Tabletop Fun

[Ceir]

Got to sit down and play a few runs on one of the Final Girl modules I picked up, Haunting of Creech Manor. I definitely see why people have ranked it low on the list of season 1 films - in my post a few up from here, I did say I knew it was pretty RNG swingy, but dang. I like it thematically, and yet - one run I found the Possessed Kid in short order, and two moves away from where I needed to go, boom, done; another, I never found her despite my best efforts, the Poltergeist murdered everyone else and finally splatted me; and in yet another I didn't even get a chance to look for the kid because the Poltergeist went from zero to a hundred in about a turn and a half and just blitzed me. Part of it I can chalk up to learning the map and mechanics, part of it is my luck with dice at any given time, but part of it definitely is the mechanics that are harder to mitigate.

Despite all that, I'm not too disappointed, it's just the less-fun of the season 1 sets I own. And I can definitely think of a couple mix and match combos that would possibly fare better. The "find the kid" gimmick is tied to the Poltergeist killer, not the Manor location; and there are definitely killers I want to try in the Manor map because it's so much denser and interconnected, and locations I want to try the Poltergeist on that would make the whole gimmick a little easier to plan and mitigate.

On a non-FG note, loot get! I was finally able to source a To Boldly Go expansion for Star Trek: Attack Wing, so now I have a pretty good spread of Federation ships for my Alliance: Dominion War solitaire game; something a little heftier than a single Akira and Excelsior from the Part 1 starter. Plus, regardless of inaccuracy, this is the set with the nice silver paintjobs on the models.

...apparently I'm really hitting the solitaire games lately.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Dragonlance--

So this week's session had us having to deal with (sigh) politics. Dwarven politics, no less. I channeled some of my inner Pratchett by remarking about how "you could stick two dwarves in a room and they'd come out with three different opinions," and the collective noun for dwarves was "an argument."

Basically, in order for us to get the dwarves of Thorbardin to accept the 800-some refugees from Pax Tharkis, it required a royal decree, but there hadn't been a King of Thorbardin in like 250 years. Selecting a new king required someone to forge a "kingsword," but you couldn't do that without the Hammer of Honor. The Hammer had been sealed away in the last king's tomb, and the tomb had been magically raised some 7000 feet up an air shaft in the middle of the mountain. Getting into it required we go into the City of the Dead, the necropolis in the deepest parts of the mountain, where the tomb had originally been located. Dwarves were forbidden from going into the City of the Dead outside of funeral processions, but as none of us were dwarves, this law technically didn't apply to us. But we still needed permission to go there, so we had to speak to the Council of Thanes.

This was where the politics applied. We had the Thane of the Hylar on side (we'd brought back word of his son's death, honor dictated he do this for us) and an allied thane alongside. There was the Thane of the Theiwar, who was a traditional rival of the Hylar, who would vote in opposition to the Hylar, and there was another thane who tended to vote in opposition of the majority due to sheer contrariness (later claimed to be "to keep balance" when we talked to him). We mostly had to make sure we could keep the other two thanes on side. One of them, the Thane of the Aghar, wasn't too much of an issue, she was pretty stupid and voted in the same way as whomever voted immediately before her (which would be the Hylar), but it was the Thane of the Klar who we really had to work on. The DM also noted that the Theiwar thane had a whiff of sulfur about him, which we associated with the Draconians (the "black cloaks"), but when we tried to bring this up to Hornfel (Hylar thane), he noted such smells were not unheard of in mining.

The Klar, as a clan, had delved a little deep, and had gotten hooked on a drug they derived from ground-up mushrooms, dubbed "spice." (This was not a Dune reference, but a reference to Critical Role's Campaign 1, where the bard Scanlan got bamboozled into spending a significant amount of money on spice, thinking it was a name for a drug.) The council adjourned so the Klar's rep could "consider his vote" (he was really just jonesing for a fix), and while Justinius and Cogburn (the two smarties) tried to see if they could get the "contrarian" thane on side, this left Runa and Catt to go talk to the Klar, who wouldn't talk to them about voting until he knew he could trust them, i.e., to take a hit of spice. Which, naturally, was snorted up the nose.

Our barbarian, and the kender. Taking fantasy cocaine.

Catt failed the CON save and basically became paralyzed for an hour, while Runa got a one-hour buff to her STR and DEX rolls, but an eight-hour debuff to her INT and WIS rolls. But it worked, and when the council reconvened, the Klar voted to allow our party to go into the City of the Dead.

We had one encounter with a pack of undead dwarves down there, but they turned out to be decent enough, and the spokes-zombie was willing to talk. He'd been cursed for sinning against Reorx the Forge-god and wouldn't get to rest until 77 people had heard his sad tale, and he was at 31. We agreed to listen to his tale, which was long and dull (three hours long), and moved along-- which is when we got jumped by a dozen dwarven assassins. We managed to survive, but found the assassins were wearing Theiwar crests.

Finally we had to solve a puzzle in the tomb of Prince Grallen (the last king's son), noting that his statue depicted him in full armor with a shield and axe, but no helmet, and every armored dwarf we'd met had always worn a helmet. We found a helmet in Grallen's uncle's tomb, put it on his statue-- which became animated and spoke to us. We explained we were trying to retrieve the Hammer of Honor, which was in his father's tomb, which was 7000 feet above our heads. Grallen knew what caused it, but the solution to lower it was inside the king's tomb, so Grallen just opened a portal to the tomb for us.

