This King Must Have Been Desperate

The third, and thus far final, D&D campaign I played in started a year after the previous one. I was still in the boonies, as was my friend who played as Taug. She'd been trying to convince me to run a campaign, but I was not interested. Still, she'd drummed up interest between a few other members of the crew (all the other people from the previous year were gone), and eventually convinced one of them to run the campaign. Considering the person had zero D&D experience, possibly a risky choice, but I wasn't getting off my ass to do it, so better than nothing.

So Taug was back in action, along with Will the Ranger, but the DM opted to start us at Level 3, which was even weaker than where we started the previous campaign. So, because I have to overthink these things, and because I wanted to do something with the "all my loved ones were merged into a flesh golem" development from the very first campaign, I decided that Will had, at some point after the campaign concluded, tried to find a way back in time to fix things, and instead wound up in a parallel timeline. Close to his, but not quite. His memories overlaid on whatever Will existed there already. The body isn't trained up to do the stuff he could manage as a Level 15 Ranger, which is why he's fairly limited (I stole that part from GrimJack).

The main goal was for Will to be more cynical and much slower to trust. He had agreed to take part in that campaign, and it got everyone killed. The campaign prior to this, the cleric turned out to be a doppelganger who robbed them and later tried to kill people. So Will's not taking anything at face value. Except maybe Taug. He trusts Taug, who seems pretty much the same as the one he remembers, if a little bigger, as much as he trusts anyone.

Anyway, beyond those two, the team initially consisted of just two other characters: Thandril, an elf wizard, and Roric, a gnome alchemist. We're hired to help a usurped king recover his birth certificate, so he can prove he is supposed to be ruling. We head for an old fortress, the interior of which is a maze. One tunnel leads to a dead. The next leads to a room full of wraiths. They don't like the light of our torches, but it doesn't harm them. Only sunlight will do that, and it's in short supply inside this stone tomb.

What ensues is, calling it a "fight" might be giving it too much credit. All four attack Taug, but all of them miss. Taug, Will, and Rory all score hits, but then the half-orc and the gnome start taking damage. Taug critical misses an attack of opportunity, then does it again. The wizard summons a clone version of the wolf goddess Amaterasu, but everyone is missing with their attacks. Amaterasu manages to do a little damage before the spell ends, and the wizard works off that to finish it with a Magic Missile, but another of them attacks Will. Taug manages a critical hit to kill one, and Will is able to finish the one right in his face. Taug scores another critical hit, and Will ends the fight.

And for all that, we got a map scroll. Credit to our DM, who actually drew a map and rolled it up like a scroll. Props were a nice touch. Still, the party is pretty beat to hell, and once again, we failed to get any sort of healer in the mix. The best we could manage was to sleep for 8 hours in a room full of wraith corpses. And when we awoke, we had a visitor.