Dungeons and Dragons

[cinaed]

Look, I’m really doing a monthly update for my Dungeons and Dragons campaign! ...After two months, but in my defense I have been buying a condo and moving and it’s been very hectic.

I'm doing four campaigns at the moment: one every Friday night, one as DM every Saturday, one every other Sunday (though that one is on hiatus), 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, though now we’re getting dragged into the actual plot because our DM kidnapped one of three people we actually like.

When last I talked about Holly, we'd managed to steal a magical stone from the cultists that turned out to be a magical talking creepy stone that claimed 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 exploded a servant of the rich couple, then the group did NOT burn the place down and instead rescued the inn owner’s family and invited them to spend the night at our magical inn.

Since then, we have built a duck pond at our tavern on behalf of our fighter who’s been possessed by a duck god (it’s fine, honestly it’s working out for her, she gets to magically speak to ducks and hasn’t gotten injured at all since this happened, the duck and dice gods love her now), gone poking around on another boat when we realized one of our few friends, a sweet drow who just wants to raise spiders and do his captain proud, was missing. Unfortunately it looks like Fel’rick and his captain and uh the crews of three ships have been kidnapped and are potentially in Hell? Maybe? Look, we don’t know what we’re doing, we just know we want to rescue him. We dripped blood and poked at the ritual circles we found on all three ships, pretty much playing ding dong ditch with hell until they got annoyed and sent a devil out after us.

When we got home, it was to discover that while our magical inn can keep people out, it won’t keep out potentially villains you invited ages ago to visit before you figured out he was probably a bad guy and never rescinded the invite. Cue an awkward conversation in which none of us could figure out if he’s evil or his wife is evil and he’s just the hot rich arm candy, but we did get an invite to a party in a few days time that we suspect will probably involve them trying to sacrifice the orphanage children to Asmodeus, so we’re glad we won’t have to sneak in for that. He also offered to pay for our fancy outfits for the party, which we accepted because hey, free clothes.

We then went on an investigation of the sewers under our inn, trying to figure out how the awful rich guy got murdered, and that, my friends, is where Holly almost died because despite the rogue/monk figuring out that this room we found had a chest that was breathing, we still went in and got attacked by mimics, one of which almost immediately critical hit Holly for 36 points of damage and KOing her, whereupon the bard tried to run in and rescue her and also got knocked out, leaving both healers rolling death saving throws as everyone tried to get to them and then escape. We survived because thankfully someone still had a healing potion but it was a close call!

While in the tunnels, we half-questioned, half-tortured the magical stone who keeps wanting to expound at length about the Vault and who we keep stuffing into our Portable Hole so it can’t be scried upon and found. In our defense, it’s a real jerk of a stone and also clearly evil, but we DO need the money to keep that hot assassin lady from murdering some or all of our party. We learned that we need three more keys to unlock the Vault-- a drow’s hand with a spider, a shining bottle, and a dirge for the lost.

After that, we got out of the sewers and met and hated the worst tailor in the world who flat out told us that he could be rude to us because we weren’t rich and Lord Cassalanter was paying for everything. We were also very unhelpful about the clothing we’re going to wear, so who knows what our DM will dress us up in for the party.

Holly’s had a string of bad luck in the last few fights between getting knocked out twice and then wasting all her spells on a devil she over-estimated, so since they were near the Temple of Luck she decided to swing in and speak to one of the head priestesses. Halfway through the conversation she realized that she hadn’t discussed with the party how much she could tell them, and had to duck out briefly, but ended up warning the temple about the cult of Asmodeus, enlisting their help to hang around outside the party in case they need back-up, and getting three bottles of holy water to use. Oh, and Alala agreed to terrorize that jerk tailor for them too.

We ended the last session heading over to one of our not-kidnapped friends’ houses, who recognized the snippet of melody of the song we need as a key, and could sing us part of the song that was commissioned for the rich couple’s son’s funeral, and that’s how we found out the rich couple we knew was tangled up with the cult didn’t so much lose their son to an accident as apparently sell his soul to Asmodeus and the poor kid’s now in Hell, commissioned a song in Abyssal/Infernal about it for the fake funeral, and that type of sacrifice is probably what they want to do with all the orphans as well.

Holly is Not Happy.

 

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. 