Next week: the Tomb of King Duncan

Also, gonna be doing my first Tier 3 (levels 11-16) adventure in Adventurers' League this week.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Dragonlance--

So the King's Tomb was a combat-less session, as we were mostly exploring the very large and blinged-out tomb. There were traps only in the sense of "do not touch this artifact" and "you're cheating at the test," but nothing that would overtly seriously harm us. A couple of lore things (Duncan XIV was a BAMF - he 1v1'd a King Ogre, something that took an entire party for us to do) and some healing potions and whatnot were found. Also, some Spectacles of True Seeing, which can see through illusions and similar. (I dubbed them the "Ruby Specs" because of their ruby lenses.)

Also, Kharas (the dwarf who basically made the Hammer of Honor) was ...still alive? We encountered him standing watch in the tomb's trophy chamber, apparently having been in some kind of trance. It was unusual that he was still alive, since while dwarves live longer than humans, they don't live that much longer. And then when we found the tomb chamber itself... we found Kharas's body, dead. We were all quite confused by this, but we the players were dumb and didn't try to Insight check alive-Kharas about it.

We retrieved the Hammer, rang the bell and caused the tomb to descend back to the ground, but as it descended, we saw that a lot more Theiwar thugs were flooding into the City of the Dead, but Hylar warriors were riding down to join us. But there was also a young Red Dragon flying down from the mountaintop, with a pack of Draconians as well.

That's where the session two weeks ago ended. We had a one-shot last week (as Camilla was going to be unavailable), and this week's session would pick up with this impending "boss fight."

We had a minute of in-game time to prepare for the fight, so folks were popping healing potions (if needed), or applying buffs to themselves. Cogburn took cover behind a column in front of the tomb, and used this deployable cover shield to give himself some more cover as well. We rolled initiative, and the Red Dragon went first... flying around to flank the party and unleashed its fire breath on four of us. I failed my DEX save, meaning I would take the full damage instead of half--

Cogburn took 63 points of damage. Cogburn has a max HP of 30. Cogburn died.

In D&D 5e, if the amount of extra damage you take after being reduced to 0 HP is more than your max HP, you instantly die. No falling unconscious, no death saves. D-E-D dead.

The rest of the table was shocked. I... wasn't. I had a feeling from the end of the previous session that I was probably going to die in this encounter. Granted, not that quickly, but I had a feeling anyway.

Bob the DM told me not to put my character sheet away yet, "We'll resolve your final moments on your turn." When my turn came up in initiative, he told me that Cog would have time for one final action before being consumed by the flames. I promptly used my one 4th-level slot to unleash a Lightning Bolt on the Dragon, it failed the DEX save, and took maximum damage for 54 points of lightning damage. Cogburn was reduced to a pile of ash and half-melted slag of artificer's gadgets.

It was nicely poetic and narratively appropriate that the rest of the party rolled extremely well, with multiple critical hits, after Cogburn's death. I joked at the table, "I took the bad luck with me!" and later, when the Dragon attempted to Fireball the Barbarian, Bob rolled terribly on the damage and only dealt 15 points of damage-- reduced to 7 thanks to the Barbarian being resistant to fire damage.

After combat was finished, there were some somber moments as the party mourned their fallen friend. They did try to see if what they thought was some kind of magical pool in the tomb might restore him, but it didn't. Justinius the Wizard collected some of the ashes in an empty vial, promising to take them to the moon for him. (I was touched by that, genuinely.)

Some levity at the table was restored when I half-joked that Cogburn was now hanging out with the Barbarian's Ancestral Guardian spirits (her mother and grandmother), and Bob thought that was so funny he declared it canon. Runa could now hear Cog snarking from beyond, and when folks put on the Ruby Specs, they could see Cog also (though they couldn't hear him), and Cog would also snark and argue with the spirit of a wizard that was bound to Justinius's staff.

After all of that, the party returned to Thorbardin with Kharas and the Hylar, who were themselves in mourning; Thane Hornfel's last son, Arman, had died in the battle. He was distraught upon hearing of it, and then furious after hearing of the Theiwar's treachery. He re-summoned the Council of Thanes, marched straight up to Raelgar, the Thane of the Theiwar, grabbed him by the throat, and skull-dragged him to the overlook. "Traitor! Treason! My last son!" He forced Raelgar to watch as the entire Theiwar clan was slaughtered by the Hylar, intending to execute him himself afterward. Justinius beat him to it, saying, "You may have the clan. But this one has a gnome-sized debt to pay." And killed Raelgar himself with an Inflict Wounds spell.

Yes, in case you mis-read that, there was some genocide going on.

Evrouin the Knight was most displeased. Catt the Kender was horrified.

The party was emotionally drained when they returned to their quarters for the night. Catt went running off, needing to be somewhere else. Evro went looking for her. This left Justinius and Runa alone, as they both mourned Cog's passing. Justinius admitting that while he bickered with Cogburn frequently, he had appreciated the gnome's intelligence and would now miss having that intellectual peer. Runa was distraught that another person she was nominally supposed to protect had died, because her Rage had overtaken her in the moment. Runa and Justinius ended up spending the night together, largely because neither wanted to be alone at that moment. It was surprisingly tender, and furthered the bond that had been slowly developing between the two.

Both felt somewhat guilty for the death for not being able to better protect him. Eric, Runa's player, admitted to me later he'd forgotten that Runa has an ability through her subclass that would allow her Ancestral Guardian spirits take some damage for an ally; it wouldn't have negated the full brunt of the blow, but it would have prevented instant death. I absolved him of it, and even he agreed that Runa-- who had a hatred for one of the dragons that wiped out her tribe-- wouldn't have been thinking clearly enough in the moment (her Rage) to try to protect Cog like that.

Camilla, Catt's player, needed to leave at that point, so the emotional scene that would happen between her and Evrouin will take place next week.

