Tabletop Fun

[Jay 2K Winger]

Mysteries of Albia--

No actual combat this week, all RP as we're investigating a new case. (Our first fully homebrewed adventure, not adapted from a module.) Investigating crime scenes, interviewing witnesses and suspects, researching archives and whatnot.

It's now been fully established that Vash prefers travelling via rooftop. Either by freerunning along them, or by riding on the roofs of vehicles. After we finished at the crime scene, Vash stayed behind while the rest of the Eagle Scouts were driven to the hospital to get the autopsy results, just to ask a few more questions of the primary witness. Then she went to the rooftops and caught up to us. Where we promptly egged Eric on: "Jump from the roof onto the car. Do it. Do it do it do it." Because that's now the running gag after Vash's infamous fall out of the tree. (She did jump down, and succeeded this time.)

We also established that chocolate milk was Vash's favorite drink (drank at least three glasses over the course of the session), leading to comments about how she's somehow going to get drunk on milk. Until I joked, "Nah, drinking all that milk for strong bones, so she'll be fine the next time she falls off the roof onto her face." Prompting a laughing "F**k you!" from Eric.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Mysteries of Albia--

So we get into the mine we were sent to investigate, with Druid sending his birds-- his owl familiar (Hoot) and a summoned beast eagle (Eagly)-- to scout ahead. Their ability to see in the darkness of the mine, plus their remarkable utility in combat -- these birds collectively got FIVE Nat-20's during combat this week -- led to me suggesting we dub our new team the Eagle Scouts until we come up with something better. This has already been accepted by the table.

In other amusing news, Eric's new Soulknife Rogue is named Vash, because he decided some aspects of her character were very like that of Vash from the anime Trigun. Accordingly, Vash's raven animal companion is called Stampede. This week, it was sort of revealed that Vash has something of a split personality, a somewhat psychotic kill-happy alter that manifested when she used her psy blades for the first time. Vash later had a pseudo-dream sequence where she met this alter, where I initially dubbed her "Smiley," but given she was holding the psy-blades in her hands, Eric spontaneously decided that calling the alter "Knives" was more thematically appropriate.

[Jay 2K Winger]

So my Strahd group finally got together for the start of our new campaign, Mysteries of Albia. (Minus one player, who is shifting to part-time with this campaign.)

There were some definite changes in character for everyone. Jesse, who played the bardiest Ranger in Strahd, was playing a stoic Fighter, a warrior of the church. Bob, who played our cagey Sorlock in Strahd, is playing the talkative Druid, a proud adherent of "the old ways." Eric, who played the Sorceress, is playing a Soulknife Rogue who is keeping her psychic abilities a secret. And I, who played a gruff but affable enough Paladin, am now playing a slightly more taciturn Gunslinger with some mild PTSD.

Our characters are all probationary members to a detective agency, meeting up at the HQ, but our Druid is down in the bar in the basement, despite it being about nine in the morning. He just greets us all cheerfully and poured everyone a shot. And Bob actually did pour us all shots of whiskey from a flash he had with him. (A 12-year Irish whiskey of some kind.)

Our first case was mostly to investigate a 70-year-old cold case, a mining disaster in a northern town, with a side order of mysterious disappearances, and a side quest from one of the survivors, who just wants us to leave some flowers at his wife's grave, and to retrieve a token of his that he'd left in an old tree in the center of town. While the rest of us went to the cemetery to find the grave, Rogue stayed in the center of town, finding the necklace we'd been asked to find, and then climbed up the tree and started eyeballing the roof of the mayor's house nearby. When the player said he wanted to have Rogue parkour over to the roof, he was told to make the requisite skill check, which they whiffed on.

I started laughing and said, "You ever see those cat videos where it tries to make a jump, and just goes like one foot and drops?" And Eric agreed that was exactly what it was like.

My rolls-- which can be pretty bad sometimes-- were good to great this week, up until we got into combat. Despite rolling first in Initiative, by the time Charlie, my Gunslinger, made it to the room where things were kicking off, he'd used his action to dash. So I prepared to bonus-action and use a spell he has called Finger Guns, which basically lets me literally shoot a magic attack from my finger-- but then I actually properly read the spell, and realized that the bonus-action just activates the spell, which still requires an action to fire it. Ugh. So I just held my position in the corner, while everyone else piled in and started killing the solitary enemy in the room. Then when my turn came up again, I made my attack roll-- and got a natural 1.

