Dungeons and Dragons

 

So I meant to do a monthly Dungeons and Dragons campaigns update thing and then...didn’t! Work and real life has fallen on my head a bit (I, uh, am going to be a homeowner real soon, and that’s not even getting into the clusterfuck of working at the library during a pandemic), but my weekends are completely free. I'm actually doing four campaigns at the moment: one every Friday night, one as DM every Saturday, one every other Sunday, and one on the other available Sundays. 

 

I've been having so much fun with them and have probably talked the ear off all my D&D friends at this point, so I thought I'd talk here too, haha. 

 

Hollyella Lightouch (Trickery domain cleric of Tymora, gnome, level 4)

 

Hollyella, who goes by Holly, follows Tymora, goddess of luck. Sure, gnomes actually have their own god of luck, but Holly thought it would be funnier to follow someone outside her race's pantheon. She is a gambler and somewhat of a con artist, though she won't take all of a tourist's money, just most of it. She also may or may not have scammed one of the party members pre-game who doesn't realize he was scammed. 

 

This is a Waterdeep: Dragon Heist campaign, but my party is a disaster and we spent a whole year so far avoiding the main plot and getting embroiled in side quests. My party continues to bumble around and commit arson. 

 

When last I talked about Holly, we'd snuck onto a boat with help of Holly's Pass Without a Trace spell and were going to try and rescue this rich guy who got into trouble with gambling. We did indeed find the guy and another guy, rescue them, burn down a boat, and then figure out that both guys we rescued are assholes involved in the child kidnapping cult of Asmodeus stuff. The rich guy promptly got murdered in the room we locked him in because snitches get worse than snitches when you’re in a cult, and the other guy is locked up and Holly wants to turn him over to the Watch or kill him after he admitted to blowing up a whole city block and killing a lot of people. 

 

Instead we managed to steal a magical stone from the cultists that turns out to be a magical talking creepy stone that claims to be a key that will lead them to catacombs and riches underneath a certain rich couple’s mansion, the same couple that is most definitely involved in cult stuff. Then we went to fight the head cultist lady, only to walk into what would’ve been a trap if the party hadn’t been clever and the assassin lady hadn’t joined the fight on our side.

 

Holly may or may not have exploded a servant of the rich couple who turned out to be evil, but not before they had her paralyzed for three rounds. Then she lost her temper and dealt 27 points of damage between her guiding bolt and spiritual weapon and they exploded. May still be alive? Who knows. 

 

Most importantly, the group did not burn down this bar where the trap was set, which is good because the cultists had tied up the owner, his wife, and their three kids upstairs, and they will also be joining the thirty-odd orphans and goblins currently hanging out in the party’s magical inn. 

 

Tovia (Life domain cleric of Chauntea, firbolg, level 3)

 

Tovia is a very good girl who left her family and their struggling farm and went to the big city to make some money. She doesn't understand what's happening a lot of the time, but mostly puts it down to weird city customs and weird non-firbolg things. 

 

However, this being Acquisitions Inc., she has accidentally fallen in with a group mostly composed of thieves and criminals and failed businessmen, all of whom kind of adopted her as the moral voice of the group. Most of them have aliases-- one has TWO aliases. Tovia keeps going by Tovia. 

 

Right now the group is still in Phandalin, having investigated the disappearance of the former Acquisitions Inc branch set up there, and cleared out the danger in the cellar under the Tresendar Manor. Tovia has met quite a few pretty ladies so far, and maybe made a date with a hot traveling merchant lady as they bonded over small farms and gardening, while the rest of the party participated in election tampering and made pamphlets accusing the corrupt mayor of bestiality. It was a great session. 

 

Next session, the party gets to set up their own branch of Acquisitions Inc, having preemptively hired a cute half-orc majordomo and a very artistic kobold as their first hires. They also need to figure out what’s going on with the majordomo’s disappeared friend and all these weird magical things that they keep experiencing.  