But the hits kept coming. Figuratively speaking. The next morning, Kharas came to the party and asked them to follow him, he had something to discuss and something to show them. Taking them to an isolated courtyard, he revealed that he was actually an Ancient Gold Dragon, named Evenstar. He asked for the Misfits to accompany him to meet with his people (the good-aligned Metallic Dragons) to corroborate his testimony that the evil-aligned Chromatic Dragons had broken oaths by returning to the mortal world, to spur the Metallics into action. Evenstar hadn't been able to take his true form during the fight against the Red Dragon because of oaths that Evenstar had sworn, and because the Chromatics had found the Metallics' eggs and were holding them hostage. To take his true form would have allowed the Chromatics to destroy the eggs.

The party agreed, and rode on Evenstar's back to Solinari, the white moon of Krynn, where the City of Dragons had been established on the far side of the moon more than a millennium before. On the way, the party asked if they could inter or scatter Cogburn's ashes somewhere on the moon, even if there weren't cemeteries or mausoleums or memorials per se there. Reorx the Forge-god didn't have a presence on Solinari like that. But the party decided to try to make a shrine to Reorx for Cogburn, and to have a little ceremony for him there. (Cog's spirit was most appreciative of the thought they were giving to this.)


At one point in the session, while the party was preparing to use Speak with Dead to interrogate the corpse of the dead Red Dragon, Bob got up to smoke a cigarette and asked me to join him, "We need to have a discussion." And that discussion was what to do next. He admitted the party would get the opportunity to use a True Resurrection spell to try to bring back Cogburn-- and was fairly certain the table would try it-- but Bob was going to use some dice-rolling to determine if the spell would succeed. He asked my thoughts on this, and while I initially was all for it, I had another thought about it, and decided it was better narratively if Cog did not return to life. Seeing the emotional effects that Cog's death had had already felt so dramatically important, and bringing him back might undo some of that.

So, Bob asked if I had any thoughts on a new character. At first, I suggested a Ranger, but he instead recommended a Cleric. I only hadn't thought of it because Clerics had not been on offer at Level 1, but once he suggested it, I immediately agreed. The party needed a stronger healer on side, that wasn't always in the front-line like Evrouin. We later talked on the phone over the weekend, as I'd settled on playing a Human Cleric of Mishakal (the goddess of healing), and Bob then pitched the character and his backstory to me. He opened with, "You are 1278 years old." The cleric (whom I eventually named Gavin) had been alive during the Third Dragon War, alongside the hero Huma Dragonbane. Indeed, Huma, his friend Magius, and Gavin had all grown up together. While Huma went off to become a knight and Magius a wizard, Gavin had joined a holy order of healers and essentially became a combat medic. It was during this time that Gavin met a healer's assistant named Gwyneth and the two grew quite close and fell in love. Then Huma returned from some of his adventures with a woman named Silvara, and Silvara and Gwyneth both revealed themselves to be Silver Dragons named Heart and Dream.

The war raged on, Gavin and Gwyneth (Dream) continued to aid in the conflict, and Gavin was there when Huma returned with the Dragonlances to turn the tide against the forces of Evil, and when Huma defeated Takhisis (the goddess of evil) and forced her and all Chromatic Dragons to be banished to the Abyss. In the aftermath, Paladine and the Gods of Good had the Metallic Dragons swear oaths of their own to depart the mortal world, and not wanting to be separated from Gwyneth, Gavin went with her to Solinari, as Mishakal granted him ageless immortality. (Gavin can't get sick or grow old, but he's still susceptible to injury and death by such.)

The discussion was very productive, got my brain fizzing, and I can't wait to see where things go at our next session.

[Nunavut Pants]

So, several more games of Terraforming Mars down. Mostly finishing last in them.

A recent one started reasonably well for me, and got better in the mid-game. My corp allowed me to turn up to 4 of the heat resource into up to 8 money, and I got a card early on that allowed me to turn one plant resource into seven money. The income boost was very handy for letting me play cards!

At one point, I said on Discord "I think this is my 'where it all went wrong' moment." I was in the lead by a modest amount, but did not see any good path forward from my position. I was able to put together a few things, but I dropped to second place in the "most steel plus energy production" award that I had funded, costing me 3 VP, and one opponent really piled on the points in the last two "generations" (rounds of play). Despite one good card right at the end giving me 3 VP, I still finished in second by almost 10 points.

Still, "NOT LAST!"

I think I'm going back to my old form in the current game, though. I don't see any good synergies in the corporations, preludes, and project cards that were available to me. No clear path to the Milestones or Awards, and no good "engine" setup to build.

[Jay 2K Winger]

D&D Adventurers League: Rime of the Frostmaiden--

Brian, one of the players at AL, is someone I've mentioned before. He loves to create characters with deep (and utterly irrelevant) backstories and likes to jokingly have them start to explain said (utterly irrelevant) backstories to anyone, whereupon the rest of the PCs at the table tend to immediately wander off when he starts to do this. Brian is one of many D&D players at AL that will rarely pass up an opportunity to make a terrible pun, frequently drawing facepalms and groans from people. (I'm not averse to making puns myself, but I go for quality over quantity, myself.)

Brian's character for this AL campaign has been Boron, a high elf ranger of noble birth, who was supposedly exiled from his homeland after losing a duel to his brother. It's transpired that said duel was literally rock-paper-scissors, which Boron lost because he kept throwing scissors, while his brother just kept picking rock. Boron treated this like it was some kind of sheer impossibility, and the character is frequently depressed over not being able to return to his homeland for another 100 years, and is constantly searching for elven wine to drown his sorrows. He makes frequent insulting remarks to anyone that isn't an elf, and views drow (dark elves) as basically only half elven, to the point that he calls our drow rogue and my half-elf sorcerer the equivalent of one elf between the two of us.