Which was egregious especially because I'd roleplayed Charlie maintaining and cleaning his gun during the train ride up to town. I played it off as a misfire with one of the bullets.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Minmaxer was DM'ing a Tier 2 (Level 5-10) adventure this week, and I took the opportunity to try out a build for a character that might be my backup for the Mysteries of Albia campaign if my gunslinger doesn't work out or if he dies. I admit to taking the idea for the build from D&D Shorts on YouTube.

An elf (custom lineage) Bladesinger (Artificer 1/Wizard 4) with the Mobile and Tough feats. Artificer means I can use medium armor without the usual penalties to Wizard. So I can wear scale mail, which with my high Dex score, gives me a base AC of 16. Start a Bladesong, and that adds my Dex to my AC again, so now it's 19. And in a pinch, I can cast Shield and bump that AC to 24.

I have a base movement of 40, bumped to 50 with the Bladesong. I get in close to an enemy and cast one of two cantrips before attacking-- Booming Blade if they're alone, and Green Flame Blade if they're grouped close together. Booming Blade does work, since I can get in and attack and get that extra damage in, then back away like ten feet. Mobile feat means they don't get opportunity attacks, so they have to move to get close enough to attack me, but Booming Blade means they get damaged again if they try to move.

It strikes the right balance of spellcaster dabbling I want to do, with the familiarity of martial class that I prefer.

[Ghel]

Thanks! I appreciate that info.

[Jay 2K Winger]

I believe the module was called "The Peculiar Case of the Selptan Felines"

[dalesys]

It was a FurSchlinger adventure!

[Ghel]

Omigawd, I need to remember this. LOL. I want to get back into D&D and eventually run a campaign. I'd love to do something like this. Basically, anything with cats is right up my street.

[Jay 2K Winger]

D&D Adventurers League--

So Minmaxer from our Spelljammer campaign is now putting in work as DM for the store's weekly D&D AL roster, and he's good at it. I took part in his first DM'd game for our AL nights last week, which went well and was fun.

But then this week as I sat down at the table, he asked me which of my characters I was bringing to the game. My usual go-to is Seb, my level 4 half-orc barbarian, but lately I've been trying out a tiefling cleric called Lucent, and debated bringing him out, but I ended up going with Seb. Minmaxer told me, "I'm happy, cuz I may have planned on you bringing him this week."

After the initial combat encounter, we end up arriving at this small town where... that's a lot of cats. And all the people seem to have one. Seems a little strange.

Then the DM looked at us all, counted off numbers for each of us for a d10, rolled, and pointed at me. "Excellent." And then described this ginger Maine Coon cat sort of wandering up and looking at Seb, who-- like a good dumb barbarian-- extended a knuckle for the cat to headbutt. Then the DM said, "Make a Charisma saving throw." Which, naturally, was my dump stat. When I failed the save, he sifted through some printouts, folded one and handed it to me. "Don't show this to anyone, yet."

I backed up from the table, read the printout, and started cackling. Basically the cats in the village had formed a hive mind and were bonding with their chosen people, which mostly just gave the benefit of the mind blank spell (which protects against charm effects and psychic damage), but also let the cats auto-succeed on the suggestion spell against their bonded person. The DM had given Seb the feline equivalent of a fightin' cat, named Cupcake.

I happily played along, with Seb very quickly adapting to having this big-ass ginger cat making biscuits on his armor pauldron and otherwise lazing about on his shoulders, going all 'oo's-a-good-Cupcaaaake, etc. Even went, "This is Cupcake, and I've only known her for a few hours, but if anything happened to her, I'd kill everyone in the room, and then myself." The DM immediately turned to the rest of the party and says, "This is not normal." As in, the party knew that Seb's newfound attachment to the cat was not normal.

Eventually, everyone at the table ended up bonded to a cat, even if they passed the charisma save, because the DM thought it was funnier that way.