 

Yolov (Order of Scribes wizard, vedalken, level 4)

 

Yolov is my nerd wizard who loved his spellbook so much that he awakened it as part of the Unearthed Arcana Order of the Scribes wizard subclass. Es, his spelbook, is the jock to his nerd and is constantly disappointed in Yolov's refusal to learn fire spells. Yolov argues that a) Es is made of PAPER and b) fire spells often have collateral damage. Yolov is not charismatic or strong, but he does love books and magic and Es a whole lot. Also just took the Observant Feat, which means he now sees all. (A 19 passive perception and a 22 passive investigation and he can read lips and use Comprehend Languages to spy on anyone he wants.) 

 

Yolov is part of an amazing homebrewed campaign in which Yolov has recently graduated from his university having learned a lot of theoretical magic but not so much practical usage for it. He decided to go visit another continent and has been swept up in an adventure with a few other folks investigating the legend of a magical artifact that could be used as a weapon. The last huge war happened about 150 years ago, but it's still fresh in the elves' minds, so everyone wants to avoid that, and keeping this potentially magical weapon out of the wrong hands seems to be the best way to do that. 

 

Friday’s session was the party getting involved in watching out for suspicious people at the capital city’s festival, having discovered over the last few days that there is a dangerous organization that has existed since before this current pantheon of gods that wants to find a magical weapon that potentially might kill gods, an organization that almost killed a level 12 wizard famous for ending a war and which definitely destroyed a mafia village of 300 criminals. My wizard is very ready to fight them, and Friday they did indeed intervene and stop a bunch of the Sworn Edge people before they could do whatever they had planned during the festival, and captured two of them even if the local High Council people were advocating just killing them (they’re a little touchy after the last war). 

 

So far in three months of this campaign, my wizard has somehow never been injured, so I cannot wait for the dice gods to mess with him. He also has managed to avoid killing anyone, but is finding that harder to avoid as they fight more dangerous people, and is a bit conflicted about it because he wants to use magic to help people, not kill people, but also the Sworn Edge keeps hurting his friends and has already killed many, many people….

 

Lost Mines of Phandelver 

 

My first time as a DM! I've been having so much fun with this game. There are three players, two real life friends I've known for over a decade, and one of those friends' college friends. We'd played together with a different DM last year until real life sort of fell on her head, so I volunteered to run a campaign. 

 

The campaign is currently The Lost Mines of Phandelver, in which the party had volunteered to bring supplies to Phandalin on behalf of a dwarf they'd helped in a little one-shot adventure, only to discover that the dwarf has been captured and that there are bandits terrorizing the town. Along the way, the party has adopted multiple NPCs, including a halfling cleric, a human fighter, three wolves, and a half-elf fighter that one of the party members is trying to flirt with. (Yes, three wolves. Our dwarf fighter kept rolling nat 20s or 22 Animal Handling rolls, I don't know what to tell you. Each character now has their own wolf they can sic on people on their turn in initiative.) 

 

The party is almost finished with the Lost Mines of Phandelver module, aka the first arc of this campaign. They have found a few neat magical items, rescued their dwarf friend’s surviving brother from the bad guys, begun to figure out that the bad guy is working with a cult that seems pretty invested in dragons, and also captured the human fighter’s terrible ex-boyfriend, a wizard who decided to set himself up as a crime lord. He was supposed to die, but then the fighter rolled a nat 1 to kill him, another PC knocked the wizard out, and I rolled death saving throws and he got an 18, a 13, and a 19, so now the wizard is alive, trussed up, and probably due for a very awkward conversation with his ex-boyfriend next session. 

 

Also my players got very annoyed when I did like 40 points of damage to the hot half-elf the one PC is crushing on, but in my defense it was D&D who made Inflict Wounds such a nasty spell for clerics. 

 

The party still has a few more places to clear out in the cave as well as kill or capture the main boss of this campaign who escaped during the last fight, so we’ll see what happens next week and if everyone survives to level 5!