Boron does not have many friends, if it weren't obvious. He's also a complete idiot, frequently getting information wrong, assuming that people are cultists even when presented with evidence to the contrary, and frequently confuses Rhoric, my character, for a warlock, and then later a bard. Naturally, Boron and Rhoric bicker a lot.

This was our final Tier-2 adventure, though there are still a few more adventures in the module to go. We're all Level 10, so we know what we're doing and have a lot of capability of rolling very well. As we're infiltrating this duergar fortress (duergar = dark dwarves), we need to make some Stealth checks, so Boron casts Pass Without a Trace. This adds +10 to all Stealth rolls. Ordinarily, this shouldn't be too much of a hindrance to the DM, since his NPCs still have to make Perception checks...

...except we all rolled very high and he rolled very low. Boron actually rolled a Nat-20, which together with his crazy stats, gave him a total of 43. Everyone was gobsmacked, including the DM, and someone at the table quipped that Boron just disappeared to the party as well. When that happened, I dropped into character and went, "...are we free?!"

This set off the table laughing, and Brian laughing the hardest, unable to stop for nearly five minutes. We actually had to pause play to give folks a chance to stop giggling and laughing, partly just at Brian's reaction. I had to remark I've never broken anyone quite so hard at any table I've been at, and that's including my notorious "Am I going to have to smite this pie?" from Curse of Strahd, or breaking the DM with some of barbarian Seb's verbal musings on ticket price inflation. ("Why would you wanna blow it up like a balloon though?")

There were a number of Nat-20's at the table last night, and continued poor rolling from the DM, who kept throwing his d20s in dice jail for rolling so terribly. That Pass Without a Trace trivialized a lot of the session, as we avoided attracting attention from the duergar and were able to quickly get to the duergar warlord and take him down without having to deal with three of the monsters he'd had brought up from the Underdark to guard the fortress.

We got some good loot, made an ally (sort of) with a different duergar that had been opposed to allying with the warlord, and now we'll be moving into Tier-3 with the next adventure in this campaign.

[Nunavut Pants]

Just finished the next game of Terraforming Mars: NOT LAST again!

OK, it was third place out of four, but I'll take it!

[Jay 2K Winger]

Dragonlance--

No combat encounters this week. Camilla, who plays Catt the Kender, couldn't make it due to some neck pain flare-up, so we played around her absence and will backfill her scenes later.

But the session was in the City of Dragons on the moon of Solinari, as the party went around to the various wards and talked with people, while waiting for the big conclave to happen. Most of it involved getting some cosmetic work done on weapons and shields and whatnot, but when they visited the "silver ward" where the silver dragons lived, the party met my new character, Gavin of Erol, along with his wife and children (wife and kids are all silver dragons that take human form), and ... well, some of it involved catching Gavin up on things he'd missed in the world since he left it to live with his wife on the moon some 1200 years previously. When he was told about the Cataclysm-- when the gods smote the city of Istar with a meteor the size of a mountain and shattered the continent, and since when the gods had turned their face from the world-- Gavin exclaimed, "What did you do?!" (Meaning, what did you (mortals) do to offend the gods so much?!)

But, hearing that the chromatic dragons had returned infuriated Gavin. He was a childhood friend of the legendary heroic knight Huma Dragonbane, had fought alongside Huma, and had been there when Huma defeated the evil goddess Takhisis and forced her and all of the chromatics to banish to the abyss, binding them to oaths to depart the mortal world. Huma had suffered a mortal wound in the battle, as well. So, as Gavin put it, "Huma died to banish them. And now they've forsaken their oaths. There will be a reckoning for this."

There was also a visit to the "bronze ward," where the bronze dragons patterned themselves off the gnomes. Here, when the "bronze gnomes" learned the party had once included a gnome (my dead artificer, Cogburn), and that his life quest had been to build a rocket to travel to and from the moon, the bronze gnomes asked to see his notes. After studying them intently and very quickly (as the DM put it, these are all the equivalent of 20th level artificers) the bronzes were able to build a rocket in about an hour's time. Then, brought the party along as the bronzes flew it to Mt Nevermind (where Cogburn had been from). While most of the party recovered from the g-shock of the flight, Runa the Barbarian took Cogburn's notebook and trusty wrench to his old guild, where they reverently enshrined them, and after seeing them glow on the shrine, revealed that it had been decreed that Cogburn's Life Quest was hereby fulfilled, and his spirit would be allowed to move on to the afterlife.

After the bronzes returned everyone back to the moon, the party held a brief ceremony atop a tower in the bronze ward, bidding farewell to their fallen friend. They got a brief glimpse of a road forming amid the scattered ashes in the breeze, with the silhouette of a gnome walking down it. And heard a cranky voice snapping, "Hurry up, Cogburn, you've kept us all waiting!" and then him hollering back, "You've been waiting this long, you can wait a little bit longer!"

And thus, did Cogburn get a sendoff.

The conclave went quickly in terms of roleplay, but it was during this part that we the players (and characters) learned that the Draconians (the "black cloaks" we'd been fighting) were actually made from the abducted eggs of the metallic dragons, corrupted through dark magic. It infuriated the metallics, and while the party (now including Gavin) already had a mission to start forging new dragonlances (they just needed to find dragonmetal to do it), they were asked to go into the evil city of Neraka (capital of the BBEG's new empire) to rescue the metallic dragon eggs, as their safety would allow the metallics to take action against the chromatics.

After being returned to Thorbardin to witness Hornfel's coronation as King, Justinius the wizard was approached by two blacksmiths, asking for his help. They were going to be making weapons for the dwarves' new army, and wanted to enchant them. Neither of the smiths could do this, and wanted his help. He agreed, which is mostly to explain Jesse's absence at the table for the next couple of weeks as he goes out of town.