[Jay 2K Winger]

So my Strahd group won't do our after-action report until next week, as our Warlock's player was unavailable this week (attending a bridal shower), so our meet up turned into Session 0 for our next campaign, the concept of which is best summarized as "steampunk fantasy London detective agency." Yes, as in Sherlock Holmes. And the DM has admitted that one of our cases may be Jack the Ripper inspired.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Curse of Strahd--

There is nothing like being the one to land the final blow on the devil Strahd with a natural 20.

Paladin hit him with the Sunsword (1d8), plus a maxed-out Divine Smite (6d8 + 2d8 for attacking an undead), plus his divine Boon (1d6 for attacking an evil/undead) -- all those dice doubled for the crit.

I borrowed a bunch of d8's from the other players and started totaling up the damage. I got above 50 and the DM started trying to stop me, but the rest of the table insisted I finish it. Ended up at 57 points of radiant damage to kill Strahd after 22 sessions.

"For Argynvost, for Tyr, for the Morninglord! SOL INVICTUS!"

Next week's our sort of "after action report," as we'll meet up to talk about the campaign, pull back the curtain, and maybe pre-session zero our next campaign. (Which is sort of "steampunk fantasy London detective agency.")

[Jay 2K Winger]

Curse of Strahd--

We're storming the castle! We're into the endgame, we've got our macguffins and we're ready to take on Strahd von Zarovich!

Some various quotes from the session--

"I'm gonna attack Fuck-knuckle over here--" "That's Sir Fuck-knuckle to you!"

"Baroviaaa~ Fuck yeah!"

"You're not the dumbest man in Barovia, but you'd better hope he doesn't die."

[Jay 2K Winger]

I did D&D online briefly last year, but when we'd only had nine sessions in nine months, some of the players lost interest and so our group just stopped. It was a month or so later that I found the game store near my house where I do D&D Adventurers' League, and it was from their Discord that I met the DM for our Curse of Strahd game.

Haven't really done too much online play since, though.

[Kit-Ginevra]

Are you online at all? I've been thinking of taking up D&D online since pandemicytime but not really sure where to start-not helped by the fact that my computer could be used as an Artefact of Useless Antiquity (seriously,it's on Windows 7,not even memory to load Discord,it has an added keyboard since only half the buttons on the original work and the left click button has now fallen off...) I've done some online LARPing which was very useful as it gave a chance to progress the quest between in person meetings in pre-COVID days.
And for my first LARP we were a seagoing people who had a lot of dead bodies of enemies.As we were sea-lovers we couldn't just chuck them overboard, so when a nice man offered to take them off our hands and give us some gold I happily accepted. Pity he turned out to be a necromancer....

[Jay 2K Winger]

Curse of Strahd--

While being confronted by a pack of vampire spawn, our Warlock uses Wall of Light and catches nearly all of them in its light, hitting them all with radiant damage. My Paladin compounded it by using the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind to cast Hold Vampire and paralyze two of them inside the wall. Neither was able to cure their blindness (from the Wall) or their paralysis (from the Symbol), and they spent their turns basically getting cooked.

We dubbed it "the Microwave."

EDIT--

Our Strahd DM has let us know that we're moving into the endgame (since we now have the macguffins we need to defeat Strahd) and is already planning our next campaign, which will be in a homebrew alternate version of Earth, a sort of steampunk urban fantasy Victorian London-type setting. (Same basic map, but all the countries are called different things, that kinda thing.) We the players are debating what characters to portray, based on what information the DM's provided about the setting.

Bob, our most experienced player, has said he's planning on playing a Druid from "Ireland" who will probably use his druid-staff as a shillelagh, and wants to try to convert the heathens in "London" back to the old magic ways, and basically drinks a lot because no one's really interested. (He's intimated that "Father Ted" might be a source of inspiration.) Meanwhile, Jesse (who plays our Ranger in Strahd) has been thinking about playing a Paladin of the Church of the Four (official church of "England") with his inspiration specifically being Father Anderson from Hellsing Unlimited.

When they were talking about this, I started laughing and pointed out the potential fun in the dynamics there-- an "Irish Catholic fanatic" and a "zealous Anglican priest." They both thought it was hilarious as well. Meanwhile, I've got two possibilities-- a cockney Rogue or a pro-wrestler inspired Barbarian or Monk.