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, and which a group that wants to kill the gods seems to have an interest in.

Last session the party got involved in watching out for suspicious people at the capital city’s festival and stopped a bunch of the Sworn Edge people before they could do whatever they had planned during the festival, and captured two of them to turn over to the local High Council.

The High Council then politely told us to leave the city since things keep happening around us, and we decided to follow the starmap we’d learned would lead us to a temple that might house the weapon the Sworn Edge is after. This meant going on a boat, which led to shenanigans involving a doppelganger impersonating the first mate, multiple hookups between some of the PCs and the ship’s NPCs, attacks by pirates, the group’s rescue of said pirates once the ship’s captain destroyed their boat, getting saddled with seven pirates because we keep collecting prisoners, and our party deciding to antagonize the ship’s captain even more by sneaking around below deck and stealing an expensive crystal and uncovering the fact that he likely works or at least has been hired before by the world’s equivalent of a mafia.

We then got to port and had to figure out how to keep the pirates from being immediately executed. We left them with the local guards and made plans to speak with the harbormaster in the morning, since he has final say over executions. Being a group of two enormous firbolgs, a half-orc, half-gnome, a vedalken, and a sea elf, we immediately attracted attention, including from a monk who’s going to be our newest party member.

Unfortunately our dinner was interrupted when we noticed a woman going from table to table talking with people, and one of those people came over and punched Yolov where his nose would be if he had an obvious one. We quickly figured out the woman had cast some sort of spell on the bar, making people fight, but in the ensuing confusion the woman and her unseen partner stole most of our money and some personal belongings, including the starmap. We chased them down and found out that they are part of a group that’s essentially a Fagin and Oliver Twist thing, who is blackmailing us with our belongings until we rescue a fourteen-year-old girl who was arrested for throwing fruit at a local noble and was going to be sent off to work as an indentured servant for the crime because the harbormaster wanted to make an example of her. They did not believe us when we grumpily said we would’ve rescued the kid if they’d just asked.

However, that meant we now had EIGHT people to rescue from execution and imprisonment, so last session the party split up, the warlock who’s a rich kid and the paladin going to talk to the harbormaster about Mona the tiefling girl and the rest going to the guards to try and convince them to let the monk offer a path of redemption and atonement through his god rather than execution. Through some fast talking, earnest talking, and the accidental adoption of the teenager as the warlock’s ward, the group managed to save four of the seven pirates and the girl, which is honestly great. Also agreed to potentially help the poor exhausted guard captain who had been ‘losing’ the mail that would’ve confirmed the girl’s sentence and travel to her new indentured life and who has had five guards go missing over the last two months.

Still don’t have our stuff, since we just got back to the woman’s bar to tell her that our warlock has adopted the girl but that the guard captain is talking to his husband and might adopt her in his place to keep her safe. We’ll see how that goes.

Since last update, Yolov has been injured a couple times -- he did NOT like getting hit with necrotic damage, not at all, or getting punched in the face -- but has successfully avoided killing anyone! The warlock’s familiar has a higher kill count, and I love it.

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 shifting from The Lost Mines of Phandelver to a mishmash of multiple adventures and campaigns (an unholy fusion of Tyranny of Dragons and a few things from Dragon of Icespire Peak and Sleeping Dragon’s Wake).

Right now they’re in Neverwinter, having learned a little about this dragon cult that seems interested in resurrecting dragons or possibly talking to living ones and also failed to capture Iarno Albeck, a wizard who they’d captured and who then escaped Phandalin with potentially the aid of some Phandalin inhabitants for reasons of their own. They also recently all had some visions involving dragons. So many dragons. So many different chromatic dragons.

Their plan is to talk to their friend, a fighter NPC who’s a member of the Lords’ Alliance and whose awful ex boyfriend they failed to capture, and then try and talk to a bronze dragon nearby and do a side quest for Phandalin’s local priest of Tymora before heading back to Phandalin.

Along the way, the party has adopted multiple NPCs, including a halfling cleric, a human fighter (the Neverwinter one), three wolves, and a half-elf fighter that one of the party members is trying to flirt with. We’ll see if they adopt anyone else….

Comments

[hokuton_punch]

Such amazing adventures! :D I love reading about them.

[cinaed]

Glad you're enjoying! :D Having so much playing them.