[Nunavut Pants]

Hosted a games afternoon earlier this week. A small one, only half a dozen people. Brought out "Just One", and everyone enjoyed it. We didn't bother playing anything else for over two hours! We had a lot more successes than failures, which is nice.

Another Terraforming Mars game--and back into last place again. Oh well. We had one person way out in front, and the other player caught up in the last turn, actually tying the other player's score at 111! Tiebreaker was money left at the end, which that second person had, so they won it.

Currently in the middle of one, and it's not going particularly well. We'll see where I end up.

[Jay 2K Winger]

D&D AL: Rime of the Frostmaiden--

So, I'd forgotten that the running gag of Brian's character Boron continually confusing my character Rhoric for any class other than his actual class wasn't completely down to Brian's sense of humor. Boron did first mistake Rhoric (a sorcerer) for a warlock, but later, DM David kept the fun going by having an NPC admonish Boron for it. "You keep calling this man a warlock, when he's not. He's clearly a bard!" So Boron (being a moron) latched onto that and started in on that vein.

I, in turn, have started leaning in on Rhoric looking for any excuse to inconvenience, embarrass, or endanger Boron. Such as suggesting that going in against some dangerous enemy might be dangerous, "One of us could die!" And Boron going, "You think so!?" Which led to this exchange--

Boron: "If I die, will you sing a song about me?"
Rhoric: "♪♫ Ding-dong, the idiot's dead-- ♪♫"
Boron: "That's very mean!"
Rhoric: "Yes. And?"

Later in this week's session, we came across the spirit of a deceased wizard, who tried to possess Boron, who resisted the effect, but then, as we were negotiating with the spirit for information, the spirit revealed that-- in the brief moments it was trying to possess him-- she had seen his memories, and revealed to the party (not the players) that Boron wasn't actually exiled from his homeland. Boron, however, insisted he had been, and it wasn't him lying to people to make a sympathetic backstory, he is just that stupid.

This session (and possibly the next two) involve our party venturing into the heart of the eternal winter that is plaguing the Icewind Dale, to confront the winter goddess causing it. We've already seen numerous animals and even people that have been frozen solid by presumably her magic. All of which tracks and isn't too surprising... but when we saw an ancient white dragon frozen solid (and white dragons are immune to cold damage), that set me on alert, and I even commented on it. "Well that's very alarming..."

[Nunavut Pants]

Two more games of Terraforming Mars, yet another loss.

And? ANOTHER WIN! I WIN I WIN I WIN!!

This last game, I started as the corporation (Terralabs Research) who only pays 1 for each playable card. Which is nice, because you can sell them for 1 each, meaning there's pretty much zero reason not to buy every single one you get. My two "prelude" cards gave me a production of three energy and six money (though the latter cost me six money up front to get the extra money production). I was able to leverage those to pick up two Milestones, the "have six energy production" milestone and the "have ten production of any one resource" milestone. The ten production was money, of course.

I also early on played a card that gave me money for every card I had played with a Science tag on it. I could do that every turn, which was bonus money and quite handy as you might imagine. Especially as one of the Awards available was "have the most Science tags", and I had a number of them already. I funded that award fairly early, trusting (hoping?) that my opponents wouldn't be able to play a ton of Science cards.

In the mid-game, I played a card that let me decrease my energy production by 1 to increase my Terraform Rating by 1, every turn. TR is victory points, and the base for your money production, so it is very valuable. And I had a lot of energy production, and was getting more as I could. Later on, I played a card that let me turn in 8 of the heat resource for 1 TR. So I was more or less getting 2 TR for free every turn. Especially because the Temperature track (which you can trade 8 heat to raise and get one TR) maxed out pretty quickly from my opponents' activity.

I also played cards that let me trade three energy (not production, just energy!) for one step on the Oxygen track, which gives one TR. And one that let me turn 5 heat into three steel, which gives a discount on any cards with the "building" tag. I also had discounts on any cards that had world-state requirements (e.g., minimum temp, minimum O2, minimum oceans, etc.) and one that was just a flat discount on everything. (That one is called "Anti-Gravity Tech" and requires SEVEN science tags to play; it doesn't get played that often.)

Toward the late game, I funded the "Magnate", which rewards whoever has the most green-colored cards. Which I had played quite a few more than anyone else.

Even later, I got tired of waiting for either opponent to play the 8th ocean, so I did with a Standard Project. That allowed me to play my Penguins card, which is worth 1 VP for every penguin on it. I had earlier played a card that kept anyone from removing my plant or animal resources, so those were secure VPs. You basically added one every turn. Plus I played a card that added two animals to any card of mine I chose, which was more VP. I also played Pets, which added one animal to itself every time anyone placed a city, and each two of those was a VP. I knew I was going to try to place at least one or two more cities, so I was pretty sure it would pay off.

It definitely did on the last turn; my opponents placed five cities and I placed five more. I made sure to put them next to at least two forest tiles so they were worth 3 VP on their own (one for the city, one for each adjacent forest) and they racked up my Pets VP. I had played a bunch of cards worth VP on their own throughout the game, including a number of the ones that gave me energy production I could use to do the trade-for-TR action mentioned earlier.

One opponent had a lot of ways to delay, so in the last two turns she wound up with a lot of money after the other two of us had passed so she could play her cards without us getting in her way. I was way out front at the end (over 120 VP) but wasn't sure if she (about 100 VP) was going to catch up--but I was out of actions and out of money, so all I could do was hang on. It turned out to be enough, as the scores wound up 124 to 115 to 102. With me in the lead.

