didn’t seem to trouble the remaining villagers overmuch.  “We’re better off without them” was the local consensus.

After that Orvin decided to blast the rock to pieces so it wouldn’t be the source of any more problems.  This was, of course, easier said than done, but was finally accomplished by Orvin’s holy blast spells.  Of course that wasn’t the end of it.  We had only a moment to try to catch our collective breaths and then the shards of rock began to reassemble, not back into a rock, but into – oh, no! – a huge, evil monster.  Aargh and Greg saved the day this time. Even though she was badly wounded she kept Greg swinging at the monster until it was finally, really, dead.  Astrid’s Flaming Sphere spell was very useful, too.  Rather like the Energizer Bunny it just kept on going and going and going…..

After a round of healing spells, followed by several rounds of drinks, and a hearty supper, we all prepared to leave on the morrow after a good, and hopefully undisturbed, night’s sleep. 

Aargh had inadvertently contracted herself to the very small circus that appeared in Riverfield the day after our arrival.  It consisted of one wagon and half a dozen men with strange accents who were trying to put as much distance as possible between themselves and something called a gulag.  Whatever it was they were terribly afraid of it, but they thought that Aargh would be a wonderful Strong Man, or Strong Woman, for their circus, and very useful if they had to fight the enemies looking for them. 

The rest of us left later in the day on the first caravan out of the village.  We had never heard of the small city it was traveling to, but thought it was bound to be more peaceful than the village we were leaving.

A bit of advice from Astrid: Do not eat at the Inn in Riverfield unless you have a strong stomach.  The beginning of meal preparation is always heralded by a loud thunk, like an axe driven into wood, followed immediately by a blood-curdling scream.  This happens even if you’ve only ordered porridge.  Actually the food is good, and their finest wine is quite palatable.