This game went to 12 turns ("generations") which is somewhat longer than most, which tend to end around 10 generations. I had taken the lead by the end of the 3rd generation, and never lost it. Though the second place opponent certainly made a good try at the end.

[Nunavut Pants]

I'm on a roll! Another blowout loss, and then ANOTHER WIN!! Woo hoo!

My corporation's power wasn't that useful this time (mostly it was "spend 3 money to draw a card") but I was able to chain several things together.

I got the "Tardigrades" card down in the first generation. That one lets you add one "microbe" to it every turn, and at the end of the game it is worth 1 VP for every 4 "microbes" on it. Not super strong, but OK. Late in the game, I played "Crows", which lets you put 1 (or rarely 2) "animals" on the card every turn, and they are worth 1 VP for each "animal". However, I also had a card that let me spend two plant resources for one animal on another card--and of course it was on Crows once I had played that. I also was able to get (and play) four separate cards that added multiple animals AND microbes to any other card I had. Plus the Bactoviral Research card gave me one microbe for every Science tag I had on played cards, and I played it late in the game when I had a lot of those! (Like a dozen of them!!) I wound up getting 16 VP from Crows and 7 from Tardigrades, both of which are kind of absurd numbers! I had forgotten that the rule set we were using forbade cards that removed resources from other players, so my opponents could not take away those points.

Another good combination was having a number of cards with Building tags on them, then playing the "add one money income for every two building tags you have" card, then playing the "repeat the income effects of one Building-tagged card" which gave me that same income again. That was sixteen more money income per turn in one fell swoop!

I didn't get any of the Milestones (no real path to them before my opponents claimed the three available), but I did place first on one Award category that I funded. It was the "played the most Event cards", and the four "add multiple microbes and animals" cards were all Events.

Really, I didn't need those. The final scores, after 10 Generations, were 106 to 98 to 89. Up until Generation 6 I was basically tied for last with the player who wound up in second. The other one was out front by a good amount, but his progress didn't really accelerate; he was making about 7 points per turn. With Generation 7, I started accelerating--gaining 10, then 15, then 15, then 25 (!!!) points. The other player who had been down with me in Gen 6 did not start really gaining points until one turn later, but his trajectory was similar to mine with 15-15-25 points.

The same three players have started another game, which is currently in Gen 9 and I'm not doing that well. More or less tied for last with another player, while the one who was second last time is out to a commanding lead.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Dragonlance--

Camilla, one of our players, currently has a hard deadline of 10 PM on our game nights, so she can get home and get to bed before work the next day. We have adjusted our sessions to write her out early, earmark any interactions we need to come back to her for, and in my recaps on our Discord server, I always tag her at the point where she left, so she can catch up on what she missed. Three weeks ago, she missed a session because she'd lost track of the day and so we ended early without running the session, because her presence was fairly mandatory at that point. There were two significant interactions we needed to backdate, and it was likely we'd be walking into a combat encounter, so we needed her present. She was apologetic for missing it, and not twigging sooner to our calls and texts, and it's not a super big deal.

So two weeks ago, we did those interactions. First, a conversation between her character Catt and our knight Sir Evrouin, where they had a serious discussion about the genocide they'd just witnessed, and our wizard Justinius' part in it, and how their trust in him was wavering because of it. Two people being supportive to one another emotionally, kind of thing. Second, rewinding back to the City of Dragons, Catt visiting the ward of the brass dragons, who patterned themselves off the kender, Catt's people. Whole lot of parkour stuff going on, some amusing interactions, and Catt having another serious talk with one of the brass-kender, as she vented about the troubles she'd seen and all that, but getting encouragement and support from the brass-kender too.

From there, our party (minus Justinius - this was during Jesse's two-week absence due to his job) had a choice of where to go next. Option One: look into finding the material called "dragonmetal" so we could forge new dragonlances, but the only place we knew of to find dragonmetal was clear on the other side of the world. Option Two: investigate the city of Neraka, where the abducted metallic dragon eggs were held, but Neraka was also the capital of the evil Empire of Ansalon the baddies were all part of, and we were only four people. Option Three: track down the remnants of the Red Dragon Army and see what's become of them after their Highlord was killed. We chose option three.

This involved tracking them across the plains and into the foothills of some mountains, and we tried to shadow a patrol to see if we could learn more, but some bad stealth rolls meant we ended up fighting them. The fight that followed did allow me a brief moment of smugness on Mike, who plays our knight, when Bob the DM rolled an attack on my cleric, Gavin.

Bob: That's a 22 to hit?
Me: That misses.
Mike: Wait. 22 misses?!
Me: My Armor Class is 23.
Mike: That's higher than me! How?!

Answer was Gavin wasn't just wearing plate (heavy armor), but +1 armor, in addition to a +1 shield, and a Cloak of Protection. Bob justified Gavin's having more magic items than anybody else as being that he's a veteran of the Third Dragon War, and had been living among very powerful 20th-level crafters and magic-users for the past 1200 years.

Mike sulked for a minute, but we all had other things to concern us shortly thereafter. Because Bob the DM kept rolling crits throughout the fight. Just in case you've forgotten, critical hits double the damage dealt. Even with my high AC, a crit is a crit and it will hit, and hit hard. People were going down, getting brought back up, getting downed again, and getting back up, only to get downed again. It was hard for Gavin and Evrouin to heal everybody up, in addition to keeping ourselves up, even as Catt and Runa were trying to take out all the baddies. In the end, only Runa was still standing (and then only just) against one last enemy. Runa goes, using her Reckless Attack feature to roll with advantage and go crit-fishing, and does some significant damage, but the baddie still had 7 HP left when it was his go. Because of the Reckless Attack, the baddie got to roll with advantage (roll 2d20 and take the higher number)--

Bob: (rolls)
Bob: (looks up at me, points to his dice tray)
Me: (looks)
Bob: (has rolled two Nat-20's)
Me: I TOLD YOU TO STOP ROLLING CRITS!

Runa didn't have enough HP left to tank the damage, so she went down. We were staring at a Total Party Kill. Bob, however, offered clemency, saying that the party would wake up as prisoners. We all accepted, so we found ourselves stripped of all our equipment (with the exception of Gavin and Evro's amulets of faith, which can't be removed by anyone else), bound and gagged in a cage. We'd been captured by the Red Dragon Army, and soon were brought before its current leader, the red dragon Emberekanashli, mother to the young red dragon we'd killed earlier. She wasn't happy with us, and was going to make us pay for the death of her son.

This past week, Jesse (and therefore Justinius) was back, and Bob explained the timeline breakdown enough that it had taken us roughly a week to find the RDA and get captured, and that we'd spent a week in captivity, fed and watered enough to keep us alive, but tortured by Ember during that time. We'd gotten long rests, but the torments had given us all a level of exhaustion. Justinius, after completing his two-week service to the Thorbardin dwarves to help outfit their army with magical weapons, used some new spells of his to scry on the party and found out they were captives. Some judicious use of the Sending spell (essentially a 25-word-limit telepathic instant message) allowed him to make contact, get information, and then use said information to pinpoint a rough area to look for them. He got the dwarves ready to ride out, and made plans to help lure the RDA into a fight with the dwarves, before riding out to try to find us.

Meanwhile, Ember the dragon decided to let the rest of her army enjoy our suffering and had the army construct the Tower of Death, a six-level Most Extreme Elimination Challenge-esque obstacle course designed to make us repeatedly get hit or fall to the ground. We were explicitly told, "If you win, you get tossed back in your cage. If you lose, we eat well tonight." So while Justinius was Metal Gear Solid sneaking around their camp, trying to find our equipment (his bag of holding was among it), we were forced to traverse the Tower of Death, gradually losing HP and getting humiliated by getting scorecards for each attempt. (Bob described the last judge as being the "East German judge" and consistently scoring us low. I jokingly referred to that one as "the last Theiwar dwarf" and thus the "Theiwar judge" despite Bob's reminder there were no Theiwar left.)

Evro was the first eliminated from the Tower when he dropped to 0 HP, but he was just tied up and chucked back in the cage for later. This allowed Justinius to get close, touch him and use Dimension Door to teleport them out of the camp, where he fed him a healing potion and untied him. He gave Evro his gear, then hurried back into camp to check on the others. Gavin went down next, and so he got rescued next, and while the two healers got some of their armor back on, Justinius then started setting the camp on fire. Thankfully, Bob's dice kept failing him on all the perception checks, so none of the RDA noticed. Runa and then Catt went down fairly high up in the Tower (they made it to Level 6) and then the RDA just fell to celebrating and still didn't notice, while Justinius rescued Runa and Catt and got everyone out of the camp, and then we ran off as quickly as we could, finally making shelter back in the foothills to get in the long rest we needed to clear the exhaustion.

But now we've got an angry army chasing after us, and we'll need to ride out into the plains to bring them into combat with the dwarven army, but that'll still leave us to deal with Emberekanashli, who is most likely an adult red dragon, and thus a very, very deadly threat...

[Jay 2K Winger]

D&D AL: Rime of the Frostmaiden--

We're still in the endgame portion of our campaign in Adventurers' League, Level 11 adventurers trekking out to a frozen island in the heart of a blizzard to confront the insane winter goddess responsible for plunging the entire Icewind Dale into an eternal winter...

As noted previously, Brian's character Boron is an idiotic, conceited, casually racist (toward non-elves) elven Ranger, who started a running gag over mistaking Rhoric, my half-elf Sorcerer, for a Warlock, and then getting convinced by NPCs that he's actually a Bard, then a Paladin. And so Boron started calling my character "Sir Roderick," only to have me correct him, no "sir" "and my name's Rhoric." Brian kept it up, but then today, it took a new turn.

Turns out that "Roderick" part was a legitimate mistake on Brian's part, and he'd thought my character's name was Roderick, not Rhoric. He was honestly sorry about it, and it just got me laughing, because it was 100% in character for Boron to get the name wrong as well. Brian, also, is a notorious pun-dealer, rarely letting an opportunity to make an atrocious pun go by, for which I'll usually give him a tired look or a glare.

The DM kept up the fun of feeding Boron incorrect information about Rhoric's class, this week having an NPC tell him that Rhoric is "clearly a Zealot Barbarian." While Brian gleefully leaned into it, and the rest of the table was giggling at the continued joke, I half-jokingly sighed, "I would like to rage..." which just set off fresh giggles.

Encounters this week included venturing briefly out to a frozen shipwreck just off the island shore, mostly to see if we could find any loot. And we found that someone had constructed a decent-sized shelter on what was a wrecked frost giant longboat. Dave the DM rolled on his encounter table to see what we'd find, and looked very pleased with himself, which made me wary. We snnuck close to the shelter and heard someone inside chanting in Primordial, a language none of us spoke, but the DM told us that the voice still sounded familiar. I had a suspicion at that point, and when we went inside the hut, we found that it was home to a coven of hags-- one of whom turned to see the party and grinned, "Oh hello again, you little shits!"

This was Granny, a Hag we'd encountered earlier in the campaign, very distinctive with the characterization that Dave had given her, especially with her verbal tic of calling everyone "you little shit." We turned her into a sort of running gag, joking about how she'd turn up again in every remote part of the Icewind Dale we ventured to. And now Dave had indeed had her turn up again.

However, Granny Hag wasn't immediately hostile, and her sisters weren't either, and we all kind of wanted to take a short rest to recover some health, but Granny wouldn't let us rest in their shelter without some sort of trade. She was asking for a single hair from each person that wanted to stay in the shelter, but none of us wanted a coven of Hags having anything of our bodies, so some other trades were made. Lit, the drunken monk, gave her a bottle of his "Litclear" moonshine, our Cleric gave her a magic item he didn't need, and off the Cleric's idea, I had Rhoric trade her a Gray Bag of Tricks that I hadn't used and didn't really foresee much use for with Rhoric (and I wouldn't be able to trade it to a different character until after the campaign anyway), and so people did the same thing. We got a short rest and some in the party (determined by random d20 rolls) got some uncomfortable feeling up by Granny's sisters, but so it went.

We later got ambushed by a group of yeti, one of which was a rather larger one that had a pretty nasty breath attack that seriously messed up the party. Furthermore, all the yeti showed a capacity to regenerate some health every round, at which point I started throwing fire spells around, which negated the regeneration ability. I did manage to tag one of the lesser yeti with a Sorcerous Burst spell, a cantrip which-- as a Level 11 character-- does 3d8 damage of an element of my choosing (naturally I chose fire). But the spell also states that if you roll an 8 on a d8 while rolling damage, you can roll another d8 to add more damage. I rolled 8+8+3 -- so I rolled two of those d8s again-- and ended up dealing 28 points of fire damage, which took that yeti from close to full health to single digits.

However, the yeti fight did leave a number of our characters messed up, so the NPC wizard with us cast Leomund's Tiny Hut to give us some shelter to take a long rest. The DM warned us that Auril the Frostmaiden (the winter goddess) may take certain actions while we do so, but we reckoned that the benefits of the rest (full health, recovered spell slots, negated exhaustion) outweighed the risks. Even so, the sheer cold of the island did still keep sapping at people's constitutions, risking exhaustion again anyway.

We got into the skull-shaped frost giant fortress at the center of the island, Grimskalle (and yes, we did make the "by the power of Grimskalle" joke one might expect), where we did run into one last surviving frost giant-- an old, blind, mostly deaf and on-death's-door warrior. All he wanted was an honorable death, which one of our monks was happy to give him, even helped the giant stand, let the giant get a hit in, before finishing him off. We recovered some loot and searched the first level of the fortress, and had been told by the giant that there was a "vault" in the basement, guarded by some giant creature with two great sharp teeth. This was backed up by a pack of ice mephits we ran into by the basement stairs, who encouraged us to kill the creature below because it was rude.

Turns out that creature was a giant awakened walrus, who honestly didn't really care about guard duty and just wanted to hang out. The DM gave him a real "ya, man" almost surfer bro kind of voice. We commiserated and were friendly enough back as he answered some questions, and after a while, I had Rhoric comment, "You know what, you're a really chill guy." ("Thanks, man!") and this understated pun just set off Brian laughing. When he managed to stop, I just grinned and reminded him I go for quality in my puns, not sheer quantity like him.

The walrus did tell us that getting into the vault would require passing a variety of tests in order to unlock it, and that's where we'll pick up next time.

[Ceir]

Nice score at the used shop today - a copy of Richthofen's War, in pretty decent shape for something from 1972! Very carefully making photocopies of a few things, and definitely need to retype some charts, but it's definitely playable.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Dragonlance--

The bulk of our most recent session was a battle against the Red Dragon Army, after fleeing from them and luring them into a fight with the Dwarven Army of Thorbardin. So there was a big mass of enemy tokens on our battle-map, representing all the "fodder" (goblins and orcs), the ogres, war-wagons, and most importantly, Emberekanashli, aka "Red Dragon Mama" who had just recently been torturing most of the party. Ember (in her 8-foot-tall amazonian "dommy mommy" human form) was leading her army while riding on the back of a giant bull.

We naturally try targeting her for some big moves to start the fight, and we get some decent hits in. We thought. Until Bob the DM casually commented, "So she's still just in quadruple hit points."

Quadruple. Hit points. For reference, on paper, the tarrasque-- an enormous kaiju of a monster that destroys cities without even trying-- averages just under 700 HP, and only goes quadruple digits if the DM happens to roll for its HP, even if they then max out and roll all 20s, only gets to about 1020. DM Bob shortly after making that remark, mentions that Ember is an "ancient wyrm red dragon." Again for reference, the largest and oldest red dragons in the D&D Monster Manual are "ancient red dragons" and even those top out on paper under 800 HP.

We were already nervous fighting her. This just made everyone at the table downright scared of her.

Fortunately, as the Dwarven Army scythed its way through the RDA, and as the ogres were getting mopped up too, Ember seemed to recognize the tide was turning. So, after KO'ing our barbarian and promising her "I'll be seeing you again," Ember casts a Plane Shift spell and leaves.

This week's session is likely going to cover a debate both above the table and in-universe about where to go next. Rescuing the abducted metallic dragon eggs, to free the metallics from their oaths to not interfere, so we can get our own dragons on-side to counter the RDA and the other Chromatic Dragon Armies. Or tracking down a magical ore that we need in order to forge new dragonlances to battle the chromatic dragons. Ideally, we'll need both to take down Ember, but which to tackle first is going to be the question.

I know what my cleric Gavin is going to say. Something on the lines of, "There is a big part of me that wants to rescue the eggs, if only so I can see my wife again." (For a reminder, his wife is a silver dragon, and he's spent the past 1200+ years living on the moon with her and their children.)